American Anwar al-Awlaki has been dead for over four years now, but The New York Times is still giving substantial ink to the U.S. government's self-serving meme that Awlaki was an "operational" terrorist," even though we still don't know whether ISIS or AQAP is responsible for the recent attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.
I called out New York Times reporter Scott Shane for carrying the government's water by pimping the "Awlaki was operational" narrative last year. Yesterday, Shane penned another lengthy article rehashing the U.S. government's post hoc justification for targeting and assassinating Awlaki without due process.
The narrative that Awlaki was more than a propagandist appeared in force after his death, as the government, led by now CIA Director John Brennan, tried to shoehorn Awlaki into Brennan's criteria for targeted drone assassinations, the first being that the target have some particularized plan to attack the U.S. (Not even Director Brennan bothered trying to similarly defend the drone death of Awlaki's innocent, American 16-year-old son)
In light of yesterday's latest summary of Awlaki's alleged crimes (that he cannot defend himself against, having been droned) courtesy of The New York Times, Brennan's supposedly concrete kill list criteria are more opaque than ever. Shane writes:
In the age of YouTube, Mr. Awlaki’s death — or martyrdom, in the view of his followers — has hardly reduced his impact.
Awlaki's "martyrdom, in the view of his followers" is a direct result of the U.S. killing him. Moreover, if Awlaki's death "has hardly reduced his impact," what what was the point of killing him in the first place? It certainly cost taxpayer money, not to mention being immoral and violating basic tenants of human rights and constitutional law. Brennan himself claimed targeted drone kills are only to stop "
an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States," yet, according to
The Times, thanks to the power of YouTube Awlaki is "the leading brand name in the world of armed jihad."
Over the weekend, when I tweeted about how preposterous it was for the government to blame the Paris attack on a dead man (and for the New York Times to perpetuate the theory) in a transparent attempt to justify a legally-questionable drone strike, a fair share of trolls were too thick to recognize that questioning the government's ability to assassinate citizens without due process is not an endorsement of Awlaki's despicable views. By all accounts, Awlaki was a hateful human being. Nonetheless, being a hateful person is not a crime, and the First Amendment protects all speech, especially offensive speech held by a small minority of citizens.
Ironically, while The New York Times correctly advocates for the free speech of Charlie Hebdo, it commits thousands of words to blaming the Paris attacks on a dead man's offensive speech.
Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent billions and billions of taxpayer dollars, tortured and rendered detainees and imprisoned hundreds in Guantanamo for well over a decade without trial, invaded the privacy of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans and even more innocent foreigners, and targeted and killed Americans and foreigners in drone strikes and accepted thousands of "collateral damage" innocent deaths, and kept the U.S. in a seemingly endless state of war. National security state apologists capitalize on every new threat, hateful video or attack by advocating for more power, more surveillance and more money for the national security state despite a dearth of evidence suggesting the torture, drone strikes and mass surveillance are actually effective at keeping us safe. All the while, the most recent terrorist crime (remember, terrorism IS a crime) is blamed on the video ghost of alleged terrorist we've already killed.
If there was ever a time to shift our national security policy, it is now.