Alex Huang

Professor Latha Varadarajan

POL-S-479
May 13th, 2020

A Just War that Erodes Democracy

There is no denying that the 9/11 incident has exposed the United States and other

democratic states to new threats posed by non-state actors such as terrorist groups, but

measures like drone warfare and state sanctioned surveillance programs adopted by both the

Bush and Obama administrations has not only failed to secure democracy as they claimed,

but also revealed the continuation of a long-term national security strategy. The United States

has been exploiting the cause of defending democracy at home and abroad to justify

administrations’ policies which are largely the ruling class’s attempt to continue to cling onto

the power baton meanwhile, securing America’s global imperialism while undermining the

democratic rights of American citizens and people around the world. To further legitimize

this argument, this paper begins with the discussion of drone warfare and state sanctioned

surveillance adopted in the War on Terror and portrays how the administrations have

manipulated legal framework to carry out those measures. I then move on to analyze the

measures adopted and how the measures have not served their strategic purposes but rather

further undermined democratic rights of the people and revealed undemocratic conduct by the

government. Finally, I conclude with the discussion of the roles of whistleblowers and the

exposé of ruling class’s suppression on domestic oppositions.

Since the launch of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the campaign has gone through

several stages where the government adopted different measures and objectives to facilitate

the war. In the early stages, under the guidance of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the

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government was aiming to liberate the Islamic world and gain victory through the

implementation of high-tech “shock and awe” tactics. While dealing with non-state actors

who do not play by the government’s rules, American forces were proven to be less

competent than the government has expected. Victory in Afghanistan or Iraq did not come

like a breeze through a series of quick and short strikes like Rumsfeld planned, but instead

the fighting with the terrorists persisted and more chaos ensued. By 2006, the objective of

liberation was a lost cause and the government moved on to the second stage when they

redefined victory as restoring the façade of order to regions that were forced into chaos under

the U.S. attempts of liberation. The plan of counterinsurgency, COIN, was introduced with

the aims of reducing insurgency and providing support to increase Afghan security forces.

COIN was another failed attempt. Not only has insurgency been reduced, the progress of

improving Afghan security forces was almost negligible and the Afghan government and

neighboring Pakistani government were both in deep resentment at the Americans’ imperious

conduct which frequently killed or injured civilians. Towards the end of the COIN stages, the

objective in Afghanistan was reduced to handing over the battle to the Afghan security forces

and quickly withdrawing from the country. After the failure of COIN, the United States found

itself trapped in a quagmire despite of the fact that President Obama had already committed a

considerable number of troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As the previous two strategies

had failed, eager to fulfill his campaign promise to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

President Obama authorized drone-missile assassinations, proposed by Michael Vickers. The

logic behind Vickers’s proposed approach was to simple- eliminate any potential terrorist

beyond geographical boundaries with any means necessary (Bacevich 2012). The United

States has entered the business of drone-facilitated killings upon the approval of the president

with an exception of active war zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where advance approval

by the president is not required (Martin 2016). The latest stage of the Global War on Terror is

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characterized by an extensive use of drone killings and manipulation of rules towards the

U.S. advantage with an assertion that it reserves the right to strike down any person who the

government considers as a direct threat to its national security.

Although General Eric Holder has laid out the legality of drone warfare under both

international law and the U.S. law, it is clear that the government has been exploiting the

legal framework and bending towards its advantage. Self-defense framework countering an

imminent threat is the essential argument that has persisted throughout Holder and the Obama

administration’s justification. After the 911 attack, the Bush administration reclassified

terrorism as an act of war which was the first step towards later administration’s justification

for the legality of drone assassinations. The government made clear that it has the

responsibility and absolute authority to adopt lawful lethal forces to defend national security.

The Obama administration established the difference between due process and judicial

process, arguing that the president with his executive power does not need permission from

federal court to prosecute any U.S. citizen that is engaged with terrorist networks given that

judicial process in not granted under the Fifth Amendment. While due process should be

granted, the government further argued that it is not a one-size-fits-all right and, when

necessary, it would be subject to procedural mandates which takes into account the realities

of combat. In terms of international law, Holder argued that the government has the right to

conduct drone warfare against the terrorists who continually pose an imminent threat to the

United States as an act of self-defense, and further asserted that the United States has been

abided by the principles of necessity and proportionality (Holder 2012). There are several

issues here regarding the government’s belief that such operations are legal, necessary and

proportionate. First, while the 1976 Executive order has banned assassinations, the

government argued that drone warfare is not a form of assassinations, which would be

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unlawful. Instead, it is the United States acting on self-defense against al-Qaeda or any

associated forces who present imminent threats to the country, so it would not be unlawful

and not violating the Executive Order (Holder 2012). Second, the government has largely

flipped the definition of “imminent” upside down. While the conventional and international

law’s understanding of imminent threats as ones that pose immediate and urgent danger, the

U.S. government seems to believe that any threats posed by terrorists in the near future could

be categorized as imminent threats (Brooks 2013). Furthermore, the necessity and

proportionality of drone assassinations are highly unquestionable given that the program has

been conducted largely in secrecy and only the president himself and his close advisors are

familiar with the internal process. Although the White House did release the guidelines of

drone program procedures, it provided little specificity. It only made clear that the

government would not conduct drone attack outside of active warzones unless the targets

present imminent threats, but largely left out are the more important questions with regard to

procedures such as ‘what criteria is necessary for a suspect’s name to added to the killing

list?’ and ‘how assassination is more feasible than capture?’. The leaked Drone Papers in

2015 revealed the dehumanizing internal process where the targets were categorized into

numbers awaiting their death sentenced by the high-level officials in the White House

without even being granted a trial (Scahill 2015). On the issue of collateral damage, the

government has disguised the actual number of non-combatant death by simply categorizing

all non-targeted deaths as incidental “enemies killed in action” (EKIA) unless evidence

emerged to prove otherwise. As the actual civilian death has remained largely inaccurate and

simply blotted out by the U.S. government, the argument of proportionality is simply

dismissible. In fact, according to several independent investigations, the actual civilian death

toll is much higher than the government has acknowledged (Friedersdorf 2016), raising

questions on government’s claim that with drone’s precision, collateral damage could be

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greatly minimized. The proliferation of drone warfare under Obama administration has

revealed how the ruling class has manipulated the democratic legal framework and

undermined individuals’ basic rights. And to prevent domestic opposition from the public,

which might threaten the ruling class’s status, the government has largely left the public in

the dark. In a strategic perspective, the preference of assassinations over capture has shown

the inability of the program to extract useful intelligence from suspected terrorists, and

simply taking down suspected targets has exacerbated the very threat that the United States

has been seeking to counter (Scahill 2015).

While the drone assassinations have been in operation, the government has

simultaneously been secretly conducting mass surveillance not only internationally but also

domestically. The Program was launched in 2001 after the 911 attack which pushed the

National Security Agency’s (NSA) decision to pursue more aggressive methods to prevent

the next attack. The NSA director Michael Hayden decided to borrow the ThinThread

program and launch a new version of it--- the Program. ThinThread was a project

consistently conducted and developed in the 1990s to handle huge amount of information and

data to identify any terrorist threat and without violating U.S. citizens’ privacy but had been

shelved three weeks before the 911 attack due to bureaucratic infighting. Numerous

independent studies have pointed out that ThinThread was a much better program which

adopted advanced method of identifying suspicious information in a vast metadata base,

encrypted U.S. communications data, included an automated auditing system to prevent

misuse of data by analysts, and only when proof of a possible threat was formulated could

analysts decrypt the information. Even the 2014 report from the Pentagon acknowledged

ThinThread’s ability to discover important and previously unknown targets (Gorman 2006).

The NSA abandoned the more effective program and adopted the new one which has granted

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the agency unprecedented power. The new Program has completely stripped off the

encryption protection on U.S. communication data and simply took the data analysis part to

form the basis of the new warrantless surveillance program. The Program was then secretly

authorized by President Bush. Later, several high-level officials from the Department of

Justice noticed that the Program might not be legal and notified the then acting Attorney

General John Ashcroft, who was in charge of re-authorizing the project every 45 days. In

order to keep the project in continuation, the White House replaced the Attorney General

from the DOJ with the White House Counsel, who does not have the equivalent legal

authority, to process the re-authorization. This is the first occurrence of government spying

on American citizens since the Nixon Watergate scandal when domestic surveillance was

shortly prohibited afterwards. And the only legality the administration has ever provided is

the fact of the president’s commander-in-chief wartime power and a controversial Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Court’s (FISC) interpretation of the 1979 Supreme Court case

involving the court ruled police acquisition of communication records of a robbery suspect

over a two-day-period (Auken 2013). Since the start of the Program, there have been

numerous attempts by persons in the NSA and the DOJ to raise concerns and stop the

program from continuing but those attempts were mostly suppressed by the NSA and the

White House. Finally, in 2005, the New York Times decided to expose the Program, despite

being previously suppressed and then threatened by the White House, with their information

provided by Thomas Tamm, a former attorney from the DOJ. The exposure did little harm to

the Program after Bush addressed it directly to the public, reassuring them that the Program

was legal and only international communications related to terrorist groups would be

intercepted but completely left out the part that mass domestic data was captured as well

(Frontline 2014). Shortly after, more sources published stories on the government secret

project which has enraged the Vice President Dick Cheney, who soon launched large-scale

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investigation on any potential whistle-blowers. While presidential candidate Obama was

running his campaign with the promise of ending illegal spying on U.S. citizens, Bush was

eager to incorporate the Program into law and pushed for the FISA Amendment Act of 2008

which would validate the Program and even expand it. The act was passed by Congress

which set the stage for Obama’s further expansion of government power. Despite his

previous campaign promise, Obama decided to continue with the Program. Since then, the

government has been spending over $10 billion annually to gather communication around the

world and relied on several crucial private contractors to facilitate the Program (Frontline

2014). Obama also continued the whistleblower manhunt under the leadership of Attorney

General Eric Holder. Based on a shaky legal foundation, the Program has largely violated

U.S. citizens’ right granted under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which asserts

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against

unreasonable searches and seizures” (Auken 2013). Despite all the government justifications

on the legality aspect and importance of the Program to counter imminent threats, there has

been no single case where an imminent attack was prevented by the Program’s data analysis

nor was any new suspected target found by the Program. Thus far, the Program seems to have

no strategic meaning in the fight against terrorism, instead it has revealed serious government

caused erosion of the Constitutional rights and an over-expansion of state-power. The United

States has embarked on a downward journey of evolving into a vast military-intelligence

complex where only an exclusive group of financial oligarchic network, with the government

being at the center, is benefited at the expense of ordinary people.

In President Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1961, he warned of the danger of the

temptation to solve crisis with increasing already massive military spending and speculative

action, asserting that Americans “must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted

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influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for

the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist,” and the only way to secure

American’s liberties was to maintain an alert and knowledgeable citizenry (LaFeber 1994).

Half a century later, Eisenhower’s foreshadowing is being manifested. The class

contradictions endemic to the capitalism system has pushed the government to pursue

militarism and concurrently subdue citizens who has raised concerns or posed challenges to

the administrations’ actions. Under such context, the role of whistleblowers is extremely

crucial to defend citizen’s democratic rights granted under the Constitution and prevent the

erosion of democracy. Thomas Drake, a pervious senior executive at the NSA, was the first

victim under the government mass manhunt against whistleblowers. He was falsely charged

with holding classified documents. Although charges against him were dropped when the

DOJ realized that the evidence supporting his allegations were falling apart, Drake’s life was

devastated after a long process of litigation that has caused him his career and drained him

financially (Frontline 2014). Chelsea Manning, who served as an Army intelligence analyst in

Iraq in 2010, provided thousands of classified State and Defense Department’s cable to Julian

Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks. In the leaked cable, there was one video showing the

U.S. forces in Baghdad brutally stroke down unarmed civilian and continued to pursue them

until they are dead (Bernstein 2019). Manning was the one who witnessed the government’s

unethical war conduct and decided that the public deserved to know it. She was later

sentenced 35 years in military prison in 2010, released after 7 years, and later was jailed

again in 2019 for refusing to testify before the grand jury against Assange’s alleged violation

of the Espionage Act. Manning’s mental and physical condition has seriously deteriorated

throughout the years in prison and was finally released by the court after she attempted

subside and was hospitalized (Savage 2020). Alongside Drake and Manning, Edward

Snowden emerged as another consequential whistleblower who cannot no longer tolerate

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government’s violation on personal privacy, freedom, and basic liberties. While Snowden

was working for the NSA’s outside contractor, he released huge amount of document

detailing government’s mass surveillance program where every phone call, email, and other

form of communications were recorded around the world, including the United States. Fully

aware of the consequences he might face, as the Obama administration has been pursuing

whistleblowers at an alarming rate, he reached out to journalist Glenn Greenwald and Laura

Poitras, who have later published the exposé on the government’s large-scale spying

operation. He believed that in a democracy people have the right to all information and he

was willing to sacrifice his career and his personal life to raise public attention on

government’s undemocratic behavior and the abuse of American people’s Constitutional

rights (Greenwald, MacAskill and Poitras 2013). Snowden is currently in political asylum in

Moscow, while government officials, from both parties, and media commentators have been

denouncing him as a traitor and coward who does not have the courage to return to America

to face his legal consequences. The bipartisan condemnation of Snowden shows that in terms

of defending unashamedly illegal and unconstitutional measures, there is absolute harmony

between the usually opposing two big parties (Grey 2013). Without the whistleblowers, the

public would never have the knowledge of what is behind the government’s national security

policy and foreign policy, especially when the ruling class has been cherry-picking what

information is allowed to the public and what is not to prevent domestic opposition on

government’s decisions.

The Global War on Terror, initiated under the name to defend democracy around the

world and call upon every individual to join the fight for a just war against terrorists,

hypocritically is nothing more than another expression of imperialism. The war started off

with utopian expectations with no clear objectives guiding the events forward, while

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government has been attempting to solve crisis, at home and abroad, by massively increasing

military spending to facilitate worldwide spying operations and high-tech state killings.

Almost 20 years on since the launch of the Global War on Terror, the U.S. citizens are not

safer and people around the world are suffering the consequences of the U.S. encroached

military actions. Terrorist groups and insurgencies are still persistent in regions like Iraq,

Afghanistan and Syria where local people’s lives are constantly under great danger. An U.S.

military-intelligence complex has formed. From the drone warfare to the mass state-

sanctioned surveillance, the erosion of democracy and the expansion of power have been

gradually taking place. Whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning might be the silver lining

in such environment where the government has been largely engaged with undemocratic

measures to secure their power, domestically and internationally, and suppress any domestic

opposition that has posed challenges to its power. Defending democracy with mass military-

intelligence establishment and undemocratic measures would not secure democracy but only

erode the very core value of democracy and push the country towards a downward path while

government continue to gain unprecedented power at the expense of people’s democratic

rights.

References
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-bacevich/global-war-on-terror_b_1289039.html.
Brooks, Rosa. 2013. "Drones And The International Rule Of Law". Georgetown University
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