OMNI
DRONE/ASSASSINATION NEWSLETTER # 15. February 20,
2015.
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; #11 May 29, 2013; #12 Nov. 1, 2013; #13 Dec. 28, 2013; #14, June 3, 2014 .) See Newsletters on ACLU, Afghanistan War, Air
War, Assassinations, Children, CIA, Civilians, Civil Liberties, Constitution
and Drones, Criminal Justice, Democracy and Drones, Extra-Judicial Killing,
Geneva Conventions, Human Rights, International Law, Iraq, Islamic State
(ISIL), Judicial System, Killing Civilians, Media and Drones, Murder and
Drones, Obama, Pakistan War, Pentagon, Privacy, Public Apathy, State Murder, Surveillance,
Terror, War Crimes, Yemen, and more.
What’s
at stake: OMNI and most peace, justice, ecology organizations
preoccupy themselves with local and state matters, with what is at hand and
familiar, and many people justify that approach, particularly with Congress and
the President now war-maker extensions of the Pentagon. But while cities fret over finding money for
infrastructures, the US continues to squander its treasure with unnecessary, illegal,
and immoral wars. Every local or
regional group therefore must also be part of the global movement. Militarism, empire, wars are not inevitable.
Blog: War Department/Peace Department
Newsletters:
Index:
Visit OMNI’s Library.
Contents
Drone/Assassination/Extra-Judicial Murder Newsletter #15
US Drone Warfare
PBS NOVA, “Rise of the Drones” a Pro-Drones History
Bureau of Investigative Journalism (UK), Tracking the Covert Drone War
Democracy Now!, US Drone Warfare Expanding to Niger
Can’t Find Enough “Pilots”
Campaign to End Drone Warfare
Kathy Kelly,
Arrested and Sentenced for Opposition
Google Search: Only a Part of Kelly’s International Presence for Mercy
and
Peace
Peace
Erica Brock, “An Opportunity to
Rejoice,” Story of Mark Colville’s Protests and
Arrest at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base
Arrest at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base
VFP Protest at Creech AFB
Compassion for Child Drone Victim in
Yemen
Jenna Krajeski’s Review of 5 Books
Recent 2015 OMNI Newsletter Contexts for US
Drone Warfare: It’s the War
Department
Department
Contact President Obama
PBS NOVA “Rise of the Drones”
Rise of the Drones
Meet a new breed of flying robots,
from tiny swarming vehicles to giant unmanned planes. Aired
January 23, 2013 on PBS
Program Description
Drones. These unmanned flying robots–some as large as jumbo jets, others
as small as birds–do things straight out of science fiction. Much of what it
takes to get these robotic airplanes to fly, sense, and kill has remained
secret. But now, with rare access to drone engineers and those who fly them for
the U.S. military, NOVA reveals the amazing technologies that make drones so
powerful as we see how a remotely-piloted drone strike looks and feels from
inside the command center. From cameras that can capture every detail of an
entire city at a glance to swarming robots that can make decisions on their own
to giant air frames that can stay aloft for days on end, drones are changing
our relationship to war, surveillance, and each other. And it's just the
beginning. Discover the cutting edge technologies that are propelling us toward
a new chapter in aviation history as NOVA gets ready for "Rise of the
Drones."
"Rise
of the Drones" is produced by WGBH, which maintains complete editorial
control over all episodes of NOVA. Lockheed Martin was a minor funder of the
NOVA series at the time this program was originally broadcast. Lockheed Martin
produces the RQ-170 Sentinel drone technology mentioned in the program.
Transcript
1. The Bureau
of Investigative Journalism (UK), Google Search, Nov. 24, 2014.
2.
The Bureau
of Investigative Journalism
www.thebureauinvestigates.com/
Bureau of
Investigative Journalism
Covert Drone War. Tracking
CIA drone strikes and other US covert actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Get the data here.
Covert Drone War | The Bureau of
Investigative Journalism
Bureau of Investigative Journalism
See Get the data: Drone wars for up to
date figures on drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. For information
on how we compiled the data, see the ...
Drone strikes in Pakistan | The Bureau
of Investigative ...
Bureau of Investigative Journalism
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
... Latest from this investigation ... Protect journalists' sources: The Bureau
is challenging the UK government in a ...
Get the data: Drone wars | The Bureau
of Investigative ...
Bureau of Investigative Journalism
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
... The Bureau's complete data sets on drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and
Somalia. Latest from this investigation.
Bureau of Investigative Journalism -
Wikipedia, the free ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Investigative_Journalism
Wikipedia
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
(TBIJ) is a London-based not-for-profit news organisation composed of
journalists who "produce investigations for press
History - Investigations - Praise -
Awards
The Bureau (@TBIJ) | Twitter
The latest Tweets from The Bureau
(@TBIJ). The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is an independent,
not-for-profit research unit which carries out investigative ...
Bureau of Investigative Journalism |
Freedom of the Press ...
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
is an independent not-for-profit organization established in April 2010. The
Bureau, which is philanthropically funded, ...
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
- London, United ...
The Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, London, United Kingdom. 32865 likes · 226 talking about this. The
Bureau bolsters original journalism by...
Where the Drones Strike
wherethedronesstrike.com/
The platform is based on data gathered
from the database of drone strikes compiled by the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism (BIJ). BIJ's archives of news
Bureau of Investigative Journalism -
Informed Comment
Juan Cole
Feb 8, 2013 - The Drones Team at the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism writes: The Bureau is launching an ambitious
new investigation, which will seek to ...
Searches related to Bureau of
Investigative Journalism
U.S. Launches Somalia Drone Strikes; New Base
Approved in Niger. Democracy Now, Sept. 2, 2014.
The United States has carried out a
new military operation in Somalia. The Pentagon
says it was targeting leaders of the militant group al-Shabab, but released no
further details. Local reports say U.S. drones launched
attacks Monday near the port city of Barawe, an al-Shabab stronghold. The
strike comes as The Washington Post
reports the United States has reached an agreement to open a second drone base
in Niger.
SHORTAGE
OF “PILOTS” STRESSING DRONE USE
“Breaking point” –> The Air Force says that the US drone fleet is being
stressed by steadily increasing demand for strikes by the unmanned
aircraft. The Daily Beast’s Dave Majumdar reports that
they have enough equipment, but are so strapped for manpower that they’re
raiding their training schools and canceling leave for overworked operators.
PROTESTS
AGAINST DRONES
Support
Kelly, Colville, Veterans for Peace,
VETERANS FOR PEACE, KATHY KELLY [To all Support Kathy Kelly. –Dick]
|
|
 VFP International Advisory Board member, Kathy Kelly writes about her
recent three month prison sentence for having crossed the line at Whiteman
Air Force Base.
On December 10,
International Human Rights Day, federal Magistrate Matt Whitworth sentenced
me to three months in prison for having crossed the line at a military base
that wages drone warfare. The punishment for our attempt to speak on behalf
of trapped and desperate people, abroad, will be an opportunity to speak with
people trapped by prisons and impoverishment here in the U.S.
<More>
|
KATHY KELLY AGAINST DRONES,
Google Search Sept. 26, 2014, page one.
[The essay I read was published in The Catholic Worker (Aug.-Sept.
2014). –Dick]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Kelly
Wikipedia
Kathy Kelly (born 1952) is an
American peace activist, pacifist and author, one ... team
members now living in and around her and her father's shared Uptown
apartment. .... by the Upstate NY Coalition to Ground
the Drones and End the Wars.
www.democracynow.org/.../kathy_kelly_on_afghan_h...
Democracy Now!
Mar 12, 2012 - We speak
with Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence,
...
vcnv.org/speaker-bio/kathy-kelly
Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices
for Creative Nonviolence, (www.vcnv.org) a campaign to end U.S.
military and economic warfare. During each of nine recent ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt_0e2mRUsc
Apr 3, 2014 - Uploaded by BNPPeace
March 6, 2014, Kathy Kelly,
co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Non- Violence, brought her first hand
witness ...
www.kboo.fm/kathykelly
KBOO
Kathy Kelly, a Nobel Peace Prize
nominee for her work to challenge US sanctions on ... the Afghan Youth Peace
Volunteers in search of non-military solutions to end the war. ...
Voices visited Pakistan, aiming to learn more about the effects of
U.S. drone warfare. .... Join now · Be a KBOO Member · Donate
your car · Wish List.
www.accuracy.org/.../war-protests-from-afghanistan-to-hancock-air-base...
Feb 29, 2012 - KATHY KELLY,
kathy.vcnv at gmail.com. Kelly is ... The Upstate Coalition to Ground
the Drones and End the Wars released a
statement today: ...
forusa.org/.../kathy-kelly/...drones/12992
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Jul 23, 2014 - End Drone
Warfare ... Frustrated by the tenacity of war resisters willing to risk
arrest, the ... whom I'm now living here in Kabul, are threatened by
the drones. ... Here in Afghanistan, the U.S uses drones to kill children,
moms, and ordinary people. ...Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for
Creative Nonviolence.
www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-kelly/
The Huffington Post
Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator
of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and a ... Kelly has been involved in numerous
nonviolent campaigns to end war, some of ... Our only hope today lies
in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out
.... Drones and Democracy · Pressured from All Sides in Pakistan's
Swat Valley ...
riseuptimes.org/2013/12/.../▶-peace-activist-kathy-kelly-at-cia-drone-protes...
Dec 17, 2013 - Kathy
Kelly speaks about the drone attacks in Yemen and Afghanistan and
... Drone Warfare Protest at CIA Follows Strike on Civilians in Yemen
... IN YEMENTODAY Calls on President Obama to apologize and pledge
to end ...
www.counterpunch.org/.../the-grassroots-battle-to-end-the...
CounterPunch
Jun 27, 2013 - Long time peace
activist, Kathy Kelly, is co-coordinator of the Chicago-based Voices for
Creative Nonviolence. Kelly just returned from her ...
“An Opportunity to Rejoice” by Erica
Brock, Catholic Worker Mark
Colville’s Arrest, Trial, and Sentencing for Protesting at Hancock
Field Air National Guard Base
Colville’s Arrest, Trial, and Sentencing for Protesting at Hancock
Field Air National Guard Base
PROTEST
AT CREECH AFB MARCH 3-6, 2015
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6:53am
Feb 11
|
'In their eyes, we don’t deserve to
live like people in the rest of the world,' said the victim ahead of his
ultimate death, 'and we don’t have feelings or emotions or cry or feel pain
like all the other humans around the world.'
Just weeks
after speaking with western journalists about his pervasive fear of the U.S.
drones...
|
|
Grim Reapers
Drones have taken on a life of their own in popular culture.
Jenna Krajeski. Review of 5 books.
·
Share
·
·
·
An MQ-9 Reaper drone
Sting of the Drone
By Richard A. Clarke. Buy this book
Drone
By Mike Maden. Putnam. 419 pp. $26.95.Buy this book
Bloodmoney
A Novel of Espionage. By David Ignatius. Buy this book
Murmuration
A Festival of Drone Culture. murmurationfestival.tumblr.com
I Am the Beggar of the World
Landays From Contemporary Afghanistan. Translated by Eliza Griswold. Photographs by Seamus Murphy. Buy this book
Erik Parsons, a colonel in the US Air Force, and his wife,
Jennifer, like to talk about Erik’s work commanding drone strikes out of a
Nevada Air Force base almost as much as they like to rendezvous in their
backyard hot tub with a couple of Heinekens. They talk about little else
in Sting of the Drone, the new
thriller by Richard Clarke. The former counterterrorism czar under Bill
Clinton and George W. Bush has strong opinions about US drone policy and only
a few hundred hyperactively paced pages in which to air them. The result is a
self-confident political critique set against a backdrop of PG-13 action.
“I’ll bring the brewskies, Flyboy,” Jennifer says, stripping naked for the
hot tub, where Erik calmly assures her that his pilots are tracking down
terrorists. “We’re finding them, Jen,” Erik says, pretending to be a monster.
“We’re winning.”
But even thousands of miles from the action, it’s a tough
fight. While he’s sampling a six-course tasting menu on the Vegas Strip, the
colonel moans about work. A Reaper drone collided recently with a passenger
plane over Somalia and then crashed into a refugee camp. Bruce, one of Erik’s
ace pilots, accidentally “fried” a civilian, although he also eliminated
“four bad guys.” Another of Bruce’s drones simply disappeared from the radar;
Erik is still trying to figure that one out, “whether he clipped a mountain
or what happened.”
Erik’s men are driving their cars drunk, asking for early
transfers, divorcing their wives. Washington might send some therapists.
Jennifer is a psychiatrist, and as she sips the restaurant’s best California
chardonnay, she offers her professional opinion about her husband’s drone
wing:
“There
is a lot of stress in the program. Let’s face it, they kill people fairly
often and then they walk out of their dark game-boy room and they’re in the
blazing Las Vegas sun, where it’s perfectly safe, fun is all around. It’s
hard to live in those two worlds simultaneously…. You don’t want them to
think of their job as just a computer game. You want them to know there are
real people at the other end. But then when you achieve that they also know
that those real people are killed like fish in a barrel, they can’t fight back.
It’s not really a fair fight, so your guys get guilty.”
Erik supports the use of armed drones by the United States,
which has resulted in the deaths of approximately 4,000 people— suspected
terrorists and civilians alike—in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and
Yemen. As a proponent, he eagerly participates in the heated debate taking
place in the United States and abroad about the ethics and efficacy of
twenty-first-century warfare. At dinner, in response to his wife, the colonel
lays out some popular arguments in favor of drones, otherwise known as
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs):
“It’s
not supposed to be a fair fight,” Erik shot back. “That’s the whole point. We
have found a way of eliminating our enemies that does not put our people at
risk. Military leaders have wanted that forever. That’s why they put men
inside big metal tanks or had them fly overhead in bombers, but then those
things got vulnerable, too. I don’t want it to be fair and to have one out of
ten of my guys killed. I want none out of ten killed. And that’s what I got
with the drones.”
The conversation continues, steered by rhetorical phrases like
“trouble is” and “truth is,” and if the talk sounds familiar, that’s the
point. Clarke may insist to his readers that Sting of the Droneis
a work of fiction, but he offers that statement up as more of a wink than a
disclaimer. Since unsuccessfully arguing for the use of military drones to
kill Osama bin Laden, Clarke has been an outspoken critic of the “war on
terror,” objecting more or less from the sidelines. Because it is
fiction, Sting of the Drone gives Clarke the chance to
bolster his theories with imagination, while insinuating throughout that his
imagination could double as insight. In the author’s note that concludes the
book, he even hints that he could have prevented 9/11.
Clarke, whose nonfiction book Against All Enemies:
Inside America’s War on Terror was a national bestseller, has also
struck a chord with Sting of the Drone. Since 2002, when the
first targeted drone strike against Al Qaeda was ordered in Afghanistan,
drones have been at the center of America’s national-security policy,
operating in countries where we have been at war, like Iraq and Afghanistan,
and in countries where we have officially not, like Yemen and Pakistan. In
spite of growing questions about the ethics of drone strikes, and an initial
optimism about the foreign policy of President Barack Obama, the drone
program has been greatly expanded since 2004; in 2012, there were as many
drone strikes in Yemen as during the previous ten years combined. Recently,
Obama referred to the strikes in Yemen and Somalia as models for the use of
force against militants with the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria.
Drones are a military mainstay and a national obsession.
To their proponents, UAVs are an exciting—and
inevitable—technology. They enhance the US military’s ability to target
foreign combatants while minimizing American and, ideally, civilian
casualties. Their development has applications in nonmilitary fields such as
science, medicine and retail (Amazon and Google tout the potential use of
drones for same-day delivery service). And they are economical: an armed
Predator drone costs a fraction of what it takes to manufacture and maintain
a fighter jet.
Critics say the drone program violates the Geneva Conventions
and other international treaties that the United States has pledged to
uphold. Drones may increase the likelihood of war, in part because they
reduce combat risk for American pilots; the perceived low threat, their
comparatively small cost and US dominance in the field make the use of UAVs
all too tempting. Furthermore, critics say, the very presence of drones—the
buzz of their engines and the violence it portends—traumatizes whole
communities. In Khashamir, in east Yemen, villagers attribute sudden deaths
and miscarriages to trauma from the ever-present drones. Human-rights groups
have published book-length collections of such testimonies. Drones, these
statements seem to confirm, recruit more terrorists than they kill.
But for opposition policy-makers, journalists and activists,
and even some supporters of drones, the most alarming aspect of the program
is its secrecy, which not only obscures facts but also stokes paranoia—or
complacency. It was only in 2012 that Obama publicly admitted the existence
of the drone program while continuing to escalate the strikes, and Americans
today are expected to reconcile the documented existence of drones with the
official silence or denials on the subject. As a result, the debate on drones
verges on the surreal, testing the limits of the American public’s connection
to its own government as well as its influence over the waging of foreign
wars. Emerging from this fog are fantastical political thrillers like Sting
of the Drone.
* * *
In recent years, not just in novels but in movies, television,
poetry, video games and the visual arts, drones have taken on a life of their
own. As a character, they are menacing, melancholy or gallant; beastly,
blind, snub-nosed, noisy and fast—Predators and Reapers in real life,
“Helicarriers” in Hollywood. They are the oversize hook at the end of a
joystick, a militarized, antiseptic video game characterized by precision; or
they are a weapon system proliferating at a breathtaking rate, and leaving a
trail of destruction behind. They show off the military talent of their
users, or they are an expression of unbridled hubris. They represent
protection or extermination—and they carry out both things at once.
In America, on whose behalf the vast majority of drones are
deployed but where none of their missiles have been used offensively, the UAV
is more a symbol than a weapon. Drones represent the thrills and pitfalls of
ingenuity, as well as the tangled threat of terrorism. They embody our own
vulnerabilities as a nation, and the complexities—or impossibility—of waging
ethical warfare. What we don’t know about drones (which is by design a lot),
we can imagine, and our fantasies are usually dark. “Well, look, they aren’t
really just airplanes,” a member of Clarke’s fictionalized “Kill Committee”
says. “People see them as Flying Killer Robots. And people have a deep fear
of armed robots.”
“What’s most interesting to me about drones is not that they
are changing the world, but that they are changing us,” Mike Maden, who has a
doctorate in political science, told me. “They are very ironic machines.”
Maden’s debut work of fiction, Drone, takes place in a lightly
fictionalized near-future in which drones are used for good—such as
monitoring the migratory habits of endangered humpback whales—and evil.
Maden’s biggest apparent leap is the core plot, in which the US president
argues that Mexican drug cartels are a threat akin to foreign terrorists and
deploys drones across the border to hunt them down. In a series of blasts,
drug kingpins are killed with ease and precision. When old-school
efforts—boots on the ground—are used to combat the Mexican traffickers, they
fail spectacularly, and within the gore is a message: “Human snipers
contended with other variables, too,” Maden writes. “Stinging sweat, the need
to breathe, beating hearts, nagging doubts, sick kids back home, lack of
sleep, fears.”
Then the weapons turn on their maker: snatched by Iranian
forces and emblazoned with American flags, the drones target an oil rig, an
airport and a church. Some are meant to kill Americans, and others to ruin
the reputation of the United States abroad. Amid the chaos, terrorism
flourishes in the United States; in one pivotal scene, a Mexican ice-cream
vendor unwittingly blows up Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Maden exploits a
fundamental worry about drones, one rooted in a strain of technophobia that
appears in much of science fiction, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to
James Cameron’s The Terminator. Humans, by virtue of our boundless
curiosity and intelligence, will eventually create a machine we cannot
control. In Maden’s book, and in Clarke’s, that machine is the UAV, and it’s
only a matter of time—and political miscalculation—before our drones attack
us.
Maden takes pains to highlight nonmilitary uses of the
technology, and he wants his arguments to be taken seriously. He assures
readers that all the machines he describes in the book either already exist
or are in development, and that the novel’s world is only vaguely futuristic.
The president, elected after Obama’s second term, is a woman. “I joke that
science fiction is dead,” Maden said. “You really can’t make this stuff up
anymore.”
In these novels, the actual fiction is like lingerie—minimal,
alluring. The same is true inBloodmoney (2011), a novel by Washington
Post columnist David Ignatius, which also presents
itself as being based in reality. The doctor Omar al-Wazir becomes a would-be
terrorist to avenge his family’s death by US drone. Like Colonel Parsons
fretting over losing control of his drones in Clarke’s novel, the doctor’s
transformation is a lesson for the reader. In one of the book’s early scenes,
a Pakistani general ponders the situation: “The Americans were changing the
rules of the game. They must think they were being clever in Washington, but
they were walking into terrain where nobody could help them—not the general,
not his agents, not their clandestine contacts…. They were the
mischief-makers. They would get caught, and it would be their fault.”
Like Clarke, Ignatius has toured the news shows promoting his
book, sometimes coyly, as an insider’s view on drones and governmental
policy. With so little genuine information coming from the White House and
the Pentagon, these books—and even television shows like 24 or
films like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which have both
featured drone-heavy plots—do sometimes provide insight or spark debate.
Discussing his novel on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show, Ignatius
broached ethical issues that policy-makers seem reluctant to touch. Drones
“allow you to kill people from 10,000 feet,” Ignatius said, “which seems, to
our public—I think wrongly—less bloody than if we did it right up close
standing next to someone with a gun.”
And yet all these fictions, while diligently researched, are
mostly far-fetched. It’s not necessarily the fault of their authors; drones
take on the gloss of fantasy too well. Genuine expertise—a background in the
military, government, political science or journalism—and plots intended to
serve as warnings or political critiques do little to differentiate these
drone entertainments from other, less topical science-fiction or
technological thrillers. The genre conventions overwhelm the message.
In Sting of the Drone, Erik grows increasingly
anxious about losing control of the weapons. “It’s like something’s shifted.
Like the bad guys are figuring us out, like we’re not quite invulnerable
anymore,” he tells Jennifer. This may be true to life. But in the novel, his
cautionary words are less a comment on American hubris than a familiar
literary convention: the rote speech delivered by a fictional hero in order
to disguise the inevitability of his victory, purely for thrills.
* * *
“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A
signature strike leveled the florist’s.” Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole’s
popular “Small Fates” series on Twitter compiles poetic, often darkly
humorous, 140-character-or-less versions of Lagos’s more violent headlines.
In January 2013, Cole turned his attention to drones. “Call me Ishmael. I was
a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are
inconsolable,” he writes in one. The last of the seven tweets, which invokes
the first sentence of Camus’s The Stranger, states, “Mother died
today. The program saves American lives.”
The tweets received a lot of attention. Fans saw them as a
fierce critique of US drone policy, much needed at a time when secrecy—and
fading optimism about Obama—appeared to limit anti-drone activism. By
embedding drones in the opening sentences of classic novels, Cole seemed to
comment on the national mindset about them, one characterized more by
distance and irony than by genuine fear or culpability. Months before, he had
offered what appeared to be a thesis: “Each age has its presiding metaphor.
Ours is aerial bombing.”
Adam Rothstein, author of the forthcoming book Drone,
responded to Cole’s tweets on the United Arab Emirates–based website the
State, calling fictional work like it of the “utmost importance.” Such
writing, compared to the whirlwind of thrillers—which suffer, anyway, from a
dearth of information—could have a profound reach, Rothstein thinks. Curating
and writing about work that incorporates drones, as well as exploring the
connection between drones and people beyond the offerings of science fiction
or political thrillers, became his focus.
“Drones are very much a character, which we compile from the
sources we choose, and those which we choose to believe,” Rothstein explained
to me in an e-mail. “Look at the number of times people rely upon stock
tropes to describe drones. ‘Killer robots,’ ‘terminators,’ ‘zombie drones,’
‘flocking birds,’ ‘vampire bats’…. We really personify drones in ways that we
don’t with cellphones or computers.” Rothstein added that “the problem with
science fiction is that the drones are an aspect of speculation. Anything
they do in the context of the work is immediately perceived as speculation,
and not to be taken seriously.”
In the summer of 2013, Rothstein and Olivia Rosane launched “Murmuration:
A Festival of Drone Culture.” They proposed a website that, for one month,
would post “art, film, music, and writing inspired by the idea of the drone.”
The result, a compilation of work tiled on a Tumblr page, explores the drone
as an object and as an object of obsession. There are posters, videos, short
stories, essays and Christmas gifts—all about drones. None of these projects
command the kind of audience of a David Ignatius novel, but taken together,
they better represent the impact that drone warfare, and speculation about
that warfare, have had on the public imagination. “Drones are a complicated
topic,” Rothstein told me. “Speaking louder is not necessarily better.”
On the “Murmuration” site, one can watch Heems, formerly of
the rap trio Das Racist, perform a song about drones and dating. Photoshopped
images depict Predator drones flying over present-day Dubai. A fluorescent
poster advertises a horse-drone hybrid called “My Little Droney: Surveillance
Is Magic.”
“Dronestagram,” one of the most compelling projects compiled
on “Murmuration,” is a visual and cultural link between the Instagramming
American public and the areas targeted by drones, as well as a method of
compiling a death toll—a daunting task given the clandestine nature of most
of these attacks. Beneath an aerial photograph showing the patchwork of flat
roofs in a small Pakistani village, a caption provides the tally of people,
both targets and civilians, killed or injured in the drone attack. In Tappi
village, according to one “Dronestagram,” three to five people were reported
killed, including one civilian, in a drone attack on October 24, 2012. “Three
cows intended to be sacrificed for Eid were also killed,” it notes.
When a drone comes alive, in the world of “Murmuration,” it
reminds us of the danger of taking refuge in fictions. Drones are not
sentient; people are responsible for what they do. In the first panel of a
short comic, the black silhouette of a drone flies against a light sky, and
the text wonders if the all-seeing flying weapon would, if it could, think
about what was happening on the ground below. If the drone truly had a mind
or a conscience; if it could control its own movements and make its own
plans; if it could take responsibility—would it consider what it was doing?
“But it thinks nothing,” the artist decides finally. “After all, it is a
drone.”
* * *
On April 17, 2013, two US drones killed a suspected Al Qaeda
member, his driver and two of his bodyguards in Wessab, a village high up in
the mountains of Yemen. A description of the carnage from the drone attack,
as told to Human Rights Watch, reads like a scene from a novel:
“The
fire was high; no one dared get close and the planes were hovering above,”
said Ahmad Hamoud Qaed Daer, the driver’s father. “I couldn’t do anything….
It was dark and there was a lot of smoke. There was no moon and I didn’t even
have a flashlight. I saw my son charred, in the front seat.”
People began to panic. Nowhere seemed safe—not in their homes,
not on their roofs. “The planes [drones] were there until we buried them,”
another villager said. “I swear by Allah, if we had had weapons, not a single
plane would leave. We would take them down because they terrified the
village.”
These testimonies are difficult to read. They are full of
explosions, gore and personal, life-altering tragedies. Baraa Shiban, of the
nongovernmental organization Reprieve, says that drones are indeed a Yemeni
obsession; they are always overhead. Villagers fear the strikes and cling to
evidence of them, knowing that their own government and the US government are
prone to denying that the attacks ever took place. “People are very aware,
even in remote areas,” Shiban said. “If you talk to very uneducated people,
very simple people living in villages, they realize that it’s an American
drone program. Sometimes they say that America is sending planes to kill us.”
In 2013, Reprieve held a drone-themed poetry contest. Writers
throughout Yemen participated, and the event received plenty of media
attention, even prompting a local pop singer to approach the NGO about
turning the winning poem into a song. That poem, “Unrhymed Drone,” by Ayman
Shahari, described the grim struggle of living with drones and the complicit
Yemeni government:
Below us:
A furnace for tyrants Above us, drones?
The
friendly drones, the enemy
Which makes death fall Overhead As though we are fields And death our downpour.
“They were angry about the constant presence of drones over
their heads,” Shiban told me. “A lot of them were addressing the fact that we
have no other way to fight these drones. But we have our words, and
expressing ourselves.” The prize for the winning poem was $600—or, as
Reprieve pointed out, a mere 1 percent of the cost of a Hellfire missile.
In Yemen, poetry is a written and oral tradition that knits
together a society otherwise composed of many disparate communities spread
over a large and geographically diverse terrain. In recent years, drones have
made their appearance in poems as well as in street art. In Sanaa, a
well-known piece of graffiti depicts a child asking a drone, “Why did you
kill my family?” The same artist also plastered images of drone victims on
walls around the city.
But it’s in rural Yemen, beneath the drones, where the poetry
has been sharpened into knives. Life for many villagers is now unbearable,
and poetry is a way to convey that reality to a skeptical audience. The
attacks have penetrated many layers of society in a reasonably short period
of time. “Drones are, in many countries, the face of the United States,”
Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on
national security and counterterrorism, told me. “Drones are such a small
part of the American government’s engagement with the world, but they are
given such tremendous weight because of the infrastructure around their use.
It’s the myth of covert action.”
Zenko is aware of the swirl of science fiction and
techno-thrillers about drones: “Look at how the CIA plays a role,” he
advised. “They have an entertainment-industry liaison.” But he’s more focused
on drones outside of fiction and metaphor; the reality is alarming enough.
“What people always get into at this point in the conversation is autonomous
killer robots,” Zenko said. “I’m more interested in what’s happening on earth
today. There are no civilians being killed by autonomous killer robots.”
Reprieve’s Shiban watched Captain America: The Winter
Soldier, he told me with a little laugh, although he didn’t think that
many other Yemenis had. Even Dirty Wars, the 2013 Jeremy Scahill
documentary about the “war on terror,” has yet to be officially screened in
Yemen, where much of it was filmed. Shiban sighed; as a Yemeni, he seemed
accustomed to being the subject of discussion, whether in a documentary or a
Hollywood movie, rather than a participant. “I think it’s interesting that
drones are starting to impact even the American movies and American
directors,” he said. “But there are limits. There is much more needed to be
done to really address what is happening to the people here.”
* * *
This poem is by an unnamed Afghan woman:
May God
destroy your tank and your drone,
you who’ve destroyed my village, my home.
The poem is a landay, folk poetry sung among
Pashtun women along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Traditionally,
the twenty-two-syllable poems were performed over drumbeats at weddings and
other gatherings, but decades of violence, and the Taliban’s oppressive rule,
have made such performances rare. Today, landays are still
collected and shared, but more privately.
Their content, too, has changed, “remixed like rap, with old
words swapped for newer, more relevant ones,” writes poet and journalist
Eliza Griswold, in the introduction to I Am the Beggar of the World,
a collection of landays she has translated. This
extraordinary book cuts to the heart of the US drone program. Much as they’ve
entered the skies above scattered villages, drones have entered the landays,
which, Griswold writes, often “reflect an exasperation with foreign
occupation and a deepening terror of living under the threat of drone
strikes.”
Over two years, Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy
traveled through Afghanistan in search of landays. It took time
and patience to gain the trust of women who value the poems, which deal
frankly with sex and relationships, as their sole means of rebellion, but who
also fear the repercussions of being named as their authors. What Griswold
found was, in part, the scar tissue of permanent war—a war where the only
things that change are the nationality of the occupiers and the types of
weapons they use. Today, those weapons are drones. As in Yemen, poetry in
Afghanistan is a way for disenfranchised, mostly rural populations to
describe their real lives, and violence has seeped into the work. A 2014
report called “Impacts of the War on Terror on Pashto Literature and Art,” by
the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) Research Centre, a
Pakistan-based NGO, determined that “Pashto literature is divided into two
sections; one post-9/11 and the other…pre-9/11….”
I Am the Beggar of the World is a universe away
from Sting of the Drone, despite the fact that both have armed
drones and the “war on terror” at their core. It’s not just that Clarke is
vastly different from the female singers of landays, which belong
to a distinctly foreign literary tradition, or that he has very different
goals (one of which, presumably, is to sell books). Drones are two separate
objects in the American versus the Afghan imagination. In the United States,
drones are all too often a metaphor, the indirectness made more profound by
the literal distance between a vehicle and its pilot. Drones symbolize a lot
but seem to do very little. However, the same drone in Afghanistan exists as
a fact of life, one that embodies real tragedy. There, a drone is a drone.
“Mostly, when people sing these poems, they’re not looking to
make a statement as much as they are talking about their lived experience,”
Griswold told me. “Certainly, [drones] are a symbol of menacing power. But
it’s much more literal. When a drone appears in a landay, it’s
because it killed [the author’s] son.”
Griswold first listened to one of the landays in
the book on the cellphone of a businesswoman in Jalalabad, far removed from
the wedding where a woman named Chadana had originally sung it. Chadana’s son
Nabi, a Taliban fighter, was reportedly killed in a US drone strike in 2011.
Chadana uses the poem to mourn her son, and in two short lines manages to
convey the impact that US drone strikes have had on her life with a force
that evokes the attack itself:
My Nabi
was shot down by a drone.
May God destroy your sons, America, you murdered my own.
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DRONE
NEWSLETTER #14
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Drones in
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