In many ways, it’s the perfect weapon for a war-weary nation that suddenly finds itself on a tight budget.
Missile-armed drones are playing a greater role than ever in U.S. counter-terror operations, as President Barack Obama winds down land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Washington’s focus expands to militant havens such as Somalia and Yemen where there are no U.S. troops permanently on the ground.
Code Pink has a petition running against drone warfare.
Their new factsheet. [pdf!]
US officials have been pressuring Pakistan to allow the expansion of CIA drone strikes beyond the nation’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and into Pakistan’s largest province of Balochistan.
Pakistani intelligence officials reportedly rejected the US demand for access to Balochistan, but did agree to a compromise allowing a larger number of CIA agents to operate on the ground in the Baloch capital city of Quetta.
The US has been launching drone strikes against FATA for years, but has dramatically increased the numbers since President Obama took office. The vast majority of those killed in the strikes appear to have been innocent civilians, and only a handful of militant leaders were ever killed.
The prospect of escalating those strikes into Balochistan would also be hugely unpopular, as Pakistanis have complained about the attacks in FATA, only nominally Pakistani territory to begin with, and would undoubtedly object much more loudly to attacks in an actual Pakistani province.
Bombed to death anyone targeted by US drones turns out to have been a terrorist.
Further reading.
The U.S. is intensifying the drone war over Yemen; yesterday the Yemeni foreign minister admitted for the first time that the U.S. was helping out in the Yemeni fight with unmanned drones; the foreign minister said that while the U.S. was providing intelligence, “The (drone) attacks are undertaken by the Yemeni air force” (officials in Yemen have habitually claimed those sorties were the work of the Yemeni air force, although Yemen has neither the aircraft nor the air crews able to conduct these precision attacks); a tug-of-war is going on in Washington on whether the drone war should be conducted by the U.S. military or the CIA; unconfirmed news reports claim that in early November the U.S. moved a squadron of Predator drones to a secret base at the Yemeni Red Sea port of Al Hodaydah.
Further reading.
Michael Schwalbe
The age when war was limited to a clearly defined battlefield is long past. In modern wars, civilian populations are bombed, targeted for genocide +and terrorism, and made to suffer by wreckage of infrastructure. The dogs of war, once loosed, respect no fences.
We can expect things to get worse. New remote combat technologies — drones and robots controlled by operators far from any delimited battlefield — will bring violence home in ways that will destroy the feelings of safety and security Americans once took for granted.
Militarists who tout these technologies claim that they will mean fewer dead soldiers. This is likely to be true, at least for the side that holds a technological edge. When neither side has better killing tools, the death toll will even out and resume ratcheting upward.
Militarists see other advantages to remote combat: less popular opposition to war if there are fewer body bags coming home; an easier job of teaching recruits to kill if “combat” is as familiar and bloodless as a video game; and more discord among the ranks of enemy leaders because drone strikes often rely on tips from insiders who are trying to eliminate rivals.
The forces driving the development and use of remote combat technologies are partly military and mainly economic. These are enormously profitable technologies for which there will be unlimited demand as nations strive to keep up with each other in a new high-tech arms race. This will be an arms maker’s fantasy come true.
As always, ordinary citizens will pay the bill, and not only with tax dollars. We will pay with more fear, fatalism, and isolation. The feel of daily life will change.
The eventual equalization of technological capability will mean the use of drones and robots to strike at targets in the United States. There will be no need to hijack planes or plant car bombs. Drones, some as small as a suitcase, will be launchable from offshore or just outside U.S. borders. These killing machines will be nearly impossible to stop, as is the case with the drones the U.S. now uses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
But the problem is not just technological equalization and blowback. The problem is that remote combat technologies have changed the rules of engagement. Stealth assassination anywhere at any time, collateral deaths, and explicit targeting of militarily-employed civilians are the new norms.
When U.S. military and political leaders tell us that a Taliban or al Qaeda leader has been taken out by a drone attack, they would have us believe this will seriously weaken the opposing force — so much so that the deaths of nearby friends and family members are an acceptable, if officially regrettable, cost.
Whether this kind of remote killing truly weakens an opposing force is a matter of dispute. What seems clear, however, is that such attacks strengthen the resolve to pay us back in kind. It’s not hard to understand why.
Drone attacks often strike people in their homes, away from active battle zones. Which is why these attacks have killed thousands of innocent bystanders, mainly women and children. What better fuel for revenge? As others have noted, for every alleged Taliban or al Qaeda leader killed by a drone attack, ten recruits are created. Americans too, we can imagine survivors thinking, must learn what it feels like to see their loved ones killed by assassination machines. They must experience this in times and places where they thought they were safe.
This retaliation, when it comes, will be justified as necessary, given that Americans have chosen to wage war with killing machines operated from their homeland. The person who flies a drone from a base in the U.S. will be seen as a combatant, hence a legitimate target — and not only while at work but at any time, preferably when most vulnerable. Perhaps while standing next to you at your daughter’s soccer game.
University-based researchers who devote their talents to inventing new remote combat technologies — like the shapeshifting ChemBot developed at the University of Chicago — will also become targets. Technicians in a laboratory, students in a classroom, and anyone else nearby will become collateral damage. War will come to campus in a way it never has.
“Ironic” is too weak a word to describe the situation toward which the inventors and deployers of remote combat technologies are taking us. We will be told that we must use sophisticated machines to kill at a distance to keep violence at bay, even as the inevitable diffusion of this technology brings violence closer to home.
We will be told that we are fighting to preserve the rule of law against the forces of lawless terrorism, even as presidents and their minions assume the prerogative to carry out remote assassinations as they deem fit, with no judicial oversight or public accountability.
We will be told to be grateful that remote combat technologies make it possible to limit war, even as we exhaust our treasury to pay for it, even as our society becomes more militarized, and even as we experience more fear of dying in conflicts that seem to have no end.
Most Americans have not yet learned a lesson well known to partisans of anti-imperialist struggles: from the standpoint of political and economic elites striving for global dominance, no one who might someday oppose them is innocent, and the deaths of the innocent are not important, except when such deaths become ideological liabilities.
The inevitable use of drones and robots against us will perhaps force Americans to learn this lesson. When violence arrives at our door, we should ask, Who invited it? The answer is not simplemindedly “us.” The answer is, Those who have purported to lead and protect us, while profiting from the invention and use of ever more powerful killing technologies.
When that day of awakening comes, Americans might begin to see that what we needed is not just a new set of leaders but a new society, a society that is radically democratic and in which human monsters cannot create mechanical ones to keep the rest of us under control.
Counterpunch.
Unarmed Predator B drones, the same unmanned aircraft used by the CIA for targeted killings in the Middle East, began patrolling the US-Mexico border between Arizona and southwestern Texas this week.
Top lawmakers from Texas and Arizona, several of whom have recently received campaign contributions from drone makers, have asked the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to approve drone flights over the entire Texas border despite recent reports that the border is the safest it’s been in years.
The announcement came amid rising tensions in the region, where US Border Patrol officers have killed two Mexican citizens in as many weeks, including a teenage boy who was shot after throwing rocks.
by Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier
On May 12th, the day after a U.S. drone strike killed 24 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, two men from the area agreed to tell us their perspective as eyewitnesses of previous drone strikes.
One is a journalist, Safdar Dawar, General Secretary of the Tribal Union of Journalists. Journalists are operating under very difficult circumstances in the area, pressured by both militant groups and the Pakistani government. Six of his colleagues have been killed while reporting in North and South Waziristan. The other man, who asked us not to disclose his name, is from Miranshah city, the epicenter of North Waziristan. He works with the locally based Waziristan Relief Agency, a group of people committed to helping the victims of drone attacks and military actions. “If people need blood or medicine or have to go to Peshawar or some other hospital,” said the social worker, “I’m known for helping them. I also try to arrange funds and contributions.”
Both men emphasized that Pakistan’s government has only a trivial presence in the area. Survivors of drone attacks receive no compensation, and neither the military nor the government investigate consequences of the drone attacks.
Mr. Dawar, the journalist, added that when he phoned the local political representative regarding the May 12th drone attack, the man couldn’t tell him anything. “If you get any new information,” said the political representative, “please let me know.”
In U.S. newspapers, reports on drone attacks often amount to about a dozen words, naming the place and an estimated number of militants killed. The journalist and social worker from North Waziristan asked us why people in the U.S. don’t ask to know more.
It’s hard to slow down and look at horrifying realities. Jane Mayer, writing for The New Yorker, (“The Predator War,” October 26, 2009) quoted a former C.I.A. official’s description of a drone attack:
“People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. ‘You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,’ a former C.I.A. officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack.”
“Human beings running for cover are such a common sight,” Jane Mayer continues, “that they have inspired a slang term: ‘squirters.’”
Just rubble and charred stuff…
The social worker recalled arriving at a home that was hit, in Miranshah, at about 9:00 p.m., close to one year ago. The house was beside a matchbox factory, near the degree college. The drone strike had killed three people. Their bodies, carbonized, were fully burned. They could only be identified by their legs and hands. One body was still on fire when he reached there. Then he learned that the charred and mutilated corpses were relatives of his who lived in his village, two men and a boy aged seven or eight. They couldn’t pick up the charred parts in one piece. Finding scraps of plastic they transported the body parts away from the site. Three to four others joined in to help cover the bodies in plastic and carry them to the morgue.
But these volunteers and nearby onlookers were attacked by another drone strike, 15 minutes after the initial one. 6 more people died. One of them was the brother of the man killed in the initial strike.
The social worker says that people are now afraid to help when a drone strike occurs because they fear a similar fate from a second attack. People will wait several hours after an attack just to be sure. Meanwhile, some lives will be lost that possibly could have been saved.
The social worker also told us that pressure from the explosion, when a drone-fired missile or bomb hits, can send bystanders flying through the air. Some are injured when their bodies hit walls or stone, causing fractures and brain injuries.
The social worker described four more cases in which he had been involved with immediate relief work, following a drone attack. He didn’t supply us with exact dates, and we weren’t able to find news articles on the internet which exactly matched his accounts. Riaz Khan, an AP reporter covering a drone strike on May 15th, noted differences in details reported by witnesses and official sources. “Such discrepancies are common and are rarely reconciled,” according to Khan.
Exasperated by the neglect and indifference people in Waziristan face, especially those who say they have nowhere to hide, the journalist and social worker began firing questions at us.
“If the US had good intelligence and they hit their targets with the first strike,” Safdar asks, “why would the second one be necessary? If you already hit the supposed militant target, then why fire again?”
“Who has given the license to kill and in what court? Who has declared that they can hit anyone they like?”
“How many ‘high level targets’ could there possibly be?”
“What kind of democracy is America,” Safdar asks, “where people do not ask these questions?”
Reliance on robotic warfare has escalated, from the Bush to the Obama administrations, with very little significant public debate. More than ever before, it is true that the U.S. doesn’t want our bodies to be part of warfare; there’s also not much interest in our consent. All that is required is our money.
But, you get what you pay for in the U.S.A. The social worker and the journalist assured us that all of the survivors feel hatred toward the United States. “It is a real problem,” said Safdar, “this rising hatred.”
Source
The Obama administration has formally disclosed the size of the Defense Department’s stockpile of nuclear weapons: 5,113 warheads as of September 30, 2009.
For a national secret, we’re pleased that the stockpile number is only 87 warheads off the estimate we made in February 2009. By now, the stockpile is probably down to just above 5,000 warheads.
The disclosure is a monumental step toward greater nuclear transparency that breaks with outdated Cold War nuclear secrecy and will put significant pressure on other nuclear weapon states to reciprocate.
The stockpile disclosure, along with the rapid reduction of operational deployed warheads disclosed yesterday, the Obama administration is significantly strengthening the U.S. position at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference.
Progress toward deep nuclear cuts and eventual nuclear disarmament would have been very difficult without disclosing the inventory of nuclear weapons.
Further reading.
Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable
No Nukes is good news!
Love of enemies means disarming nuclear weapons
They will hammer their swords into plowshares
Sacred Peace Walk - Nevada 