[Peace-discuss] Mary Dudziak @NYT: Obama's Nixonian Precedent in drone strike white paper was false when spoken

[Robert Naiman]

This should prove useful for introducing people to the drone strike
white paper. If this is in the white paper, imagine what's in the OLC
memos on which the white paper is based...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/opinion/obamas-nixonian-precedent.html

Excerpt: "On Page 4 of the unclassified 16-page "white paper," Justice
Department lawyers tried to refute the argument that international law
does not support extending armed conflict outside a battlefield...
[T]he Obama administration's lawyers have cited a statement that was
patently false."

Obama's Nixonian Precedent
By MARY L. DUDZIAK
The New York Times
March 22, 2013

Atlanta - ON March 17, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon began a secret
bombing campaign in Cambodia, sending B-52 bombers over the border
from South Vietnam. This episode, largely buried in history,
resurfaced recently in an unexpected place: the Obama administration's
"white paper" justifying targeted killings of Americans suspected of
involvement in terrorism.

President Obama is reportedly considering moving control of the drone
program from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Defense
Department, as questions about the program's legality continue to be
asked. But this shift would do nothing to confer legitimacy to the
drone strikes. The legitimacy problem comes from the secrecy itself -
not which entity secretly does the killing.
Secrecy has been used to hide presidential overreach - as the Cambodia
example shows.

On Page 4 of the unclassified 16-page "white paper," Justice
Department lawyers tried to refute the argument that international law
does not support extending armed conflict outside a battlefield. They
cited as historical authority a speech given May 28, 1970, by John R.
Stevenson, then the top lawyer for the State Department, following the
United States' invasion of Cambodia.
Since 1965, "the territory of Cambodia has been used by North Vietnam
as a base of military operations," he told the New York City Bar
Association. "It long ago reached a level that would have justified us
in taking appropriate measures of self-defense on the territory of
Cambodia. However, except for scattered instances of returning fire
across the border, we refrained until April from taking such action in
Cambodia."

In fact, Nixon had begun his secret bombing of Cambodia more than a
year earlier. (It is not clear whether Mr. Stevenson knew this.) So
the Obama administration's lawyers have cited a statement that was
patently false.

To be sure, the administration may have additional arguments in
support of its use of drones in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and other
countries. To secure the confirmation of John O. Brennan as the C.I.A.
director, it recently showed members of the Congressional intelligence
committees some of the highly classified legal memos that were the
basis for the white paper. But Mr. Obama has asked us to trust him,
and Cambodia offers us no reason to do so.

A more limited, secret bombing campaign in Cambodia had begun in 1965
during Lyndon B. Johnson's administration, but Nixon escalated it to
carpet-bombing. The aim was to disrupt Communist bases and supply
routes. The New York Times reported on it two months after it began,
but the White House denied it, and the trail went cold. When the
bombing began, Nixon even kept it a secret from his secretary of
state, William P. Rogers. Worried about leaks, Nixon told Henry A.
Kissinger, his national security adviser: "State is to be notified
only after the point of no return."

The bombing campaign, called Operation Breakfast, was carried out
through out-and-out deception. Sixty B-52 bombers were prepared for a
bombing run over targets in Vietnam. After the usual pre-mission
briefing, pilots and navigators of 48 planes were then pulled aside
and informed that they would receive new coordinates from a radar
installation in Vietnam. Their planes would be diverted to Cambodia.
But the destination was kept secret even from some crew members. The
historian Marilyn B. Young found an "elaborate system of double
reporting," such that "even the secret records of B-52 bombing targets
were falsified so that nowhere was it recorded that the raids had ever
taken place."

So the sort of "scattered instances of returning fire across the
border" cited by Mr. Stevenson were actually regular bombing runs by
B-52's. Over 14 months, nearly 4,000 flights dropped 103,921 tons of
explosives, followed by more extensive bombing farther into Cambodia.
Mr. Kissinger later claimed that he had been assured that there were
no civilians in the area, which was not the case. Meanwhile, the North
Vietnamese response was to move farther into Cambodia. The bombers
followed.
Eventually, select members of Congress were notified, and an effort by
Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, to add the
bombing to the Watergate articles of impeachment failed. Critics have
argued that the ultimate result of Nixon's strategy was to destabilize
the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk and enable the Khmer Rouge's
ascent to power in 1975, and the subsequent genocide.

The Cambodia bombing, far from providing a valuable precedent for
today's counterterrorism campaign, illustrates the trouble with
secrecy: It doesn't work. If Nixon had gone to Congress or announced
the plan publicly, the historian Jeffrey P. Kimball has written,
"there would have been an uproar." But disclosure was ultimately
forced upon him when he decided to send ground troops into Cambodia. A
new wave of giant antiwar protests erupted, and Nixon's ability to
take further aggressive action became infeasible.

Barack Obama is, of course, no Richard Nixon - we expect better of
him. And we deserve the transparency he promised us, not a new version
of secret warfare.

Mary L. Dudziak, a professor of law and director of the Project on War
and Security in Law, Culture and Society at Emory University, is the
author of "War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences."

-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org