Obama has made torture a question of policy, not a crime to be prosecuted. Frowning on it and outsourcing it and hushing it up do not deny it to the next president in the way that prosecuting it in court would. Obama campaigned against rewriting laws with signing statements. Then he proceeded to do just as Bush had done. Obama has only used fewer signing statements than Bush did largely because fewer laws have been passed and because he has created the silent signing statement. Remember that Obama announced he would review Bush’s signing statements and decide which to reject and which to keep. (That is itself a remarkable power that now passes to the next president, who can keep or reject any of Bush’s or Obama’s signing statements.) But as far as I know, Obama never did actually tell us which of Bush’s signing statements he was keeping. Obama simply announced that prior signing statements—issued by himself or by Bush—would continue to apply to new laws, even he did not issue a new signing statement. Obama also has developed the practice of instructing the Office of Legal Counsel to write a memo in place of a law. And he’s developed the additional technique of creating self-imposed restrictions, which have the benefit of not being laws at all when he violates them. A key example of this is his standards for whom to kill with drones. On the question of starting wars, Obama has radically altered what is acceptable. He began a war on Libya without Congress. He told Congress in his last State of the Union speech that he would wage a war in Syria with or without them (a statement which they applauded). That power, further normalized by all the drone wars, will pass to the next president. Lawyers have testified to Congress that drone killing is murder and illegal if not part of a war, but perfectly fine if part of a war, and that whether it’s part of a war or not depends on secret presidential memos that—by definition—the public hasn’t seen. The power to render murder effectively legal by declaring the existence of a secret memo, is also a power that passes to the next president. In reality, there is no way to even remotely begin to legalize drone murders, whether or not part of a war. The seven current U.S. wars that we know of—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Somalia—are all illegal under the United Nations Charter and under the Kellogg-Briand Pact. So any element of them is also illegal. This is a simple point but a very difficult one for American liberals to grasp, particularly in a context where human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have taken a principled stand against recognizing the illegality of any war in order to appear politically neutral. If, on the other hand, the drone murders are not part of an illegal war, they are still illegal because murder is illegal everywhere under universal jurisdiction. The defense that a foreign dictator, exiled or otherwise, has granted permission to murder people in his country so that sovereignty is not violated, misses the basic illegality of murder, not to mention the irony that helping dictators kill their people conflicts rather stunningly with the common U.S. excuse for launching wars of overthrow, namely punishment of a dictator for the ultimate sin of “killing his own people.” Sovereignty is also an idea very selectively respected. Just ask Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria. In “The Assassination Complex,” reporter Cora Currier looks at Obama’s self-imposed restrictions on drone murders. Under these limitations, it is required that drone missiles target only people who are “continuing, imminent threats to the American people” and who cannot be captured and that there is “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed or injured. Currier points out that Obama approves people for murder for months at a time, rendering dubious the already incoherent idea of a “continuing imminent threat.” It’s not clear that “capture” is ever seriously considered, and it is clear that in many cases it is not. The alleged requirement that drone operators seek “near certainty” that civilians will not be killed is belied by the constant killing of civilians and, as Currier points out, by the White House’s claim to have had that “near certainty” in a case where the dead civilians were American and European—a crime that necessitated at least some accountability. In the book, Scahill and Greenwald also document the fact that sometimes what is being targeted is not a particular person but a cellphone believed to belong to that person. Obviously, this strategy offers no “near certainty” that that person is near their phone during a drone attack—nor that anyone else isn’t. What might begin to restrain this madness? Will those who opposed lawlessness under Bush but turned a blind eye to its expansion under Obama find themselves opposing it again? That seems highly unlikely under the best of the three remaining big-party presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders. I can’t imagine ever getting a significant number of his supporters to even become aware of his foreign policy, so good is he on domestic issues. With Hillary Clinton, the task would be extremely difficult as well, aided only by the likelihood that she would launch truly big-scale wars. With a President Trump, it seems much more conceivable that millions of people would suddenly find themselves opposing what has been firmly put into place the past 16 years. Whether it would then be too late is a different question. David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is a Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio, and he is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and Facebook. Your support matters…

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#2016 election#afghanistan#barack obama#donald trump#drones#hillary clinton#iraq#justice#killing#law#libya#pakistan#somalia#spying#surveillance#syria#united states#usa#war#yemen