How Does Obama Deal with the Guilt of Having a Kill List?

This weekend, the world became aware of something called The Disposition Matrix. This fancy bit of jargon is basically the application of modern management theories to the age-old problem of killing people. To put it in simpler terms, Nero probably had a "disposition matrix". He just wouldn't have called it that. It would all have been internal – scrolling through certain key actions in his mind: "just kill", "boil in oil", "pull apart by horses", "make a senator", all on the basis of a range of motivations, such as: "tried to kill me", "secretly Christian", "plotting with the Cretians", "selfish lover at orgies". Like a butterfly equation of death, the action and motivation would be fed into his brain and a match would be found.

And now America has one, too. Only, theirs has become formalised, written down – graphed, even – under the present administration. That’s Harvard types for you: Obama’s time at the home of Peter Drucker and Paul Lawrence has learned him well in terms of wanting to do everything the ISO 9000 way.

If revelations in the Guardian are anything to go by, then how it works is this: every week, Obama himself and a series of senior Pentagon types get together for a meeting only semi-ironically dubbed "Terror Tuesday". There, they look at this Disposition Matrix and, based on what it tells them, they inform their flying killbot drones which far-flung Islamists they’re going to wipe out this week. In terms of their execution, Obama has the final say. He is the Judge Judy of the piece. So, if you’re an adherent of radical Islam hiding out somewhere in Yemen's mountainous highlands, you should start your daily Salah by praying that Barack is generally in a good mood on Tuesdays.

To illustrate this, the Guardian cites the extraordinary case of a young man who is sadly no longer with us, having been reduced to a flaming pair of shoes by the Obama aerial killbots. Bilal Berjawi was a 27-year-old British citizen, who – owing to a few bad choices and a general naughty-streak – had somehow ended up in Somalia, where he was doing radical-type things for terroristic organistation al-Shabaab. Mainly, he'd been fighting against the secular coalition that now controls Mogadishu.

Obama in the Oval Office, presumably where – or close to where – he gets together with his Pentagon buddies for Terror Tuesday. (Photo via)

While there, he’d already almost been wiped-out in a US drone strike in mid-2011. This had been an important reminder for him that high roaming charges weren’t the only thing to be wary of when using a mobile phone abroad. But sadly it had somehow not been clear enough. With his wife going into labour back in Paddington, Berjawi – apparently already flagged by his friends as basically not the sharpest tool in the shed – decided to risk just one call. But Berjawi was already on the kill matrix, flagged as "delete" in the big anti-terror Excel spreadsheet. As soon as US intelligence picked up on his call, Mr Killbot was dispatched. He did the necessary.

He wasn’t the only one. With the lively sense of irony they’re well known for, the Pentagon dispatched Berjawi’s London neighbour in a fireball of martyrdom a few weeks later. On the basis of what we now know, we can only assume that Obama must have personally OK'd this one, too. These names almost certainly flashed up to him on the Matrix. Bilal Berjawi, ex-British, 27. Likes: beards and Allah. Dislikes: America and Penthouse magazine. Presently doing a bit of al-Shabaab in the Gulf. Can we kill him, boss…?

No doubt, in most cases, when faced with the ultimate decision, Obama first frowns and prevaricates a bit. He knows what the answer should be: “Yeah, why the hell not?” But he also knows that he should at least look like he’s still contemplating mercy as a man’s life dangles in his palm: "Demonstrate mercy… What have we got in the plus column? Is he kind to animals? I mean, is there a chance he might give up radical Islam? Get bored of it, go into something more suitable?" No boss, the Pentagon suits all agree. Looks like he’s just a bad egg.

Obama wrings his big liberal hands in a painfully earnest way and does his official presidential sadface that he normally reserves for hurricanes and school shootings. He thinks what Nancy Pelosi would say if she knew quite how up to his neck in all this murder he is now. He makes a mental note not to tell her, nods acquiescence and moves onto the next one of the day – "Right. Now, what’ve we got planned for Mahdi Hashi?" Madhi Hashi no doubt also flickered across the grid one idle Terror Tuesday. He was also "out there" on the naughty end of the Horn Of Africa. He was also an ex-Brit. And, like Berjawi, Her Majesty’s government had recently revoked his passport. (Yeah, they’re allowed to do that now – but only if they really want to.) Deprived of the flak jacket of UK nationality, he’d suddenly found himself bumped onto the upper end of the Disposition Matrix.

Unlike Berjawi, this time they put his details into the Matrix and it said: “Don’t kill. Just capture and then interrogate without charge in Djibouti for three months. Then fly back to the US to stand trial.” The Matrix tends to throw in a few curveballs every now and then. So it was that 23-year-old Hashi appeared in a Brooklyn court in January, smiling, despite having been told that, if he didn’t cooperate, he would simply be locked up indefinitely.

Footage from a US drone in Afghanistan.

Such is the nature of the thing. In a realm stuffed with screwy paradoxes, the diplomatic mechanics are maybe the highest form of comedy. On the face of it, it would seem that whenever America identifies a British citizen they would like to kill, they go to Theresa May and ask her whether she can withdraw their passport. Theresa May then covenes the Special Immigration Appeals Committee, where she is allowed to use secret evidence that the defendant is not allowed to see. Having established secretly that they are guilty of terrible but naturally unmentionable things, the committee then summarily strips them of their British citizenship, rendering them merely "Somali" or, in Berjawi’s case, "Lebanese".

At the stroke of a pen, they become 600 percent more killable. Short of painting a big red "X" on the top of their bald heads, it’d be hard to think of a move designed to be more inviting to predator drones looking to make nests of fire in people's brains. They may have fucked us over Suez and failed to back us over the Falklands, but whatever our occasionally awkward relationship with the Americans, it should make you proud to know that a British passport can still massively diminish one’s personal killability by American drones.

Recently, the British government have developed a tendency to do this to its ex-citizens while they’re out of the country. That’s right: you go away for a couple of months to see about a bit of low-grade plutonium somewhere near Bishkek, and when you come back that old hag Theresa May has changed the bloody locks on Britain. We all understand very well that international espionage is a sneaky business, but maybe we’ve never quite understood just how sneaky.

The irony of the Disposition Matrix is that it’s designed to solve the illiberalisms of the Bush era. Those dark days of that other great euphemism of our times: Extraordinary Rendition. Tired of liberals whining about these rights-exempt punchbags being shuttled like UPS parcels around the world, from Bombay to Camp X Ray via nine months at secret torture centres in grey blobs of non-existent no-man’s land, they decided to solve both the problems by killing them where everyone could see. Kill a man in a deeply hidden illegal US prison = deep shit. Kill a man in broad daylight in upstate Djibouti – who cares?

It’s kind of the opposite of the "only Nixon can go to China" principle. Only Obama can be a true psychotic asshole. On this axis at least, the public trust him. They look into his milky brown eyes and they see a man who, at the very least, wrings his big liberal hands and asks a few probing questions about the soon-to-be-deceased. He’s a sympathetic padre. Like the well-meaning crucifixion-administrator in Life of Brian, he’s always inwardly hoping that this time they’ll be given the soft option, this time the grid will announce they haven’t done anything wrong and can probably go free. But every time, it seems like the cards are marked with, "Death, death, death." They like that about him. So long as someone’s feeling a bit sad, dying a little inside to save us from our sins, the spiritual circle is squared. We are truly lucky to have such a man.

Follow Gavin and Marta on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @MartaParszeniew

Illustration by Marta Parszeniew.

Previously – Don't Worry Britain, Murray's Victory Means We're Great Again