Exposed 'Kill Matrix' Gives Permanence to US 'War on Terror'

An in-depth Washington Post story reveals that the drone warfare and bottomless "kill list" that have become signature features of the Obama administration's foreign policy have evolved. At the center of these policies is a "next-generation" 'kill-list' rebranded as a 'disposition matrix' meant to serve as a guide for "future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced." 

Greg Miller's exposé for the Post reveals that as "U.S.'s conventional wars are winding down," the Obama administration has secretly been ramping up on long-term counterterrorism policies that will essentially institutionalize the tracking, targeting, and killing of individuals—at will—for years and years.

The 'disposition matrix' contains the names and biographical information of terrorism suspects—including "locations, known associates and affiliated organizations"—against an array of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including "extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols".

“Anyone who thought U.S. targeted killing outside of armed conflict was a narrow, emergency-based exception to the requirement of due process before a death sentence is being proven conclusively wrong,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, in response to Miller's report. “The danger of dispensing with due process is obvious because without it, we cannot be assured that the people in the government’s death database truly present a concrete, imminent threat to the country. What we do know is that tragic mistakes have been made, hundreds of civilian bystanders have died, and our government has even killed a 16-year-old U.S. citizen without acknowledging let alone explaining his death. A bureaucratized paramilitary killing program that targets people far from any battlefield is not just unlawful, it will create more enemies than it kills.”

Read the entire article at CommonDreams.org