Drug-War Assassinations

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http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-10-28.asp
Drug-War Assassinations
by Jacob G. Hornberger

The U.S. government has now extended its assassination program to the
drug war. According to the New York Times, the Pentagon now has an
assassination list for suspected drug dealers in Afghanistan.

No arrests. No hearings. No attorneys. No judges. No trials. Just kill them.

Great! So now the occupation of Afghanistan has expanded not only to CIA
drone assassinations but also now to Pentagon’s drug-war assassinations.

U.S. officials are justifying the drug-war assassinations as part of
their counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan. They say that
they’re only going to be assassinating those drug dealers whose drug
trafficking is benefiting the terrorists.

I wonder how they make that determination, especially without judicial
hearings and trials.

Keep in mind that U.S. officials justify their occupation of Afghanistan
as part of their overall “war on terrorism.” Keep in mind also that
according to them, in the war on terrorism the entire world is a
battlefield, including the United States.

As part of their war on terrorism, U.S. officials claim the power to
treat Americans as “enemy combatants,” which entails the power to ignore
the rights and guarantees in the Bill of Rights for people suspected of
committing the federal criminal offense of terrorism. That includes the
power to arrest suspected terrorists, incarcerate them for life, torture
them, and deny them due process of law.

It also includes the power to assassinate suspected terrorists, a power
that U.S. officials have exercised on “the battlefield” in such places
as Yemen, where they assassinated an American citizen who happened to be
traveling with a suspected terrorist, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. So far,
they have not exercised the assassination power on that part of the
battlefield that encompasses the United States, but they certainly now
wield the post-9/11 power to do so.

And now they have extended their assassination power to the drug war.
And without even bothering to ask Congress to enact a law giving them
such power. Hey, this is the era of the war on terrorism. They don’t
need no stinking assassination law. All they need is a presidential
order to the CIA and the military to begin assassinating people.

Will they apply their assassination power to suspected drug dealers
elsewhere in the world? After all, doesn’t the sale of heroin everywhere
likely put money into the pockets of drug producers in Afghanistan,
given that that’s where 90 percent of the world’s heroin originates?

We know that they are employing the power to assassinate suspected
terrorists in different parts of the world. Time will tell whether they
do the same with suspected drug dealers, including, of course, that part
of the battlefield that encompasses the United States.

Meanwhile, families are mourning the deaths of three American DEA agents
and 11 U.S. soldiers who died this past week in two helicopter crashes
in Afghanistan.

Fourteen more senseless deaths. Where does this lunacy end?

End the assassinations. End the occupations. End the war on terrorism.
End the war on drugs. There is no other solution for restoring freedom,
morality, peace, prosperity, and security to our nation.

*****

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/world/asia/10afghan.html?_r=1
August 10, 2009
U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Drug Lords Tied to Taliban
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to
the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or
killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy
in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.

United States military commanders have told Congress that they are
convinced that the policy is legal under the military’s rules of
engagement and international law. They also said the move is an
essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that
is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.

In interviews with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is
releasing the report, two American generals serving in Afghanistan said
that major traffickers with proven links to the insurgency have been put
on the “joint integrated prioritized target list.” That means they have
been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be
captured or killed at any time.

The generals told Senate staff members that two credible sources and
substantial additional evidence were required before a trafficker was
placed on the list, and only those providing support to the insurgency
would be made targets.

Currently, they said, there are about 50 major traffickers who
contribute money to the Taliban on the list.

“We have a list of 367 ‘kill or capture’ targets, including 50 nexus
targets who link drugs and the insurgency,” one of the generals told the
committee staff. The generals were not identified in the Senate report,
which was obtained by The New York Times.

The shift in policy comes as the Obama administration, deep into the war
in Afghanistan, makes significant changes to its strategy for dealing
with that country’s lucrative drug trade, which provides 90 percent of
the world’s heroin and has led to substantial government corruption.

The Senate report’s disclosure of a hit list for drug traffickers may
lead to criticism in the United States over the expansion of the
military’s mission, and NATO allies have already raised questions about
the strategy of killing individuals who are not traditional military
targets.

For years the American-led mission in Afghanistan had focused on
destroying poppy crops. Pentagon officials have said their new emphasis
is on weaning local farmers off the drug trade — including the
possibility of paying them to grow nothing — and going after the drug
runners and drug lords. But the Senate report is the first account of a
policy to actually place drug chieftains aligned with the Taliban on a
“kill or capture” list.

Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, would not comment on the
Senate report, but said that “there is a positive, well-known connection
between the drug trade and financing for the insurgency and terrorism.”
Without directly addressing the existence of the target list, he said
that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with
links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with
links to terrorism.”

Several individuals suspected of ties to drug trafficking have already
been apprehended and others have been killed by the United States
military since the new policy went into effect earlier this year, a
senior military official with direct knowledge of the matter said in an
interview. Most of the targets are in southern and eastern Afghanistan,
where both the drug trade and the insurgency are the most intense.

One American military officer serving in Afghanistan described the
purpose of the target list for the Senate committee. “Our long-term
approach is to identify the regional drug figures,” the unidentified
officer is quoted as saying in the Senate report. The goal, he said, is
to “persuade them to choose legitimacy, or remove them from the
battlefield.”

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were
discussing delicate policy matters.

When Donald H. Rumsfeld was defense secretary, the Pentagon fiercely
resisted efforts to draw the United States military into supporting
counternarcotics efforts. Top military commanders feared that trying to
prevent drug trafficking would only antagonize corrupt regional warlords
whose support they needed, and might turn more of the populace against
American troops.

It was only in the last year or two of the Bush administration that the
United States began to recognize that the Taliban insurgency was being
revived with the help of drug money.

The policy of going after drug lords is likely to raise legal concerns
from some NATO countries that have troops in Afghanistan. Several NATO
countries initially questioned whether the new policy would comply with
international law.

“This was a hard sell in NATO,” said retired Gen. John Craddock, who was
supreme allied commander of NATO forces until he retired in July.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the secretary general of NATO until last month,
told the Senate committee staff that to deal with the concerns of other
nations with troops in Afghanistan, safeguards had been put in place to
make sure the alliance remained within legal bounds while pursuing drug
traffickers. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, is also informed
before a mission takes place, according to a senior military official.

General Craddock said that some NATO countries were also concerned that
the new policy would draw the drug lords closer to the Taliban, because
they would turn to them for more protection. “But the opposite is the
case, since it weakens the Taliban, so they can’t provide that
protection,” General Craddock said. “If we continue to push on this, we
will see progress,” he added. “It’s causing them problems.”

In a surprise, the Senate report reveals that the United States
intelligence community believes that the Taliban has been getting less
money from the drug trade than previous public studies have suggested.
The Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency both
estimate that the Taliban obtains about $70 million a year from drugs.

The Senate report found that American officials did not believe that
Afghan drug money was fueling Al Qaeda, which instead relies on
contributions from wealthy individuals and charities in Persian Gulf
countries, as well as aid organizations working inside Afghanistan.

But even with the new, more cautious estimates, the Taliban has plenty
of drug money to finance its relatively inexpensive insurgency. Taliban
foot soldiers are paid just $10 a day — more if they plant an improvised
explosive device.

Not all those suspected of drug trafficking will end up on the
Pentagon’s list. Intelligence gathered by the United States and
Afghanistan will more often be used for prosecutions, although American
officials are frustrated that they still have not been able to negotiate
an extradition treaty with the Afghan government.

A major unresolved problem in the counternarcotics strategy is the fact
that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan remains wide open, and
the Pakistanis are doing little to close down drug smuggling routes.

A senior American law enforcement official in the region is quoted in
the report as saying that cooperation with Pakistan on counternarcotics
is so poor that traffickers cross the border with impunity.

“We give them leads on targets,” the official said in describing the
Pakistani government’s counternarcotics tactics, adding, “We get smiles,
a decent cup of tea, occasional reheated sandwiches and assertions of
progress, and we all leave with smiles on our faces.”

*****

--
Dan Clore

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