Breaching the rule of law

Is it racism to accuse a black man of doing it?

A short while ago, I got into a discussion with somebody on LinkedIn. In the course of that discussion, which was prompted by a photograph, I was outed as a racist. The photograph in question is a well-known photograph of members of the US security community observing by live transmission the killing of Osama bin Laden. Here is the photograph.

The tenor of the comments on the photograph erred towards the notion that the person who appears at first blush to be the most important person in the room, isn’t. The parties depicted are as follows (according to Wikipedia).

Seated, from left to right:

• a person with black hair (only part of the head is visible);

• Vice President of the United States Joe Biden;

• President Obama;

• Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, USAF, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command;

• Denis McDonough, Deputy National Security Advisor;

• Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State; and

• Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense.

Standing, from left to right, are:

• Admiral Mike Mullen, USN, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;

• Tom Donilon, National Security Advisor;

• Bill Daley, Chief of Staff;

• Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President;

• Audrey Tomason, Director for Counterterrorism;

• a person in a beige shirt (only part of the shoulder is visible);

• John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism;

• James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence; and

• a person in a black suit with a white tie.

The original post on LinkedIn cited the following comment on the photograph:

Historian Clarence Lusane said that past presidents have felt a need to project “machismo” and '“swagger.” Meredith College sociology professor Lori Brown said it is significant, however, that Obama is neither in the center of the room nor in the tallest chair. Political analyst Cheryl Contee said “Obama's willingness to be photographed without the typical Oval Office swagger gives birth to a new type of swagger.” She said that the image shows Obama’s leadership style as a collaborator.

My initial comment was in Dutch. Translated it was:

I first looked at the photo. “Isn’t that Joseph R. Biden up front?” Yes, so who else? Oh yes, I see the tea boy has taken a seat after serving the refreshments. That’s what the president looks like if you glance too quickly (which I did). But why is that John Lithgow from Third Rock from the Sun standing there? [I was referring to Tom Donilon.]

The immediate reaction was hostile: I had identified the only black man in the picture as the tea boy. This is true. Because, as I tried to say, his appearance is that of an unimportant person. He does not project swagger, which was the point made by the comment cited by the OP.

The response from a certain Toine van der Heijden was this:

Are you calling Obama a tea boy? That’s downright racist. And what does “serving” even mean?

The dispute never got reconciled, so I shall reconcile it here. You are racist if someone thinks you are, and really there’s no absolute on that score. If you are of one race and you criticise or comment upon someone of another race, you always risk being labelled as a racist. That is the point at which wokeism goes too far. One cannot have an open discussion about President Obama’s leadership style without getting entangled in the colour of his skin.

But there is perhaps more to this photograph than just Obama’s leadership style. You can read on the Internet the details of the preparations and planning that went into the military operation known as Neptune Spear. And, when you compare that operation to assassinations such as of the Hamas leadership in Doha of recent date, or the attack against Hamas leadership in Beirut, or Russian attacks against defectors in Spain, the judgment as to the legality or otherwise of such operations falls squarely within your personal judgment, of whether you yourself wanted the person in question to die.

In that moment, when you issue your personal death warrant on the person in question (which is either directed at the person who is killed or, indeed, the person who orders the killing, supposing your sympathies lie with the victim), you assume the position of an anarchist. You may be surrounded by many people of the same mind (90 per cent of Americans asked in a survey whether they approved of Neptune Spear said positively “yes”), and you may all be of one accord in suspending the rule of law in order to eliminate the man who allegedly orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, but that does not detract from that suspension of the rule of law. Nor, much more importantly, does it detract from the fact that suspending the rule of law sets a precedent for suspending the rule of law again.

The rule of law is vaunted, held high as a proud aspirational achievement of western civilisation. Time, and time, and time again we hear this in public speeches by prominent people. And time and again, we hear of justified examples of how the rule of law is cast aside like dross, in the interests of justice (the proclamation by President Obama after Neptune Spear was “Justice has been done”). That proclamation founded squarely on the patent obviousness to the world that bin Laden was guilty as charged. Even if he had no opportunity to present a defence. Or to explain his reasoning. Or to benefit from the maxim of innocence till guilt be proved. And, for 90 per cent of Americans, that posed no difficulty. It is not problematic to deny the accused those benefits of the rule of law when it is so obvious that the accused is guilty. When it is so obvious that he must die.

Osama bin Laden, assuming his guilt is taken as read, was responsible for the deaths of something like 3,000 people. You might like to consider the deaths that have occurred at the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu, also by dint of illegal acts, or of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam, or of the company 3M due to the proliferation of its PFAS poisons throughout the world: it’s pretty much proved that 3M has poisoned all of mankind and all of nature and caused many cancerous deaths, far more than 3,000. Should we not then send in troops to take out the management of 3M? A trial? Why would we need a trial? It’s obvious they are guilty, it’s obvious they tried to conceal their guilt, it’s obvious they need to be punished, it’s obvious that justice needs to be done.

Nowadays, Americans are seeing another side of this attitude. That green cards are residence permits that are granted by the leave of the US administration, and that the US administration can, if it so chooses, withdraw that consent. The assumption that a green card conferred entitlement is modified: it confers entitlement by the administration’s leave. And, moreover, the US administration now takes it upon itself to decide that, when interdiction “does not work” as a disincentive to drug smugglers, it may freely decide who is or is not a drug smuggler and intercept them kinetically on the open seas, in international waters and destroy their vessel and kill its occupants. And now, furthermore, another state has decided that it is permissible to attack seagoing vessels at harbour in a third state’s port with utter immunity, on the ground that the vessel’s owners intend to use it to provide aid to inhabitants of that state who are in hungering need of food.

That’s the extent to which the rule of law is now flouted by sovereign states. No one is safe anywhere, especially if they oppose the acts of anyone. If I oppose Russia, then they may send a hitman to my front door and slice my throat open. If I oppose Israel, there may appear a mob of Jews at my driveway yelling how antisemitic I am. If I oppose the UK’s stance on Palestine Action, I may be strip searched the next time I enter the UK (as it was, last month, my car was searched extensively, including the engine). Public safety is now a question of emulating Bre’er Rabbit: lay low and say nuffinck. Yet public safety is precisely what the rule of law is there to ensure.

I think I can sense why Mr Obama may have been sitting low in that picture: he was in the very act of breaching the rule of law, and he knew it. And he knew he was setting a precedent that would not easily be reined back in. No amount of high-sounding mémoires can make up for the criminal act he was authorising: there were people killed in that operation who were not Osama bin Laden. His remains were taken back by US soldiers and buried in an unknown location, so we don’t even know whether the operation really was successful. What became of the other dead we don’t know, and never will.

I’m sorry if you think I’m a racist for accusing a black man of breaching the rule of law. It just so happens he is black. And it just so happens that I think he continued an awful precedent that the current US president, among many others, is applying with glee.