"Disposition Matrix": President’s 10-Year Plan for the Kill List
Source: thenewamerican.com
There will be no end to the War on Terror and the targeting of “suspected militants” will continue and become more sophisticated, according to an article published in the Washington Post on October 23.In the piece, Greg Miller describes a project the Obama administration has been developing for a couple of years called — in true Orwellian fashion — the “disposition matrix.”
Glen Greenwald at the Guardian (U.K.) describes the matrix’s chain of command:
The "disposition matrix" has been developed and will be overseen by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). One of its purposes is "to augment" the "separate but overlapping kill lists" maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon: to serve, in other words, as the centralized clearinghouse for determining who will be executed without due process based upon how one fits into the executive branch’s "matrix".
According to reports, the plans for perpetuating and perfecting the death-by-drone program “contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations.”
The article quotes “U.S. officials” saying that the matrix will improve the existing pair of kill lists (one maintained by the President, the other kept by the CIA) by “mapping plans for the ‘disposition’ of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.”
Readers unfamiliar with the argot of the White House and the intelligence community should understand that the phrase “plans for the disposition” of someone means plans for summarily executing a person who has never been accused of a crime and who has never been proven to have any plan to attack the United States or its interests.
Charging someone with a crime and allowing him to counter evidence produced of his intent to commit a crime or of his collusion with those who do intend to commit a crime is called due process. It is a right guaranteed by the Constitution, but regularly and unrepentantly denied by the Obama administration to scores of people killed by drones everyday.
In an article in the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf records the comments made by Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary and now a senior adviser to the Obama reelection campaign, regarding the use of drones to assassinate those without a demonstrable link to terror, particularly Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
For those unfamiliar with the story, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed in October 2011, and to date the Obama administration has never informed the country of any wrongdoing by this teenager, other than being related to a man (his father) who posted anti-American videos on the Internet that allegedly influenced others to commit crimes.
As he sat enjoying a roadside picnic in Yemen with a few second cousins and their friends — most of whom the young Colorado native had never met before that day — the teenager and all his companions were killed by two Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator drone.
The finger that pressed the button launching the lethal ordnance was American, and so was 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the target of the strike.
[...]
Read the full article at: thenewamerican.com
