If watch this Obama "99 Problems" Jay-Z parody, you'll never forget that catchy bit at the end, where first Martin Luther King says "I have a dream," then Obama is set up to say "I have a drone."
Today the Daily Mail has a sensational piece posted with bloody pictures of drone victims, talking about how CIA chiefs "face arrest" over their drone misfires.
The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes.
The Telegraph is a little more sedate in explaining that the lawyer I heard speak in New York at the UN Church Center, Shahid Akbar, is suing on behalf of his clients.
The son of a Pakistani man killed in a strike in Waziristan last year has brought an action against the Foreign Office in an attempt to make it state publicly whether it provides intelligence to the United States for drone attacks.
Warfare. Lawfare?
I do believe that drones as I've written are essentially immoral because of the removal and distance from the target and because of the apparently high level of collateral damage, despite the claims of precision.
To be sure, this new round of actions and articles is based on the same information we've had for months, estimating the roughly "400-800" civilians that may have been killed in the 3,000 strikes -- and there is no new sources to corroborate this information. That means that critics pounce on this scarcity of sources, and that even when prestigious individuals like Columbia law students write reports asking questions about drones, if they don't use anything but this one source, they are opening themselves up to Faustian jousting.
Having heard Akbar speak and having asked him a number of questions, I have no reason not to take what he is saying at face value. He himself was precise in his reporting, and stuck to the story of his clients, not exaggerating, and not indulging in the rhetoric and politics of his sponsors on the US speaking tour, CODE PINK. When I asked him how many people were injured, as opposed to killed, and was there a higher number as there are with land mines, he matter-of-factly acknowledged that no, drones are more precise and therefore injure less people, and kill their targets -- the issue is that there often other people near them like family members.
Today Suzanne Nossel, the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA put out an urgent e-mail alert regarding drones in connection with the presidential elections, in the hope that either or both candidates would mention them in the debates tonight:
There are many things we don't know about U.S. drone policy, for
example, the government's rules of engagement for drone attacks. Drone
missions and strategy operate under a shroud of secrecy. But what we do
know is scary -- the deliberate killing of individuals deemed by the
U.S. government to be terrorism suspects, far from any recognized
battlefield and without charge or trial, raises grave concerns that the
U.S. is committing extrajudicial executions in violation of
international human rights law.
Tell the Obama administration to come clean about its drone policy and put an end to unlawful killings with drones.
This is an interesting development; Nossel, who formerly served in the Obama Administration in the international organizations department of the State Department, working on the UN Human Rights Council in particular, has been accused by leftists of somehow being tied to Obama's drone policy merely by being in the Administration.
This is unfair, as Nossel worked for two years in human rights, not in the Pentagon and was unrelated to drones. Even so, the mere presence in the evil Amerikan imperialist power is enough to set off these haters.
Amnesty -- which decides policies like this at its London HQ, not in the US -- has decided that killing people extrajudicially in a war without a trial is itself a human rights crime.
That's definitely a topic for debate, as the counterfactual for these human rights groups is that in fact, war isn't illegal; it just has to be fought by rules. Those rules include not killing civilians. It's odd -- would Amnesty accept a uniformed soldier killing another uniformed soldier in a war, say, over an invasion of a country, or an unprovoked attack, but it would not accept that same state killing a terrorist not in uniform, a non-state actor, who had launched that attack hosted from a country?
This is part of that whole school of thinking -- for which Obama is famous -- of conceiving of terrorism as a crime, an offense in the criminal code, a police matter, and not a matter of warfare.
In any event, the operative point here is the shroud of secrecy. Victims of mistakes by US military air attacks get compensation from the US. But drone victims don't -- because the program is secret. So at a minimum the program should not be run by the CIA -- since when is the CIA engaged in massive, direct armed warfare, as distinct from intelligence gathering -- and the occasional extradicial assassination for which it usually faces reproaches? I will let people like Scott Horton or Ken Anderson figuire out what is legal and illegal here about the CIA, but it seems that secret programs that target people abroad -- and then miss -- are fraught with problems and violations of human rights.
Akbar noted that he does not take up the cases of militants injured by drones or of relatives seeking compensation for militants killed by drones -- although he believes someone should defend them. Yet he also described how hard it was to tell who the militants were -- making that seem like NATO's problem, not his, i.e. they make mistakes because they can't tell a 15-year-old boy or a male who just happens to be at a militant's home apart from an armed militant. But yet he makes the claim that he can distinguish militants enough not to accept them as clients. Well, there it is.
What I think is key here is focusing on victims, because focusing on militants is a hall of mirrors. First identifying who really is a victim, as distinct from a combatant, and then focusing on justice for them -- and prevention of new ones. And even if you can't tell who the militants are per se, you can tell a 7-year-old whose legs are blown off, or an unarmed 15-year-old whose eye is lost, from an armed adult.
The cynics and the pragmatists trying to be useful to the Administration and get positions with power , like Joshua Foust or Christine Fair, either get all meta and say that the real problem is government itself and its whole architecture of wars, or get all concern-troll and say that drones are regrettably necessary in a situation where ground troops invading areas like the tribal territories would lead to huge numbers of civilian and military casualties.
I think it's more than fine to keep asking questions about deadly drones, just like nuclear bombs, and keep demanding an end to secrecy and justice for victims.
And that's what CODE PINK has been doing, of course, but in a very one-sided fashion, as has been noted by a number of people -- certainly more on social media these days than in the old days, when the one-sided pro-Soviet nature of these groups would go virtually unchallenged except for a handful of faith groups and conscientious objectors.
Meredith Tax of the Center for Secular Space is bravely trying to fight this one-sidedness on her blog and at Open Democracy, and maintain a critique both of the US drone program and its alarming impact in Pakistan, but also condemn the Taliban, and Pakistan's support of it.
Brave, because to post on Open Democracy means to be endlessly nettled by British Islamists who drive away any liberal human rights writer there who criticizes anything about fundamentalist Islam as somehow in the pay of that evil Amerika I mentioned. (It isn't even that they are what drives you away; what drives you away is the bad faith of the moderators and the refusal of people to counter the haters.)e
I see that infamous cantloginas_Momo -- who is the evidently banned Momo back on an alt that the moderators can't see their way clear to banning -- is still trying to bedevil people trying to be even-handed like Meredith. I remember years ago wasting time on him. Time justified only if there are young people looking over his shoulder who may still be reached with reason.
And that's why I don't go to Open Democracy much anymore -- I know that you will face anonymous ankle-biters like Momo who just endlessly heckle and harass, and few people come to defense of the liberal values that supposedly OD represents. OD also tilts to the left, and just isn't my thing. It's a shame, as there aren't very many sites that cover human rights, and cover it without the really leftist bias of Democracy Now. OD is critical of Russia, which the American left seldom takes on.
The discussion among feminists -- pro and con regarding CODE PINK and charges of one-sidedness -- is far more interesting and productive than the one dominated by Momo as per usual at OD. So join in here.
