Tom’s Introduction:
Strangely, amid the spike in
racial tensions after the killing of two black men by police in Louisiana and
Minnesota, and of five white police officers by a black sharpshooter in Dallas,
one American reality has gone unmentioned. The U.S. has been fighting
wars -- declared, half-declared, and undeclared -- for almost 15 years and,
distant as they are, they’ve been coming home in all sorts of barely noted
ways. In the years in which the U.S. has up-armored globally, the country
has also seen an arms race developing on the domestic front. As vets have
returned from their Iraq and Afghan tours of duty, striking numbers of them
have gone into police work at a time when American weaponry,
vehicles, and military equipment -- including, for instance, MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles) -- have poured off America’s distant battlefields and, via the Pentagon, into police departments nationwide.
And while the police were militarizing, gun companies have been marketing battlefield-style assault rifles to Americans by the millions, at the very moment when it has become ever
more possible for citizens to carry weapons of every sort in a concealed or open fashion in public.
The result in Dallas: Micah
Johnson, a disturbed Army Reserves veteran, who spent a tour of duty in
Afghanistan and practiced military tactics in his backyard, armed with an SKS semi-automatic assault rifle, wearing full body armor,
and angry over police killings of black civilians, took out those five white
officers. One of them was a Navy vet who had served three tours of duty in Iraq and another a former
Marine who had trained local police for DynCorp, a private contractor, in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, civilian protesters, also armed with assault rifles (quite legal in the streets
of Dallas), scattered as the first shots rang out and were, in some cases,
taken in by the police as suspects. And at least two unarmed protesters
were wounded by Johnson. (Think of that, in his terms, as
“collateral damage.”) In the end, he would be killed by a Remotec Andros
F5 robot, built by weapons-maker Northrop Grumman, carrying a pound of C4 plastic explosive, and typical of
robots that police departments now possess.
In other words, this incident
was capped by the first use of deadly force by a drone in the United
States. Consider that a war-comes-home upping of the ante. Already,
reports the Defense One website, makers of military-grade
robots -- a burgeoning field for the Pentagon -- are imagining other ways to
employ such armed bots not only on our distant battlefields but at home in a
future in which they will be “useful, cheap, and ubiquitous,” and capable of Tasing as well as killing.
Of course, among the many things that have also come home from the country’s wars, Predator and Reaper
drones are now flying over “the homeland” on missions for the Pentagon, not to mention the FBI, the Border Patrol, and other domestic agencies. So the
future stage is set. Once you’ve used any kind of drone in the U.S. to
kill by remote control, it’s only logical -- given some future extreme
situation -- to extend that use to the skies and so consider firing a missile
at some U.S. target, as the CIA and the Air Force have been doing regularly for
years in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And of course,
in our domestic arms race, with small drones commercially available to anyone
and the first of them armed (no matter the rudimentary nature of that armament),
it’s not hard to imagine a future Micah Johnson, white or black, using one of
them sooner or later. After all, Johnson was already talking about
planting “IEDs” (the term for insurgent roadside bombs in our war
zones) and a flying IED is a relatively modest step from there.
So, welcome to the “home
front,” folks. And speaking of drones, it’s worth giving a little thought
to what might, in fact, still come home, to the sort of example that two
administrations have set by turning the president into an assassin-in-chief and regularly creating law for themselves
when it comes to the targeting of distant peoples. In that light, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon considers America’s
Trojan Horse technology of death and just what it may someday smuggle into “the
homeland.” Tom
Posted by Rebecca Gordon at
4:00pm, July 17, 2016.
The Trojan Drone
An Illegal Military Strategy
Disguised as Technological Advance
Think of it as the Trojan
Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American warfare in these years, a single
remotely operated plane sent to take out a single key figure. It's a shiny
video game for grown ups -- a Mortal
Kombat or Call of
Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the giant
wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to bring inside their gates,
however, the drone carries something deadly in its belly: a new and illegal
military strategy disguised as an impressive piece of technology.
The technical advances
embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in
military strategy. However it is achieved -- whether through conventional air
strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone -- the United States has
now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive
administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public
discussion. And most of the discussion we’ve had has focused more on the new
instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). It’s a case
of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all
right to kill people with them.
The Rise of the Drones
The Bush administration launched the assassination program in October 2001 in Afghanistan, expanded it in 2002 to Yemen, and went from there. Under Obama, with an actual
White House “kill list,” the use of drones has again expanded, this time
nine-fold, with growing numbers of attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and
Somalia, as well as in the Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian war zones.
There’s an obvious appeal to a
technology that allows pilots for the CIA, Joint Special Operations Command, or
the Air Force to sit safely in front of video screens in Nevada or elsewhere in
the U.S., while killing people half a world away. This is especially true for a
president running a global war with a public that does not easily accept
American casualties and a Congress that prefers not to be responsible for war
and peace decision-making. Drone assassinations have allowed President Obama to
spread the “war on terror” to ever more places (even as he quietly retired that phrase), without U.S. casualties or
congressional oversight and approval.
One problem has, however,
dogged the drone program from the beginning: just like conventional
air strikes, remotely targeted missiles and bombs tend to kill the wrong
people. Over the last seven years, the count of civilians killed by drones has
been mounting. Actual figures are hard to come by, although a number of nongovernmental organizations and journalists
have done a good job of collating information from a variety of sources and
offering reasonable estimates.
Analysis from all these
sources suggests that there are at least three reasons why civilians die in
such attacks.
1. The intelligence
information on the individual targeted is often wrong. He isn’t where they think he is, or he isn’t even who they think he
is. For example, in 2014 a British human rights organization, Reprieve,
compiled data on drone strikes that targeted specific individuals in Yemen and
Pakistan. According to the Guardian, Reprieve’s work
“indicates that even when
operators target specific individuals -- the most focused effort of what Barack
Obama calls 'targeted killing' -- they kill vastly more people than their
targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men
resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November [2014].”
Some of these men were
reported in the media as killed multiple times. Even if they didn’t die in the
first, second, and in some cases third attempts, other people certainly did.
Reprieve also reports one particularly egregious case of mistaken
identity:
“Someone with the same name as
a terror suspect on the Obama administration’s ‘kill list’ was killed on the
third attempt by U.S. drones. His brother was captured, interrogated, and
encouraged to ‘tell the Americans what they want to hear’: that they had in
fact killed the right person.”
2. There isn’t even a named
target. The CIA has long based drone assassination targeting for many missions
not on direct intelligence about a particular individual, but on what it calls
the “signature” of possible terrorist activity (that is, the behavior or look
of people below). Such “signature strikes” target unidentified individuals
based on some suspicious activity, usually picked up through drone surveillance.
Such a “signature” can be as ill defined as “a gathering of men, teenaged to
middle-aged, traveling in convoys or carrying weapons” in countries where many
men may be armed. Unfortunately, while such a gathering may indeed indicate
some kind of military activity, it may also describe a rural wedding in, say, Yemen, involving driving in convoy from the groom’s town to
the bride’s, accompanied sometimes by celebratory gunfire.
Not everyone in the government
is convinced that signature strikes are a good idea. In 2012, the New York
Times reported this joke at the State Department: “When the
C.I.A. sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks,’ the agency thinks it is a
terrorist training camp.”
The fact that signature strikes continue to this day
suggests that Secretary of State John Kerry was not entirely truthful when, in
2013, he said at a BBC forum: “The only people that we fire a drone
at are confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level after a great deal of
vetting that takes a long period of time. We don’t just fire a drone at
somebody and think they’re a terrorist.”
3. They were in the way, and
so became “collateral damage.” This is the term military theorists
regularly use to describe human beings or civilian infrastructure unavoidably
destroyed in an attack on a legitimate military target. Of course, a drone
operator’s understanding of the term “unavoidable” may be different from that
of a woman who has just lost three of her four sons as they were returning
home from shopping for supplies to celebrate Eid-al-Fitr, the end of the holy
month of Ramadan.
In addition, drone strikes
don’t just kill people, including women and children; they also destroy buildings
and other property. For example, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that,
in Pakistan, more than 60% of all strikes target domestic buildings -- people’s
houses. In other words, “collateral damage” often refers to the destruction of
the homes of any survivors of a drone attack.
Not surprisingly, people don’t
like living in terror of deadly missiles screaming out of a clear blue sky.
Many observers have argued that terrorist organizations have used widespread
fear and anger over drone attacks as a recruiting tool. Al-Qaeda and ISIS
appear to offer Pakistanis, Yemenis, and others an alternative to simply
waiting for an attack they can’t prevent. The CIA itself recognized the
counterproductive potential of drone killings, which they call “HVT [High Value
Target] operations.” A leaked July 2009 CIA report on “Best Practices in Counter-Insurgency”
outlines the issues:
“Potential negative effects of
HVT operations include increasing the level of insurgent support, causing a
government to neglect other aspects of its counterinsurgency strategy, altering
insurgent strategy or organization in ways that favor the insurgents,
strengthening an armed group’s bond with the population, radicalizing an
insurgent group’s remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical
groups can enter, and escalating or deescalating a conflict in ways that favor
the insurgents.”
So there are long-term
strategic problems with targeted killings by drone. In addition, drones may
help spread and intensify terror movements and insurgencies, rather than
destroying them or their leaderships. Often, as Andrew Cockburn has made clear
in his book Kill Chain, the successors to leaders assassinated by drone
turn out to be younger, more effective, and more
brutal.
There is, however, another
problem with this sort of warfare. Such killings -- at least when they take
place outside a declared war zone -- are almost certainly illegal; that is,
they are murders, plain and simple.
Targeted Killing Is Murder
In my household we have a
rule: we’re not allowed to kill something just because we’re afraid of it. This
has saved the lives of countless spiders and other creatures sporting (in my
view at least) too many legs.
Whatever your view on
arachnids, should it really be permissible to kill people simply because we are
afraid of them? After all, that’s what these drone assassinations are --
extrajudicial executions of people someone believes we should be afraid of. It is
easier to see an illegal execution for what it is when the killer is not
separated from the target by thousands of miles and a video screen. Drone
technology is really a Trojan Horse, a distracting, glitzy means of smuggling
an illegal and immoral tactic into the heart of U.S. foreign relations.
Not all killing is illegal, of
course. There are situations in which both international and U.S. laws permit
killing. One of these is self-defense; another is war. However, a “war” waged
against a tactic (terrorism), or even more vaguely, against an emotion (terror)
is only metaphorically a war. Under international law, real wars, in which it
is legal to kill the enemy, involve sustained combat between organized military
forces.
Outside of the fighting in
Iraq, Afghanistan, and now possibly Syria (where Congress has arguably never
even declared war), the “war on terror” is not a war at all. It is instead a
conflict with an ever-expanding list of targets, no defined geographical boundaries,
and no foreseeable endpoint. It is a campaign against any conceivable potential
U.S. enemy, fought in fits and starts in many countries on several continents.
It involves ongoing covert operations largely hidden from everyone except its
targets. As an undertaking, it lacks the regular, sustained conflict between
armies that characterizes war in the legal sense. Such operations fit another
category far better: assassination, illegal at least since President Jimmy
Carter’s Executive Order 12036, which stated, “No person employed by
or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or
conspire to engage in, assassination.”
Nor is the Middle East the
only region where the United States is using targeted killing outside a
shooting war. The U.S. military also deploys drones in parts of Africa. In fact, President
Obama’s nominee to head U.S. Africa Command, Marine Lieutenant General Thomas
Waldhauser, recently told Senator Lindsay Graham that he thinks he should be
free to order drone killings on his own authority.
So much for war and “war.”
What about self-defense? At every stage of the “war on terror,” Washington has
claimed self-defense. That was the explanation for rounding up hundreds of Muslims living in the U.S.
immediately after the attacks of 9/11, torturing some of them, and holding them
incommunicado for months in a Brooklyn, New York, jail. It was the excuse
offered for beginning torture programs in CIA “black sites” and at Guantánamo. It was the reason the U.S.
gave for invading Afghanistan, and later for invading Iraq -- before, as Bush
administration representatives and the president himself kept saying, “the smoking gun” of
Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction turned into “a mushroom
cloud” over, presumably, some American city.
And self-defense has been the
Justice Department’s rationale for targeted killing as well. In a November 2011
paper prepared by that department for the White House, its
author (identity unknown) outlined the necessary conditions to make a targeted
killing legal:
“(1) an informed, high-level
official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual
poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States;
(2) capture is infeasible, and
the United States continues to monitor whether capture becomes feasible; and
(3) the operation would be
conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”
That would seem to rule out
most U.S. targeted killings. Few of their targets were people on the verge of a
violent attack on the United States or U.S. soldiers in the field. Ah, but in
the through-the-looking-glass logic of the Obama Justice Department, “imminent”
turns out not to mean “imminent” in the sense that something is about to
happen. As that document explains: “The condition that an operational leader
present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does
not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on
U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”
It turns out that the threat
from any “operational leader” is always imminent, because “with respect to
al-Qaeda leaders who are continually planning attacks, the United States is
likely to have only a limited window of opportunity within which to defend
Americans.” In other words, once a person has been identified as an al-Qaeda or
allied group “leader,” he is by definition “continually planning attacks,”
always represents an imminent danger, and so is a legitimate target. Q.E.D.
In fact, few enough of these
targeted killings, including the signature ones can be defended as instances of
self-defense. We should call them what they really are: extrajudicial
executions.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on
Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions has agreed with this view. In
his 2013 report to the General Assembly, Christof Heyns noted that international human rights law guarantees a
right to life. This right is enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and given legal force in, among other treaties, the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a party. There
certainly are legal limits to the right to life, including -- in countries that
have the death penalty -- the state’s right to execute a person after a
legitimate trial. To execute someone without a trial, however, is an
“extrajudicial killing” and a human rights crime.
Obama “Comes Clean”
By the middle of President
Obama’s second term in office, criticism of this extrajudicial killing program,
and especially of the civilian deaths involved, had mushroomed. So, in May
2013, at least 11 years after the program was launched, the president announced a shift in drone strategy, telling an audience at
the National Defense University that the U.S. would engage in “targeted
killings” of al-Qaeda militants only when there was a “near-certainty” that no
civilians would be injured. He added that he was planning to make the drone
program more transparent than it had been and to transfer most of its
operations from the CIA to the Pentagon.
In the two years since, little
of this has happened. Although Obama has continued the job of personally approving drone targets, the CIA still runs much of the program.
On July 1st, he did finally
take a step towards providing greater transparency. The Office of the Director
of National Intelligence issued a report stating that, outside of more conventional
war zones like those in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. airstrikes have
killed “64 to 116 civilian bystanders and about 2,500 members of terrorist
groups.” These estimates are, in fact, quite a bit lower than those supplied by
the various groups that track such killings. Note as well that, legally
speaking, not only the “collateral damage” victims, but all those that
Americans identified as “members of terrorist groups” died via illegal,
extrajudicial executions.
The document fulfills one of
the requirements of a newly issued executive order, which, among other things, requires the
government to release a report by May 1st of each year containing “information
about the number of strikes undertaken by the U.S. Government against terrorist
targets outside areas of active hostilities [i.e., outside genuine war zones]”
for the previous calendar year.
Attached to the executive
order was a “fact sheet,” which noted that one goal of the new executive
order is to “set standards for other nations to follow.” How happy would the
United States really be if other nations decided that they had the right to
kill anyone who scares them? How would the United States react if Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad decided to take out a U.S. general or two, on the
grounds that, since the U.S. is supporting forces that seek to depose him,
those generals are (as the Fact Sheet puts it) “targetable in the exercise of
national self-defense”?
Some critics of the Obama
drone program have welcomed the executive order, which does include a new
emphasis on protecting civilians. But the larger effect of the order is to make
the practice of illegal assassination a permanent feature of U.S. policy. It
assumes that we can expect an annual murder toll announcement for years to
come. No future is contemplated in which the United States will not be raining
death from the sky on people who cannot defend themselves. The drones will
continue to fly, but the Trojan Drone’s work is complete.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches philosophy at the University
of San Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture and most recently
of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial
for Post-9/11 War Crimes. She can be contacted at
www.mainstreamingtorture.org.
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