This illuminating article posted by the Denver chapter of an autonomous political action group, Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement (Denver). Note the lead to these compelling and utterly disturbing source stories:
CIA used 'illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones''They want to kill people with software that doesn't work'by Chris Williams, TheRegister.co.uk, Sept. 24
And also,
"CIA used pirated, inaccurate software to target drone attacks: lawsuit"by Daniel Tencer, RawStory.com, also dated Sept. 24
Drones kill 28 people, then hit the funeral
www.raimd.wordpress.com
A recent string of bombings, killing dozens in Pakistan, has the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or “drone,” making headlines once again. So-called “Predator Drones” have become one of imperialism’s favorite tools of oppression. Bombing attacks by these vehicles are being carried out consistently and more frequently than ever. (1).
Predator Drones are center stage as the US ups its assault on Pakistan’s northwest border region. At least 28 people were killed as a result of drone strikes in South Waziristan during the week of September 19 (2). The week’s two bloodiest attacks, responsible for more than a dozen deaths, took place on September 22. The initial strike launched two missiles at a targeted vehicle, killing seven. A funeral was arranged for the victims in the following hours; subsequently, this funeral was also targeted by a drone strike, resulting in more deaths yet. This absurd sequence mirrors an incident that took place last summer. On the morning of Tuesday 23 June 2009, unmanned drones killed more than 45 people in a series of bombings including a strike on a funeral procession for victims of the earlier assault (3).
Violence caused by drone missiles has sparked outrage in Pakistan, where drones have killed at least 1,700 people(4). The mutilation caused by the bombings makes compiling a solid count of the deaths all but impossible. Even so, it is clear that hundreds of those killed have been civilians (5). Drones have been a fixture in Pakistan for over five years; however, US officials do not officially comment on any drone activities. The attacks fall under the veil of CIA secrecy. It is clear, nonetheless, that using drones has become particularly attractive to decision-makers in the past two years. Estimated death tolls clearly show drone attacks being responsible for more deaths in 2009 alone than in the four years between 2004-2008 combined (6).
With mounting numbers of casualties, drone attacks have become known for their haphazard destruction. Missiles fired from the unpiloted vehicles are often grossly off-target. This, and general belligerence have contributed to the high civilian deaths which have, embarrassingly for the US, included Amerikan citizens (7).
Part of the cause of the vehicle’s reckless imprecision is being revealed in an ongoing lawsuit. Accusations and evidence depict the as CIA consciously utilizing faulty targeting software in the unmanned vehicles. IISI, a small, Massachusetts-based software company alleges that IT firm “Netezza” facilitated the CIA with a pirated, and knowingly-unreliable, version of their software to the CIA for use in US drone vehicles. The location-analysis software in turn may have produced locations up to 13 meters off target (8). IISI was pressured to meet a quick deadline to provide the software, when the company voiced reservations, Netezza allegedly went ahead and reverse-engineered the program themselves. The IISI Chief Technology Officer summarized his earliest feelings on the situation, stating, “they want to kill people with my software that doesn’t work” (9). The lawsuit aims to halt use of the pirated software by Netezza and its clients, including the CIA. IISI has expressed concern that the buggy software may lead to loss of innocent life. Unfortunately, the host of civilian deaths cannot be declared a mere “software issue.” Such recklessness is hardwired into the logic of imperialism.
Predator Drones are becoming a standard instrument in the oppression of Third World peoples by . As RAIM has noted (xhttp://raimd.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/imperialism-drones-on/), US drones are now deployed everywhere from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and recently on the militarized US/Mexico border. Israel used US-provided drones in attacks on Gaza in December 2008. The First World is looking to a high technology, impersonal approach of fighting their battles. These machines cause much destruction, but high-tech gadgetry will not defeat Third Wold resistance. As comrade Lin Biao wrote in “Long Live the Victory of People’s War!”
However highly developed modern weapons and technical equipment may be and however complicated the methods of modern warfare, in the final analysis the outcome of a war will be decided by the sustained fighting of the ground forces, by the fighting at close quarters on battlefields, by the political consciousness of the men, by their courage and spirit of sacrifice. Here the weak points of U.S. imperialism will be completely laid bare, while the superiority of the revolutionary people will be brought into full play. The reactionary troops of U.S. imperialism cannot possibly be endowed with the courage and the spirit of sacrifice possessed by the revolutionary people. The spiritual atom bomb which the revolutionary people possess is a far more powerful and useful weapon than the physical atom bomb. (10)
The Third World majority, collectively terrorized by imperialism, must collectively defeat imperialism. The enemy’s extravagant technology cannot hold up against People’s War.
Notes.
1. Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann’s drones database at the New America Foundation
xxhttp://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/drones
2. xxhttp://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/09/2010921181212227907.html
3. xxhttp://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/06/200962317958264507.html
3. Ibid. Protest
4.xxhttp://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/drones#2010chart
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. xxhttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/09/cia_drones_killed_us_citizens.html
8. xxhttp://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/cia-inaccurate-software-drone-attacks/
9. Ibid.
Showing posts with label hellfire missiles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hellfire missiles. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
North Waziristan motorcyclists latest to be killed by UAV
From the Long War Journal ...
US Predators strike again in North Waziristan
By Bill Roggio September 20, 2010
Excerpts appear here—
"Four 'militants' were reported killed in the strike, but their affiliation to terror groups is unclear. No senior Taliban or al Qaeda commanders have been reported killed."
"The areas controlled by Bahadar and by the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani Network have been hit especially hard this year. Despite the fact that Bahadar and the Haqqani Network shelter al Qaeda and other South and Central Asian terror groups, the Pakistani government and military refuse to take action in North Waziristan. Bahadar and the Haqqanis are viewed as 'good Taliban' as they do not attack the Pakistani state."
US Predators strike again in North Waziristan
By Bill Roggio September 20, 2010
Excerpts appear here—
"Four 'militants' were reported killed in the strike, but their affiliation to terror groups is unclear. No senior Taliban or al Qaeda commanders have been reported killed."
"The areas controlled by Bahadar and by the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani Network have been hit especially hard this year. Despite the fact that Bahadar and the Haqqani Network shelter al Qaeda and other South and Central Asian terror groups, the Pakistani government and military refuse to take action in North Waziristan. Bahadar and the Haqqanis are viewed as 'good Taliban' as they do not attack the Pakistani state."
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Tom Engelhardt on the Perfect American Weapon
"When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight."
Tom Engelhardt
Article dates back to June 24, 2010
America Detached from War
Bush’s Pilotless Dream, Smoking Drones, and Other Strange Tales from the Crypt
Available on Tomdispatch.com
Admittedly, before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the U.S. had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.
In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war. Six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the destroyer the USS Cole would be turned into twisted metal and ash -- the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.
Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA Director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country. A “smoking gun” had been uncovered.
According to “new intelligence,” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry. Worse yet, these were capable -- so the CIA director and vice president claimed -- of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the east coast of the United States. It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in Congress.
Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard."
In a speech in October 2002, President Bush then offered a version of this apocalyptic nightmare to the American public. Of course, like Saddam’s supposed ability to produce “mushroom clouds” over American cities, the Iraqi autocrat’s advanced UAVs (along with the ships needed to position them off the U.S. coast) were a feverish fantasy of the Bush era and would soon enough be forgotten. Instead, in the years to come, it would be American pilotless drones that would repeatedly attack Iraqi urban areas with Hellfire missiles and bombs.
In those years, our drones would also strike repeatedly in Afghanistan, and especially in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan, where in an escalating “secret” or “covert” war, which has been no secret to anyone, multiple drone attacks often occur weekly. They are now considered so much the norm that, with humdrum headlines slapped on (“U.S. missile strike kills 12 in NW Pakistan”), they barely make it out of summary articles about war developments in the American press.
And yet those robotic planes, with their young “pilots” (as well as the camera operators and intelligence analysts who make up a drone “crew”) sitting in front of consoles 7,000 miles away from where their missiles and bombs are landing, have become another kind of American fever dream. The drone is our latest wonder weapon and a bragging point in a set of wars where there has been little enough to brag about.
CIA director Leon Panetta has, for instance, called the Agency’s drones flying over Pakistan “the only game in town” when it comes to destroying al-Qaeda; a typically anonymous U.S. official in a Washington Post report claims of drone missile attacks, “We’re talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare”; or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command told author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: “They don't get hungry. They are not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”
Seven thousand of them, the vast majority surveillance varieties, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that’s before swarms of “mini-drones” come on line. Our American world is being redefined accordingly.
In February, Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post caught something of this process when he spent time with Colonel Eric Mathewson, perhaps the most experienced Air Force officer in drone operations and on the verge of retirement. Mathewson, reported Jaffe, was trying to come up with an appropriately new definition of battlefield “valor” -- a necessity for most combat award citations -- to fit our latest corps of pilots at their video consoles. “Valor to me is not risking your life," the colonel told the reporter. "Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons. That to me is valor."
Smoking Drones
These days, CIA and administration officials troop up to Capitol Hill to offer briefings to Congress on the miraculous value of pilotless drones: in disrupting al-Qaeda, destroying its leadership or driving it “deeper into hiding,” and taking out key figures in the Taliban. Indeed, what started as a 24/7 assassination campaign against al-Qaeda’s top leadership has already widened considerably. The “target set” has by now reportedly expanded to take in ever lower-level militants in the tribal borderlands. In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war (and, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers).
If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the Air Force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.
When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.
Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It's the U.S. which is developing a 22-ton tail-less drone 20 times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It's the Pentagon which is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.
Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, “precision,” and “valor.” It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions. He recently issued a 29-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.” Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another.”
Such mechanized, long-distance warfare, he also suggests, will breach what respect remains for the laws of war. “Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield,” he wrote, “and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a 'PlayStation' mentality to killing.”
Similarly, the ACLU has filed a freedom of information lawsuit against the U.S. government, demanding that it “disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused.”
But pay no mind to all this. The arguments may be legally compelling, but not in Washington, which has mounted a half-hearted claim of legitimate “self-defense,” but senses that it’s already well past the point where legalities matter. The die is cast, the money committed. The momentum for drone war and yet more drone war is overwhelming.
It’s a done deal. Drone war is, and will be, us.
A Pilotless Military
If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment.
It’s a moment that could, of course, be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the U.S. as the soul-crushing Skynet), or as a remarkable tale of how “networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare” (as Christopher Drew recently put it in the New York Times). It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment, or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work “in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk... and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts.” It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice -- the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of miles away -- or (as Col. Mathewson would prefer) a new form of valor.
The drones -- their use expanding exponentially, with ever newer generations on the drawing boards, and the planes even heading for “the homeland” -- could certainly be considered a demon spawn of modern warfare, or (as is generally the case in the U.S.) a remarkable example of American technological ingenuity, a problem-solver of the first order at a time when few American problems seem capable of solution. Thanks to our technological prowess, it’s claimed that we can now kill them, wherever they may be lurking, at absolutely no cost to ourselves, other than the odd malfunctioning drone. Not that even all CIA operatives involved in the drone wars agree with that one. Some of them understand perfectly well that there’s a price to be paid.
As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one President Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it’s also distinctly us. In fact, drone warfare fits the America of 2010 tighter than a glove. With its consoles, chat rooms, and “single shooter” death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook, and video games. That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood of the moment.
The Air Force “detachments” that “manage” the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are “detached” from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn’t. If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war.
After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.
As a start, with no draft and so no citizen’s army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families). It occurs thousands of miles away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity. As Pratap Chatterjee reported recently, “[E]very US soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world.” And a majority of those contractors aren’t even U.S. citizens.
If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate among that detached populace. In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones. We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind. The question is: Have we redefined our detachment as a new version of citizenly valor (and covered it over by a constant drumbeat of “support for our troops”)?
Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a “pilotless” force should, in turn, develop the sort of contempt for civilians that can be seen in the recent flap over the derogatory comments of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about Obama administration officials.
The Globalization of Death
Maybe what we need is the return of George W. Bush’s fever dream from the American oblivion in which it’s now interred. He was beyond wrong, of course, when it came to Saddam Hussein and Iraqi drones, but he wasn’t completely wrong about the dystopian Drone World to come. There are now reportedly more than 40 countries developing versions of those pilot-less planes. Earlier this year, the Iranians announced that they were starting up production lines for both armed and unarmed drones. Hezbollah used them against Israel in the 2006 summer war, years after Israel began pioneering their use in targeted killings of Palestinians.
Right now, in what still remains largely a post-Cold War arms race of one, the U.S. is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. In the process, we’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike.
We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo. And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of "terrorists," we won’t like it one bit. When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less. And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.
In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization” which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the U.S. and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It’s a nasty combination, this globalization of death.
Tom Engelhardt
Article dates back to June 24, 2010
America Detached from War
Bush’s Pilotless Dream, Smoking Drones, and Other Strange Tales from the Crypt
Available on Tomdispatch.com
Admittedly, before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the U.S. had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.
In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war. Six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the destroyer the USS Cole would be turned into twisted metal and ash -- the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.
Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA Director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country. A “smoking gun” had been uncovered.
According to “new intelligence,” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry. Worse yet, these were capable -- so the CIA director and vice president claimed -- of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the east coast of the United States. It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in Congress.
Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard."
In a speech in October 2002, President Bush then offered a version of this apocalyptic nightmare to the American public. Of course, like Saddam’s supposed ability to produce “mushroom clouds” over American cities, the Iraqi autocrat’s advanced UAVs (along with the ships needed to position them off the U.S. coast) were a feverish fantasy of the Bush era and would soon enough be forgotten. Instead, in the years to come, it would be American pilotless drones that would repeatedly attack Iraqi urban areas with Hellfire missiles and bombs.
In those years, our drones would also strike repeatedly in Afghanistan, and especially in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan, where in an escalating “secret” or “covert” war, which has been no secret to anyone, multiple drone attacks often occur weekly. They are now considered so much the norm that, with humdrum headlines slapped on (“U.S. missile strike kills 12 in NW Pakistan”), they barely make it out of summary articles about war developments in the American press.
And yet those robotic planes, with their young “pilots” (as well as the camera operators and intelligence analysts who make up a drone “crew”) sitting in front of consoles 7,000 miles away from where their missiles and bombs are landing, have become another kind of American fever dream. The drone is our latest wonder weapon and a bragging point in a set of wars where there has been little enough to brag about.
CIA director Leon Panetta has, for instance, called the Agency’s drones flying over Pakistan “the only game in town” when it comes to destroying al-Qaeda; a typically anonymous U.S. official in a Washington Post report claims of drone missile attacks, “We’re talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare”; or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command told author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: “They don't get hungry. They are not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”
Seven thousand of them, the vast majority surveillance varieties, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that’s before swarms of “mini-drones” come on line. Our American world is being redefined accordingly.
In February, Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post caught something of this process when he spent time with Colonel Eric Mathewson, perhaps the most experienced Air Force officer in drone operations and on the verge of retirement. Mathewson, reported Jaffe, was trying to come up with an appropriately new definition of battlefield “valor” -- a necessity for most combat award citations -- to fit our latest corps of pilots at their video consoles. “Valor to me is not risking your life," the colonel told the reporter. "Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons. That to me is valor."
Smoking Drones
These days, CIA and administration officials troop up to Capitol Hill to offer briefings to Congress on the miraculous value of pilotless drones: in disrupting al-Qaeda, destroying its leadership or driving it “deeper into hiding,” and taking out key figures in the Taliban. Indeed, what started as a 24/7 assassination campaign against al-Qaeda’s top leadership has already widened considerably. The “target set” has by now reportedly expanded to take in ever lower-level militants in the tribal borderlands. In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war (and, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers).
If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the Air Force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.
When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.
Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It's the U.S. which is developing a 22-ton tail-less drone 20 times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It's the Pentagon which is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.
Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, “precision,” and “valor.” It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions. He recently issued a 29-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.” Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another.”
Such mechanized, long-distance warfare, he also suggests, will breach what respect remains for the laws of war. “Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield,” he wrote, “and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a 'PlayStation' mentality to killing.”
Similarly, the ACLU has filed a freedom of information lawsuit against the U.S. government, demanding that it “disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused.”
But pay no mind to all this. The arguments may be legally compelling, but not in Washington, which has mounted a half-hearted claim of legitimate “self-defense,” but senses that it’s already well past the point where legalities matter. The die is cast, the money committed. The momentum for drone war and yet more drone war is overwhelming.
It’s a done deal. Drone war is, and will be, us.
A Pilotless Military
If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment.
It’s a moment that could, of course, be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the U.S. as the soul-crushing Skynet), or as a remarkable tale of how “networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare” (as Christopher Drew recently put it in the New York Times). It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment, or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work “in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk... and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts.” It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice -- the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of miles away -- or (as Col. Mathewson would prefer) a new form of valor.
The drones -- their use expanding exponentially, with ever newer generations on the drawing boards, and the planes even heading for “the homeland” -- could certainly be considered a demon spawn of modern warfare, or (as is generally the case in the U.S.) a remarkable example of American technological ingenuity, a problem-solver of the first order at a time when few American problems seem capable of solution. Thanks to our technological prowess, it’s claimed that we can now kill them, wherever they may be lurking, at absolutely no cost to ourselves, other than the odd malfunctioning drone. Not that even all CIA operatives involved in the drone wars agree with that one. Some of them understand perfectly well that there’s a price to be paid.
As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one President Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it’s also distinctly us. In fact, drone warfare fits the America of 2010 tighter than a glove. With its consoles, chat rooms, and “single shooter” death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook, and video games. That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood of the moment.
The Air Force “detachments” that “manage” the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are “detached” from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn’t. If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war.
After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.
As a start, with no draft and so no citizen’s army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families). It occurs thousands of miles away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity. As Pratap Chatterjee reported recently, “[E]very US soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world.” And a majority of those contractors aren’t even U.S. citizens.
If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate among that detached populace. In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones. We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind. The question is: Have we redefined our detachment as a new version of citizenly valor (and covered it over by a constant drumbeat of “support for our troops”)?
Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a “pilotless” force should, in turn, develop the sort of contempt for civilians that can be seen in the recent flap over the derogatory comments of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about Obama administration officials.
The Globalization of Death
Maybe what we need is the return of George W. Bush’s fever dream from the American oblivion in which it’s now interred. He was beyond wrong, of course, when it came to Saddam Hussein and Iraqi drones, but he wasn’t completely wrong about the dystopian Drone World to come. There are now reportedly more than 40 countries developing versions of those pilot-less planes. Earlier this year, the Iranians announced that they were starting up production lines for both armed and unarmed drones. Hezbollah used them against Israel in the 2006 summer war, years after Israel began pioneering their use in targeted killings of Palestinians.
Right now, in what still remains largely a post-Cold War arms race of one, the U.S. is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. In the process, we’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike.
We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo. And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of "terrorists," we won’t like it one bit. When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less. And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.
In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization” which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the U.S. and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It’s a nasty combination, this globalization of death.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Excellent blog post on ABC News tribute to the murderous glory of UAV drones
Nice work from whoever is behind http://www.spider-topihitam.com
This excerpt cuts to the core of the issue (at this point I wish there was one):
"In the particular instance highlighted in Tuesday’s report, the drone spots a number of individuals carrying heavy objects. Weir, somewhat disappointed that the suspicious Afghans are not immediately blown to bits, comments on the military’s remarkable 'restraint.' They turn out to be four boys and a girl collecting firewood. They were fortunate on this occasion. how many have not been?"
By David Walsh
14 January 2010
American television news becomes more and more unwatchable, especially in its reports on the expanding wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Perfectly coiffed, interchangeable news and anchor people repeat White House and Pentagon lies. “In-depth” reports provide nothing in the way of meaningful commentary or analysis. In general, everything is done to hide the truth from the American people.
Diane Sawyer, promoted to hosting ABC’s prime time evening news program a few weeks ago, and the rest of that network’s news personalities are in the forefront of the government’s disinformation campaign. it is worth noting that Sawyer, who began her television career doing the weather in Louisville, Kentucky, went to work for the Nixon administration in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and stayed with the disgraced former president through his forced resignation, helping him write his memoirs.
US drone in flight On Tuesday night’s evening news, Sawyer and two colleagues, David Muir and bill Weir, spent six or seven minutes extolling the merits of the US Air Force’s Predator drones and their deadly attacks in Afghanistan. The Predators, according to Pakistani government and media sources, murdered some 700 civilians in that country in 2009, but the CIA-US military program of killings by drone attack on that side of the border is “covert,” without the official sanction of the Islamabad regime (emphasis ExEd).
Thus, Sawyer and company had to be satisfied with covering the US military’s increased use of drones in Afghanistan. According to a companion piece by Weir on its web site, ABC News was “granted exclusive access to the ground control station at the California [Air Force] base, one of six in the country where the planes are flown.” In other words, the broadcast report was a component part of the military’s official propaganda effort, prepared and vetted with the collaboration of Pentagon officials. A drone control station Sawyer introduced the story from Kabul, alerting her viewers to “the war you do not see, the skyrocketing use of drones.”
She went on to explain in Orwellian fashion that the “potentially lethal” drones were “another new strategy against the rising tide of violence in this country.” Yesterday, Sawyer told her audience, “drones assisted in taking out 16 of the enemy.” she noted that airmen 8,000 miles from Afghanistan were pushing the buttons, sending 500-pound bombs or Hellfire missiles hurtling to the ground. The Obama administration has overseen a sharp increase in the drone program, notes ABC, to “400 hours a day, a 300 percent increase.” From 100 three years ago, the number of drones in use has jumped to 1,200.
Muir writes on the ABC web site: “On this one California base alone, over the last six months, not one hour has gone by when Air Force pilots haven’t been watching over Afghanistan through the eyes of a at least one Predator drone. the technology has been such a game-changer that over the next year, the Air Force will now train more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined.”
Sawyer proudly tells us that the drone is a “high-tech symbol of American might.”
About one minute of the segment is devoted to the moral issues involved in bombing people from halfway around the world. it raises, the ABC anchorwoman notes, “new questions about what’s right and wrong,” before she quickly passes on to the “exclusive” footage shot in the California control center. Here, Muir explains, “Each drone is controlled by a two-man team, seated in front of a video screen clutching a joystick. On the screens, the men see live video from the drones in Afghanistan, picking out armed enemies on the ground who have no idea they’re being watched. The pilot can launch a missile simply by pulling a trigger. “The drones send back images in the blink of an eye—it takes just 1.7 seconds for the imagery to travel through 12 time zones. The video travels from the drone to a satellite and then down to a classified location in Europe. From there, it flows through a fiber optic nerve across the Atlantic Ocean to reach the California base. But it’s not finished—the signal then branches out to other bases, the Pentagon, and right back to the ground commander in Afghanistan.” He goes on: “We watched as a pilot monitored insurgents planting an IED [improvised explosive device] in northern Afghanistan. It made a good target, and with the punch of a button, a Hellfire missile launched, taking the insurgents out.”
As the WSWS has noted on more than one occasion in recent years, US government officials and media personalities have had no difficulty in adopting the lingo of the Mafia. ABC’s Weir reports on efforts by the American military team on the ground to determine whether a given group of Afghans seems an appropriate target to be wiped out. In the particular instance highlighted in Tuesday’s report, the drone spots a number of individuals carrying heavy objects. Weir, somewhat disappointed that the suspicious Afghans are not immediately blown to bits, comments on the military’s remarkable “restraint.” They turn out to be four boys and a girl collecting firewood. They were fortunate on this occasion. how many have not been?
As a final comment, Weir declares, “Even if he could have proven it [the potential slaughter of the children] was an honest mistake, the captain tells me that killing these five children would have undone months of work winning over local elders, and that has become the key battle in this war.”
What can one say? This is the moral state of the American media: the murder of poverty-stricken children by missiles or bombs might, after all, be no more than an “honest mistake” (and therefore pardonable), but, on the downside, it could prove an inconvenience to US war aims (and therefore should be avoided, if possible).
Bill Weir’s résumé indicates that he is well suited to deal with life-and-death questions in Central Asia. A graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, California (where a typical student, according to one commentator, “tends to be devoutly Christian, right-wing, Republican,” and wealthy), Weir began his career as a weekend sportscaster at a radio station in Austin, Minnesota. He worked his way up to sports anchor at KABC-TV in Los Angeles from 1998 to 2002, where he hosted a weekly program that aired after Monday Night Football. He has also written and developed three television pilots for the USA and FX networks.
On the ABC web site, Muir concludes that “the drone pilots know their work is important. Every minute in the cockpit helps defend their military colleagues on the battlefield and improve their chances of getting home alive.” The entire “news report” Tuesday was nothing more nor less than a defense of neo-colonial warfare and mass murder by well-paid hirelings of the American establishment.
This excerpt cuts to the core of the issue (at this point I wish there was one):
"In the particular instance highlighted in Tuesday’s report, the drone spots a number of individuals carrying heavy objects. Weir, somewhat disappointed that the suspicious Afghans are not immediately blown to bits, comments on the military’s remarkable 'restraint.' They turn out to be four boys and a girl collecting firewood. They were fortunate on this occasion. how many have not been?"
By David Walsh
14 January 2010
American television news becomes more and more unwatchable, especially in its reports on the expanding wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Perfectly coiffed, interchangeable news and anchor people repeat White House and Pentagon lies. “In-depth” reports provide nothing in the way of meaningful commentary or analysis. In general, everything is done to hide the truth from the American people.
Diane Sawyer, promoted to hosting ABC’s prime time evening news program a few weeks ago, and the rest of that network’s news personalities are in the forefront of the government’s disinformation campaign. it is worth noting that Sawyer, who began her television career doing the weather in Louisville, Kentucky, went to work for the Nixon administration in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and stayed with the disgraced former president through his forced resignation, helping him write his memoirs.
US drone in flight On Tuesday night’s evening news, Sawyer and two colleagues, David Muir and bill Weir, spent six or seven minutes extolling the merits of the US Air Force’s Predator drones and their deadly attacks in Afghanistan. The Predators, according to Pakistani government and media sources, murdered some 700 civilians in that country in 2009, but the CIA-US military program of killings by drone attack on that side of the border is “covert,” without the official sanction of the Islamabad regime (emphasis ExEd).
Thus, Sawyer and company had to be satisfied with covering the US military’s increased use of drones in Afghanistan. According to a companion piece by Weir on its web site, ABC News was “granted exclusive access to the ground control station at the California [Air Force] base, one of six in the country where the planes are flown.” In other words, the broadcast report was a component part of the military’s official propaganda effort, prepared and vetted with the collaboration of Pentagon officials. A drone control station Sawyer introduced the story from Kabul, alerting her viewers to “the war you do not see, the skyrocketing use of drones.”
She went on to explain in Orwellian fashion that the “potentially lethal” drones were “another new strategy against the rising tide of violence in this country.” Yesterday, Sawyer told her audience, “drones assisted in taking out 16 of the enemy.” she noted that airmen 8,000 miles from Afghanistan were pushing the buttons, sending 500-pound bombs or Hellfire missiles hurtling to the ground. The Obama administration has overseen a sharp increase in the drone program, notes ABC, to “400 hours a day, a 300 percent increase.” From 100 three years ago, the number of drones in use has jumped to 1,200.
Muir writes on the ABC web site: “On this one California base alone, over the last six months, not one hour has gone by when Air Force pilots haven’t been watching over Afghanistan through the eyes of a at least one Predator drone. the technology has been such a game-changer that over the next year, the Air Force will now train more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined.”
Sawyer proudly tells us that the drone is a “high-tech symbol of American might.”
About one minute of the segment is devoted to the moral issues involved in bombing people from halfway around the world. it raises, the ABC anchorwoman notes, “new questions about what’s right and wrong,” before she quickly passes on to the “exclusive” footage shot in the California control center. Here, Muir explains, “Each drone is controlled by a two-man team, seated in front of a video screen clutching a joystick. On the screens, the men see live video from the drones in Afghanistan, picking out armed enemies on the ground who have no idea they’re being watched. The pilot can launch a missile simply by pulling a trigger. “The drones send back images in the blink of an eye—it takes just 1.7 seconds for the imagery to travel through 12 time zones. The video travels from the drone to a satellite and then down to a classified location in Europe. From there, it flows through a fiber optic nerve across the Atlantic Ocean to reach the California base. But it’s not finished—the signal then branches out to other bases, the Pentagon, and right back to the ground commander in Afghanistan.” He goes on: “We watched as a pilot monitored insurgents planting an IED [improvised explosive device] in northern Afghanistan. It made a good target, and with the punch of a button, a Hellfire missile launched, taking the insurgents out.”
As the WSWS has noted on more than one occasion in recent years, US government officials and media personalities have had no difficulty in adopting the lingo of the Mafia. ABC’s Weir reports on efforts by the American military team on the ground to determine whether a given group of Afghans seems an appropriate target to be wiped out. In the particular instance highlighted in Tuesday’s report, the drone spots a number of individuals carrying heavy objects. Weir, somewhat disappointed that the suspicious Afghans are not immediately blown to bits, comments on the military’s remarkable “restraint.” They turn out to be four boys and a girl collecting firewood. They were fortunate on this occasion. how many have not been?
As a final comment, Weir declares, “Even if he could have proven it [the potential slaughter of the children] was an honest mistake, the captain tells me that killing these five children would have undone months of work winning over local elders, and that has become the key battle in this war.”
What can one say? This is the moral state of the American media: the murder of poverty-stricken children by missiles or bombs might, after all, be no more than an “honest mistake” (and therefore pardonable), but, on the downside, it could prove an inconvenience to US war aims (and therefore should be avoided, if possible).
Bill Weir’s résumé indicates that he is well suited to deal with life-and-death questions in Central Asia. A graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, California (where a typical student, according to one commentator, “tends to be devoutly Christian, right-wing, Republican,” and wealthy), Weir began his career as a weekend sportscaster at a radio station in Austin, Minnesota. He worked his way up to sports anchor at KABC-TV in Los Angeles from 1998 to 2002, where he hosted a weekly program that aired after Monday Night Football. He has also written and developed three television pilots for the USA and FX networks.
On the ABC web site, Muir concludes that “the drone pilots know their work is important. Every minute in the cockpit helps defend their military colleagues on the battlefield and improve their chances of getting home alive.” The entire “news report” Tuesday was nothing more nor less than a defense of neo-colonial warfare and mass murder by well-paid hirelings of the American establishment.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Decide for yourself: Predator drones on YouTube
"I'd say the thing I enjoy most about the job is knowing what's going to be in the paper the next day, and, when I read about it, knowing I was involved." Major Clayton Marshall, Predator pilot
"I guess the most rewarding is when I was able to assist with actually employing hellfire weapons."
Major James Ackerman, Predator pilot
"I guess the most rewarding is when I was able to assist with actually employing hellfire weapons."
Major James Ackerman, Predator pilot
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)