Murder Incorporated
Jane Maher has written a wonderful article (“The Predator War” in the current New Yorker) about how the war on terror in Pakistan is really remote control assassination by predator drones. She raises some disturbing questions we all ought to be thinking about. Let’s start with the easier ones.
Let’s say you are in Afghanistan or even some parts of Pakistan and you have either a high value enemy combat or what appears to be enemy action like placing a bomb, in your cross hairs. It’s a war zone and war is about killing so there are few that would object with this application of force. What about collateral damage? Well quite frankly if it is within the rules of war, you are not firing it at a hospital or an orphanage; it is no different than dropping a bomb. It is part of war.
The next question in this scenario starts to muddy the waters. Who decides to fire the rocket and what are the rules of engagement? Is it the military who are trained in the rules of engagement and the War Crimes Act, or is the CIA, or is some contractor actively involved in this decision making processes. Sadly I believe Jane Maher has raised serious concerns about private contractor involvement in this process. Would we want Black Water involved in these decisions? I guess the real question here is what is the oversight to ensure this is really a tool used by our military, in military action and not some assassination by the CIA or their contractors. That question has not been publically answered.
The second issue is, is it effective. Well, if you measure effectiveness by killing guys that are on our most wanted list, then we are picking off the head of the hydra. But this measure of success is a function of Western thought about command and control. Kill the brain and the body becomes immobilized. But this is not a war of intelligence and rational thinking; it is a war of religious zealots. The collateral damage most assuredly is creating more hatred than we are wiping out. But what do I know. I would refer you to the five part series that appeared in the New York Times of journalist David Rhode’s 7 month, 10 day captivity before he escaped from the Taliban in Pakistan (Held by the Taliban).
So even its use when the situation seems fairly straight forward raises serious concerns which we have been ignoring. One thing you can say for the United States is that we are really good at ignoring our problems until they are almost unmanageable. Another concern is the amount of battle fatigue that this is generating with the pilots. These guys usually sit in Langley, or in the pentagon, or some facility in California, and after a shift, they go home to their families and normality. It would appear that the contrast between civilized and uncivilized behavior (war any way you define it is uncivilized) puts tremendous pressure on these combatants mental state. Most of us are not sociopaths.
Scenario number two gets even more problematic when this tool is used for assassinations outside a declared war zone. Who of you didn’t watch the Bourne Trilogy where CIA bureaucrats started to decide who to kill, when, and where? As I write this, they are working on smaller and smaller devices that can track and kill a person inside a building. Anybody remember the Star Trek episode where Kirk and his crew were pinned down on a planet by these tireless killing machines? Is that where we are going? Once you get outside a war zone, when does civil justice get tossed for the expediency of a killing machine? Who decides this and how? What happened to a fair trial and the assumption of innocence? Don’t bother to ask the Neocons, because their answer is the war on terror is everywhere therefore our power knows no bounds.
I find this whole thing troubling. I worry about killing by video screen further and further removing the horror of war from our experience and make it so much easier to do, especially if we let the robots do it. I worry about the idea that because it is effective in its task, it is considered an effective tool in the war. It may be just the opposite and by continuing to use it, we delegitimize our moral claim of the high road and truth and justice. I think we need to start talking about this and note that President Obama has authorized its use far more often President Bush. Is President Obama really a deep a thinker that we gave him credit for? As always, Congress is asleep at the switch.