Karen Greenberg, The Age of Unaccountability

July 8, 2021

Only recently, more than 18 years after President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq and quickly declared victory ("Mission accomplished!"), Joe Biden once again ordered U.S. air strikes, three of them, against Iranian-backed Iraqi militias in that country's borderlands with Syria. In the process, he reportedly killed several militiamen, but also possibly a child. And within 24 hours, at least one of those militias had responded by launching rocket attacks on a U.S. base in... no kidding... Syria! And so it goes, and has gone, in American war-making in the twenty-first century.

Of course, no one in official Washington refers to such acts as "war" any longer as that might bring Congress, the part of our government with the constitutional power to declare such a state, into play. In fact, as Karen Greenberg wrote recently at the American Prospect, "The refusal to distinguish war from hostilities overall has been a landmark piece of the war on terrorism architecture. It’s worth noting that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to counter those responsible for 9/11 does not use the word 'war' itself."

And keep in mind that, whatever U.S. troops may be doing in Syria, there are also 2,500 U.S. troops still in Iraq so many years later, though why (since the Iraqi parliament has demanded their departure) remains open to question. What generally doesn't remain open to question, at least in this country, is the power of an American president to order such strikes or similar drone assassination attacks launched -- as Donald Trump did against a key Iranian general at Baghdad International Airport in 2020 -- at any moment of his choosing. Biden and crew cited no particular authority for striking Syrian and Iraqi targets again, other than the right to self-defense under international law (in Iraq and Syria, no less!). They certainly didn't cite any congressional authorization. And the Iraqi government didn't authorize such attacks, instead protesting them vehemently.

But these days, in this country's somewhat dwindling but never-ending war on terror, one thing that never truly seems to be at stake is what Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular and author of the upcoming book Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, sadly highlights today: accountability. Instead, it appears that an accountability crisis of the first order is coming home big time. That was obviously true in the Trump years when the president was quite literally accountable for nothing he did, no matter how damaging. Now, sadly enough, it seems to be spilling over into the Biden years as well. But let Greenberg tell you this sorry tale of a system that seems to become less accountable by the moment. Tom

America's Accountability Problem
Is Anyone Responsible Anymore?
By Karen Greenberg
America has an accountability problem. In fact, if the Covid-19 disaster, the January 6th Capitol attack, and the Trump years are any indication, the American lexicon has essentially dispensed with the term "accountability."
This should come as no surprise. After all, there's nothing particularly new about this. In the Bush years, those who created a system of indefinite offshore detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, those who implemented a CIA global torture program and the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance policy, not to mention those who purposely took us to war based on lies about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, were neither dismissed, sanctioned, nor punished in any way for obvious violations of the law. Nor has Congress passed significant legislation of any kind to ensure that all-encompassing abuses like these will not happen again.
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