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Friday’s New York Times features a story on our expanded use of predator drones with HellFire missiles to bomb suspected al Qaeda/Taliban targets in Pakistan. The practice has apparently greatly increased under the Obama Administration.
We’ve become immune to the horror of what this means, but even then, this statement struck me:
The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-tech appeal and its secrecy have obscured just how radical it is. For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war.
I don’t think that’s correct in any meaningful sense, even if you don’t count B-52s bombing countries in the 1970s as "robots." The only technical change is the use of robots. If you substituted the word "agents" or "assassins," there’s nothing new about the practice of some countries sending them into other countries to murder people, and to do so completely outside any legal framework.
What’s new is the public acknowledgment that this is what we do, and how we behave, that it’s routine, and the implicit acceptance that it’s okay. And all that has occurred with no recognition whatsoever that if an agent from another country did that here, it would be called a terrorist act carried out by a people without soul or morality.
Only now we’re the best in the world.
57 Comments
I think the operative word is suspected. This is a continuation of the Bush Doctrine
BTW, they have a new toy over there; it looks like an X-47
Bless you Scarecrow for defining the revolting real implications of this new reality.
So glad you’re back; you’ve been missed.
Gee! I wonder if the Iraqies who lived through shock and Awe, really thank us for that.
The question should be who really are the terrorists.
Remember the Chinese Embasy in the balkins.
Who actually used the Bomb, and blew people to bits.
We should ask ourselves how many countries we want to bomb the shit of of while saying were saving the world.
It even has it’s own name–the Bush Doctrine.
Note that this is not “in a country with which the United States is not at war”.
Obama has clearly embraced the Bush Doctrine, as he has most of the legal arguments Bush used.
little known fact: drones are also called “freedoms”.
that might clear things up for some people on why they hate us.
Using drones to attack a country your not at war with. Shooting missiles at weddings, funerals and villages killing innocent people that’s the way to win the hearts and minds of the locals.
War powers of the president need to be revised to involve Congress, perforce. The president can’t be held directly responsible for his acts, but members of Congress can, if they are called on their nonfeasance.
Not to worry; all of the survivors realize that their people have to be sacrificed because they are dying in a good cause. Their dead are less dead than they would be if we were not such righteous people.
Obama has been much more willing to use brutal methods in fighting extremists than I would have expected. See Jane Mayer’s The Predator War: What are the risks of the C.I.A.’s covert drone program? (Oct 26, 2009) in the New Yorker, which makes Scarecrow’s point:
It is being discussed more now than before.
Remember what happened to Bill Maher when he commented on the use of predator drones back in 2002? See Death of Maher’s ‘PI’ is a blow against courage:
Here’s what Maher said that got his show canceled:
It’s terrorism when they do it. It’s resisting aggression when we do it.
Jobs, health care and a return to an economy based on manufacturing.
No more war.
We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace! White Rose
Good find.
These weapons are seriously psychologically traumatizing to the Pakistani populace. Imagine having a wedding and a second later out of nowhere everyone has been turned to mounds of burning flesh. You don’t see anything. There’s no one to fight back against. There’s nothing you can do.
The fallout from this is going to be more retaliatory terrorist attacks. At worst it could trigger a Pakistani civil war, and at that point… hello draft.
Some years ago there was a movie called RED DAWN about a small group of young people in Colorado (an area that looks much like Afghanistan) who fought back when the USA was invaded by the the black helicopters from Honduras. The tactics used by the young Americans was very similar to many of the tactics used in the ME against our forces. Our people were called patriots and freedom fighters, the ME people are called terrorists. I guess that the ME terrorists don’t understand that we are not to be opposed because our goals are righteous.
What the hell constitution did obama study ?
No more God Damn War.
To be truthful, we’re attacking individuals, not the country. Paki isn’t too worried about it.
This isn’t inhumane, it’s inhuman.
I guess some viewed “Terminator” as a horrific future fantasy while others a blueprint.
I hate every loss of every fallen soldier, it’s painful. It’s supposed to be.
Just as I suspected. Petraeus and McChrystal are fools.
Juan Cole has a report on Pakistani response to Obama’s speech, which among other things claims that Osama bin Laden has been sighted in Ghrazni, Afghanistan. This is a province along the Kabul-Kandahar road, one province away from Waziristan.
Also in response to nagaura @ 6:
Pakistan is directing the attacks. For better or worse, they’re providing many of the targets.
Barbara Lee
I agree with much of what you have said regarding the long-established practice of illegal (CIA) killing operations in other countries.
However the use of robots as the killing agent does cross an important barrier for this reason: without american lives at risk, the threshold for a decision to attack drops.
Plus, there is something fundamentally creepy about these drones — reminiscent of the worst sci-fi nightmares. Dead is dead in the end, but Predators are literally machines of terror.
Barbara Lee
Thanks, Scarecrow.
Rachel Maddow had Jeremy Scahill on last night discussing this very thing. They both were making the point that this is an escalation under Obama, and Scahill was emphasizing that this is military vs CIA and that this represents a big departure from what’s been acceptable. Oh, and that there’s virtually no congressional oversight.
What was particularly interesting to me is that in this media-savvy world, they were being so explicit in their language, but their affects remained calm and media-trained. You can tell they’re outraged, but oh so contained.
Disturbing. On many levels.
Extrajudicial killing, i.e., assassination, you mean.
Thanks, Scarecrow.
I shudder to think what our country has become. In a comment over at Instaputz a couple days ago, “Guest” kinda summed it up:
“I think a certain pragmatism toward who and what we are as a country is laudable compared to their view, which is that the USA collectively has shit that don’t smell.
(Longer version: Afghanistan was lost the minute the Bush cabal allowed Osama Bin Laden to get away. Every minute since has been a waste, a waste of lives, materiel and moral standing. Iraq was a mistake from the minute the “plan” was conceived and every dollar spent, every life lost is totally unnecessary. Like the Vietnam “conflict” we have done our level best to destroy Iraq for no good reason and no specific definition of “victory” and nobody is calling us on it because we’re the biggest bully in the playground. We’ve coasted on our reputation as the good guys since WWII but it’s not really true any longer: we don’t look after our own, we meddle for our own venal ends in other countries where we don’t belong and we’ve grown complacent, stupid and mean. Best ever? We have a population that doesn’t care about Democracy, they just want to get theirs, whatever that might be, whether it’s that shiny double-wide or a killing on Wall Street. We are ruining the environment, apparently just because we can. In a word, we suck. Damn right someone should be apologizing for the shameful sham Democracy has become in this wonderful land.)” (My bold)
Afghanistan, Iraq..and now it’s Pakistan’s turn.
And General Petraus had a long interview on NPR about the extensive push in Pakistan….We are the killing empire, it seems to me, to re-shape the world. Im no expert; just sounds that way.
Here’s the link.
Whether or not this is true, one thing is certain, the CIA clearly makes no effort to verify the information they collect. It is extremely incompetent in foreign affairs where it matters and certainly shouldn’t be in charge of these missions the president wishes to pursue. They’ve stepped well beyond the role assigned to them to the neglect of that role.
First, of course, America has done this sort of thing throughout its history. Around the globe it has helped to install and then prop up some of the most brutal thug regimes ever known. For example: in Indonesia, South Korea, the Philipines. And all throughout Central and South America it systematically embodied the Monroe Doctrine by supporting heinous dictatorships and anti-democratic forces in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia and on and on.
The very point of American foreign policy has always been to maintain a favorable business climate for the folks on Wall Street.
Does anyone here actually believe that changes when Democrats are in power?!!
Ah, but on the other hand, I am always torn by attacks in places like Pakistan [today] because of a visceral disdain I have for any and all religious fundamentalists. Especially those hell bent on killing the infidels. If Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their ilk are being destroyed in Pakistan, fine with me. I just don’t have any illusions about the motive behind the attacks. Not from Obama anymore than from Bush.
Thanks — annoying things happen on my computer whenever I venture into the video section of MSNBC!
Scarecrow -
I completely disagree with your assertion that the only “technical” change is the switch to robots, because you are ignoring the switch from military to civilian (CIA) control. Civilians played little or no role in the bombings in Cambodia. The idea came from military intelligence and Operation Menu et al. was conducted by the Air Force.
With that said, I completely agree that the largest difference between what we’re doing now and what we’ve done before is that we aren’t denying that we’re doing it. The distinctions between manned and unmanned and between civilian and military are relatively unimportant compared to this.
Obama is continuing to carry out the Bush Doctrine: launching attacks in countries against which we are not at war and not hiding this from anyone; even boasting about it. The not hiding part is key to me because it makes it clear that these attacks are mostly designed to achieve a political effect. Whether this behavior is on the near or far side of the line that defines “terrorism” is something I’ll leave to you to decide.
So, all those things you mentioned above are a-ok with you, but with emphasis on religious fundamentalists more than others.
Got it. Thanks for sharing your sentiments.
This is what I think really is new, and what other countries think is new. Compare it to the star wars-type missle defenses that the Soviets and Russians consistently opposed our trying to develop. That was because they saw these systems as allowing a unilateral grab of first-move attack capability with less concern about being devastated in a counterattack. This is similar.
Yes, I ignored the distinction between “civilian” CIA vs US military; but if the CIA uses the same drones/missiles as US Army Special Forces or Navy Seals, the distinction between “civilian” vs “military” doesn’t seem that meaningful. They’re all the same government (I assume), just different boxes on the org charts.
Agree on the general principle, but that detachment was also true for B-52s carpet bombing from 30,000 feet. We’re just getting closer and more precise.
Well said!
And great post Scarecrow … thanks for saying this.
Any moral difference between predator strikes and suicide bombing? None, methinks.
Funny how an escalation, a surge, to well over 100,000 troops and more than 100,000 mercenaries (already) in Afghanistan means more war in Pakistan. Oh, what a Laos-y war, non? One might even say Cambodia. Mr. Obama is the president told to go into a round room and sit in the corner, while his generals do the work, and the corner he found was Richard Nixon’s.
Sorry to keep being a pain, but I’m not so sure about your claim that we’re getting more precise. I have no idea what percents of the killed via B-52s vs Predators were innocent bystanders, but my guts says that the latter isn’t doing that much better than the former.
Closer, yes. More precise? Need more data.
Yes, you got it.
The most dangerous people on earth are the True Believers. Whether of the religious or secular sort. Once you are convinced you embody The Whole Truth it’s almost never much of a stretch to going out into the world and attacking those who refuse to agree.
The Communists and the Fascists were by far the bloodiest renditions of this in the past century. But the religionists have been making a comeback of late.
Fortunately, the Islamists do not have at their disposal the military might of some religionists in the past. And the Henry Kissinger “realists” who own and operate our Bilderberg world today are by far more capable of inflicting their WMD on the world. That’s true. And I point this out over and again.
But stomping out Al Qaeda and their ilk will never be something I oppose.
Word to you, alank, you beat me to the retort.
Brother george, methinks you tarred yourself with that brush. Doesn’t this sound self-refuting?
That’s rather fundamentalism of you to say, is it not? As long as we kill people with the “right” labels, that’s “fine” with you? Who does the designating? The military always claims never to have killed civilians, only “suspected insurgents” or what have you–until the videos turn up, that is.
The problem, in this poet’s opinion, is too many people believe war is the way the world was made to work. Both religious and secular fundamentalists believe in the world as an artifact, something constructed by force from originally separate bits. Thus, the physical world is imaged as being governed by the laws of a cosmic tyrant. For secular fundamentalists, there’s no god but Newton, and the sound of gunfire is his prophet.
Ever wonder why we treat generals and admirals as if they were delivering weather reports? Isn’t it odd that high priests of the temple of kinetic activity are treated like weathermen? Why is that?
We’ve entirely conflated military violence and the forces of Mother Nature herself, making warfare our state religion and leading directly to the ultimate idiocy of attempting “nation building” with military violence.
News flash: military violence isn’t the weather! Nevertheless, as measured in dollars devoted, it is our dominant way of being in the world. Given these conditions, looking to political messiahs is for re-fooled fools.
Any real “change we can believe in” will have to come from within. Quite obviously, peace can only be achieved by people who genuinely intend that outcome.
For those reasons, Brother george, I don’t share your insouciance about wiping out our “officially” designated enemies. Looks to me like that method yields only more war for its own sake.
Absolutely correct.
They can defund it, and they can overturn the AUMF.
I don’t think that the drone attacks are doing any good. But I can’t say that I see them as somehow super-immoral. You seem to be arguing that the more discriminate a weapon is, the worse it is. If anything, the contrary is true.
The B-52s in your example, operating in three-aircraft “cells”, would scatter 210,000 pounds of high explosive randomly over an area of a square mile or two, killing pretty much anyone and anything in the area. The Hellfire missile carries 100 lbs or so of explosive and destroys a single vehicle or house. Which kills more bystanders?
The question is not the morality of the weapon but morality of the operation itself. If it were reasonable to believe that the targets were Al Qaeda agents posing clear and present danger to American lives, killing them with small missiles would seem to be about as reasonable as killing anyone is ever going to get. But, if we know nothing else, military history and recent experience both tell us that “surgical” strikes never are, that targeting data is seldom reliable enough and that assessing the clarity and immediacy of danger–particulary at such a distance–is always difficult. If the attacks in Pakistan are wrong–and I think that they are–it is not the fault of the technology but the fault of those who decide to use it and justify the results.
The other thing I take issue with is the idea that these things are “robotic” and that that makes any difference. The drones are not really drones at all–they are remotely piloted vehicles flown by airmen sitting in vans somewhere in Afghanistan. But even if the things were robots, they would still be weapons and thus as much under the moral control of a human as a pistol. Guns don’t kill people–the people who own and fire them do.
Drones are inherently immoral, imo, because they make it too easy for a Bush or an Obama to wage a low-level war — to kill people who shouldn’t be killed.
This is bad all around, but that the CIA is running this with their track record of failure and lack of accountability is pretty fucking frightening. It’s rather mindboggling that the Obama Admin is allowing it rather than at the very least pulling it into the military.
Just to be clear: I don’t like the program at all. But seeing the nutters at the CIA run it… this just comes across as begging for the worst possible thing to happen.
John
Who did the designating when the wars were being fought against the fascists? Against the Hitlers, Mussolinis, Tojos, Stalins, Pol Pots?
Has or has not Al Qaeda committed mass murder around the globe? Have or have not they insisted they will do it again?
I don’t pretend that my point of view is right one. There is no “right one” with respect to issues like this. We all take our existential leaps.
Do you imagine we live in this perfect world where all military actions can be clearly differentiated between Okay and Not Okay? Are you a pacifist?
You paint war and peace above with the broad strokes of self-righteous rhetoric. That’s easy enough to do, isn’t it?
But that doesn’t rid the world of religious fanatics hell bent on annihilating any and all infidels—men, women and children.
American presidents have caused the deaths of far more American citizens than has A.Q.
Hell, few in here have been as vociferous as I in naming the true nature of American foreign policy.
Yes, indeed, from the despicably brutal imperialism America pursued in Central and South America to all the thug regimes both Democratic and Republican administrations have propped up around the world [think the Shah of Iran] the U.S. presidents have buckets and buckets of blood on their hands.
But so does Al Qaeda. And the reason they don’t have more is because they can’t get their hands on the weapons needed to spill it.
They are fiercely zealous religious fanatics bent on draconian sharia law and acquiring a caliphate to spread their reactionary agenda as far and wide as they possibly can. And I despise them for it.
So don’t expect me not to embrace that part of American foreign policy that aims to wipe them out.
I understand the feeling. But the argument is hard to make consistently. Nixon had no more trouble using B-52s secretly over Cambodia.
Arguably, B-52s were even more impersonal than drones because the crews flew at 30,000+ ft and released their bombs over unseen targets, automatically, in response to a signal from a ground station that plotted their position using radar. A drone crew sees what happens in realtime via video link and decides whether to fire or not.
Killing people is nasty business. One way isn’t much more moral than any other.
General Patraus? Isn’t He the guy that was supposed to be training the Iraqie army, and did such a lousy job of it they promoted Him.
THen his great insugancy stratigy was to buy everybody off with our money, not fight the insurgents.
Now they put HIm incharge of all of it so He can fuck it up again.
Boy the American people have short memories, and believe the bull shit they are told.
Had Patraus got the Iraqie Army trained earlier we might not have had the insurgency and had to fight that, and stay so long.
They trained some of our guys to fight and die in two weeks, yet we are expected that it takes years to train people from other Countries. What a joke.
Could be a Raptor, which is the next generation of Predator drone. The Raptor is a jet designed to avoid detection cruising at 50,000 feet and it has a much longer range than the prop driven Predator that maxes out at 15,000 feet.
Am I a pacifist?! What part of “knowbuddhau” don’t you get?
What part don’t you want me to get?
Let’s define some terms.
According to Pepe Escobar, they are a “thinly disguised brigade of Saudi intelligence.”
Your response?
Your response?
Your questions sounds a lot like, “I know you are but what am I?”
So what part of my username don’t you get? Is it the ‘know?’ I presume you know what know means. Same with ‘u.’ So it appears you don’t get the ‘buddha,” am I right?
Yes, like most things, Al Qaeda is in the mind of the beholder. But there are lots of them [and their religious fanatic ilk] in Pakistan, however many there may be in Afghanistan. And in Afghanistan there is the Taliban, another 4th century throwback to the religious crusaders. Ridding the world of them is a good thing. At least it is from my own existential point of view. But I don’t pretend that my own existential point of view should be yours. Do you pretend that your’s should be mine?
Any kind of fanaticism, religious or secular, is a fount for human brutality and political oppression. Flush it from the human race, I say. You may see a big distinction between Al Qaeda and the Taliban. I don’t. They are both fiercely anti-democratic zealots hell bent on forcing people to do things their way—or else.
Well, here are the fundamental social, political and economic variables intrinsic to all cultures, to all human beings.
* the need to subsist, to procure basic necessities like food and water
* the need to fend off the elements—procuring clothing and shelter from the storm
* the need to sustain communities such that reproduction is able to carry on with a minimal of dysfunction
* the need for police and military forces to protect the community from dangers—both inside and outside
It matters not whether they are Christians, Muslims or Jews….tribes, villages, cities or nation-states…. democracies, plutocracies or autocracies…..thousands of years old or just having popped up on the scene.
Everything in the end comes back to how particular human communities choose to organize themselves in order to survive into the future.
The “gravy” comes only after this is firmly cemented into place. Without sustaining the fundamentals above, all else is mote.
Yet few people [in America] stop to think about this in depth. Instead, they tend to relate more to “lifestyles”, to those intertwined in their own circle of interests: sports, music, politics, sex, love, family, jobs, entertainment, hobbies etc etc.
In other words: me! me! me! me! me!
It is only in a time like this [i.e. a time of economic turmoil] that people begin to see more clearly how fragile the things they once took for granted can become. There is only so much booty and bounty to go around; and there are only so many fonts of political and economic power to spread it.
Yes, welcome to the class struggle, the global economy edition. Survival of the fittest, indeed.
The Taliban and Al Qaeda may be gnats here in the grand scheme of things. And again I point out over and again how, next to Bilderberg, CFR, the IMF, the World Bank….China, Russia and other crass exploiters around the globe, they are.
But they are still dangerous fanatics. They reflect the pernicious point of view that there is only one way to think about everything. Their way.
Getting rid of them can’t make things any worse.