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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights this morning filed a lawsuit
in federal court against several Obama officials, including Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus. The suit is
brought on behalf of the survivors of three American citizens killed in
Yemen by the U.S. Government — killed specifically by the CIA and the
Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command — with no due process and
far from any battlefield: Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan (killed together
in a drone strike) and Awlaki’s teenaged son Abdulrahman (killed two
weeks later).
The suit alleges that the killing of these Americans
violates their Constitutional rights (including their Fifth Amendment
right to due process) because “the United States was not engaged in an
armed conflict with or within Yemen” and “these killings rely on vague
legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never
presented to the courts.”
[C]onsider as Exhibit One a recent speech by the president’s counterterrorism “tsar,”
John Brennan, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
According to his own account, he was dispatched to the center by
President Obama to provide greater openness when it comes to the
administration’s secret drone wars, to respond to critics of the drones
and their legality, and undoubtedly to put a smiley face on drone
operations generally.
Ever since the Puritan minister John Winthrop first used the phrase in a sermon on shipboard on the way to North America, “a city upon a hill”
has caught something of at least one American-style dream -- a sense
that this country’s fate was to be a blessed paragon for the rest of the
world, an exception to every norm. In the last century, it became “a
shining city upon a hill” and was regularly cited in presidential
addresses.
Whatever that “city,” that dream, was once imagined to be, it has
undergone a largely unnoticed metamorphosis in the twenty-first
century. It has become -- even in our dreams -- an up-armored garrison
encampment, just as Washington itself has become the heavily fortified
bureaucratic heartland of a war state. So when Brennan spoke, what he
offered was a new version of American exceptionalism: the first “shining
drone upon a hill” speech, which also qualifies as an instant classic
of self-congratulation.
Never, according to him, has a country with such an advanced weapon
system as the drone used it quite so judiciously, quite so -- if not
peacefully -- at least with the sagacity and skill usually reserved for
the gods. American drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are
“ethical and just," "wise," and "surgically precise” -- exactly what
you’d expect from a country he refers to, quoting the president, as the preeminent “standard bearer in the conduct of war.”
Those drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are based on
staggeringly “rigorous standards” involving the individual
identification of human targets. Even when visited on American citizens
outside declared war zones, they are invariably “within the bounds of
the law,” as you would expect of the preeminent “nation of laws.”
The strikes are never motivated by vengeance, always target someone
known to us as the worst of the worst, and almost invariably avoid
anyone who is even the most mediocre of the mediocre. (Forget the fact
that, as Greg Miller of the Washington Postreported,
the CIA has recently received permission from the president to launch
drone strikes in Yemen based only on the observed “patterns of
suspicious behavior” of groups of unidentified individuals, as was
already true in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.)
Yes, in such circumstances innocents do unfortunately die, even if
unbelievably rarely -- and for that we couldn’t be more regretful. Such
deaths, however, are in some sense salutary, since they lead to the
most rigorous reviews and reassessments of, and so improvements in, our
actions. “This too,” Brennan assured his audience, “is a reflection of
our values as Americans.”
“I would note,” he added, “that these standards, for identifying a
target and avoiding... the loss of lives of innocent civilians, exceed
what is required as a matter of international law on a typical
battlefield. That’s another example of the high standards to which we
hold ourselves.”
yes, we are truly exceptional as a nation, ever mindful of the highest principles of accountability, the rule of law and international humanitarian conventions... no other country can lay claim to such lofty moral standards...
but wait, there's more...
In truth, our leaders should be in mourning for whatever peaceful
dreams we ever had. But mention drones and they light up. They’re
having a love affair with those machines. They just can’t get enough of
them or imagine their world or ours without them.
What they can’t see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is
this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of
death. And death, visited from the skies, isn’t precise. It isn’t
glorious. It isn’t judicious. It certainly isn’t a shining vision. It’s
hell. And it’s a global future for which, someday, no one will thank
us.
An Air Force officer gives his unvarnished opinion of the DADT repeal
intolerance won't go away, it'll just go underground...
I also had the distastefull [sic] duty of delivering the mandatory 'Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell' brief, and ensuring documentation of same for 100% of the squadron. Definitely one of those 'salute smartly, and carry out your orders' kind of assignments.
for obvious reasons, i can't reveal the source... i do know, however, that he flies predator drone missions...
i've mentioned in previous posts that for the past two consecutive summers, i've parked my rv in a park right next to military folks who were either flying or commanding drone missions in afghanistan and pakistan... both were very, shall we say, strident in their support of the u.s. military mission in general and of the need to "eradicate" terrorists in particular, so in my conversations with them i had to be somewhat circumspect about revealing my true political leanings... i was mostly interested in being a good neighbor and also learning a little bit about what they did... they confirmed what i already knew, that they were basically fighter pilots operating out of the same schema and under the same command and control structure as fighter pilots... the big difference, of course, was that they could come home every day to their wives and families, order pizza, watch tv and shop at walmart, rather than do duty in a combat zone or at an air base or aircraft carrier far from home...
this morning, as i sit in my office here in kabul, afghanistan, and look out the window at a sunny, springtime scene, fresh after a day of steady drizzling rain (somewhat of a rarity in this arid climate), i can't help but sweep the skies for a glimpse of a predator drone and reflect on this la times story...
there's a lot of very disturbing stuff going on out there but i think targeted killing and extrajudicial assassinations are right at the top of the list...
This video from the American Civil Liberties Union condemns the U.S. government practice of issuing death sentences without due process as part of its targeted killing policy. "Targeted Killing" is being released to coincide with the filing today of an unprecedented lawsuit by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) challenging the government's asserted authority to use lethal force against U.S. citizens located far from any battlefield without judicial process, and without disclosing the standards it uses to target individuals for death.
What I've found most disturbing about this controversy from the start is how many Americans are willing to blindly believe the Government's accusations of Terrorism against their fellow citizens -- provided they're Muslims with foreign-sounding names -- without needing to see any evidence at all. All government officials have to do is anonymously leak to the media extremely vague accusations against someone without any evidence presented (Awlaki is involved in multiple plots!!), and a substantial number of people will then immediately run around yelling: Kill that Terrorist!!
It's an authoritarian scene out of some near-future dystopian novel, yet it's exactly what is happening. This is precisely the reaction of a substantial portion of the population which has been trained to believe every unproven government accusation of Terrorism. The mere utterance of the accusation -- Terrorist -- sends them into mindless, fear-driven submission, so extreme that they're willing even to endorse a Presidential-imposed death penalty on American citizens with no due process: about the most tyrannical power that can be imagined, literally. The fact that this very same Government is continuously and repeatedly wrong when it makes those accusations does not seem to be even a cause for hesitation among this faction. They just keep dutifully reciting the ultimate authoritarian anthem: if my Government says it, it must be true, and I don't need to see any evidence or indulge any of this bothersome process stuff -- trials and courts or whatever -- before punishment is meted out, including the death penalty.
So now Barack Obama is being sued by an American citizen who is forced to plead with a court to protect him from due-process-free, state-sanctioned murder. There are multiple reasons why this lawsuit may not succeed, beginning with the demonstrated reluctance of federal judges to "interfere with" war-related decisions of the President, particularly when the specter of Terrorism is raised. The power-revering factions on the Right have joined with some Democratic loyalists who are comfortable with any power now that their Party controls the White House. But if the Obama administration succeeds in vesting itself with the power to order American citizens killed far from any battlefield, with no evidence of violent resistance to arrest and no due process whatsoever to contest the accusations, that is a power that will endure with future Presidents as well.
as usually happens when i'm engaged with non-u.s. citizens during my many travels, i get the opportunity to hear what they think about current events and i'm particularly interested in hearing what they think about my country from their respective vantage points... it isn't in the least bit comforting to hear them worrying about what kind of message the u.s. is sending to the budding despots in their own countries who justify increasingly harsh measures by saying, "well, the u.s. does it, why shouldn't we...?"
the u.s. dearly loves to paint itself as the positive role model for the rest of the world but seems to be very nearly blind, either through ignorance or by choice, to just how true that is as well as to the fact that, throughout the history of humankind, actions ALWAYS speak louder than words...
Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey, The Washington Post, today, arguing against civilian trials for Guantanamo detainees:
The civilized world has tried over several hundred years to establish rules of warfare so that those who wear uniforms, follow a recognized chain of command, carry their arms openly and do not target civilians are treated as prisoners of war when captured. Those who follow none of these rules are treated as war criminals, not as ordinary defendants accused of ordinary crimes and entitled to far more robust protection than war criminals.
[...]
The irony here is that the decision to declare enemy fighters in Afghanistan as "unlawful enemy combatants" -- which is what, in turn, "justified" denial of Geneva Conventions protections for them (at least until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise) -- was grounded in the fact that they do not, as Mukasey put it, "wear uniforms, follow a recognized chain of command, carry their arms openly." That's what made them, in the U.S. lexicon, not only "unlawful combatants" but even Terrorists. But, of course, exactly the same is true for our countless private contractors who are acting as combatants for the U.S. in multiple parts of the world... .
as i said yesterday, the ability of the u.s. to wax righteous to the rest of the world while blindly justifying its own utter disregard for accountability, the rule of law and internationally accepted standards of conduct is seemingly limitless...
speaking of which, a neighbor of mine in the rv park is on temporary duty here with the air national guard, serving as a mission commander for drone missions in afghanistan and pakistan and probably other places i'll never hear about... as with so many of these guys, he's a decent enough sort, pleasant to talk with, laid back and easy-going... i'm sure he doesn't think of himself as either a war criminal or a terrorist and i'm sure nothing i could say would change that... however, i'd be really curious to know how much and how deeply he actually thinks about what he's doing... i can't believe he doesn't think about it at all but i strongly suspect he tells himself that, unpleasant as it is, it's a job that's got to be done... if pressed, i'd guess most people would respond that way, so thoroughly have we been sold on the unimpeachable rightness of united states behavior in all things...
p.s. how come it is that former officials of a thoroughly discredited presidential administration - rove, cheney, yoo, mcconnell, mukasey, et al, ad nauseam - keep getting trotted back out to spew their fear-based, constitution-shredding garbage...? why do their opinions still matter...? why not john dean...? why not paul craig roberts...? for that matter, why not ramsey clark...? just askin'...
Damn...! It's REALLY hard to keep the ol' chin up...!
the never-ending oil spill steadily killing the entire caribbean ecosystem, israel intent on exterminating the palestinians by insuring they starve to death, predator drone attacks murdering innocent civilians in afghanistan and pakistan and, on the home scene, continuously accelerating foreclosures, jobs being erased by the thousands... let's all keep a stiff upper lip, eh...? tomorrow's another day...
this morning, i sent the following email to a friend...
is it beyond the realm of possibility to even imagine that, given just how incredibly profitable war, terrorism and massive surveillance are for a select few, that the u.s. policy of carrying out random predator drone attacks carried out by anonymous people sitting behind electronic consoles 10,000 miles away, attacks that seemingly come from nowhere and are entirely unpredictable, attacks that inevitably kill many innocent civilians on a daily basis, just might be intentionally provoking a terrorist response, thus insuring that there's no end to it...?
barely two hours later, i read the following in the new york post...
It was payback.
The Connecticut man charged yesterday with the botched Times Square car bombing confessed to trying to slaughter innocent people in retaliation for US drone attacks that wiped out the leadership of his beloved Taliban, The Post has learned.
"his beloved taliban"...? oh, puh-le-e-e-eze... give it a rest...
that was followed by this in wired, commenting on the post article...
The tabloid, relying on anonymous “law-enforcement sources,” says that Shahzad was an “eyewitness” to the unmanned “onslaught throughout the eight months he spent in Pakistan beginning last summer.”
In a video made prior to the attack, the Pakistani Taliban leader Qari Hussain Mehsud said “the attack is a revenge” for “the recent rain of drone attacks,” and for the slaying of extremist leaders in Iraq and Pakistan.
There have been an estimated 121 American drone strikes in Pakistan since early 2008. The death toll, by some calculations, is over 1,000 people. Counterinsurgency and counterterror experts have warned that the drone strikes risked creating more enemies than they offed.
can you even imagine what it would be like to live in constant fear of death raining out of the skies at any minute...? i know i can't...
right now, i'm listening to kids running around madly outside in full-bore sugar hype after downing soda and cake to celebrate my grandson's 11th birthday... what if, suddenly, they were taken out by a drone strike targeting our next-door neighbor who had been tagged as an al qaeda supporter...? how would i feel...? how would i react...? i wouldn't be just sitting around wringing my hands, i can tell you that much...
we blithely sit in our consumer-fueled, faux paradise and condemn people around the world for all sorts of things and the truth is, we don't have the slightest fucking idea what we're talking about...
Ender's Game - annihilating real people by video game
in the park where i had my rv set up this summer, the man of the family parked across from me was an air force guy headed off to do drone training... he was a really nice guy despite being a batshit crazy, wingnut, fundamentalist christian, neocon... needless to say, i had to completely ignore all his comments about wicked liberals because i knew if i rose to the bait, only one of us would come out alive and since i'm rapidly entering my dotage, i knew it wouldn't be me...
This year, the Air Force will train more joystick pilots than new fighter and bomber pilots. "If you want to be in the center of the action, this is the place to be," Schwartz says. "It's not a temporary phenomenon. It's a sustainable career path. I've made that very clear." Lt. Col. Travis Burdine, a Predator pilot-from-afar, has gotten the message: "We all joined the Air Force to go flying, but word on the street is that job satisfaction is very high [manning a joystick]. Every day we're doing this, we're in the thick of the fight. We fly 36 [combat air patrols] a day. Where they're happening, the hottest 36 things are going on."
It's not hard now to imagine a time when the dominant combat leaders of the Air Force have no physical contact with airplanes. "We're opening an aperture," Schwartz says. "How do we define a warrior-airman? The definition is expanding." Whatever happens, he says, "the trend lines are inescapable: we increasingly will become less of a manned aviation force." C. R. Anderegg, the Air Force historian, says that just as the generals of the 1950s and '60s were predominantly bomber pilots, and the generals of the 1970s and '80s were mainly fighter pilots, so a lot of the generals in the coming decades may be UAV joystick pilots. "It's going to be pretty hard for a promotion board, picking the next one-star generals, to pick a colonel who hasn't commanded a UAV wing over a colonel who has. The UAV commander has the experience, and he has a larger, less insular view of the battlefield than, say, an F-22 pilot at Langley."
how cool is this...? annihilating people from 10,000 miles away... it's the ultimate video game and nicely fulfills the apocalyptic vision of one of the more popular science fiction bestsellers, ender's game...
Here's a story presented as a "gee-whiz" technology piece that should make your blood run cold
Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times
imagine looking up and seeing one of these circling your neighborhood... imagine knowing what it can do... imagine living with that kind of terror day in and day out...
this article reminds me of the public-service ads praising the brave men and women who proudly defend our country using only the very latest technology selflessly dished up by our glorious defense establishment that you'd see on tv in the late 50s and early 60s... what it really is, of course, is a continuing glorification of death and destruction, only rendered more horrifyingly anonymous with the shift to hapless paid assassins raining death from the skies as they sit comfortably in barcaloungers in the nevada desert many thousands of miles from their victims... then, after a hard day at the "office," they go home to the wife and kids for dinner and a night in front of the tv...
The Pentagon is preparing to graduate its first pilots of unmanned drones from the elite U.S. Air Force Weapons School -- a version of the Navy's Top Gun program -- in a bid to elevate the skills and status of the officers who fly Predators, one of the military's fastest growing aircraft programs.
The elite flight schools of the Air Force and Navy are most closely associated with smart, tough fighter jocks. But over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the MQ-1 Predator and more heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper craft have become, to many in the Pentagon, the most important aircraft the U.S. has deployed.
[...]
The Predator and Reaper pilots do their debriefings and classroom work at Nellis with weapons school students specializing in other aircraft. They fly the drones from nearby Creech Air Force Base, the control station used to fly drones in Afghanistan and Iraq.
since we're so hot on this new method of killing and destroying, how about using those new teeny-tiny robot drones to film what happens on the ground and then making that required viewing at the conclusion of each pilot's mission...? maybe watching children screaming and dying, bodies being blasted into raw, bloody bits, and buildings collapsing on and crushing their occupants would bring a better sense of reality to the whole affair...
while we're at it, why not include a slaughter-house photo gallery with each neat, shrink-wrapped package of meat in the supermarket butcher case as a reminder of how it came to be there...?
Photos provided by the U.S. Air Force Inside the U.S. Air Force's Combined Air & Space Operations Center in the Middle East
Each [screen] is about 5 feet wide, displaying remarkably clear live footage from cameras mounted on the Air Force's un-manned Predator drones that buzz incessantly above Iraq and Afghanistan. The Predator drones, however, are not filming a raging firefight, or a bridge about to be strafed from the air.
They are stalking prey.
You see a man, walking through a shrub-dotted, dusty field. A small dog wanders behind him. Another screen shows a group of individuals, standing huddled together on a city street, looking like they could be chatting about a ballgame. A third Predator tracks a figure getting into a car, following as the car snakes through traffic. Yet another screen stays fixated on a single squat house surrounded by what looks like a low cement wall, as if someone is about to emerge from the front door.
The scenes look misleadingly pedestrian. The miniature people on the screens do not know they are being watched. "We are looking for individual people," Lt. Col. Walt Manwill says, as he stares up at the massive screens. "Especially when you are killing people, you want to make sure you do it right." Manwill, a blockish former pilot whose call sign is Fridge, is a chief of combat operations here, on what the Air Force simply calls "the floor." He handles one of three eight-hour shifts in a job that runs 24 hours a day.
Targeters here show me recent footage of two men on the ground in Iraq. The two men, far below the Predator drone's gaze, appear to be setting up a mortar on a city street. They are in the shadow of a building just feet away. Suddenly, the two men explode. Everything around the men, including the buildings, looks unharmed. But when the dust clears, the two men are wiped away. A small bomb, tailor-made for hunting single individuals, has done the job.
besides the nightmarish scene described above in which a duo presumably intent on causing death and destruction are exterminated, seemingly by god himself, we have our u.s. air force coming to realizations like this from the comfort of their air-conditioned operations center...
The Air Force learned the hard way that inadvertently killing and injuring civilians or damaging property is counterproductive to the overall cause. "We went back and looked at our procedures -- how we use air, why we use air and under what circumstances," explains [Col. Gary Crowder, the commander of the operations center]. "We changed the way we do business."
"It's just like a business," agrees Maj. Gen. Maury Forsyth, the deputy commander of Air Force operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Every time you have one unsatisfied customer, you have to have nine satisfied customers to counteract that," he says during an interview in his office. "I'll put it this way: All of the military and political benefits of 10 perfect airstrikes targeting insurgent leaders can be lost in a few seconds by one strike that goes awry and causes civilian casualties."
to complete the absolute horror of this hi-tech operation and the characterization of those ordering the killing as "customers", the targets have even been given a nickname - "bubba"...
The technology the Air Force relies on to kill Bubba, but not his neighbors, is mesmerizing. It also makes the process of killing another human being eerily impersonal.
On the floor, once Bubba is up on the screen, targeting officials can quickly call up satellite images of his location. They have at their fingertips high-fidelity images less than 90 days old of nearly every square foot of Iraq and Afghanistan -- a vast amount of data. By overlaying two images of the same location taken from separate angles, and donning a pair of gray 3-D glasses (I wore a pair), a stunning real-life-looking, 3-D image of Bubba's house appears on a computer screen: There is Bubba's yard, the tree in Bubba's yard and so on. Using a mouse to point and click, a computer quickly determines the size, height and precise location of nearby structures.
to say that i am aghast would be a serious understatement... and, as much as i would like to repress it, another thought crosses my mind... this available and highly-sophisticated technology of instant and impersonal death is on the horizon for domestic use... bet on it...
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