Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, How Extrajudicial Executions Became "War" Policy in
Washington
By Rebecca Gordon
Posted on July 17, 2016, Printed on July 17, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176166/ ;
Strangely, amid the spike in racial tensions after the killing of two black
men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of five white police officers
by a black sharpshooter in Dallas, one American reality has gone
unmentioned. The U.S. has been fighting wars -- declared, half-declared,
and undeclared -- for almost 15 years and, distant as they are, theyve been
coming home in all sorts of barely noted ways. In the years in which the
U.S. has up-armored globally, the country has also seen an arms race
developing on the domestic front. As vets have returned from their Iraq and
Afghan tours of duty, striking numbers of them have gone into police work at
a time when American weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment --
including, for instance, MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles) --
have poured off Americas distant battlefields and, via the Pentagon, into
police departments nationwide. And while the police were militarizing, gun
companies have been marketing battlefield-style assault rifles to Americans
by the millions, at the very moment when it has become ever more possible
for citizens to carry weapons of every sort in a concealed or open fashion
in public.
The result in Dallas: Micah Johnson, a disturbed Army Reserves veteran, who
spent a tour of duty in Afghanistan and practiced military tactics in his
backyard, armed with an SKS semi-automatic assault rifle, wearing full body
armor, and angry over police killings of black civilians, took out those
five white officers. One of them was a Navy vet who had served three tours
of duty in Iraq and another a former Marine who had trained local police for
DynCorp, a private contractor, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, civilian
protesters, also armed with assault rifles (quite legal in the streets of
Dallas), scattered as the first shots rang out and were, in some cases,
taken in by the police as suspects. And at least two unarmed protesters
were wounded by Johnson. (Think of that, in his terms, as collateral
damage.) In the end, he would be killed by a Remotec Andros F5 robot,
built by weapons-maker Northrop Grumman, carrying a pound of C4 plastic
explosive, and typical of robots that police departments now possess.
In other words, this incident was capped by the first use of deadly force by
a drone in the United States. Consider that a war-comes-home upping of the
ante. Already, reports the Defense One website, makers of military-grade
robots -- a burgeoning field for the Pentagon -- are imagining other ways to
employ such armed bots not only on our distant battlefields but at home in a
future in which they will be useful, cheap, and ubiquitous, and capable of
Tasing as well as killing.
Of course, among the many things that have also come home from the countrys
wars, Predator and Reaper drones are now flying over the homeland on
missions for the Pentagon, not to mention the FBI, the Border Patrol, and
other domestic agencies. So the future stage is set. Once youve used any
kind of drone in the U.S. to kill by remote control, its only logical --
given some future extreme situation -- to extend that use to the skies and
so consider firing a missile at some U.S. target, as the CIA and the Air
Force have been doing regularly for years in places like Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And of course, in our domestic arms race, with
small drones commercially available to anyone and the first of them armed
(no matter the rudimentary nature of that armament), its not hard to
imagine a future Micah Johnson, white or black, using one of them sooner or
later. After all, Johnson was already talking about planting IEDs (the
term for insurgent roadside bombs in our war zones) and a flying IED is a
relatively modest step from there.
So, welcome to the home front, folks. And speaking of drones, its worth
giving a little thought to what might, in fact, still come home, to the sort
of example that two administrations have set by turning the president into
an assassin-in-chief and regularly creating law for themselves when it comes
to the targeting of distant peoples. In that light, TomDispatch regular
Rebecca Gordon considers Americas Trojan Horse technology of death and just
what it may someday smuggle into the homeland. Tom
The Trojan Drone
An Illegal Military Strategy Disguised as Technological Advance
By Rebecca Gordon
Think of it as the Trojan Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American
warfare in these years, a single remotely operated plane sent to take out a
single key figure. It's a shiny video game for grown ups -- a Mortal Kombat
or Call of Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the
giant wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to bring inside their
gates, however, the drone carries something deadly in its belly: a new and
illegal military strategy disguised as an impressive piece of technology.
The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more
fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved -- whether
through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by
drone -- the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on
foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous
change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion weve had
has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its
purpose (assassination). Its a case of the means justifying the end. The
drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.
The Rise of the Drones
The Bush administration launched the assassination program in October 2001
in Afghanistan, expanded it in 2002 to Yemen, and went from there. Under
Obama, with an actual White House kill list, the use of drones has again
expanded, this time nine-fold, with growing numbers of attacks in Pakistan,
Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as well as in the Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian war
zones.
Theres an obvious appeal to a technology that allows pilots for the CIA,
Joint Special Operations Command, or the Air Force to sit safely in front of
video screens in Nevada or elsewhere in the U.S., while killing people half
a world away. This is especially true for a president running a global war
with a public that does not easily accept American casualties and a Congress
that prefers not to be responsible for war and peace decision-making. Drone
assassinations have allowed President Obama to spread the war on terror to
ever more places (even as he quietly retired that phrase), without U.S.
casualties or congressional oversight and approval.
One problem has, however, dogged the drone program from the beginning: just
like conventional air strikes, remotely targeted missiles and bombs tend to
kill the wrong people. Over the last seven years, the count of civilians
killed by drones has been mounting. Actual figures are hard to come by,
although a number of nongovernmental organizations and journalists have done
a good job of collating information from a variety of sources and offering
reasonable estimates.
Analysis from all these sources suggests that there are at least three
reasons why civilians die in such attacks.
1. The intelligence information on the individual targeted is often wrong.
He isnt where they think he is, or he isnt even who they think he is. For
example, in 2014 a British human rights organization, Reprieve, compiled
data on drone strikes that targeted specific individuals in Yemen and
Pakistan. According to the Guardian, Reprieves work
indicates that even when operators target specific individuals -- the most
focused effort of what Barack Obama calls 'targeted killing' -- they kill
vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple
times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147
people, as of 24 November [2014].
Some of these men were reported in the media as killed multiple times. Even
if they didnt die in the first, second, and in some cases third attempts,
other people certainly did. Reprieve also reports one particularly egregious
case of mistaken identity:
Someone with the same name as a terror suspect on the Obama
administrations kill list was killed on the third attempt by U.S. drones.
His brother was captured, interrogated, and encouraged to tell the
Americans what they want to hear: that they had in fact killed the right
person.
2. There isnt even a named target. The CIA has long based drone
assassination targeting for many missions not on direct intelligence about a
particular individual, but on what it calls the signature of possible
terrorist activity (that is, the behavior or look of people below). Such
signature strikes target unidentified individuals based on some suspicious
activity, usually picked up through drone surveillance. Such a signature
can be as ill defined as a gathering of men, teenaged to middle-aged,
traveling in convoys or carrying weapons in countries where many men may be
armed. Unfortunately, while such a gathering may indeed indicate some kind
of military activity, it may also describe a rural wedding in, say, Yemen,
involving driving in convoy from the grooms town to the brides,
accompanied sometimes by celebratory gunfire.
Not everyone in the government is convinced that signature strikes are a
good idea. In 2012, the New York Times reported this joke at the State
Department: When the C.I.A. sees three guys doing jumping jacks, the
agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp.
The fact that signature strikes continue to this day suggests that Secretary
of State John Kerry was not entirely truthful when, in 2013, he said at a
BBC forum: The only people that we fire a drone at are confirmed terrorist
targets at the highest level after a great deal of vetting that takes a long
period of time. We dont just fire a drone at somebody and think theyre a
terrorist.
3. They were in the way, and so became collateral damage. This is the term
military theorists regularly use to describe human beings or civilian
infrastructure unavoidably destroyed in an attack on a legitimate military
target. Of course, a drone operators understanding of the term
unavoidable may be different from that of a woman who has just lost three
of her four sons as they were returning home from shopping for supplies to
celebrate Eid-al-Fitr, the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
In addition, drone strikes dont just kill people, including women and
children; they also destroy buildings and other property. For example, the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that, in Pakistan, more than 60% of
all strikes target domestic buildings -- peoples houses. In other words,
collateral damage often refers to the destruction of the homes of any
survivors of a drone attack.
Not surprisingly, people dont like living in terror of deadly missiles
screaming out of a clear blue sky. Many observers have argued that terrorist
organizations have used widespread fear and anger over drone attacks as a
recruiting tool. Al-Qaeda and ISIS appear to offer Pakistanis, Yemenis, and
others an alternative to simply waiting for an attack they cant prevent.
The CIA itself recognized the counterproductive potential of drone killings,
which they call HVT [High Value Target] operations. A leaked July 2009 CIA
report on Best Practices in Counter-Insurgency outlines the issues:
Potential negative effects of HVT operations include increasing the level
of insurgent support, causing a government to neglect other aspects of its
counterinsurgency strategy, altering insurgent strategy or organization in
ways that favor the insurgents, strengthening an armed groups bond with the
population, radicalizing an insurgent groups remaining leaders, creating a
vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or
deescalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.
So there are long-term strategic problems with targeted killings by drone.
In addition, drones may help spread and intensify terror movements and
insurgencies, rather than destroying them or their leaderships. Often, as
Andrew Cockburn has made clear in his book Kill Chain, the successors to
leaders assassinated by drone turn out to be younger, more effective, and
more brutal.
There is, however, another problem with this sort of warfare. Such killings
-- at least when they take place outside a declared war zone -- are almost
certainly illegal; that is, they are murders, plain and simple.
Targeted Killing Is Murder
In my household we have a rule: were not allowed to kill something just
because were afraid of it. This has saved the lives of countless spiders
and other creatures sporting (in my view at least) too many legs.
Whatever your view on arachnids, should it really be permissible to kill
people simply because we are afraid of them? After all, thats what these
drone assassinations are -- extrajudicial executions of people someone
believes we should be afraid of. It is easier to see an illegal execution
for what it is when the killer is not separated from the target by thousands
of miles and a video screen. Drone technology is really a Trojan Horse, a
distracting, glitzy means of smuggling an illegal and immoral tactic into
the heart of U.S. foreign relations.
Not all killing is illegal, of course. There are situations in which both
international and U.S. laws permit killing. One of these is self-defense;
another is war. However, a war waged against a tactic (terrorism), or even
more vaguely, against an emotion (terror) is only metaphorically a war.
Under international law, real wars, in which it is legal to kill the enemy,
involve sustained combat between organized military forces.
Outside of the fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now possibly Syria (where
Congress has arguably never even declared war), the war on terror is not a
war at all. It is instead a conflict with an ever-expanding list of targets,
no defined geographical boundaries, and no foreseeable endpoint. It is a
campaign against any conceivable potential U.S. enemy, fought in fits and
starts in many countries on several continents. It involves ongoing covert
operations largely hidden from everyone except its targets. As an
undertaking, it lacks the regular, sustained conflict between armies that
characterizes war in the legal sense. Such operations fit another category
far better: assassination, illegal at least since President Jimmy Carters
Executive Order 12036, which stated, No person employed by or acting on
behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to
engage in, assassination.
Nor is the Middle East the only region where the United States is using
targeted killing outside a shooting war. The U.S. military also deploys
drones in parts of Africa. In fact, President Obamas nominee to head U.S.
Africa Command, Marine Lieutenant General Thomas Waldhauser, recently told
Senator Lindsay Graham that he thinks he should be free to order drone
killings on his own authority.
So much for war and war. What about self-defense? At every stage of the
war on terror, Washington has claimed self-defense. That was the
explanation for rounding up hundreds of Muslims living in the U.S.
immediately after the attacks of 9/11, torturing some of them, and holding
them incommunicado for months in a Brooklyn, New York, jail. It was the
excuse offered for beginning torture programs in CIA black sites and at
Guantánamo. It was the reason the U.S. gave for invading Afghanistan, and
later for invading Iraq -- before, as Bush administration representatives
and the president himself kept saying, the smoking gun of Saddam Husseins
supposed weapons of mass destruction turned into a mushroom cloud over,
presumably, some American city.
And self-defense has been the Justice Departments rationale for targeted
killing as well. In a November 2011 paper prepared by that department for
the White House, its author (identity unknown) outlined the necessary
conditions to make a targeted killing legal:
(1) an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined
that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack
against the United States;
(2) capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor
whether capture becomes feasible; and
(3) the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable
law of war principles.
That would seem to rule out most U.S. targeted killings. Few of their
targets were people on the verge of a violent attack on the United States or
U.S. soldiers in the field. Ah, but in the through-the-looking-glass logic
of the Obama Justice Department, imminent turns out not to mean imminent
in the sense that something is about to happen. As that document explains:
The condition that an operational leader present an imminent threat of
violent attack against the United States does not require the United States
to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests
will take place in the immediate future.
It turns out that the threat from any operational leader is always
imminent, because with respect to al-Qaeda leaders who are continually
planning attacks, the United States is likely to have only a limited window
of opportunity within which to defend Americans. In other words, once a
person has been identified as an al-Qaeda or allied group leader, he is by
definition continually planning attacks, always represents an imminent
danger, and so is a legitimate target. Q.E.D.
In fact, few enough of these targeted killings, including the signature ones
can be defended as instances of self-defense. We should call them what they
really are: extrajudicial executions.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary
Executions has agreed with this view. In his 2013 report to the General
Assembly, Christof Heyns noted that international human rights law
guarantees a right to life. This right is enshrined in the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and given legal force in, among other treaties,
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the
United States is a party. There certainly are legal limits to the right to
life, including -- in countries that have the death penalty -- the states
right to execute a person after a legitimate trial. To execute someone
without a trial, however, is an extrajudicial killing and a human rights
crime.
Obama Comes Clean
By the middle of President Obamas second term in office, criticism of this
extrajudicial killing program, and especially of the civilian deaths
involved, had mushroomed. So, in May 2013, at least 11 years after the
program was launched, the president announced a shift in drone strategy,
telling an audience at the National Defense University that the U.S. would
engage in targeted killings of al-Qaeda militants only when there was a
near-certainty that no civilians would be injured. He added that he was
planning to make the drone program more transparent than it had been and to
transfer most of its operations from the CIA to the Pentagon.
In the two years since, little of this has happened. Although Obama has
continued the job of personally approving drone targets, the CIA still runs
much of the program.
On July 1st, he did finally take a step towards providing greater
transparency. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a
report stating that, outside of more conventional war zones like those in
Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. airstrikes have killed 64 to 116
civilian bystanders and about 2,500 members of terrorist groups. These
estimates are, in fact, quite a bit lower than those supplied by the various
groups that track such killings. Note as well that, legally speaking, not
only the collateral damage victims, but all those that Americans
identified as members of terrorist groups died via illegal, extrajudicial
executions.
The document fulfills one of the requirements of a newly issued executive
order, which, among other things, requires the government to release a
report by May 1st of each year containing information about the number of
strikes undertaken by the U.S. Government against terrorist targets outside
areas of active hostilities [i.e., outside genuine war zones] for the
previous calendar year.
Attached to the executive order was a fact sheet, which noted that one
goal of the new executive order is to set standards for other nations to
follow. How happy would the United States really be if other nations
decided that they had the right to kill anyone who scares them? How would
the United States react if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad decided to take
out a U.S. general or two, on the grounds that, since the U.S. is supporting
forces that seek to depose him, those generals are (as the Fact Sheet puts
it) targetable in the exercise of national self-defense?
Some critics of the Obama drone program have welcomed the executive order,
which does include a new emphasis on protecting civilians. But the larger
effect of the order is to make the practice of illegal assassination a
permanent feature of U.S. policy. It assumes that we can expect an annual
murder toll announcement for years to come. No future is contemplated in
which the United States will not be raining death from the sky on people who
cannot defend themselves. The drones will continue to fly, but the Trojan
Drones work is complete.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches philosophy at the University
of San Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture and most
recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial
for Post-9/11 War Crimes. She can be contacted at
www.mainstreamingtorture.org.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Rebecca Gordon
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176166
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, How Extrajudicial Executions Became "War" Policy in
Washington
By Rebecca Gordon
Posted on July 17, 2016, Printed on July 17, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176166/ ;
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I think you're just great! What a response TD
subscribers gave to my recent request for donations in a pitch letter themed
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Strangely, amid the spike in racial tensions after the killing of two black
men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of five white police officers
by a black sharpshooter in Dallas, one American reality has gone
unmentioned. The U.S. has been fighting wars -- declared, half-declared, and
undeclared -- for almost 15 years and, distant as they are, theyve been
coming home in all sorts of barely noted ways. In the years in which the
U.S. has up-armored globally, the country has also seen an arms race
developing on the domestic front. As vets have returned from their Iraq and
Afghan tours of duty, striking numbers of them have gone into police work at
a time when American weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment --
including, for instance, MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles) --
have poured off Americas distant battlefields and, via the Pentagon, into
police departments nationwide. And while the police were militarizing, gun
companies have been marketing battlefield-style assault rifles to Americans
by the millions, at the very moment when it has become ever more possible
for citizens to carry weapons of every sort in a concealed or open fashion
in public.
The result in Dallas: Micah Johnson, a disturbed Army Reserves veteran, who
spent a tour of duty in Afghanistan and practiced military tactics in his
backyard, armed with an SKS semi-automatic assault rifle, wearing full body
armor, and angry over police killings of black civilians, took out those
five white officers. One of them was a Navy vet who had served three tours
of duty in Iraq and another a former Marine who had trained local police for
DynCorp, a private contractor, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, civilian
protesters, also armed with assault rifles (quite legal in the streets of
Dallas), scattered as the first shots rang out and were, in some cases,
taken in by the police as suspects. And at least two unarmed protesters were
wounded by Johnson. (Think of that, in his terms, as collateral damage.)
In the end, he would be killed by a Remotec Andros F5 robot, built by
weapons-maker Northrop Grumman, carrying a pound of C4 plastic explosive,
and typical of robots that police departments now possess.
In other words, this incident was capped by the first use of deadly force by
a drone in the United States. Consider that a war-comes-home upping of the
ante. Already, reports the Defense One website, makers of military-grade
robots -- a burgeoning field for the Pentagon -- are imagining other ways to
employ such armed bots not only on our distant battlefields but at home in a
future in which they will be useful, cheap, and ubiquitous, and capable of
Tasing as well as killing.
Of course, among the many things that have also come home from the countrys
wars, Predator and Reaper drones are now flying over the homeland on
missions for the Pentagon, not to mention the FBI, the Border Patrol, and
other domestic agencies. So the future stage is set. Once youve used any
kind of drone in the U.S. to kill by remote control, its only logical --
given some future extreme situation -- to extend that use to the skies and
so consider firing a missile at some U.S. target, as the CIA and the Air
Force have been doing regularly for years in places like Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And of course, in our domestic arms race, with
small drones commercially available to anyone and the first of them armed
(no matter the rudimentary nature of that armament), its not hard to
imagine a future Micah Johnson, white or black, using one of them sooner or
later. After all, Johnson was already talking about planting IEDs (the
term for insurgent roadside bombs in our war zones) and a flying IED is a
relatively modest step from there.
So, welcome to the home front, folks. And speaking of drones, its worth
giving a little thought to what might, in fact, still come home, to the sort
of example that two administrations have set by turning the president into
an assassin-in-chief and regularly creating law for themselves when it comes
to the targeting of distant peoples. In that light, TomDispatch regular
Rebecca Gordon considers Americas Trojan Horse technology of death and just
what it may someday smuggle into the homeland. Tom
The Trojan Drone
An Illegal Military Strategy Disguised as Technological Advance
By Rebecca Gordon
Think of it as the Trojan Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American
warfare in these years, a single remotely operated plane sent to take out a
single key figure. It's a shiny video game for grown ups -- a Mortal Kombat
or Call of Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the
giant wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to bring inside their
gates, however, the drone carries something deadly in its belly: a new and
illegal military strategy disguised as an impressive piece of technology.
The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more
fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved -- whether
through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by
drone -- the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on
foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous
change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion weve had
has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its
purpose (assassination). Its a case of the means justifying the end. The
drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.
The Rise of the Drones
The Bush administration launched the assassination program in October 2001
in Afghanistan, expanded it in 2002 to Yemen, and went from there. Under
Obama, with an actual White House kill list, the use of drones has again
expanded, this time nine-fold, with growing numbers of attacks in Pakistan,
Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as well as in the Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian war
zones.
Theres an obvious appeal to a technology that allows pilots for the CIA,
Joint Special Operations Command, or the Air Force to sit safely in front of
video screens in Nevada or elsewhere in the U.S., while killing people half
a world away. This is especially true for a president running a global war
with a public that does not easily accept American casualties and a Congress
that prefers not to be responsible for war and peace decision-making. Drone
assassinations have allowed President Obama to spread the war on terror to
ever more places (even as he quietly retired that phrase), without U.S.
casualties or congressional oversight and approval.
One problem has, however, dogged the drone program from the beginning: just
like conventional air strikes, remotely targeted missiles and bombs tend to
kill the wrong people. Over the last seven years, the count of civilians
killed by drones has been mounting. Actual figures are hard to come by,
although a number of nongovernmental organizations and journalists have done
a good job of collating information from a variety of sources and offering
reasonable estimates.
Analysis from all these sources suggests that there are at least three
reasons why civilians die in such attacks.
1. The intelligence information on the individual targeted is often wrong.
He isnt where they think he is, or he isnt even who they think he is. For
example, in 2014 a British human rights organization, Reprieve, compiled
data on drone strikes that targeted specific individuals in Yemen and
Pakistan. According to the Guardian, Reprieves work
indicates that even when operators target specific individuals -- the most
focused effort of what Barack Obama calls 'targeted killing' -- they kill
vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple
times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147
people, as of 24 November [2014].
Some of these men were reported in the media as killed multiple times. Even
if they didnt die in the first, second, and in some cases third attempts,
other people certainly did. Reprieve also reports one particularly egregious
case of mistaken identity:
Someone with the same name as a terror suspect on the Obama
administrations kill list was killed on the third attempt by U.S. drones.
His brother was captured, interrogated, and encouraged to tell the
Americans what they want to hear: that they had in fact killed the right
person.
2. There isnt even a named target. The CIA has long based drone
assassination targeting for many missions not on direct intelligence about a
particular individual, but on what it calls the signature of possible
terrorist activity (that is, the behavior or look of people below). Such
signature strikes target unidentified individuals based on some suspicious
activity, usually picked up through drone surveillance. Such a signature
can be as ill defined as a gathering of men, teenaged to middle-aged,
traveling in convoys or carrying weapons in countries where many men may be
armed. Unfortunately, while such a gathering may indeed indicate some kind
of military activity, it may also describe a rural wedding in, say, Yemen,
involving driving in convoy from the grooms town to the brides,
accompanied sometimes by celebratory gunfire.
Not everyone in the government is convinced that signature strikes are a
good idea. In 2012, the New York Times reported this joke at the State
Department: When the C.I.A. sees three guys doing jumping jacks, the
agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1510703330/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1510703330/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20The fact
that signature strikes continue to this day suggests that Secretary of State
John Kerry was not entirely truthful when, in 2013, he said at a BBC forum:
The only people that we fire a drone at are confirmed terrorist targets at
the highest level after a great deal of vetting that takes a long period of
time. We dont just fire a drone at somebody and think theyre a terrorist.
3. They were in the way, and so became collateral damage. This is the term
military theorists regularly use to describe human beings or civilian
infrastructure unavoidably destroyed in an attack on a legitimate military
target. Of course, a drone operators understanding of the term
unavoidable may be different from that of a woman who has just lost three
of her four sons as they were returning home from shopping for supplies to
celebrate Eid-al-Fitr, the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
In addition, drone strikes dont just kill people, including women and
children; they also destroy buildings and other property. For example, the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that, in Pakistan, more than 60% of
all strikes target domestic buildings -- peoples houses. In other words,
collateral damage often refers to the destruction of the homes of any
survivors of a drone attack.
Not surprisingly, people dont like living in terror of deadly missiles
screaming out of a clear blue sky. Many observers have argued that terrorist
organizations have used widespread fear and anger over drone attacks as a
recruiting tool. Al-Qaeda and ISIS appear to offer Pakistanis, Yemenis, and
others an alternative to simply waiting for an attack they cant prevent.
The CIA itself recognized the counterproductive potential of drone killings,
which they call HVT [High Value Target] operations. A leaked July 2009 CIA
report on Best Practices in Counter-Insurgency outlines the issues:
Potential negative effects of HVT operations include increasing the level
of insurgent support, causing a government to neglect other aspects of its
counterinsurgency strategy, altering insurgent strategy or organization in
ways that favor the insurgents, strengthening an armed groups bond with the
population, radicalizing an insurgent groups remaining leaders, creating a
vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or
deescalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.
So there are long-term strategic problems with targeted killings by drone.
In addition, drones may help spread and intensify terror movements and
insurgencies, rather than destroying them or their leaderships. Often, as
Andrew Cockburn has made clear in his book Kill Chain, the successors to
leaders assassinated by drone turn out to be younger, more effective, and
more brutal.
There is, however, another problem with this sort of warfare. Such killings
-- at least when they take place outside a declared war zone -- are almost
certainly illegal; that is, they are murders, plain and simple.
Targeted Killing Is Murder
In my household we have a rule: were not allowed to kill something just
because were afraid of it. This has saved the lives of countless spiders
and other creatures sporting (in my view at least) too many legs.
Whatever your view on arachnids, should it really be permissible to kill
people simply because we are afraid of them? After all, thats what these
drone assassinations are -- extrajudicial executions of people someone
believes we should be afraid of. It is easier to see an illegal execution
for what it is when the killer is not separated from the target by thousands
of miles and a video screen. Drone technology is really a Trojan Horse, a
distracting, glitzy means of smuggling an illegal and immoral tactic into
the heart of U.S. foreign relations.
Not all killing is illegal, of course. There are situations in which both
international and U.S. laws permit killing. One of these is self-defense;
another is war. However, a war waged against a tactic (terrorism), or even
more vaguely, against an emotion (terror) is only metaphorically a war.
Under international law, real wars, in which it is legal to kill the enemy,
involve sustained combat between organized military forces.
Outside of the fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now possibly Syria (where
Congress has arguably never even declared war), the war on terror is not a
war at all. It is instead a conflict with an ever-expanding list of targets,
no defined geographical boundaries, and no foreseeable endpoint. It is a
campaign against any conceivable potential U.S. enemy, fought in fits and
starts in many countries on several continents. It involves ongoing covert
operations largely hidden from everyone except its targets. As an
undertaking, it lacks the regular, sustained conflict between armies that
characterizes war in the legal sense. Such operations fit another category
far better: assassination, illegal at least since President Jimmy Carters
Executive Order 12036, which stated, No person employed by or acting on
behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to
engage in, assassination.
Nor is the Middle East the only region where the United States is using
targeted killing outside a shooting war. The U.S. military also deploys
drones in parts of Africa. In fact, President Obamas nominee to head U.S.
Africa Command, Marine Lieutenant General Thomas Waldhauser, recently told
Senator Lindsay Graham that he thinks he should be free to order drone
killings on his own authority.
So much for war and war. What about self-defense? At every stage of the
war on terror, Washington has claimed self-defense. That was the
explanation for rounding up hundreds of Muslims living in the U.S.
immediately after the attacks of 9/11, torturing some of them, and holding
them incommunicado for months in a Brooklyn, New York, jail. It was the
excuse offered for beginning torture programs in CIA black sites and at
Guantánamo. It was the reason the U.S. gave for invading Afghanistan, and
later for invading Iraq -- before, as Bush administration representatives
and the president himself kept saying, the smoking gun of Saddam Husseins
supposed weapons of mass destruction turned into a mushroom cloud over,
presumably, some American city.
And self-defense has been the Justice Departments rationale for targeted
killing as well. In a November 2011 paper prepared by that department for
the White House, its author (identity unknown) outlined the necessary
conditions to make a targeted killing legal:
(1) an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined
that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack
against the United States;
(2) capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor
whether capture becomes feasible; and
(3) the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable
law of war principles.
That would seem to rule out most U.S. targeted killings. Few of their
targets were people on the verge of a violent attack on the United States or
U.S. soldiers in the field. Ah, but in the through-the-looking-glass logic
of the Obama Justice Department, imminent turns out not to mean imminent
in the sense that something is about to happen. As that document explains:
The condition that an operational leader present an imminent threat of
violent attack against the United States does not require the United States
to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests
will take place in the immediate future.
It turns out that the threat from any operational leader is always
imminent, because with respect to al-Qaeda leaders who are continually
planning attacks, the United States is likely to have only a limited window
of opportunity within which to defend Americans. In other words, once a
person has been identified as an al-Qaeda or allied group leader, he is by
definition continually planning attacks, always represents an imminent
danger, and so is a legitimate target. Q.E.D.
In fact, few enough of these targeted killings, including the signature ones
can be defended as instances of self-defense. We should call them what they
really are: extrajudicial executions.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary
Executions has agreed with this view. In his 2013 report to the General
Assembly, Christof Heyns noted that international human rights law
guarantees a right to life. This right is enshrined in the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and given legal force in, among other treaties,
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the
United States is a party. There certainly are legal limits to the right to
life, including -- in countries that have the death penalty -- the states
right to execute a person after a legitimate trial. To execute someone
without a trial, however, is an extrajudicial killing and a human rights
crime.
Obama Comes Clean
By the middle of President Obamas second term in office, criticism of this
extrajudicial killing program, and especially of the civilian deaths
involved, had mushroomed. So, in May 2013, at least 11 years after the
program was launched, the president announced a shift in drone strategy,
telling an audience at the National Defense University that the U.S. would
engage in targeted killings of al-Qaeda militants only when there was a
near-certainty that no civilians would be injured. He added that he was
planning to make the drone program more transparent than it had been and to
transfer most of its operations from the CIA to the Pentagon.
In the two years since, little of this has happened. Although Obama has
continued the job of personally approving drone targets, the CIA still runs
much of the program.
On July 1st, he did finally take a step towards providing greater
transparency. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a
report stating that, outside of more conventional war zones like those in
Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. airstrikes have killed 64 to 116
civilian bystanders and about 2,500 members of terrorist groups. These
estimates are, in fact, quite a bit lower than those supplied by the various
groups that track such killings. Note as well that, legally speaking, not
only the collateral damage victims, but all those that Americans
identified as members of terrorist groups died via illegal, extrajudicial
executions.
The document fulfills one of the requirements of a newly issued executive
order, which, among other things, requires the government to release a
report by May 1st of each year containing information about the number of
strikes undertaken by the U.S. Government against terrorist targets outside
areas of active hostilities [i.e., outside genuine war zones] for the
previous calendar year.
Attached to the executive order was a fact sheet, which noted that one
goal of the new executive order is to set standards for other nations to
follow. How happy would the United States really be if other nations
decided that they had the right to kill anyone who scares them? How would
the United States react if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad decided to take
out a U.S. general or two, on the grounds that, since the U.S. is supporting
forces that seek to depose him, those generals are (as the Fact Sheet puts
it) targetable in the exercise of national self-defense?
Some critics of the Obama drone program have welcomed the executive order,
which does include a new emphasis on protecting civilians. But the larger
effect of the order is to make the practice of illegal assassination a
permanent feature of U.S. policy. It assumes that we can expect an annual
murder toll announcement for years to come. No future is contemplated in
which the United States will not be raining death from the sky on people who
cannot defend themselves. The drones will continue to fly, but the Trojan
Drones work is complete.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches philosophy at the University
of San Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture and most
recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial
for Post-9/11 War Crimes. She can be contacted at
www.mainstreamingtorture.org.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
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Copyright 2016 Rebecca Gordon
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176166
