death squads

Sandy Levinson

The invaluable Dana Priest has an article in today's Wasington Post, "Experts See a Strategy Behind CIA Shuffle: General May Help Intelligence Chief Rein In Rumsfeld and His Military Spy Plans."

The most intriguing paragraph is the following:

Managed by Army Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, a legendary special operations officer [who is also well known for being the most hard-core Christian zealot in the Pentagon] who now holds the title of deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and warfighting support, the Pentagon is demanding that the CIA share its most sensitive databases, that small teams of undercover soldiers be allowed to secretly collect information in friendly countries, and that clandestine teams of military man-hunters be allowed to sneak into countries with which the United States is not at war to kill or capture terrorism suspects.

So my questions are as follows:
1) Isn't the proper name for the "clandestine teams" "death squads" (at least if indeed they "kill . . . terrorism suspects").
2) What, precisely, prevents the Bush Administration from bringing such squads into the US? There are, presumably, two answers, one involving statutes, the other involving the Constitution (something about due process of law). But this is a President who believes that statutes simply do not apply when they limit his powers as "commander-in-chief" of the "global war on terrorists" (and global, of course, includes the US). And, of course, this is a President who reads Article II, including the C-in-C Clause, in a way that overrides any finicky concern for due process and the like where those deemed (by the President and those to whom he has delegated his powers under Article II) "terrorist suspects." Perhaps Jose Padilla should consider himself lucky to be merely detained at O'Hare and then put into solitary, with no ascertainable rights, for a number of years. After all, the same logic would presumably have justified killing him if the Administration thought that desirable.
3. If they are "captured" instead of killed, where are they sent, and by what means? Are we to believe that they would simply be turned over to the intelligence services of the friendly countries within which these operations are taking place? But this would, among other things, presuppose that these countries thought the operation of US death squads was a fine idea. So are they spirited out and sent to CIA camps for interrogation? But what happens after interrogation? It would be very dangerous to let them go if a mistake had been made, wouldn't it, lest the existence of these programs be confirmed (beyond the paragraph in Priest's article).

I hope that this is simply a paranoid posting, since surely the US would not tolerate a President who would even think of turning us into an up-market version of Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador and their own domestic "disappearances" and "death squads." But where is the public debate about our foreign death squads? Will Democrats continue to be so cowed that they will refuse to challenge this latest foray into fascist-style tactics by Rumsfeld and Boykin lest they be charged by the raging bull Karl Rove as "soft on national security" as we enter into the 2006 elections that Rove is determined to win by any means necessary. And if the operation of foreign death squads is tolerated, then why not in the US? Especially, I might add, if the suspect is an alien, legal or otherwise, since so much of the debate about Padilla turns on the fact that he is, after all, a US citizen (and therefore should have at least some rights that the state is bound to respect)?
Posted 2:06 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]