Jeremy Scahill, Glenn Greenwald blast U.S. drone war and “assassination complex,” say liberals would never let a Republican get away with Obama’s crimes

In its new book "The Assassination Complex," The Intercept details the shocking dystopian powers the U.S. has

BEN NORTON

Award-winning journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald warn the Obama administration’s “deadly legacy” has paved a dangerous path for a future of egregious abuse of executive power.

The Democratic president, they say, has gotten away with crimes and repressive policies that liberals never would have let a Republican carry out.

“The most significant aspect of what President Obama has done, regarding drones and regarding the so-called targeted killing program around the world, is that Obama has codified assassination as a central official component of American foreign policy,” Scahill said in an interview on Democracy Now this week.

Obama “has implemented policies that a Republican probably would not have been able to implement, certainly not with the support that Obama has received from so many self-identified liberals,” he added.

In 2015 alone, the U.S. dropped at least 23,144 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries, many in which it has not officially declared war.

Scahill expressed doubts that, if a Republican wins the presidential election, MSNBC pundits and other liberals will maintain the same position on these very same policies.

Greenwald argued the same. Obama campaigned in 2007 on the destructive policies and undemocratic mindset of the Bush administration, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist recalled. Yet, once Obama became president, “he ended up not only embracing, but strengthening and increasing” these very same policies, continuing indefinite detention in Guantánamo and elsewhere and greatly expanding the drone program.

President Obama “has institutionalized a program where now we don’t only just imprison people without any charges or due process, we don’t just eavesdrop on them, which was one of his big critiques of the Bush administration, without first giving them due process or a trial, we now just target them for execution, for death, for a death penalty,” Greenwald added in the Democracy Now interview.

He pointed out the irony that, while Democrats have long opposed the death penalty in all cases, even when criminal defendants are given a full trial and assured all constitutional rights, the Democratic president “has embraced a policy that says that he can literally go around the world, target people for death anywhere in the world that he wants, including places where we’re not at war, including even American citizens, and simply eradicate their lives based on his order.”

“The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program,” Scahill’s new book, was released this week. It is a joint project of the staff of The Intercept, the hard-hitting investigative news outlet Scahill and Greenwald founded with filmmaker Laura Poitras, who shares a Pulitzer Prize for her work with the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Snowden himself in fact wrote the introduction to the book, which The Interceptpublished on its website with the title “Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance.”

“The Assassination Complex” is based on leaked government documents provided by a whistleblower that expose how destructive the secretive U.S. drone war has been. Some of the findings in this leak were released in October as The Drone Papers.

Among the many revelations in the book is that during a five-month period in a U.S. program in northeastern Afghanistan called Operation Haymaker, almost 90 percent of people killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets.

Investigative journalists and researchers say hundreds of civilians have been killed in U.S. drone strikes, at the very least.

The Obama administration has released very little information about its drone program. As Scahill put it, “the covert drone program, for the majority of its lifespan, has been shrouded in secrecy.” It was only recently that the government pledged for the first time to release figures on the number of people it has killed.

http://www.salon.com/2016/05/05/jeremy_scahill_glenn_greenwald_blast_u_s_drone_war_and_assassination_complex_say_liberals_would_never_let_a_republican_get_away_with_obamas_crimes/