OMNI DRONE/ASSASSINATION NEWSLETTER # 11, May
29, 2013.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice. (Newsletter
#1, Dec. 29, 2010; #2 July 20, 2011; #3 Feb. 16, 2012; #4 May 3, 2012; #5 June
9, 2012; #6 Oct. 12, 2012; #7 Dec. 20, 2012; #8 Jan. 22, 2013; #9, Feb. 16,
2013; #10 May 11, 2013.) See
Newsletters on ACLU, Air War, Assassinations, CIA, Civil Liberties, Constitution and Drones, Democracy
and Drones, Extra-Judicial Killing, Geneva Conventions, International Law, Killing Civilians, Media and
Drones, Obama , Pakistan War, Pentagon,
Privacy, Surveillance, Terror, War
Crimes, and more.
If
any subject links these newsletters, it is violence, its complexity, and how to reduce it. “Make
World Less Violent, New UA Graduates Told.”
(ADG 12-16-12).
My blog: War
Department/Peace Department
My Newsletters:
Index:
Peace, Justice, Ecology Birthdays
Visit OMNI’s Library.
“Act in such a way that the
principle according to which the action is performed can be accepted as a
universal law.” Immanuel Kant’s
Categorical Imperative.
DRONE
WATCH: MuckRock.com, a free, online data-base.
Nos. 5 & 6 at end
Contents of
#7 Dec. 20, 2012
Obama Assassination President
Public Discussion of Drones; Stanford/NYU
report
ACLU Sues CIA
Terrorizing Civilian Population
Rules
for Drone Warfare
Restricting Protest
US Police Use Drones, Citizens Protest
Contents
#8 Jan. 22, 2013
NOVA, “Rise of the Drones”
Greenwald, Stanford/NYU on Terrorized
Civilians, Living Under Drones
Cavallaro, Living Under Drones
Bailey, Assassination Drones
Sprusansky, Demand Truths of Drone War
Glaser, Drones, My Lai ,
Prosecution
Stauffer, UN to Investigate Drone Killings
Kucinich Holds Congressional Briefing
Contents #9 2013
New Medal for Drone Pilots
Yemen : Drone Kills al-Qaeda and Innocents
Moyers and Co.: Drones vs. Democracy
Moyers and Co.: Innocents Murdered, Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize
a Mistake
Washington Post’s Biased
Reporting and Polling
PBS NOVA
Drone Report Underwritten by Lockheed Martin, Maker of Drones (see #8)
Dick’s Letter to PBS Ombudsman
Obama Creates
Manual or “Playbook:” for the Killing Process
30,000 Drones Over US by 2020
Contents #10,
May 11, 2013
PAKISTAN
Drone Strikes Illegal
Abbot, Strikes in Pakistan Violate International Law
Amnesty International Petition: Drones Not Above Law
VFP April Black Tuesdays Project , Take
Action
Goodman: Drone, Obama, CIA Assassinations—from
In These Times
Stop Drone Strikes in US, Take Action
Disclose Records of Drone Strikes (ADG from NYT)
Sirota, Language of Drone War
Court Opens Secrecy, a Little
Rassbach, Germans Against Combat Drones
Contents
#11
Robert Greenwald Film Needs Our Help
Extra-Judicial Killing, UN Rapporteur
Medea Benjamin Challenges President Obama
Sprusansky on Muslimi and Obama Admin.
Preference for Killing
BOOKS ON DRONES (in reverse chronological
order)
Scahill, Dirty Wars
Benjamin, Drone
Warfare
Engelhart
and Turse, Terminator Planet
Cavallaro,
Living Under Drones (a long report)
Keep the Obama Drone Momentum Going!
Become a Producer Now
Become a Producer Now
Dear Dick --
On Thursday President Obama spoke before the American people giving a powerful and eloquent speech on the use of drones. Unfortunately the speech leaves many of the basic assumptions of a policy based on trying to kill our way to safety still in place. Help us change that.
On Thursday President Obama spoke before the American people giving a powerful and eloquent speech on the use of drones. Unfortunately the speech leaves many of the basic assumptions of a policy based on trying to kill our way to safety still in place. Help us change that.
Last year, I traveled to Pakistan and saw firsthand the
damage that these drones are doing to families, businesses and the safety of
our own country. Were the innocent men, women and children considered ‘a
significant threat’ or did the drones malfunction? The program is still
shrouded in secrecy, so all we know for sure is that countless of innocent
Pakistanis are dead and the families they left behind are grieving and angry.
We have some important and unique interviews but we can’t finish the film without your
help.
Koch Brothers Exposed, Iraq
for Sale and War on Whistleblowers were all finished because you chipped
in to make it happen! Donate $25 now to become a Producer on
our film and see it for free when it is completed.
Thanks as always for your support.
Best,
Robert
Robert
UN Special
Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions
[Extrajudicial executions are banned by
Articles 6, 14, and 15 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights. –Dick]
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Home ›
Heckler-In-Chief:
CodePink’s Medea Benjamin
By Ed Rampell, May 24, 2013
CodePink
co-founder Medea Benjamin is at it again.
On
Thursday, she repeatedly interrupted and even got into a back-and-forth
exchange with President Obama, during his speech at the National
Defense University
in Washington , D.C.
Benjamin,
a veteran antiwar activist who is about five feet tall, has made a career of
disrupting high ranking officials and forcing them to confront uncomfortable
truths.
The
author of Drone Warfare,
Killing by Remote Control, Benjamin is particularly concerned about of the U.S.
use of unmanned aerial vehicles for “targeted killings.”
Because
drone warfare is so secretive it’s difficult to tally the casualties.
In
February Senator Lindsay Graham estimated that there have been 4,700
fatalities.
According
to the London-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism up to 1,727 people have
been injured and up to 4,379 people have been killed by U.S. drone strikes between 2002 and 2013 in Pakistan , Yemen
and Somalia .
(These numbers don”t include the injured and dead in Afghanistan
and Iraq .)
Of
the dead, up to 209 have been children.
|
Medea Benjamin with Emmy award winning actor/activist David Clennon.
Photo by Ed Rampell
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I
caught up with Medea Benjamin on April 10 after she spoke at an Interfaith
Communities United for Justice and Peace luncheon in Holman
United Methodist
Church in Los Angeles .
As
Obama said when Benjamin repeatedly interrupted him: “The voice of that woman
is worth paying attention to.”
Q: Tell us about the drone policy.
MEDEA
BENJAMIN: There were
between 46 and 52 drone strikes under the Bush administration. And now there
are over 400 – that’s not counting Afghanistan . So this has been
tremendously increased under the Obama administration. If you look at Afghanistan
the numbers are even more astounding -- the last year where have figures for is
2012, and that’s 506 drone strikes, whereas there were very few drone strikes
under Bush… The CIA runs the drone program in Pakistan solely, not with the military.
Then there’s a joint CIA-military program in Yemen , then the CIA is involved in
a lot of use of spy drones around the world and in the proliferation of bases.
Q: How are the subjects of the targeted killings
selected?
Benjamin: They’re supposed to be high-level Al Qaeda
operatives that pose an imminent threat to the U.S. and American personnel and
citizens. There’s supposed to be no way to capture them. We have not been told
how they try to capture them or what constitutes a “high level Al Qaeda operative”…
The “kill list” is calculated in the “terror Tuesdays” at the White House every
week, where the President and his advisors -- including CIA -- “nominate”
people to be on the kill list. Ultimately, the President has to sign off on the
kill list. From what we know it looks like there are two separate but
overlapping kill lists: One is the CIA kill list, the other is the military
kill list. It’s speculated that [having two lists] makes it more difficult to
have Congressional oversight and the executive is not thrilled about having
that.
Q: How much does drone warfare cost?
Benjamin: There are hidden costs, such as hellfire missiles
costing $75,000 each and the requisite personnel, the expenditure is up to $20
million per drone and maybe 800 drones have been bought… It’s not as “cheap” as
it’s put out to be. One predator drone in one day of activity supposedly needs
168 people… to carry out the day’s operations… They crash a lot. So when you
calculate their costs, consider that the Air Force has said about a third of
their drones have crashed.
Q: On February 7 CodePink disrupted the Senate
hearings considering Obama’s nominee to become the CIA Director. Why?
Benjamin: John
Brennan has been the mastermind
of the drone program. He’s the one who’d convene the terror Tuesday meetings at
the White House… He was high up in the CIA during the Bush years, the chief of
staff in the CIA to George Tenet during the years when torture, extraordinary
rendition and indefinite detention were used… I thought it was quite astounding
that he’d even be nominated and I was flabbergasted when so many Democrats got
on board behind him.
Q: While Brennan’s confirmation process was going on,
during the live Academy Awards ceremony Mrs. Obama announced that Argo,
a movie glorifying the CIA, won the Best Picture Oscar. What did you think
about that?
Benjamin: There is a real attempt to sanitize the CIA
killings and to glorify the CIA and to give it a new face. That’s what happened
with Zero Dark Thirty, that’s what happened with Michelle Obama…
When she appeared my jaw dropped; I couldn’t believe it… These were really disgusting propaganda films, glorifying the
role of the CIA… The fact that this was happening while the CIA is in one of
its darkest periods ever in the history of this country -- there have been
several times in our history when the CIA
has gone rogue, and this is one of them… The CIA is absolutely out of
control. The CIA has been on a killing spree… The CIA has become a death squad
and to see these films get so much acclaim at the time when the CIA is in its
rogue killing phase is very disturbing.
Q: What do you think about the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on
torture remains classified?
Benjamin: It’s horrible. That information, those 6,000 pages,
should be released to the public. It’s our right as U.S.
citizens to know what our government has done in our name just as I think that
these memos about the U.S.
of drones should be released to the public.
|
Medea Benjamin with CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans. Photo by Ed
Rampell
|
Ed
Rampell is an L.A.-based journalist who writes regularly for The Progressive
and is the author of "Progressive Hollywood ,
A People’s Film History of the United
States ."
DALE
SPRUSANSKY, “FROM TWITTER TO CAPITOL HILL, YEMENI ACTIVIST EXPOSES REALITY OF U.S. DRONE
WAR.” The Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs (June/July
2013). Refutes John Brennan’s claim that “U.S. strongly
prefers to capture suspected al-Qaeda militants.” Yemeni youth activist Farea al-Muslimi
testified at April 23 Senate hearing that killing is “the administration’s modus operandi.” Sprusansky cites NYT report that some “3,000
people have been killed in drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia since
President Obama took office in 2009,” while “only a handful of suspected
militants have been captured.”
Excellent article with much more detail.—Dick
“THE DRONE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX WANTS 30,000 EYES IN THE
SKY SPYING ON US
AMERICANS BY 2020.). JIM HIGHTOWER’S LOWDOWN (FEB. 2013). http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/3239#.UaejPtLVDzg
BOOKS ON DRONES (in reverse chronological order)
Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars (2013)
US drone strikes:
'deadly and dirty' warns new book
• Big increase in drone
strikes after Obama embraced hawks
• Strikes could backfire, says author
• Potential implications forBritain
• Strikes could backfire, says author
• Potential implications for
·
·
·
0
data-href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/09/drone-warfare-medea-benjamin-review"
data-link-name="Facebook Share"'
alt="A Pakistani protest against US drone strikes. The latest two attacks have killed 12 people"
itemprop="contentUrl representativeOfPage" v:shapes="_x0000_i1045">
A Pakistani protest against US drone strikes.
Photograph: SS Mirza/AFP/Getty
Not long after he was elected president, Barack Obama arranged
what senior US
officials called "Terror Tuesdays".
1.
Dirty Wars: The world is a battlefield
2.
by Jeremy Scahill
4.
On the agenda were "kill lists" — names of individuals
whose perceived threat to America 's
security made them targets for assassination by unmanned drone attacks in Pakistan , Yemen ,
and Somalia .
The kill lists, scrutinised personally by Obama at the weekly
meetings, were soon expanded to become what US journalist Jeremy Scahill,
author of Dirty Wars, calls a form of "pre-crime" justice where
individuals are considered fair game if they met certain life patterns of
suspected terrorists.
Unidentified individuals, described as "military
aged-males", would be targeted if they were at a certain place at certain
times.
These are considered legitimate targets in "signature
strikes".
How Obama embraced the hawks and the unaccountable and secretive
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) left behind by the Bush administration
is powerfully documented in Dirty Wars, published in Britain by Serpent's Tail this
week.
"One of the enduring legacies of Obama's presidency is how
he has normalised assassination as a central component of what is called America 's
national security policy", Scahill told me.
It has been easier for a Nobel Peace prize winning liberal
Democrat to get away with drone strikes, prosecuting and persecuting
whistleblowers, keeping Congress in the dark, than a Republican hawk, Scahill
suggests.
Congress has not been able, or not wanted, to question the drone
strikes, and polls show a majority in support of them.
"They are seen as a smarter, new way of cleaning up
war", said Scarhill. That encouraged him to call the book, Dirty Wars.
He added: "I believe we are creating more new enemies than
we are killing terrorists...And revenge is as powerful force".
Republicans, meanwhile, have chided Obama calling the drone
strikes as an alternative to transporting and interrogating terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay .
Over the past decade, the US
has ordered at least 300 drone strikes in Pakistan ,
Afghanistan , Yemen , Iraq
and Mali ,
taking out some high level al-Qaida targets, but also killing some 2,000
civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
In his eight years in office, Bush ordered about 50 drone
strikes aimed at alleged terrorists. Obama is believed to have ordered nearly
300 in his first term as president.
The belated stirrings of a debate in the US will not be welcomed
by the British government which has already tried to distance itself from the
opposition drone strikes have provoked in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
Drones are here to stay.
They are likely to be used more and more against targets in
north, east, and west Africa, and elsewhere. Scahill subtitles his book, The
World is a Battlefield.
Dirty Wars also chronicles in detail the life and death of Anwar
al-Awlaki, an American killed by a drone strike in Yemen in September 2011 on the
grounds that he was an influential al-Qaida supporter and operative.
His son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American boy, was
killed in a drone strike a month later.
ABOUT JEREMY SCAHILL
"SCAHILL IS A ONE-MAN TRUTH
SQUAD." BILL MOYERS
JEREMY
SCAHILL is
National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine and is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute.
Scahill is
author of the New York
Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's
Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books, 2007). Nation
Books will release Scahill's second book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a
Battlefield, on April 23, 2013.
He is the
writer, with David Riker, and a producer of the documentary feature film, Dirty Wars, which won theCinematography Award
for U.S. Documentary at
the Sundance Film Festival 2013. IFC Films releases Dirty
Wars in theaters June
7 throughout the United
States .
Scahill has
reported from Afghanistan , Iraq , Somalia ,
Nigeria , Yemen , the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere across the
globe. Scahill is a frequent guest on a wide array of programs, appearing
regularly on The Rachel
Maddow Show, Real
Time with Bill Maher, and Democracy
Now!. He has also
appeared on ABC World News, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, BBC, al
Jazeera, CNN, The NewsHour,
and Bill Moyers Journal.
Scahill’s
work has sparked several Congressional investigations and won some of
journalism’s highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George
Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for his
book Blackwater.
In 2013,
Scahill was named one of nine recipients of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University .
Scahill is
a member of the Writers Guild of America, East.
MEDEA BENJAMIN, DRONE
WARFARE
Drone Warfare:
Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin – review
A well-researched, angry
book that is also a call to arms
War at arms' length … A Reaper unmanned aerial
vehicle (UAV) prepares for takeoff. Photograph: Steve Bain/PA
Throughout history,
some forms of war and weaponry have been viewed with greater horror than
others. Even ancient civilisations tried to codify the rules of war – jus
in bello .
Homer's Greeks disapproved of archery; real men fought hand-to-hand, not at a
distance. Shakespeare's Henry V roared with anger when, at Agincourt , the French cavalry killed his camp
followers. At the beginning of the last century, dum-dum bullets, a British
invention, were outlawed following an appeal by Germany . Revulsion against the
widespread use of gas in the first world war led in the 1920s to an
international convention prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons
– not that the ban stopped the British using chemicals in Iraq , or the Italians in Ethiopia in the
1930s. A landmine convention was agreed in 1997, though not signed by the US , China
or Russia .
Today, China , India , and perhaps surprisingly North Korea are among nuclear‑armed states that
have pledged no first use, though Nato , Israel and the US have not.
1.
Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control
2.
by
Benjamin Medea, Barbara Ehrenreich
4.
Other, equally horrific weapons go
unchallenged. Napalm (invented on the playing fields of Harvard University ),
incendiaries,"daisy cutters", depleted uranium, defoliants … the
list goes on and on. And the nature of war has changed. Warfare has become
asymmetric; hi-tech states fight not each other, but shadowy insurgents,
terrorists and freedom fighters. Where once the ratio of soldier to civilian
war deaths was 9:1, now it has reversed. Today's hi-tech warfighters are at
less risk than the civilians in whose territories they fight. The lives of
each of these warfighters is precious: the US and UK mourn each of their few dead in Iraq or Afghanistan almost more intensely
than they did the tens of thousands who died in 1939-45. To minimise such
deaths, and to exploit developing computer and information technologies, the
Vietnam war ushered in something called "the automated
battlefield".
Enter the
drones. As Medea Benjamin's well-researched book points out, speculation about
the potential of autonomous flying vehicles long predates their actual
construction. But in the modern era we have to thank above all Abraham Karem,
chief designer for the Israeli airforce, who migrated to California and by the 1980s was building
drones in his garage with the enthusiastic support of the US Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency and, later, the CIA. From then on, powered by huge
advances in information and computer technology, drones have become
irresistibly attractive to military and police forces across
the industrialised world, providing a financial bonanza for the –
mainly US and Israeli – companies that build them.
Today, drones range from the tiny
humming-bird sized surveillance devices to the plane-sized Predators and
Reapers carrying Hellfire missiles. "Gorgon Stare" drones can spy on an entire small
city. Miniaturisation promises solar-powered insect-sized drones capable of
staying aloft indefinitely or being steered into buildings to spy or kill.
Drones have spun off from the military and are now used commercially in various
ways, from delivering packages to spraying pesticides. You can buy your own
smartphone-controlled drone from Amazon for as little as $300. There's
no technical reason why they shouldn't in future replace pilots on passenger
planes. And as always, there's an enthusiastic community of DIYers building and
flying their own.
But it is their military use that is the focus
of Benjamin's book. Initially, they were used primarily for
surveillance; by 2003, US drones were logging 1500 hours a month in Iraq ; and by 2010, 20 Predator flights were
providing some 500 hours of video surveillance a day in Afghanistan . They were limited in their use during
the George W Bush presidency, but Barack Obama initiated a step‑change
by approving their use for "targeted killing", not just in Afghanistan but also Pakistan ,
an escalation already pioneered by the Israelis in Gaza . The drones track and kill
identified militants – or individuals whose behaviour, as observed from the
drone, fits a pattern thought to typify militancy. Despite numerous direct
reports of civilian deaths, the Obama administration insists that so-called
collateral damage is slight. However, as it also persists with the view
that any prime-age male killed by a drone is by definition a militant, the
claim lacks elementary credibility. Even the anger over the deliberate
targeting by the CIA of a US
citizen in Yemen
in 2011, or the accidental killing of 20 Pakistani soldiers in Waziristan has not limited their use. A recent
British poll found 54% were in favour of such targeted killing.
That
such extra-judicial killing is illegal is not in doubt – as has recently been
reconfirmed by the UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson. Obama's
justification is similar to Bush's – that those killed are actively threatening the security of
the US .
But the crucial issue is an ethical one: the pilot of a drone tracking the
movements of a Waziri villager and making a life-or-death decision to fire
a missile may be sitting in a control room in a US
air base in the Nevada
desert. That's when many will agree with Benjamin, a founder of the women's
anti-war movement CODEPINK,
that a moral line has been
crossed.
Is firing a missile from a drone
morally worse than dropping a 500lb bomb from 10,000ft? Or pressing the button
that launches a cruise missile? Perhaps what is repugnant is the unique
combination of deliberately firing at a specific individual, combined with
distance and the knowledge that you yourself are invulnerable to retaliation.
Time to reprise the ancient Greeks with their contempt for archers. Despite
some loose editing and repetition, Drone Warfare is both a justifiably angry sourcebook
and a call to action for the growing worldwide citizen opposition to the
drones.
Steven Rose is the co-author, with
Hilary Rose, of Genes, Cells and Brains. •
MORE
ABOUT BENJAMIN
GOOGLE SEARCH MAY 30, 2013 PAGE ONE
1.
|
For Obama's Global Vision, Daunting Problems
“We have no illusions that there are not challenges,” said Benjamin J. ... or about whether dronestrikes
would be carried out by the Pentagon or ...
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Show more
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3.
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Medea Benjamin Surprised Obama Drones Speech Protest Worked
Huffington
Post-May 23, 2013
Benjamin,
60, was escorted out of the the hall after she repeatedly interrupted Obama's
address, pressing the president on the use of drone ...
+
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5.
The ethics and efficacy of Obama's drones
Financial
Times-May 12, 2013
“Drone strikes are the face of
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7.
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Beyond
the drones
DAWN.com-11 hours ago
Medea Benjamin raises the level of the debate on drones to the more fundamental issues of
the rules of war and the drone threat to ...
+
Show more
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9.
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"Worth Paying Attention to": What Obama's
"Heckler", Medea ...
Truth-Out-May 29, 2013
I rather liked the questions that Benjamin shouted out before and as ... compensation to the families of
innocent victims killed in drone strikes.
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Show more
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11.
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Op-Ed:
Medea Benjamin on Obama's speech on security and drones
DigitalJournal.com-May 25, 2013
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13.
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Medea Benjamin describes secret weapon
Politico-19 hours ago
So just how does Medea Benjamin find her way into so many events so ... Benjamin told Current that the
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ENGELHARDT AND TURSE, TERMINATOR
PLANET, 2012
Dispatches on the Drone
Wars: The State of Our Unmanned Planet
·
Home
Book Review: Terminator
Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001 – 2050
Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone
Warfare, 2001 – 2050. Dispatch Books, 2012. 179 pp
For readers of the
popular website TomDispatch.com, editors Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse need
little introduction. The weekly ‘Tomgrams’ (or articles) they write and oversee
are a ‘regular antidote to the mainstream media’, and contain opinion and
information on issues ranging from the ‘war on terror’ to the scoured
landscapes of neoliberalism and climate change. Terminator
Planet is the first
book from the pair, and each chapter is composed of entries previously penned
on their website, united by an analysis of the rise of remotely piloted
planes, or drones, and how these technologies are re-wiring the ‘American way
of war’. Often written in pithy, polemical, if not downright scathing language,
the book’s primary accomplishment is its engaging and sobering set of critiques
of our brave new Droneworld. For example, a common trope throughout the book is
a comparison of U.S.
drone warfare to the Terminator films
starring the future Californian Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie’s
memorable ‘Hunter-Killer’ robots that searched for human survivors across a
ravaged, skull-encrusted landscape, is a fictional dystopia that Engelhardt
finds irresistible for political satire. The future is now, and with it comes a
new chapter in the history of assassination.
Unfortunately the book has no real structure to it, other than
the chronological order the articles were published. This becomes a real
problem, especially when the book’s unavoidable redundancy starts to creep in.
Nonetheless, Turse and Engelhardt cover the main issues well. While over 50
nations are developing aircraft that can be operated from thousands of miles
away by ‘pilots’ sat in air-conditioned trailers, the U.S. has pioneered the
extrajudicial assassinations that generate so much controversy today. At over
300, the Obama administration has authorized far more strikes than Bush ever
did against people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; firmly entrenching the drone
program as Washington’s favoured counter-terrorist strategy. As of October
2011, the MQ-1 Predator, part of an armada of over 7,500 drones, had flown more
than a million hours in the sky and dropped 703 ‘Hellfire’ missiles. The
geographic reach of this Droneworld is staggering: six countries have felt the
full force of Predators and Reapers in strikes often spearheaded by the CIA: Afghanistan , Iraq ,
Pakistan , Somalia , Yemen ,
and Libya .
Despite U.S. officials, such as John Brenan, insisting that such attacks are
‘wise, ‘surgical, and ‘ethical’, civilian casualties have trailed in the wake
of these shadowy assassinations. For Engelhardt, the U.S. is performing its age-old
‘inalienable’ right to act as judge, jury, and executioner on a planetary
scale, attracting a storm of legal challenge and international condemnation.
The global scale of drone strikes is matched by an equally
expansive ‘galaxy of drone bases’. In one of the stand-out chapters of the entire
book (Chapter 6, ‘America’s Secret Empire of Drone Bases’) Turse—using original
research—lists the 60 or so drone bases that are integral to U.S. military and
CIA drone operations. Outside of the many training facilities within the
continental U.S., the area of focus for these bases, which are often no more
than small, stripped-down airfields called ‘lily pads’, is concentrated in and
around the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, with bases recently constructed
on the island nation of the Seychelles, as well as others in Ethiopia,
Djibouti, and another ‘probably’ in Saudi Arabia. From these locations the CIA
and Special Forces strike against al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen . Lesser known sites include
bases in Italy , Turkey , the UAE, Kuwait ,
Qatar , Pakistan , and Uzbekistan . Additionally, in two
related chapters, Turse reports on the widespread crashes of Predator drones,
which for him, present a much-needed corrective to the ‘awe’ some journalists
describe drones with. Due to human error, climate, and technology failures,
there have been over 70 ‘catastrophic’ Air Force drone mishaps since 2000 (13
in 2011 alone), each of which cost over $2 million.
Engelhardt hits his stride in Chapters 9 (‘Offshore Everywhere’)
and 11 (‘Remotely Piloted War’). The first reports on changing U.S. military strategy with an emphasis on
smaller, mobile, technologically advanced units positioned outside of the Middle East . The combination of U.S. Special Forces—which
number 60,000 in some 120 nations—with Predator and Reaper drones is indicative
of a new geopolitical strategy to eliminate ‘whoever’ ‘wherever’, with a small
‘footprint’; as the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan illustrated.
‘From lily pads to aircraft carriers, advanced drones to special operations
teams, it’s offshore and into the shadows for U.S. military policy’ (p.120). In
Chapter 11, Engelhardt argues that drone warfare represents the apex of an
increased alienation, or detachment, between U.S. foreign violence, and a
concerned domestic citizenry—which dates back to the 1973 ending of the draft
by President Nixon. For Engelhardt, drone warfare is therefore both literally
and figuratively remote.
Two final themes
round out the book. The first is the precedence given to the ‘future’. Modern
drones are still quite basic technologies, and need significant human
involvement. But the future hints towards increased autonomy, intelligence,
high-definition surveillance, and cooperation between drones, as they work
together in ‘swarms’ that resemble groups of angry insects. Future scenarios
for drone use imagined by the military, lifted from theUnmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, FY 2011-2036, are
used to illustrate the creative brains and possible futures that might be
hatched by DARPA and for-profit companies such as General Atomics. But as
Engelhardt reminds us, futuristic military technologies are never utopian
solutions: from the ‘electronic battlefield’ of Vietnam, to Reagan’s ‘Star
Wars’ defense initiative, to Rumsfeld’s ‘netcentric’ warfare, technology has
been a perennial false prophet, and what’s more, a source of blowback. ‘Since
we are incapable of thinking of ourselves [the U.S.] as either predators or
Predators, no less emotionless Terminators, it becomes impossible for us that
our air ‘war’ on terror is, in reality, a machine for creating what we call
“terrorists”’ (p.69).
The book is not
without its problems. As already mentioned, because Engelhardt and Turse have
left the chapters almost untouched from the online articles, there is an unavoidable
redundancy across the manuscript. Depending on how you look at it, you’ll
either find this repetition a necessary commitment to the original ink, or a
failed opportunity to add detail to their polemics. What makes the book a
success then can also hold it back: Engelhart’s clever barbs are eminently
engaging, but ultimately beg for more analysis, especially in a book with a
title that claims to be the first (modern) history of drone warfare. At its
best though, Terminator Planet, and the website and authors behind
it, remain go-to places for critical commentary on the science-fiction present
we have woken up in.
CAVALLARO, KNUCKEY,
SONNENBERG, LIVING UNDER DRONES, 2012
What the U.S. Won’t Discuss
James Cavallaro of Stanford Law School and Sarah Knuckey of New York University
School of Law are co-authors, with Stephan Sonnenberg of Stanford, of the
report “Living Under Drones.”
UPDATED SEPTEMBER
26, 2012, 10:26 AM NEW YORK TIMES
In the United States, the dominant narrative about
the use of drones in Pakistan is of a “surgically precise” and effective tool
that makes the U.S. safer by enabling “targeted killings” of terrorists, with
minimal downsides or collateral damage. This narrative is false.
After nine months of research, two investigations
in Pakistan ,
and more than 130 interviews with victims, witnesses, journalists, humanitarian
workers and medical doctors, we found significant evidence of harmful civilian
impacts of drone policies.
It
is almost impossible to have an informed debate, because the government tries
to shield its program from democratic accountability.
First, there are civilian deaths and injuries; 474
to 881 civilians have been killed by drones in Pakistan since 2004, according to
the most reliable available estimates.
Second, U.S. drone strikes cause
considerable harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians. Civilians face the
constant worry that a strike may be fired at any moment – at someone’s home or
car, or at a school, mosque or market. Civilians and even humanitarian workers
are afraid to assist victims for fear they may be killed in a second strike.
Third, publicly available evidence that the strikes
have made the U.S.
safer is ambiguous at best: they have certainly killed alleged combatants, but
the number of “high-level” targets killed is estimated at just 2 percent, and
there is evidence that strikes have motivated further attacks.
Fourth, U.S. practices undermine respect
for the rule of law and international legal protections, and may set dangerous
precedents for other governments. Do we want a world in which governments are
permitted to track down their enemies in any other nation, and target and kill
them, with no real oversight or accountability? Even a brief thought experiment
along those lines becomes very frightening, very quickly.
What should be done? The U.S. should conduct a fundamental
re-evaluation of current targeted killings practices, taking into account all
available evidence, the concerns of all relevant stakeholders, and the short-
and long-term costs and benefits. These stakeholders must include the Pakistani
civilians directly affected by drones.
Today, it is almost impossible to have an informed
public debate about U.S.
policies on drone warfare – primarily because of efforts by the government to
shield its targeted killings program from democratic accountability. The U.S.
should release Department of Justice memorandums outlining the legal basis for
targeted killings, make public critical information about U.S. policies, ensure
independent investigations into drone strike deaths (with prosecutions, as
appropriate) and establish compensation programs for affected civilians.
GOOGLE SEARCH FOR MORE MAY 29, 2013
HERE IS THE STUDY
1.
Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US ...
Cavallaro,
Knuckey, and Sonnenberg supervised and directed the preparation .... Thoseliving
under drones have to face
the constant worry that a deadly strike ...
2.
"Living
Under Drones" Interview with James Cavallaro on The ...
www.revcom.us/a/301/living-under-drones-en.html
"Living Under Drones". Interview
with James Cavallaro on The Michael Slate
Show. April 11, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us. Listen to audio of ...
3.
Press
Release | Living Under Drones
www.livingunderdrones.org/press-release/
The report, called “Living Under Drones,” describes the
conditions of daily life in ... or had been injured
themselves,” said Professor James Cavallaro, Director of ...
4.
SLS News | “Living
Under Drones”– New Report Issued by the ...
blogs.law.stanford.edu/.../living-under-drones”-new-report-issued-by-the...
Sep 25, 2012 – tagged: drone strikes,
drones, International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, James Cavallaro, Living Under Drones, Pakistan ...
5.
Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US ...
www.law.stanford.edu/.../living-under-drones-death-injury-and-trauma-t...
Sep 25, 2012 – Bibliography: James Cavallaro, Stephan Sonnenberg, Living UnderDrones: Death, Injury
and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in ...
6.
Study Finds U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan Miss Militant Targets and ...
Sep 26, 2012
In "Living Under Drones," researchers
conclude the drone strikes "terrorize ... We're joined by report ...
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