The US Supreme Court’s decision to grant the President of the United States “absolute immunity” merely codifies criminal behavior by all US presidents. Take, for example, Barack Obama’s assassination of teenager Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
Are you shocked by the US Supreme Court’s recent decision decreeing the President of the United States has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority?”
Don’t be!
In the US, executive power has become increasingly concentrated in the figure of the President while, as the bloody history of CIA coups and foreign assassinations attests, “absolute immunity” has long existed in fact, if not in law. Despite Justice Sotomayor’s belated hand-wringing, the Supreme Court has merely taken the mask off and codified US imperialism’s best practices for domestic purposes.
The great circle of American immunity, and impunity, is now complete. Anything is possible. The sovereign has reclaimed the throne – democracy be damned. And the sovereign, you will remember, has the right to decide who will live, and who will die.
Writing in The Black Agenda Report back in 2012, Jemima Pierre linked the murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin by the cracker George Zimmerman to the assassination of sixteen-year-old Adbulrahman al-Awlaki by US President, Barack Obama. One child was Black, the other Brown, one lived in Florida, the other in Yemen, both were US citizens, both were killed under the cover of a dubious legality, and both, as Pierre writes, were “victims of a culture of vigilantism masking itself through false appeals to white security.”
As of today, such murders no longer need a legal cover. Welcome to the return of the whitesupremacist wild, wild West. Read Jemima Pierre below.
Assassinations at Home and Abroad
Jemima Pierre
Trayvon Martin was a slim, seventeen-year-old Black boy callously murdered on February 26, 2012 by George Zimmerman, an unhinged, racist vigilante. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, claimed that he shot the young Martin in self-defense. The recently released 9-1-1 calls show that Zimmerman, without any evidence but Martin’s Blackness, assumed that Martin was high on drugs, up to no good, and on his way to commit a crime in the gated community of Stanford, a suburb of Orlando, Florida. By all indications, Zimmerman got out of his car, ran after Martin, accosted him, cornered him, and shot him.
The reaction to Trayvon Martin’s killing has been swift. Most people are outraged, and rightly so. For us in the Black community, Trayvon Martin’s death is both the latest incident in a long history of racial profiling and racist murders and another manifestation of a steadily-increasing anti-Black racism. The calls for a federal investigation are growing—including those from the muted and lethargic Congressional Black Caucus. And while Obama has refused to comment on the case, calling it a matter for the local police, the Civil Rights Division of Eric Holder’s Department of Justice has decided to open an investigation. For most of us, this is a good start.
As of today, Zimmerman has not been arrested or even charged for the murder. The reason? The Sanford police department accepted Zimmerman’s claim that he was acting in self-defense. In a recent article on MotherJones.com, Adam Weinstein has argued that the Florida self-defense and “stand your ground” laws will be key to this case—and may very well keep Zimmerman out of jail. Zimmerman, he says, “may have benefited from some of the broadest firearms and self-defense regulations in the nation.” These regulations make it extremely easy for Florida citizens to obtain permits to carry concealed weapons while those who already hold permits are exempted from mandatory waiting periods when purchasing new guns. Furthermore, the “stand your ground” law allows residents to use deadly force against a perceived threat without having to back down. “Stand your ground” is the most pernicious part of the law, as it allows anyone to use deadly force if they perceive a threat of death or “great bodily harm ,” with the assurance that those claiming self-defense will be given civil and criminal immunity .
But if we are angry that Zimmerman’s non-prosecution is an effect of the Florida “stand your ground” laws allowing – indeed, encouraging – “justifiable homicides” on the basis of perceived threat, we should also be angry about another claim for justifiable homicides that also hides under legal cover: the US government’s targeted assassination program. In a speech to Northwestern University law student in early March, Eric Holder argued that the Obama administration has the authority to secretly target and kill U.S. citizens and non-citizens perceived to be threats without the target knowing they are a target, without the target being charged, without the target being given an opportunity to respond to the charges, and without any judicial oversight. “The President and his underlings are your accuser, your judge, your jury and your executioner all wrapped up in one,” Glenn Greenwald has written on this policy, “acting in total secrecy and without your even knowing that he’s accused you and sentenced you to death, and you have no opportunity even to know about, let alone confront and address, his accusations.” How is this policy of targeted assassination different from the Florida “stand your ground” law? At least Zimmerman confronted Martin before killing him.
For those of you who will chastise me as being insensitive to Martin’s horrible death -- or who will insist that the two cases are distinct, let me remind you of the story of Adbulrahman al-Awlaki. Adbulrahmana al-Awlaki was the sixteen year old American-born US citizen killed by a US drone strike in Yemen in early October 2011. The young al-Awlaki was walking with his seventeen year old cousin and seven other people when he was killed in a “trio of drone attacks,” according to a CNN report. At first, the Western press reported al-Awlaki’s age as 21, ignored the fact of his citizenship, and implied that he was a legitimate “terrorist” target. When the truth of the young boy’s citizenship and age emerged, a US official said, without apology, that he “was in the wrong place at the wrong time .” TIME magazine later asked if the young al-Awlaki was “paying for the sins of this father.” His father, Anwar al-Awlaki had been killed weeks earlier by another US drone attack. While he was well known to Western audiences through US Homeland Security propaganda as a radical cleric and dangerous terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki’s assassination was carried out without public evidence or due process. But these assassinations were justified by Eric Holder – whose office is now tasked to investigate Trayvon Martin’s murder.
We should be outraged at all of these deaths. Trayvon Martin, Adbulrahmana al-Awlaki, his cousin, and the countless civilians – so-called terrorist targets — who are victims of a US policy of drone strikes and who have no recourse to the law, and no appeal to human decency.
Our righteous indignation and anger over the Trayvon Martin murder has to stretch beyond our community to consider a global humanity – and especially the nonwhite victims of US militarism and racism. We must pause and reflect on the injustice of the US government’s extrajudicial assassinations, and the fact that the Obama administration has claimed the right to kill people in multiple countries around the world whenever it wants. And we also should ask ourselves the question recently posed on twitter by @public_archive : “Trayvon was executed because of a perceived threat; US launches target assassinations because of perceived threats. Both are somehow legal?” Unfortunately, they are. And they are related: the Florida laws are the local articulation of a US foreign policy that deploys murder and mayhem at any sign of a threat—even as our officials generate these threats behind closed doors and without any pretensions of legality. And both Trayvon and Abdulrahmana, Black boy and Brown, were victims of a culture of vigilantism masking itself through false appeals to white security.
Jemima Pierre, “Assassinations at Home and Abroad,” Black Agenda Report, 12 March 2012.
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