The Truth About the U.S. Government’s Drone War

In this forty-two minute interview, Keith Knight, host of the podcast Don’t Tread on Anyone, discusses a range of war-related topics with Laurie Calhoun, including just war theory, the nature of terrorism, the MIC, the drone assassination of suspects on the basis of circumstantial evidence, the plight of Julian Assange, and the necessity of whistleblowers given the takeover of the mainstream media by pro-war forces…

Smart War Disinformation and the U.S. Military State

Drone killing has long been billed by the military as a cleaner, smarter way to conduct war. The standard marketing line has been that with drones it is possible to neutralize even elusive enemies such as factional terrorists while sparing the lives of innocent persons, and without sacrificing any soldiers at all. The most effective propagandist throughout the period when drone assassination was redefined as “targeted killing” and normalized as a standard operating procedure was John Brennan, who served as Barack Obama’s drone killing czar before being promoted to the position of CIA director in 2013. During the eight years of the Obama presidency, many politicians were persuaded (along with the president) to support the use of lethal drones by Brennan’s duplicitous depiction of the practice of remote-control killing. Even some who claim to oppose capital punishment, such as Senator Bernie Sanders, have sung the praises of lethal drones.

That drones are more precise and discriminate implements of war, which can be used “surgically” to eliminate the “cancerous” enemy, has been the reflexive response by pundits, politicians, and the pro-military populace alike to anyone who dares to suggest that the hunting down and killing of individual human beings without indictment or trial violates the most basic principles of a democratic republic. In garnering support for remote-control killing, lethal drone advocates have capitalized on a confusing equivocation in their characterization of the targets. The victims are said posthumously to have been combatants, when in fact during the intelligence collection leading up to the strikes, they were suspects said to be potentially complicit in future possible crimes.

The stark disparity between rhetoric and reality was placed in graphic relief on August 29, 2021 by the drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, which killed an aid worker, Zemari Ahmadi, and nine other persons, including seven children. Immediately after the strike, the U.S. military vaunted their usual “important victory” against radical Islamist terrorists, gloating that they had protected all of those involved in the departures underway at the Kabul airport. Not only did the military insist that they had killed terrorists, when in fact 100% of the victims were nonthreatening civilians, they furthermore claimed that a secondary explosion at the site proved that the target and his entourage were planning a terrorist attack. With the aid of bomb specialists, locals on the ground were able later to determine by examining the damage created by the missile launched from the drone that there was no such secondary explosion. The military simply made up a palatable story to persuade the populace to believe that they had killed evil terrorists rather than innocent people. This was a classic case of government-composed and disseminated disinformation, which should come as no surprise to serious scholars of the Global War on Terror but was perhaps a bit disconcerting to the editors of the New York Times who promoted the Brennan smart war line for many years and thereby helped to normalize assassination.

Once the military’s initial coverage of the strike had been completely debunked, officials were forced to rewrite the secondary explosion story, eventually explaining that what had been reported as a blast from explosives in the trunk of the victim’s car was probably caused by a propane or gas tank in the vicinity. The fabrication of pleasing propaganda to propel the killing machine forward on the same old tried-and-true marketing line—that civilians are nearly never harmed by drone strikes—went on throughout the twenty-year Global War on Terror but was rarely contested loudly or effectively enough to garner any attention from the U.S. taxpayers who funded all of the carnage. How many other of the thousands of strikes claimed to be “victories” in the Global War on Terror also killed 100% civilians, as on August 29, 2021? We’ll never know, because the U.S. military exerted nearly total control over the post-strike narratives disseminated to people in the West, and dismissed alternative versions of the stories as terrorist propaganda, in some cases adding new names to their hit lists in response.

Thousands of human beings regarded as “suspicious” by their killers have been summarily executed by missiles launched from drones against targets located outside areas of active hostilities, i.e., not in war zones. In most cases, the victims were unarmed and were not apprised of the fact that they were about to be annihilated. This made it impossible for them to defend themselves against the allegation that they deserved to die for crimes which they may or may not have been going to commit at some unknown future time. The notion of pre-crime conviction of potential future criminals may evoke memories of the fictional film Minority Report, but the drone program is all too real.

If the Geneva Conventions have any meaning whatsoever, then the so-called smart warriors have been committing war crimes throughout the twenty-first century. For according even to the military itself, soldiers on the ground are not permitted to summarily execute unarmed persons who are not directly threatening anyone with death. Yet that is the essence of the vocation of a drone operator: he lays in wait far from the scene of carnage which he will unleash through the push of a button the moment his commander has decided that someone somewhere must die.

As awful as the remote-control killing of suspects is—exemplifying as it does the essence of tyranny, with the killers serving as detective, judge, jury, executioner and historians of what they themselves have done—drone enthusiasts nonetheless persist in brandishing false dichotomies to promote the practice. (Pace Tucker Carlson, false dichotomy is a fallacious form of reasoning in which two alternatives are represented as both exhaustive and exclusive.) “Carpet bombing or remote-control killing? Obviously, drones are better—more precise and less collateral damage!” This disjunction is first and foremost a piece of sophistry because in many of the places where drone strikes have been used to kill suspects, there are no soldiers on the ground to serve as the pretext for any sort of bombing whatsoever.

In countries where the U.S. government never waged war but killed thousands of people anyway, there is no conceivable scenario in which carpet bombing would have been used in the place of drones to wipe out communities where individual suspicious persons were said to hide. That would just be mass murder, tout court. In truth, the sum of all of the extrajudicial executions carried out against suspects located outside war zones, too, constitutes state-inflicted mass murder. What’s more, the people living in those areas were simultaneously terrorized by the arbitrary threat of death each time a lethal drone hovered above their heads.

We know from cases such as that of Zemari Ahmadi that civilians are not spared death but are endangered by the use of lethal drones, for the killers are human beings on the lookout for threatening persons to neutralize—that is the essence of their job. They therefore operate with a confirmation bias, interpreting as suspicious the activities of individuals already flagged as suspicious. (See Collateral Murder for a visual illustration of how such confirmation bias works.)

Disenchanted drone operators have been speaking out about the unsavory features of their profession for more than a decade now. Part of the moral rehabilitation of those who refuse to participate further in government contract killing has consisted in attempting to warn others not to make the same mistakes which they made in believing recruiters who depicted the vocation as a form of smart war, thereby flattering potential recruits while simultaneously conning them into believing that they were being offered a good deal. The profession is portrayed, first and foremost, as making it possible for soldiers to win war without getting killed or suffering injury.

Rhetoric and reality diverge here, too, because not only are innocent civilians both terrorized and killed by lethal drones, but operators themselves have suffered grave, in some cases permanent and even deadly, psychological damage through serving as government contract killers. Case in point: Air Force Captain Kevin Larson, who took his own life in a state of anguish on January 19, 2020, after having participated in 650 combat missions using the MQ-9 Reaper drone.

Despite never having themselves faced any risk of death whatsoever, remote-control killers have suffered symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) at higher rates than regular combat soldiers. This is plausibly because drone killers cannot conceive of their execution of fellow human beings as literal acts of self-defense, which combatants on the ground faced with a threatening enemy are often able to do. When the choice is “kill or be killed,” even soldiers who would prefer not to kill may do so, if that is the only way to save their own life. The drone operators who have renounced their positions know, in their heart of hearts, that they were never killing in literal self-defense, and some have found that they cannot continue to act in ways which weigh so heavily on their conscience. They did not consciously sign up to serve as “government contract killers” for “the customer,” whoever that ended up being. Yet that is what the apostates eventually discovered that they had become.

Kevin Larson is no longer around to tell his story, but based on what his family and friends have disclosed, it is clear that he was plagued by the very same concerns aired by several other former drone operators and analysts over the past decade, all of whom lamented the stark disparity between the mythical depiction of remote-control killing as smart war and the reality of what it means to kill on command even in situations where it is unclear that the targets, much less other people who happen to be near them at the time, deserve to die. Among other grisly examples, Larson was ordered to kill a target and then follow and kill everyone who attended his funeral. Smart war was always too good to be true, but gullible new recruits such as Larson bought the line—until they could not anymore.

The tragic toll of ill-begotten wars on the soldiers who fight them is nothing new in history, but drone warfare is, and the claim that its perpetrators could kill without suffering negative repercussions has been exposed as a lie. Unfortunately, potential enlistees such as Kevin Larson did not hear the alarms sounded by the first group of drone program whistleblowers: Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland, Daniel Hale, and others, who have done their best to attempt to warn persons like them not to be seduced by the standard marketing lines used to lure gullible young people into perpetrating crimes which they will later regret. Together these whistleblowers have revealed how the drone program administrators have redefined terms and stipulated rules of engagement which speciously portray the practice as surgically precise when it is nothing of the kind.

Daniel Hale, who currently resides in a federal penitentiary, stole and shared classified documents which confirmed, as other operators and analysts had already reported, that the exceptionally “low” rate of mistakes acknowledged publicly by the Obama administration was a result of the fact that the military-age males destroyed were defined as Enemy Killed in Action (EKIA). Any target eliminated was simply assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. This slick schema maximized the tally of “dead terrorists” reported to the populace while minimizing the possibility of any significant debate in the public sphere about the practice of so-called smart war. By inverting the burden of proof, the killers effectively (and absurdly) denied the very possibility of erroneously identifying as a terrorist any suspect in the specified age and gender cohort, most of whom, it is worth pointing out, have been persons of color. In “crowd killing” and signature strikes of entire groups of persons of unknown identity based on an assumed guilt by association, the targets executed were arguably victims of racial profiling.

Surely if more citizens understood the inherent evil being perpetrated with their tax dollars, there would be more pushback against the summary execution of suspects using lethal drones. But government-produced and mainstream media-promulgated disinformation have effectively squelched debate on the practice of remote-control killing and muted the voices of whistleblowers. Throughout the Global War on Terror, the major Western media outlets served as the functional equivalent of a Ministry of Propaganda in the tentacular military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics banking complex. It should come as little surprise, then, that the drone program whistleblowers have been, at best, ignored and, at worst, discredited and criminalized.

Ominously, the Biden administration has announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board, to be headed up by Nina Jankowicz, a former adviser to the Ukrainian government and supporter of the current proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. Should this initiative succeed—it looks to be a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution—we can look forward to even more suppression of dissent from pro-military narratives, which has always been depicted as conspiratorial misinformation or disinformation. This move will propel the killing machine forward as the perspectives of people on the ground and whistleblowers who attempt to reveal to taxpayers the truth and to warn future recruits about what they are being hoodwinked into doing are systematically erased. With the ongoing persecution of Julian Assange, the most effective transmitter of antiwar narratives in the first part of the twenty-first century, we are moving closer and closer to the point where what once was a democratic republic will be no more and no less than a dictatorial military state.

Critics on the right have identified the Biden administration’s formal erection of the functional equivalent of a Ministry of Truth as politically motivated, intended to provide the current office holders with the power to silence opposition to any and all official narratives. Given the reality of the war party duopoly, however, the gravest danger posed by a Disinformation Governance Board (or Ministry of Truth), to people the world over, will be its facilitation and support of the U.S. government’s hegemonic military interventions whenever and wherever the administrators please, and whoever they happen to be.

Should the elimination of citizens’ right to free speech by the government proceed, backed up by the threat of punishment, then no dissenter anywhere will be able to challenge official narratives without risking the fate suffered by U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. A formerly moderate Muslim cleric who spoke out publicly against the crimes of September 11, 2001, al-Awlaki was executed in 2011 without indictment or trial, having been put on the drone killers’ hit list when he began speaking out against the U.S. government’s own war crimes.

(This essay first appeared at LibertarianInstitute.org on May 4, 2022.)

When is a Whistleblower not a Whistleblower?

The Frances Haugen Insurgency

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen has taken the world by storm by stealing and sharing reams of company communications in which the social media giant’s cavalier attitudes toward a range of behaviors among its users are revealed. She compares what she regards as “the Facebook problem” with earlier corporate revelations in history which led to legislation regulating tobacco and automobile use, and she emphasizes that children are specifically at risk from the company’s policies. The disgruntled former employee also alleges that Facebook products—in particular, Instagram—harm young women by promoting unhealthy and unrealistic body images. Despite the vagueness and generality of these complaints, Haugen is being hailed as a “whistleblower” by everyone who agrees with her ideological and political perspective, which is as plain as day: textbook neoliberal, big government, pro-Democratic Party. The objective of the Frances Haugen insurgency is equally manifest: to implement formal government censorship of social media platforms, a literal Ministry of Truth, for “the good” of the people who use them.

The mere fact that Haugen has been granted such an impressive platform and portrayed throughout the mainstream media as some sort of heroine does not imply that she is a “whistleblower” any more than calling the innocent people killed by bombs “collateral damage” somehow exonerates the killers for their completely avoidable acts of homicide. Frances Haugen, whose vast and highly visible media tour has been funded by Pierre Omidyar (according to Glenn Greenwald, formerly of The Intercept, which, too, is funded by Omidyar), is not, let us be perfectly frank, a whistleblower. This is yet another case where language has been redefined to support a particular political program. Just as “assassination” became “targeted killing” and “torture” became “enhanced interrogation techniques” when authorized by the U.S. president, the concept of “whistleblower” has now been rebranded to cover people who speak out in ways approved of by the very people who provide the speaker with a platform for airing grievances with which all “good” people will agree, with the ultimate aim of expanding the orchestrators’ own domain of power and control.

In reality, Haugen has “revealed” only that the social media platform founded by Mark Zuckerberg has not been conducting itself in the manner in which Haugen’s associates want it to. Spectacularly enough, Haugen alleges that publicly traded Facebook has been run as—wait for it—a profit-driven company. One might immediately dismiss such a complaint as a failure on the part of the so-called whistleblower to understand the nature of business in a capitalist society. But Haugen holds an M.B.A. from Harvard University. Presumably in securing that credential she was taught that publicly traded companies work for their shareholders and aim to maximize profit. That’s what they do. Sure, there are plenty of “woke” companies, which launch “socially conscious” initiatives, but those activities are part and parcel of the marketing apparatus. Erecting a “woke” façade apparently improves the image of a company and thereby increases the sales of its products—at least to the woke. I am not intending here to express cynicism but to state the uncontroversial fact that publicly traded companies which do not keep their shareholders happy eventually fail. Should “wokeness” cut into profits—by alienating self-styled “anti-woke” or “based” customers—then it is bound to be curtailed, at least in the case of any competently run company.

The fact that Haugen has secured such a wide-ranging audience is all the more remarkable given that nearly everyone already knew that Facebook was a profit-driven company. That is precisely why when one creates an auxiliary page at the platform, to promote a book or a small business or product, virtually nobody who likes or follows the page is ever alerted to new content posted there, unless the page owner forks over some funds. The page feature is no doubt a huge moneymaker for the company, as many users feel that it is worth putting Facebook on credit card autopay to ensure that someone—anyone—will see what they have to sell—or to show and to tell.

Ms. Haugen, who touts her own personal risk as evidence of her sincerity, may have stolen documents from Facebook and violated her NDA (nondisclosure agreement), but she has not uncovered any litigable crimes. That’s because private businesses have the right to run their companies and, in this case, moderate their content, as they please. We know that the Big Tech social media giants censor posts and exclude people who post what they identify as “disinformation” or “hate speech”. Up to now, this has been regarded by many liberty advocates as perfectly acceptable, on the grounds that private companies have every right to remove content which they themselves find objectionable or to banish users who violate their terms of service. In their backyard, people must play by their rules. Now, however, the issue has become a test of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This provision limits not private businesses but only the government. Indeed, it is specifically designed to protect the people from the government, not to protect the government from the people. Anyone who labels Haugen a “whistleblower” has succumbed to an incredible con job, whereby the First Amendment is to be entirely negated by creating a government-run regulatory body whose role will be to censor content directly, not indirectly, as has been done until now. I wholeheartedly agree with Glenn Greenwald that the reason for this initiative is not that Facebook has acted criminally in maximizing profit but that they have not been subservient enough to government pressure already put on them to prohibit certain types of content.

Facebook is a profit-driven company, not a branch of the U.S. government. The algorithms used by Facebook do not allow people to see new content organically and chronologically as it is posted by those whom they follow. Instead, Facebook leads users to certain content and prevents them from seeing other content. None of this is done with the intention of promoting extremism. It just happens to be the best way to maximize profit. Haugen’s complaints and moralizing are made from a specific, TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) perspective, the same one which fueled three years of the nugatory Russiagate hunt to prove that Trump was elected only thanks to Vladimir Putin. That the platform has been used by human traffickers is merely a pretext by which to persuade people to believe that it needs to be controlled by a central government authority or Ministry of Truth. In fact, the same argument, mutatis mutandis, would apply to the use of vehicles to transport victims. Or to cellphone usage, given that criminals also communicate using those devices.

There are plenty of obvious responses to Haugen’s many complaints. Children’s use of the internet, as of the television, should be monitored by their parents, who are responsible for them until they achieve adulthood. Furthermore, seeing pictures and reading texts does not cause cancer and lung disease, and therefore is nothing like smoking cigarettes. Again, where was Frances Haugen (now thirty-seven years old) before the internet? Apparently not looking at magazines such as Vogue, which have promoted images of extremely thin women for more than a century. Each of her many complaints is similarly simple to diffuse, evincing a general conflation of cultural causes and effects.

Yet the story just keeps getting better and better. At the Lisbon Tech Fair on November 1, 2021, Haugen, the keynote speaker, went even so far as to call for the resignation of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. She claimed that leaving Zuckerberg in place would be a grave error because she believes that 10 million lives are at stake. (What?!) If such a projection does not sound sensationalist to you, then I’d venture to guess that you number among the people who believe that the protest on January 6, 2021, was the worst thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War. And, yes, Haugen has indeed included among her many grievances Facebook’s “dangerous” contribution to that nugatory “insurrection” attempt, just in case there were any lingering doubts as to her ideological sympathies.

Remarkably, Haugen is so confident in her self-righteousness (or is it just her security detail?) and so little afraid of Facebook, whose documents she stole, that she seems to believe that she should be able to select the company’s CEO. This preposterous conceit should sound familiar, for it is not at all unlike the U.S. government’s longstanding practice of decreeing who should govern foreign countries. The sort of CEO favored by Haugen & Co. would be the corporate analogue to Juan Guaidó, whom the U.S. government “recognized” as the true president of Venezuela in 2019, notwithstanding the democratic election of Nicolás Maduro by the people of Venezuela.

The farcical nature of Haugen’s obviously scripted, theatrical production is best illuminated by contrast to cases in the real world (not Haugen & Co.’s imagination) where millions of lives are in fact directly at stake—specifically, in the wars of choice continually waged by the United States. The true whistleblowers, who reveal the criminality of what the government is doing and has done, invariably wind up either dead, exiled or imprisoned under conditions even worse than those of terrorist suspects. Why should that be the case? Because the government wishes not only to prevent these entirely nonviolent dissidents from getting the word out but also to deter other possible future whistleblowers from following in their footsteps. Thanks to genuine whistleblower Edward Snowden, we know that the NSA sweeps up all of our cellphone data, regardless of whether or not we have been convicted of or are suspected of crimes. Snowden was stripped of his U.S. passport and now resides in Russia.

The persecution of Julian Assange is another case in point. The U.S. government is not pursuing anything approaching justice in this case, for Assange published top secret documents provided to him by whistleblower Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, among others. Assange, being an Australian national, certainly has no obligation to support the U.S. government and cannot with legal or linguistic propriety be termed a traitor. The relentless pursuit of Assange is clearly intended to prevent him from having any further effect on the world. By founding Wikileaks and revealing what goes on behind the scenes of so-called just wars, Assange had the potential to effect a veritable antiwar revolution. Instead, he is wasting away in prison while his lawyers attempt to prevent his extradition to the United States to face charges of espionage. This despite well-documented criminal violations on the part of the plaintive, ranging from spying on Assange and his lawyers to plotting to kill him.

The reason why investigative journalists break stories based on stolen documents is because they have discovered news about which the populace is ignorant. Wikileaks published the Collateral Murder video stolen by Private Manning not to glorify Julian Assange but because it showed U.S. soldiers killing Reuters journalists from a helicopter. This was shocking in and of itself, but the accompanying audio recording revealed the attitudes of the killers toward their victims, including their desire to kill even wounded persons. This was surely news to most people of the United States, and around the world, and it needed to be reported because, in a free society, citizens must know what they are paying for when they file taxes each year. Otherwise, they are being coerced through deception.

Similarly, drone program whistleblowers have sought to alleviate their profound sense of guilt and shame by documenting the horrifying truth for all Americans to see, in the hope that, if only they knew that they were accomplices to murder, then at least some among them would withdraw their support from the serial military interventions in the Middle East. The Obama administration rebranded assassination as “targeted killing” and used that label as their cover for executing, on the basis of purely circumstantial evidence, thousands of persons suspected of collaboration with terrorist groups, in places where there were no U.S. citizens on the ground to protect. We were recently afforded the opportunity to glimpse the “rigor” with which targets were selected by those running the U.S. government’s drone program when Zemari Ahmadi, an aid worker, and his entire family were taken out by a Reaper drone in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021.

Anyone who has been listening to the critics and whistleblowers who abandoned the drone program, such as Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland, Stephen Lewis, Michael Haas, and Daniel Hale, already knew that such executions of suspects on the basis of scant evidence have been carried out for years. Of those who have spoken out, Daniel Hale deserves special mention, for he also stole and shared a trove of documents, published online as The Drone Papers, and later in book form as The Assassination Complex, which revealed to the public precisely what was graphically displayed in the strike carried out on August 29, 2021. Persons “outside areas of active hostility” are targeted based on cellphone SIM card data, the claims of bribed informants looking to procure wads of cash, and drone footage appearing to confirm the killers’ prior beliefs that the suspects are indeed terrorists. None of the victims were ever provided with the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence before being incinerated, and none have been permitted to surrender—most having had no idea that they were about to be erased from existence by a missile launched from a drone. In other words, this practice of “targeted killing” blatantly violates the Geneva Conventions prohibiting the summary execution of unarmed soldiers and the requirement of taking as prisoners any of those who agree to lay down their arms.

Where is Daniel Hale today? He certainly was not invited to speak before the U.S Congress or as a special guest before the British Parliament about the malfeasance of the U.S. and U.K. government in executing innocent human beings on the basis of shoddy evidence. Instead, Hale, a genuine whistleblower, who committed a crime in order to reveal the much worse crimes of his government, is now serving a nearly four-year sentence (forty-five months) in Federal prison for sharing with the public the truth about the drone program. Despite the gravity of Hale’s revelations, no one in the mainstream media discussed the outrageousness of killing suspects offered no opportunity to demonstrate their innocence, nor even to surrender, before being carbonized in places where no U.S. citizen’s life was at stake. Instead, Daniel Hale was hardly mentioned by anyone in the mainstream media at all. Upon his conviction, a line or two to the effect that another former soldier had been convicted under the Espionage Act could be found in a few media outlets. Oh well, another spy bites the dust!

Given the obvious role of the mainstream media in supporting the war party duopoly, having persuaded the populace to believe that “offensive military action is defensive,” and “suspects are terrorists,” and “We are good, and they are evil,” perhaps the Frances Haugen insurgency was bound to happen eventually. Here we are, in 2021, in a world where political operatives speak out not to reveal crimes committed by the government but to strengthen its power to suppress dissent through undermining the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, thereby permitting the commission of even more crimes by the state.

Make no mistake: Haugen’s repeated expression of concern for children is a rhetorical tactic to garner support for the federal government’s usurpation of the power of private companies to determine what may and may not be said and shown on their platforms. Just as the claim that infants were being ripped from incubators by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen in Kuwait was instrumental in galvanizing support for the ill-begotten First Gulf War on Iraq in 1991, Haugen makes a big show of caring about the children supposedly harmed by Facebook in order to persuade congress to establish a broad regulatory power not currently enjoyed by the government.

The potential for misuse of this open-ended of expansion of executive power is well illustrated by the 2002 AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force). Recall that in October 2002, the U.S. congress ratified the AUMF on the grounds that President George W. Bush needed to protect the world from Iraq’s dictator, who was said to possess WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and the intention to share them with factional terrorists. In the subsequent two decades, the AUMF was wielded repeatedly as the alleged authorization for every president to kill anyone anywhere they wanted, even “outside areas of active hostility.”

For now, words still have meanings, and 2 + 2 = 4. But the very real danger to the citizens of a republic inherent to Haugen’s initiative cannot be exaggerated. The establishment of a full-fledged Ministry of Truth would stifle, if not altogether eliminate, dissent. For such a regulatory apparatus would possess the means to prevent its own dismantlement for generations to come, by silencing everyone who disagrees with the government, denouncing them as purveyors of disinformation or, worse, traitors.

Given the outrageousness of Haugen’s call for Zuckerberg’s resignation, one hopes that people will come to question her motives and think through the implications of her demands. Perhaps the most beneficial outcome of the Frances Haugen insurgency will be to permit us to determine, by their reactions to Haugen, who among the current crop of politicians are in fact closet totalitarians, their rhetoric about the importance of democracy notwithstanding.

When is a whistleblower not a whistleblower? When she’s a politically driven operative who promotes censorship in order to expand the power of the government by diminishing the power of citizens to express themselves.

first published by the Libertarian Institute

$100 a day as a retainer fee to serve as an assassin for President Clinton or President Trump?

 

The US Air Force has been busy doling out US taxpayer cash, not only for the production of 30 more MQ-9 Reaper (read: death) drones by General Atomics, but also in the hopes of retaining drone operators willing to fly and fire missiles from them. The latest “incentive” being offered to RPA (remotely piloted aircraft) operators is $35,000 each year for the next five years. That’s about $100 a day, on top of their current salary. All that they have to do is not quit their job once their first contract term has expired. Sounds like a good deal, right?

Not so good to the drone and sensor operators who have abandoned the profession as a result of their profound regret (in some cases they suffer from PTSD) for having ever agreed to serve as government assassins in the first place. Brandon Bryant was offered more than $100K to continue on, and he declined. Rather than attempt to understand the moral basis for drone operator discontent, the USAF has decided that really what the operators preparing to bolt need is more money. Who could resist?

If $100 a day as a retainer fee seems like enough of a bonus to continue serving as an on-call government assassin, then perhaps some of these people will stay on. But it is extremely important for them to be fully aware of what they are agreeing to do for the next five years of their lives. President Barack Obama, the current commander in chief, will be leaving office soon. In all likelihood either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will assume the presidency and carry on the Obama tradition of dispatching terrorist suspects by drone. It’s much easier, politically, than conventional warfare (no flag-wrapped coffins, no condolence letters to write), and Obama has effectively normalized assassination by rebranding it as “targeted killing”.

In truth, “targeted killing” using Predator or Reaper drones differs from assassination in only two ways. First, missiles are being used to kill targets, rather than other implements of homicide (pistols, poisons, strangulation wires…). Second, unlike most black op assassinations carried out by hit squads in the twentieth century, drone strikes produce collateral damage alongside the obliterated target. Remarkably, many people have not recognized that those are the only two ways in which the stalking, hunting down and execution of human beings by governments has changed in the Drone Age.

“This is war,” allegedly, because “weapons of war” are used to effect the deaths, and unintended deaths of civilians are caused at the same time. Never mind that, in contrast to regular combat situations, the soldier who pushes the button to launch a missile is not in any direct danger of physical harm, least of all at the hands of his target, who is usually located thousands of miles away and has no idea that he is about to die. Drone operators and sensors might develop carpal tunnel syndrome, but their lives are never on the line when they follow orders to kill.

Given the reality of what they are doing, the drone and sensor operators who accept the latest bribe are in effect agreeing to execute anyone designated by either President Clinton or President Trump as worthy of death. The new US president won’t have to say why, because Barack Obama never did. The drone program has always been secretive and opaque, under cover of national security. The release of the “playbook” (Presidential Policy Guidance or PPG) did nothing to assuage the concerns of critics who have for years been demanding transparency.

All that we know with certainty now is that President Obama was wrong when he told a group of listeners during a GoogleTalk chat in January 2012 that “it’s not a bunch of folks in a room just making decisions.” That is, indeed, precisely what Barack Obama’s version of “due process” is. A massive, secretive, bureaucratic institution of killing, with no checks and balances and zero provision for revisiting death sentences handed down by anonymous officials (“folks in a room”) from behind closed doors, primarily on the basis of analysis (by “folks in a room”) of signals intelligence (SIGINT): metadata from cellphones and SIM cards, and drone video footage. Looks like a terrorist. Walks like a terrorist. Talks like a terrorist. Guilty as charged: send out the drones.

In some cases, bribed intelligence from informants on the ground (human intelligence or HUMINT) is used to supplement the electronic sources of “evidence” that the people being slaughtered truly deserve to die, along with anyone at their side at the time—the dreaded “associates”: taxi drivers, family members and friends, funeral or wedding attendees, first responders, the list goes on and on…

The problems with bribed intelligence from human sources are just as bad as the racial profiling inherent to SIGINT-based “signature strikes” or “crowd killing” of brown-skinned Muslims wearing turbans and carrying guns—or not. Hundreds of strikes have been carried out “outside areas of active hostilities” under Obama’s authorization. Today we know what happened when HUMINT was used to round up suspects for detention at Guantánamo Bay prison: most of the men incarcerated (86%) were innocent. “The worst of the worst” they were called at the time.

It is therefore very important for any drone operators and sensors considering the possibility of continuing on in their role as a professional assassin to recognize that they are agreeing to kill people who in many cases will be innocent of any wrongdoing—certainly any capital offense. Even worse, they are agreeing to serve as the henchman of a future president whom they may or may not believe to be either moral or good.

Many Americans have expressed concern that the Republican and Democratic parties have nominated candidates for the presidency who are wholly ill-suited for the task. In Trump’s case, we really have no idea what he will do. He’s the classic case of a “known unknown”. Some days he sounds like an isolationist ready and willing to put an end to US meddling in the Middle East; other days he sounds like Dr. Strangelove.

In Clinton’s case, we know precisely what she will do: send out the drones and expand and multiply the wars already raging in the Middle East. Amazingly, Hillary Clinton appears to believe that “third time’s a charm,” as she is calling for a repetition in Syria of the regime-change policy which failed so miserably in both Iraq and Libya.

On the drone front, Clinton surrogates have suggested that even nonviolent dissidents such as Wikileaks’ Julian Assange should be added to the US government’s hit list. Perhaps Clinton will try to outdo Obama (who executed US citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki without trial), and Edward Snowden’s name will be added to the list as well. Not so far-fetched, given her evident antipathy toward technologically savvy whistleblowers…

Trump or Clinton? Who will the next US president be? Once having signed on the dotted line, drone operators and sensors will be expected to follow the orders of the commander in chief, whoever it may be. Maybe $100 a day as a retainer fee to serve as an on-call assassin isn’t such a good deal after all.

2016 paperback edition with a new foreword available for pre-order at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Because-Can-Soldiering-Assassination/dp/1783605472?ie=UTF8&qid=&ref_=tmm_pap_swatch_0&sr=

 

Zooming in on the Drone Warfare Ground Game: Drone (2014), directed by Tonje Hessen Schei

 

Many people believe that lethal drones are good because they have been used to “take the battle to the enemy” while sparing the lives of US soldiers. CIA directors have long touted targeted killing using UCAVs (unmanned combat aerial vehicles) as an essential tool in the Global War on Terror. What more needs to be said?

Drone (2014), a documentary directed by Norwegian Tonje Hessen Schei, aims to dispel the impression that lethal drones are obviously a force for good. Like Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars (2013), directed by American activist filmmaker Robert Greenwald, Drone (2014) presents a kaleidoscopic collage of images of remote-control killing, juxtaposing close-range snapshots of the ecosystems of many of the various parties involved at different points along the “kill chain”.

Perpetrators at the political, the business and the operator level offer their perspectives on what is being done. Victims at both the sending and the receiving end of Hellfire missiles provide moral insight into the homicides being committed abroad, and the fear caused to nonnationals in the name of the people of the United States. The overall effect of the film is to illuminate connections which may not be salient at all to the many people, including most politicians, who support the use of lethal drones in the seemingly endless quagmire in the Middle East, which by now has spilled into Africa as well.

The impact of the drone industry boom on some smaller businesses and subcontractors is illustrated through footage of a man at the head of INSITU, a company which produces medium-sized surveillance drones. As a start-up in the 1990s, INSITU originally built drones to help tuna fishermen. Today they produce thousands of UAVs for use by the US government. Andy von Flotow, the company’s founder, observes that, although they have not weaponized their drones yet, he would have no qualms against doing so. His logic is that not giving soldiers what they need is like refusing to provide them with “underpants”. Like most of the populace, he accepts that drone killing is always and everywhere warfare, just as the US government has maintained since the dawning of the Drone Age.

Nuances such as the difference between contexts where force protection is at issue, and those where there are no “boots on the ground” to protect, tend to be ignored by supporters of targeted killing. Generally speaking, advocates of remote-control killing are inclined to accept that “battlefields” are the places where “warriors” have seen fit to deploy deadly weapons. The governing assumption is that the Global War, waged in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, covers every corner of the planet, so there’s no need to declare a new war every time a Hellfire missile is launched over another country.

Drone includes scenes of an arms fair where unmanned aerial systems are everywhere on display, with company reps standing by to extol their virtues. Alongside smaller companies such as INSITU, behemoths such as Boeing and Raytheon are said to be working hard to make sure that their drone production is as profitable as the bigger-ticket items which they and their shareholders grew accustomed to providing for the US government throughout the Cold War. The implication is that in the Drone Age, more applications for the use of drones must be found in order to justify the need to produce even more UCAVs, since individually they cost quite a bit less than the manned platforms of the past. Public companies have a duty to their shareholders to maximize profit. In the Drone Age, that will translate into more and more surveillance, and more and more targeted killing.

When civilians are destroyed at the targeting sites, they are perfunctorily written off as “collateral damage”, if acknowledged at all. Drone killing czar John Brennan exulted to an audience in 2011 that there had not been a single civilian casualty during the previous year’s drone campaign because of the “surgical precision” of the new technology. Drone makes graphically clear that there have been many victims in the drone campaigns, with survivors left bereft of their loved ones. Excursions are undertaken to tribal areas where missiles “splash” suspects, with plenty of footage of the grieving and traumatized family and community members.

Two apostate operators, Brandon Bryant and Michael Haas, who now find appalling what they were persuaded to do under a pretext of national security, open a window onto a top-secret world about which most people know next to nothing. Bryant and Haas share intimate glimpses into what it is like to be at the launching end of a missile while having no way of knowing whether the intelligence being acted on is sound.

A number of other critics of targeted killing—lawyers and locals, journalists and retired military personnel, human rights advocates and scholars—express heartfelt concern and even alarm at what they take to be the brazen illegality of the US drone program. Alarm is indeed the appropriate moral response to a practice which undermines centuries of work to establish international law and defend human rights. Equally troubling is the abject inefficacy of this counterterrorism tactic viewed over time. The crimes being committed are leading to more crimes as people incensed with what has been done decide to join forces with extremist terrorist groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and beyond.

The flagrant evidence of the quagmire in the Middle East notwithstanding, the drone campaigns have been sold as a superlative success story by the mainstream media. Each time the US government relays that suspected militants have been slain somewhere by a lethal drone, the press dutifully parrots the text and rarely bothers to emend the report when it turns out that the victims were not the intended targets after all.

 

 

The action of Drone takes place everywhere: in the tribal regions of Pakistan, at the UN General Assembly in New York City, in the desert in Nevada, in a gigantic gaming facility where hordes of adolescents are sitting at video consoles pressing buttons, their eyes glued to the screen in front of them. In one short segment, Air Force pilot mentors appear to be luring acne-faced youngsters into the world of drone killing, sharing their expertise on how best to home in on targets. Presumably this is all a part of persuading future recruits to opt for the profession of drone operator. Like retired officers Bryant and Haas, the young people who enlist will be called upon by their commanders to dispatch suspects by remote-control. All of this is happening alongside the widespread development of video games and apps such as Mobile Strike, which are being advertised all over the place (including on tv) and disseminated cost-free over platforms such as the Amazon Kindle.

Drone illustrates how all of these subcultures are intimately connected to one another through a single new technology, the lethal drone, whether the people funding targeted killing are aware of this fact or not. The moral cost of remote-control killing is no news to the people on the ground, nor to the journalists and activists who have been traveling to the tribal regions where lethal drones have lurked above in the sky throughout most of the twenty-first century.

The human costs are invisible to most Westerners, but they are infinitely steep, in moral terms. The most plausible explanation for the widespread ignorance among US citizens about the use of lethal drones by their government is that, in unoccupied territories, the program has been run by the CIA. The shots, however, have been taken everywhere by Air Force personnel, a little recognized point which is shared during one of the interviews with Brandon Bryant.

As various critics lucidly suggest in Drone, it looks as though the CIA cover was adopted precisely in order to be able to evade any and all accountability. Because the drone campaigns have been protected by State Secrets Privilege, as a CIA-run program under the authority of the executive branch of the government, the perpetrators have not been required by domestic law to report on the outcomes of the strikes, nor to share details of the individual missions.

This secrecy has served not to keep US citizens safe but to shield those in charge of the drone program from allegations of wrongful killing, not only collateral damage, but also in cases where innocent targets have been effectively convicted by state execution and written into history as EKIA or “enemy killed in action”. Drone makes it abundantly clear that the US government’s refusal to discuss both the evidence thought to implicate targets and the strike outcomes does not imply that there have not been any people wrongfully killed.

Survivors of drone attacks, especially in Waziristan, Pakistan, are allowed to speak freely for a few minutes. Unfortunately, and this is my only criticism of the film, there are no subtitles or dubbed translations provided for some of these people’s words. The effect may be to make them look as alien as they could possibly seem to average American suburbanites, the very people who need to be awakened to the truth about remote-control killing. From the likely perspective of the average white American moviegoer, the victims depicted in Drone have dark skin and wear funny clothes and hats. They hail from a foreign and backwards culture and speak an incomprehensible language.

I do not know whether the lack of subtitles to translate the very human emotions which these victims are attempting to express was a mistake or an oversight or an intentional omission. Whatever the reason, I consider it to be a flaw of the film, for without having any inkling of what some of the victims are saying, many monolingual Anglophones will not find them persuasive in the least. How can these people be sympathized with when they remain as incomprehensible as the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001?

There certainly are plenty of pictures of dead victims, which together with the words of lawyers and journalists help to tell these people’s horrific stories. But the reflexive soundbite “We are at war” and the cultural inurement to “collateral damage” ensure that champions of targeted killing are unlikely to switch sides upon exposure to images of victims. Drone program supporters already believe that remote-control killing is war, and “everyone knows” that with war comes the inevitable and regrettable “collateral damage”.

With no translation of their words, some of these people may be viewed not as full-fledged human beings with the same rights as American citizens, but as backwards tribesmen who might join up with Al Qaeda tomorrow, if given the chance.  Along these lines, the footage of protests, and specifically of a group of angry Pakistanis burning an effigy of a drone, waving anti-American banners, and yelling out in rage, may be interpreted by some as evidence that they are potential terrorist recruits.

At this point in history, with the US government having already assassinated thousands of suspects, what needs to be subjected to intense scrutiny, before other nations step up their drone-killing games, is the very premise that these homicides are a part of warfare. In Drone, concern is expressed that the technology is moving faster than human beings’ capacity to philosophize about drone killing. In fact, that is false, as some among the interviewees articulate very well and quite clearly how this feat of technological progress has led to a regression in terms of international law. The fault lies not with the moral blindness of human beings in general, but of the drone warriors themselves, who have been allowed to write the last word on what they have done.

The experts on extrajudicial execution at the United Nations have repeatedly weighed in on the illegality of what is being done, but the US government has stubbornly refused to do anything more than issue empty reassurances. Examples are included in Drone, such as Barack Obama’s insistence that there hasn’t been “a huge number of civilian casualties,” and that the United States must be a “standard bearer” in the proper conduct of war. John Brennan, now the director of the CIA, is shown animatedly comparing Al Qaeda terrorists to a cancerous tumor which must be excised, and can be done, he insists, thanks to lethal drones, without harming the surrounding tissue.

Clearly Brennan and Obama need to watch Drone. It seems highly unlikely that either of them ever will, however, for they have already killed so many thousands of people that they could never face up to the enormity of their mistake. In this vein, the courage of former operators Brandon Bryant and Michael Haas should not be underestimated, for they have wrenched themselves out of the drone dream in which they were laboring for several years and are now attempting through speaking out to dissuade others from making the mistake which they now deeply regret.

US drone program supporters will no doubt ignore this film, for they have already accepted “the official story” ceaselessly pumped out by the US government, according to which “We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could, if we did not stop them first,” as Barack Obama claims in one of the speech excerpts. What remains is for more and more of the people of other lands, such as director Tonje Hesse Frei, whose governments have not yet been lured into the culture of lethal drones, to stand up, and denounce the slaughter of brown-skinned suspects on the basis of opaque criteria at the culmination of secretive proceedings to which only the killers themselves are privy.

There is also still hope for young people in the United States. Drone should be watched by anyone considering remote-control killing as a career path. They need to be warned that all is not nearly so noble and honorable as the recruiters would have them believe. If no one would agree to serve as a paid assassin for the US government, then the drone program would come to a lurching halt.

Even people who do not care so much about the condition of the souls of human beings need to be made aware that the longer this madness continues on, the more brown-skinned young people will flock to the likes of ISIS in an effort to put a stop to the victimization of their communities by drone warriors. In addition to the mess in the Middle East, the recent killing sprees in San Bernardino and Paris should serve as a cautionary warning to those who have been blithely assuming that lethal drones are the answer to the problem of terrorism.

 

War on Terror? War on Truth.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, US President George W. Bush proclaimed that “We are at war,” and we have been at war ever since. The world’s most powerful military was not apt to the task of bringing the perpetrators to justice, as evidenced by the fact that it took nearly a decade to apprehend the man believed to be behind the attacks, Osama bin Laden.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of persons were slaughtered, most of whom were innocent. Thousands of others were detained without charges and mistreated in a variety of appalling ways. Millions were driven to leave their native lands, and the refugees of war-torn countries continue to flow out in a steady stream, as peace-loving people quite rationally attempt to defend themselves from the arbitrary termination of their lives by warriors of all stripes.

How could all of this murder and mayhem have been avoided? It’s sad to say, but if the US war makers had only listened to Osama bin Laden when he complained about the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of whom were children, then they would have recognized that the worst possible response to 9/11 was to attack Iraq all over again. Stating the facts decried by Osama bin Laden is in no way to condone his response to them. It is to acknowledge the source of his “shock and awe” retaliation campaign, perpetrated by jihadists outraged by US military policies abroad.

Undeterred by the dictates of rationality, George W. Bush waged an outright war of aggression on the already suffering people of Iraq. The Iraqis had been living under a dictator empowered by the US government during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, but their conditions were rendered considerably more miserable by the bombing of water treatment facilities by the US military in 1991.

The subsequently imposed international sanctions prevented access to materials needed to purify the drinking water, and also medications needed to address the diseases caused by the lack of clean water. Remarkably, when Barack Obama became president, he awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor to George H.W. Bush, whose 1991 Gulf War led directly to the blowback attack of 9/11.

During the occupation of Iraq, the poor policies of US government officials, including the dismissal of the Iraqi army and the blacklisting of Ba’ath party members, produced thousands of angry insurgents, who vowed to expel the invaders. Rather than admit that the strategies were not working, the occupiers doubled down with surges, more JSOC raids, more missile strikes, and more privately contracted “security forces”, some of whom behaved quite scandalously.

Another grievance aired by Bin Laden was the establishment of military bases in Muslim lands such as Saudi Arabia. Obama has dramatically increased the number of drone stations from which deadly sorties are launched, and continues to deliver Hellfire missiles to an ever-lengthening list of countries in a zealous effort to eliminate an ever-lengthening list of targets in his “war without borders”.

Under President Obama, who had campaigned on an anti-preemptive war platform, drone killing in lands where war was never formally waged came to be viewed as a standard operating procedure for dealing with suspected terrorists, wherever they may be said by a bribed informant to hide.

US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, once a moderate Islamist cleric, was radicalized in the years after 9/11, coming to advocate jihad in response to what he regarded as war crimes committed against his brethren. Again, Al-Awlaki was right that the US government slaughtered many Muslims who never threatened any US national in the least. Al-Awlaki was himself harassed by the US government, and he was thrown into jail for more than a year in Yemen, without charges, at the request of the US government. After that, he was released, hunted down and summarily executed.

In addition to slaughtering Muslims, “We tortured some folks,” as President Obama put it. Unfortunately, the ever-charitable Obama opted not to prosecute the torturers, seemingly on the grounds that their misguided tactics were intended to keep the US homeland safe. They meant to do the right thing! They were just confused about the best way of going about doing that.

In fact, the means used by the warriors post-9/11 had exactly the opposite of the intended effect, causing a massive mobilization of jihadists in response—including the creation of new groups such as ISIS and AQAP, and a renewal and expansion of interest in radical Islam in countries such as Yemen and Somalia, where its presence had been minor—before US intervention.

The torturers and invaders and orchestrators of covert ops of many kinds undeniably endangered the citizens who funded the many initiatives, as should have been obvious from the global response to the crimes at Abu Ghraib prison. As a matter of fact, the Pentagon has taken great pains to withhold thousands of the ghastly photos taken of abused prisoners, on the grounds that they may endanger American lives. QED.

These gross mistakes have obviously made Westerners vulnerable to retaliation and revenge attacks, yet the failures were not viewed as grounds for dismissing those responsible, many of whom were retained by Obama in his not-so-new administration. Most notably, John Brennan, who condoned torture during the Bush administration, became Obama’s closest counterterrorism advisor.

In 2013, Brennan was amazingly promoted to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). One wonders what Mr. Brennan would have to do to get fired by Obama. No matter how many times Brennan changes his stories, Obama continues to trust him as one of his closest confidantes. When concern was expressed that the CIA had violated US law by penetrating the computers of US Senators in the period preceding the release of the torture report, Brennan indignantly reproached his accusers:

“Nothing could be further from the truth… that’s just beyond the scope of reason… some members of the Senate have decided to make spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.”

Two months later, Brennan was issuing a public apology for the CIA’s having done precisely what it had been accused of doing. So which is it: is Brennan a pathological liar, or is he flagrantly incompetent?

According to Gregory Johnsen, the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia (2013), it was none other than John Brennan’s “theory” that Anwar Al-Awlaki was the operational leader of AQAP. We have never been provided with any of the alleged evidence of his guilt in actually perpetrating violent acts—as opposed to inspiring or inciting them.

It was recently made public that the very administration which redacted the evidence in its response to a court order to release the memos leading up to Al-Awlaki’s summary execution without trial is calling for all of the cleric’s sermons—whatever they may contain—to be taken down from the internet. Here is the opening line of the New York Times “report” on the call for the blanket censorship of everything ever said by Al-Awlaki, including his early sermons:

“In case after terrorism case, from the Fort Hood, Tex., shootings to the Boston Marathon bombing and now to the slaughter in San Bernardino, Calif., the inflammatory videos and bomb-making instructions of Anwar al-Awlaki, easily accessible on the Internet, have turned up as a powerful influence.”

Talk about specious reasoning. Indeed, precisely the sort one would expect to issue from the mouths of torture advocates and graduates of the fact-challenged George W. Bush School of Strategy. The New York Times serves here, as so often, as a megaphone for officials of the US government. This call for censorship is a frightening development, and surprising even for a government which redefined terms in truly Orwellian ways in order to legalize “targeted killing” against “imminent threats” which are said not to imply immediacy.

The undeniable truth is that some of what Anwar Al-Awlaki said was true. Let’s consider a couple of examples. In an interview with National Geographic News on September 28, 2001, he said:

“My worry is that because of this conflict, the views of Osama bin Laden will become appealing to some of the population of the Muslim world. Never in the past were there any demonstrations raising the picture of Osama bin Laden–it has just happened now. So Osama bin Laden, who was considered to be an extremist, radical in his views, could end up becoming mainstream. That’s a very frightening thing, so the US needs to be very careful and not have itself perceived as an enemy of Islam.”

 In an interview on October 31, 2001, by Ray Suarez for PBS, Anwar al-Awlaki clarified his criticism of the US government and reiterated his opposition (at that time) to violent retaliation:

“Our position needs to be reiterated, and needs to be very clear. The fact that the US has administered the death and homicide of over 1 million civilians in Iraq, the fact that the US is supporting the deaths and killing of thousands of Palestinians, does not justify the killing of one US civilian in New York City or Washington, DC.”

How would preventing people from knowing what Al-Awlaki said protect the people of the United States? Obviously it would not. Censorship serves the purpose, instead, of shielding people from the truth, in this case, that there may indeed be a substantive answer, grounded in historical fact, to the question: Why do they hate us?

If words spoken by people about crimes inspired young people to undertake jihad, then would that not imply that Shaker Aamer, who has been talking openly about the abuse which he endured while imprisoned for years without charges at Guantánamo Bay, should be silenced as well?  Jeremy Scahill, the author of Dirty Wars (2013), has also chronicled US war crimes and examines the case of Anwar al-Awlaki quite closely. Should Scahill be censored?

What about the brave drone operators who have stepped forward to denounce what they were persuaded to do and now deeply regret? Will such persons, who dare to share the grisly news about what the US government has been up to, be next in line for censorship? As a matter of fact, former drone sensor Brandon Bryant has revealed in social media that some of his interviews have already been removed from the internet.

There are plenty of recipes around for making bombs, and no one needs the words of Anwar Al-Awlaki to be incited to jihad. What radicalizes young men and women are not calls for homicide in the name of justice—for that they have the clear and ever-present example of the US government’s various killing campaigns. If both Osama bin Laden and Anwar Al-Awlaki were radicalized by US war crimes, then the only way to prevent the radicalization of other people just like them will be for the offending actions to stop.

Without halting the bombing which drives young people to seek retaliation, the tide of angry jihadists will never come to end. The persons being slaughtered are becoming younger and younger, as “high value” targets are destroyed and replaced in some cases by persons who have known nothing but war for most or all of their lives. The perverse insistence upon annihilating brown-skinned persons for their future potential to commit future possible crimes is no more and no less than a recipe for genocide. Regardless of whether Americans remain in a blithe state of ignorance about what is being done in their name, the people at the receiving end of missiles know very well what is being done, and some of them, like the perpetrators of the crimes of 9/11, vow to seek revenge.

Since the 1991 Gulf War, Muslims in lands far away, beginning with Iraq, have been treated as though they had no rights whatsoever. They have been systematically slaughtered at the caprice of US warmakers. Under Obama, suspects are denied even the opportunity to surrender. Nothing should be more obvious than that we cannot continue to do the same things over and over again, and then expect men such as Osama bin Laden not to emerge from the ashes left behind by US missiles and bombs.

For more information and related criticism, see We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, Chapter 4: Strike First, Suppress Questions Later; Chapter 9: Death and Politics; and Chapter 12: Tyrants are as Tyrants do

“Chew ‘em up and Spit ‘em out”: The Drone Operator Edition

Any sober look at the recent history of veterans in the United States can only lead one to wonder why men and women continue to enlist in the armed forces in the twenty-first century. There was Agent Orange in Vietnam, the effects of which were denied for decades by military administrators, despite an abundance of scientific evidence that many veterans’ illnesses were linked to exposure to the poison. Then there was the Gulf War Syndrome, a horrifying range of problems, many neurological, which arose among veterans subsequent to the 1991 Gulf War. Soldiers in that mission were told to bomb chemical factories, after which everyone on the ground was assured that when toxin alarms went off, they were malfunctioning.

During the protracted occupation of Iraq after the 2003 invasion, many troops were redeployed against their will and in spite of the fact that they had already been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some of them took their own lives. National Guardsmen, who had enlisted to defend the homeland in the homeland, were sent abroad as well, and record percentages of them also committed suicide.

The problems suffered by veterans engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan persist. The PTSD victims continue to be plied with in some cases deadly cocktails of drugs officially intended to alleviate their psychological troubles but which have not in fact stemmed the tide of suicides. It is plainly written in black and white on the labels of many of the antidepressants and SSRIs being prescribed by the VA that such drugs lower the threshold to violence, yet possible connections between the drugs and the epidemic of veteran suicides are doggedly ignored.

The latest episode in this scandalous chronology involves the young persons enlisted to work as assassins at a distance, lured in by generous salaries to kill people who never threatened them with death, under cover of what is dubiously claimed to be “just war”. There is currently a recruitment crisis in the drone program. Why? Because the US government cannot find enough people ready and willing to kill on command by pushing buttons on computer consoles on the other side of the planet from the so-called battlefields where the allegedly evil targets—suspected of possibly plotting a future possible terrorist attack—are said by anonymous analysts to hide.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: in Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, 86% of the detainees were eventually exonerated of any connection whatsoever to violent extremist groups. How many of the suspects dispatched under authorization by President Barack Obama, whose policy it is to “kill don’t capture”, have also been innocent? They are fingered by the same forms of intelligence: HUMINT and SIGINT. Bribed hearsay and circumstantial evidence. You do the math.

The government makes it sound as though the sole reason for the shortage of drone operators is that the job itself is taxing: the “long hours” and “fast pace” of the job are supposed to be the explanation for why remote-control killers are not re-enlisting once their initial contract term has expired. Needless to say, the government ignores claims to the effect that the true reason for some of these operators’ refusal to reenlist is that they have painfully learned what the job really entails and want nothing further to do with it. Some now claim that they wish they had never enlisted. If only they could travel back in time…

Thanks to the testimony of brave men such as Michael Haas, Stephen Lewis, Cian Westmoreland, and Brandon Bryant, future prospective drone operators have been warned in no uncertain terms: you, too, may later conclude that you made an irrevocable mistake in doing what you were persuaded to do by commanding officers under cover of “just war”. (Remember the Milgram experiments on obedience to authority?) Nothing is free, and if not now, perhaps later, the next generation of drone operators may, too, pay a heavy toll for acting against their conscience and suppressing the questions which arose in their minds before killing people who did not deserve to be summarily executed without trial.

Given all of this, each and every young person who is considering the career of professional killer in the service of the US government needs to view the below video before signing a contract which they may come later deeply to regret. Friends don’t let friends sign contracts which may burden their conscience for the rest of their lives:

http://player.theplatform.com/p/2E2eJC/nbcNewsOffsite?guid=a_orig_dronepilots_151207

 

For more information and related criticism, see We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, Chapter 7: The Operators; Chapter 8: From Conscience to Oblivion; and Chapter 11: The Death of Military Virtue

A Letter from Four Former Drone Operators with Echoes from the Stimson Center Report

 

Former drone sensor operator Brandon Bryant has given interviews all over the world about his involvement in the US government’s drone program or “killing machine”, as it has been aptly labeled by some. He has not always met with sympathy from interviewers and commentators. I was especially struck by the antagonistic stance of one BBC reporter, Stephen Sackur, whose questions often hinged on questionable facts which he had accepted as the gospel truth. Here’s a YouTube video of the interview:

Where, for example, did the notion that Anwar al-Awlaki gave advice to the 9/11 attackers come from, if not from a myth fabricated for the public to rationalize the US citizen’s summary execution without trial in Yemen? For those who missed it, including Stephen Sackur, here’s what Anwar al-Awlaki said in an interview with National Geographic News on September 28, 2001:

“My worry is that because of this conflict, the views of Osama bin Laden will become appealing to some of the population of the Muslim world. Never in the past were there any demonstrations raising the picture of Osama bin Laden–it has just happened now. So Osama bin Laden, who was considered to be an extremist, radical in his views, could end up becoming mainstream. That’s a very frightening thing, so the US needs to be very careful and not have itself perceived as an enemy of Islam.”

 In an interview on October 31, 2001, by Ray Suarez for PBS, Anwar al-Awlaki said:

“Our position needs to be reiterated, and needs to be very clear. The fact that the US has administered the death and homicide of over 1 million civilians in Iraq, the fact that the US is supporting the deaths and killing of thousands of Palestinians, does not justify the killing of one US civilian in New York City or Washington, DC.”

It is possible, of course, that this was all a part of a grand and sneaky scheme on the part of Al-Awlaki to pretend to condemn the attacks which he “in fact” helped to orchestrate. It is also logically possible, I suppose, that the 9/11 hijackers attacked the United States because “they hate us for our freedom.” Far more probable—and logically tenable—is that 9/11 was blowback for the 1991 Gulf War and related US interventions, especially in Muslim lands, abroad.

Likewise, more probable than the conspiracy theory according to which Al-Awlaki was only pretending to denounce the attacks of 9/11 is the version of the story ably relayed by Jeremy Scahill in Dirty Wars: that the Muslim cleric was radicalized by the actions of the US government itself, which in aftermath of 9/11 did precisely what Al-Awlaki counseled against, by waging what could be reasonably interpreted as a war on Islam.

By executing Al-Awlaki, rather than indicting him and allowing him to stand trial, the US government effectively etched its own version of what transpired onto the tablets of history. Reporters such as Stephen Sackur simply assume that the US government version of the story is true, without doing so much as a cursory Google search to find out what Al-Awlaki was doing and saying back in 2001.

It is more than a little disturbing that so many journalists and reporters have uncritically parroted, replicated and disseminated whatever the US drone warriors say, even as they regularly contradict themselves and completely re-write the story of what they have done as circumstances dictate. Was Osama bin Laden armed when he was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan? The initial official story was that he was killed by Navy SEALS in legitimate self-defense, armed as the mastermind was with an AK-47. Later versions—some from the US government—have offered very different accounts of what transpired.

The obdurate refusal on the part of mainstream journalists to go beyond the official stories shared (and often “leaked”) by the government reveals that the Fourth Estate has effectively forsaken its democratic raison d’être–just as surely as US congresspersons did when in October 2002 they renounced their right and responsibility to check the power of the executive to wage war at his caprice. The result? The 2003 invasion of Iraq, and everything to ensue, up to and including the ongoing ISIS-driven quagmire in Syria.

When brave men such as Brandon Bryant step forward to share the ghastly reality of what is being done in the drone program, they are naturally met with skepticism and sometimes ire. Why? Because if what they are saying is true—and there is no compelling reason for thinking that they lie—then the US government has gone morally awry in its politically driven effort to convince citizens that they are being kept safe through a concerted and wide-ranging program of “targeted killing” (formerly known as “assassination”) abroad.

In assessing the credibility of this witness, it is important to bear in mind that Brandon Bryant was not fired from his position. He quit his job and declined even to accept a generous bonus (aka “bribe”) for staying on. Why? Because he could no longer continue in good conscience to do what he had come to believe was wrong.

Here is a recent letter sent to the powers that be by Bryant and three kindred spirits, Cian Westmoreland, Stephen Lewis, and Michael Haas:

 

 (source: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2515596-final-drone-letter.html — Contributed by: Ed Pilkington, The Guardian)

 

It is worth pointing out that in the first paragraph of the letter these admirable souls have clearly articulated some of the very concerns aired by the Stimson Center task force in its US government-commissioned report of 2014. One rarely hears mention of it these days, but the administration agreed to subject the drone program to scrutiny by an independent group of academics, industry experts, and former military officers. Unfortunately, no one in power appears to have read the report, which, in addition to advising that lethal drones be taken out of the hands of the CIA, also clearly warns in its Executive Summary:

“Blowback: Civilian casualties, even if relatively few, can anger whole communities, increase anti-US sentiment and become a potent recruiting tool for terrorist organizations. Even strikes that kill only terrorist operatives can cause great resentment, particularly in contexts in which terrorist recruiting efforts rely on tribal loyalties or on an economically desperate population. UAV strikes by the United States have also generated a backlash in states not directly affected by the strikes, in part due to the perception that such strikes cause excessive civilian deaths, and in part due to concerns about sovereignty, transparency, accountability and other human rights and rule of law issues.”

Sound familiar? Military and drone program supporters may dismiss out of hand the testimony of former drone operators—writing them off as PTSD victims, disgruntled employees, or simply “bad apples”. But can any of those terms be applied to the Stimson center committee, the members of which were appointed by the US government?

Perhaps Obama, Brennan & Co. (literally) were hoping for a report which would conclude by patting the drone warriors on the back and exhorting them to continue on in their quest to kill brown-skinned suspects wherever they may be said to hide, working from “evidence” furnished by privately contracted analysts with strong reasons of financial self-interest to generate longer and longer kill lists–as long as they can.