Legal, Ethical, and Wise: America's secret drone war is secret no longer

Speaking of people who could do with being blown up. Not that drones, even if they were being used with perfect intentions, could do much at all to solve this problem.

About the only perspective I share, somewhat, with pro-war types, is that it's hopeless to talk about compromise with or tolerance of the Taliban. I mean, worst case scenario is that's what happens anyway, but I do think they represent a rejection of civilisation (in the normative sense) which will only be regressive, even in areas nobody would describe as particularly enlightened. Fuck those guys, in other words.

It's really sad what happened to that girl. The attempted murder on its own does not provide a good retroactive basis for policy generally or for the drone policy particularly, no matter how low the area falls on your all-important enlightenment scale.

Women's rights in Afghanistan-Pakistan have always been first on the grotesque symbolism (ask Hamid Karzain about Kabul's women's shelters) chopping block in power negotiations, and you don't get to alter their position in the queue by blowing people up when the drones are being used explicitly as a cost-effective means of paralyzing an area. Not that I believe there's a politically viable, comprehensive "hard stance" strategy for Afghanistan that could do much else, but that's almost an academic consideration at this point.

In any case, a significant percentage of those blown up people are also children in return for a tiny percentage of confirmed HVT kills. How many of those estimated 176 would be enough to put you into "fuck those guys" territory with the US policy towards the Taliban?

Here's the Living Under Drones study itself, and the associated website with a variety of materials supporting their case. Honestly, I don't think this is the right frame for Ms. Yousafzi's story, although in general I find the "women's rights" rationale for aggressive engagement in countries that are ruled sufficiently benighted via anecdotes a horrific way to blackmail people emotionally into supporting actions that you know are being driven by other factors. I don't think that's what you're doing, but I do think you're a victim of it to some extent.

Just thought I better note that she's not dead yet:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/10/malala-yousafzai-bullet-removed-taliban

Oh, no kidding. I just assumed given the format of the shooting that she was a goner. That's good to know, thanks.

Oh sure, I was just venting when I said they should be blown up. What constitutes a good policy is a different question. Though I don't see how anyone could argue that drones could break the Taliban in swat.

I should have been clearer, I don't like US policy in Pakistan, much less drones. I say fuck those guys more generally - that domestically tolerating the Taliban in Pakistan seems like a road to nowhere. Whether anything else is viable I don't know.

I think you're confusing my rejection of the idea, which some liberals entertain, that the Taliban are unfairly characterized or can be lived with, with supporting any sort of foreign intervention. I view the latter as an entirely different question and remain deeply sceptical of the US's ability to make any positive difference overall. Or at least their willingness to.

The question isn't whether there's an idealized notion of Afghan self-rule that might be palatable to Western governments. The question is whether the last century has offered a single comparably sustainable and sovereign model to the Taliban for Afghan governance, and the answer to that is really hard to crack without falling back on imperial models of dependency.

What I'm getting at is that if you have a choice between a Taliban that compromises on its worst excesses and ceases to pose a direct threat in harboring terrorists, and anarchic endless war coupled with a delusion-model kleptocracy that is simply differently repressive, what ultimately constitutes the ethical choice for the United States? I *hate* the position it puts anyone in to contemplate that divide, but it's a question that the history of intervention in the region demands that we ask honestly.

If there's anything the trajectory of Western social justice teaches us, it's that these principles are really difficult and expensive (in blood, not just money) to impose externally, and are generally fixated on moral outrage rather than the strategic picture of the well-being of citizens. Machiavelli* would have us look to stability that is internally consistent as a model towards anything that resembles durable liberalism over the long term, and I don't think I've seen a compelling counterargument.

*the actual Machiavelli, not the punchline of out-of-context quotes.

I was talking about Pakistan, but sure, the same questions can be asked about Afghanistan. I suppose where I differ is thinking it makes any sense to talk about the Taliban 'compromising on its excesses' at all. That seems to not take them seriously when they bomb schools and shoot anyone, including young girls, who speaks out in opposition to their beliefs. I think they are deadly serious and are not going to mitigate their barbarity with the acquisition of power.

With a despicably corrupt government as an alternative it's a deep question whether we can say there's any moral distinction to draw. I would argue that there is, because at least the government offers a lesser degree of commitment to regressive policies and beliefs. Things like the education of girls are at least possible, despite the horrendous displays of bigotry and fundamentalism the current leaders are capable of. With the Taliban there's a line in the sand, as far as progressive policies go, which they make absolutely clear will not be crossed on their watch. In other words, non-Taliban rule at least doesn't rule out progress, however bleak a prognosis that may be now.

But again, this argument is more in principle, because I'm not promoting intervention and it's not at all clear intervention can even achieve these aims. The current excuse for Afghan leadership doesn't inspire confidence in being able to maintain much of anything, including the power needed to suppress Taliban rule.

Ironically, perhaps, I find this sort of realist position to be somewhat idealistic. Few would argue that a high degree of stability is a necessary condition for any form of liberalism to flourish and be maintained, but it's much less clear that there's any natural or even likely tendency from that to liberalism. It discounts the ideological motivations of those who seek (or rather can maintain) power as essentially irrelevant to outcomes, at least in the long term. I don't find that plausible.

The girl is doing better.

Apparently you can be a living Martyr too. Take that you backwater throwback theocratic ends-justify-the-means fucks.

Came to me via Greenwald but it is a good piece on the drone war and how up close and personal the operators have to get with their victims. They end up watching them for days through their infra-red cameras and they see everything as their victims go about their daily lives; having sex, tending their goats and putting their kids to bed.

http://www.spiegel.de/international...er-war-for-american-drone-pilot-a-872726.html

Can we have an "accidental" drone strike on the Westboro Baptist Church?

Spiegel is masculine.

What's old is new again. The author said it best:

Sheepherder
Can you give some context? A link? I'm not sure what it is I read.

All Quiet on the Western Front. Good book.

I'm not entirely on board with what I assume is Sheepherder's point - something alone the lines of "some people will be more and less damaged by the killing and moral negation in war, and this is a constant as in the case of the drone story quoted." Not false exactly but the moral experience of war hasn't exactly been an eternal constant, perhaps not the direction I'd go in in responding to the story - YMMV.

The protagonist of the novel, who has trouble with violence and killing around him and his inability to make sense of it either with his comrades or on leave, winds up trapped in a shell hole with a French soldier he'd stabbed when they both took shelter there. He learns his name, goes through his family pictures, and has trouble with it later. His pragmatic friend Kat is "contextualizing" his worries a bit by contrasting it with the crazy moral shit and general indifference thereto that surrounds them.

Coincidentally or not the episode parallels Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting" a bit.

My point is that knowing you're the proximate cause of a death you watched isn't good for your head, even if through a gunsight. A century of weapons innovation hasn't changed this. I wouldn't necessarily say the individuals are effected more or less, either: rationalizations, denial, or a cavalier attitude aren't exactly a sign of a balanced individual either.

I feel this makes it remarkably analogous, as the Spiegel article details how the drone operators get to know, as it were, their targets, by monitoring them for long periods before firing. Watching them playing with their kids, working, even having sex with their wives. It's the shell hole scene in reverse. And the rationalisations and/or indifference some people involved display, or at least choose to profess, are there too.

I think this is quite a profound point, actually, because a major concern often expressed about drone warfare is that it makes killing like a video game, allowing the operators to distance themselves, figuratively and literally, from the battlefield. The article suggests this is often not the case, that killing through a computer screen can have similar psychological effects to doing it in person, even to the point of PTSD.

It's almost as if a drone operator gets the reverse information set that the average soldier on the ground gets when confronted by an enemy he's killed. In the former case they know a lot about the individual (or at least think they know some of it as we've gone over the problems with US intelligence before) but they can't smell the blood, they can't see their facial expressions they don't have that sense of immediacy and being there that distinguishes things we see on a screen from the things we experience happening right in front of us. On the other hand the soldier on the ground has all that context and information but generally knows very little about the individual he's killed, doesn't know his family, doesn't know his habits where he lives or whether he had kids. The experience for the protaganist in All quiet on the Western Front is shocking precisely because it is atypical for a soldier to have all of that additional context. I imagine that a lot of drone operators would find it hard to press the button if they had the additional context of the soldier on the ground just as the soldier on the ground would find it harder to pull the trigger if they had the knowledge of the drone operator. They both have different kinds of dehumanising distance from 'the enemy'.

The drone article is also interesting for the detail on all the steps that the military goes through to try and make the process of dropping a bomb on a family like a Milgram experiment. There is that dual responsibility with one operator lining up the target and a second one pressing the fire button and then the further step of reducing the soldiers autonomy and having the instructions for each kill delivered almost anonymously by an authority figure through a chat interface. All designed to diffuse the question of who really killed that kid in Pakistan. I know some of that is standard military procedure but it seems amplified in the world of drone warfare somehow.

A strange legal development.

Unfortunately that's the way FOIA was written. There are several exemptions where a FOIA request can be denied. I can see two of them could apply. There's the one that protects info that is classified to protect national security (and honestly, that's kind of a nebulous determination in the first place), but also as the documents concern legal determinations, it could be protected under another exemption for legal privilege.

FOIA is yet another better idea than law; even for documents that aren't exempted, it can take years for a FOIA request to get processed, and it's still subject to redaction. I got one from FDA (only took 2.5 years...), and they redacted about 80% of it. Left us with pretty much nothing useful...

And arise... as a new Whitehouse leak provides more insight into the 'legal' case for the new era of drone 'warfare'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/obama-administration-us-al-qaida


I love the madhouse logic redefinition of 'imminent' as described here, where an imminent threat to life is now redefined to mean, 'any chance you get' because those terrorists have probably always got something on the go amirite?

The unspoken theme underpinning the whole memo being, that as the War on Terror is, by its very nature, an unending war that can never be won these new powers are for all time. Murderous dictatorial minds have levered a one-time congressional approval for this ridiculous 'war on a concept' into a full on legal blank cheque to kill anyone, anywhere at any time just so long as the Whitehouse thinks it is time for them to die. There will be no due process, no oversight, no citizenship protection and no recourse. If the president or a future administration thinks that you should die, then no matter where you are or whatever you might be doing, they will go ahead and do it. And they will do so in plain sight ( likely from the air), with no subterfuge required (beyond some vague claims that you were definitely, probably a terrorist because you went to a website or a mosque or whatever man stop asking).

The only realistic barrier to this state murder-for-thought-crime program is a public relations backlash but I shudder to think what uses less ethically-encumbered (and less media interested) future administrations might make of these kinds of powers.

Le sigh

Greenwald on this memo, for what it's worth:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/05/obama-kill-list-doj-memo

The full article is pretty long but I think its something worth reading a polemical style piece about because really, this shit is disgraceful.

Frankly, we should impeach the bastard. This is completely out of control, and what other recourse is there? Hope that he stops, with no way to check that he has?

I'm surprised how much media coverage this has gotten, it's been known for a while.

This policy is the consensus opinion of the entire US government, excepting the far left and far right edges of the two parties, near as I can tell.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/20...ht-about-the-law-and-thats-a-serious-problem/

I think it is mostly likely legal but only because Congress authorized a ridiculous war on words that scare us. On the upside, that means a Congress with its shit together could easily limit the Executive. So lets hope for 2014?

Such abuse of power policies are always the "consensus opinion of the entire US government" -- until they're not. See the Vietnam War, FBI abuse of power vs. minorities, etc. Hell, most government policy is consensus by definition, excepting only the rare rogue actor. So, bravo for pointing out the obvious.

Being the consensus doesn't make them any more ethical, any less likely to blow up in the long run (allow the exectutive branch complete and and unnaccountable power to murder whoever-they-please just-trust-us, how could that go wrong?), nor even particularly unlikely to change. Such policies certainly won't change if everyone tacitly accepts them despite quietly disagreeing with them.

And seriously, when Karl Rove is publicly lauding your abuse of exective power perhaps it's time to rethink things.

Yes, and those policies were changed by years of sustained pressure and political organization building. Impeaching individual presidents wouldn't have had an effect. I agree on the end goal, just find the look for an easy fix - impeachment, electing a Democrat, electing a libertarian, filing just the right lawsuit - unproductive.

The second Republicans are back in office they'll stop pretending to care.

The United States so fancies itself that as long as it can convince itself it has not changed on its face, it is content for history to draw it a portrait not unlike that of Dorian Gray. So it is when life imitates art.

Impeaching individual presidents absolutely would have an effect -- it's just that it won't happen, and has never happened.

I'm not even really advocating for it as a practical measure, just saying that he deserves to be impeached for abuse of power. I'm having a hard time thinking of a greater abuse of executive power -- if impeachment isn't warranted for this, then what could possibly warrant it? Merely blow jobs and political opportunity? Comparatively minor things like spying on political opponents?

I don't even know what you're trying to say here. This is very much a topic that Republicans like Karl Rove care about, and his goal here is all about (successfully) moving the goalposts of debate. Such that staunch centrists like yourself brush off what once would have been unthinkable as "oh, that's the consensus" and "it would take years of sustained pressure" to change. I mean, you're nominally against it, but can't be bothered to vilify it or even actually argue against it.

Nixon breaking into the offices of the other political party, trying to have his political enemy Dnaile Ellsberg killed, and floating the possibility of a military coup during the Watergate scandals was quite a bit worse. As was Andrew Jackson outright ignoring a supreme court decision. As was Kennedy nearly starting a nuclear war that could have wiped out human civilization.

Killing US citizens without on a fast-and-loose no-due-process assessment they're "terrorists" is awful, but it's not even close to the worse thing a president can do. Note that the US president has reserved the right to do this to non-US citizens with virtually no review for around 60 years through the CIA.

That post-9/11, there's a bipartisan mainstream political consensus in favor of US presidents assassinating "terrorists." Karl Rove is pretending to be upset (or maybe he actually is, it's hard to tell), but the second a Republican president is in office I can guarentee you he'll defend the exact same policy.

So I need to act madder about it for you to believe me?

I think its worth noting that the former CIA assassination option required some level of subterfuge & planning, where discovery often, or was at least felt to carry real costs in terms of diplomacy, public relations and manpower. In practice this meant that assassination was a much more rarely used tool. There certainly wasn't a routine, almost entirely in the open, assassination program that killed hundreds of people a year as we have now.

The new convenience technology of aerial drones combined with the arrogance of total economic and military supremacy over the countries in which America's modern foes now operate has been as much a part of this grim result as has the gradual expansion of parameters over what exactly is the legal bar required before a state murder can be sanctioned. Of course we now know that those parameters have expanded so far as to be practically non-existent, John Brennan or an underling says you should die and nothing else matters - the state sanctions it.

The american people and the rest of the world have been prepared by degrees to accept more and more barbarism in the name of fighting terrorism, whether by accident or design. Right now US citizens are only being killed abroad for being accused of terrorism but it seems to me that there is little left, bar unfavourable news stories, to stop the CIA bringing this murder program home to US soil for anyone they feel they can't manage to convict. Drone strikes seem a little too showy for downtown LA but I hear quadrotor development is really progressing.

Lets just hope news reporting is doing well enough to keep everyone safe.... oh right.

Not really. The Kennedy era CIA was sort of a gong show.

I shit you not, allegedly at one point the plan was to irradiate defoliate Castro's beard with thallium in the hopes that it would destroy his image something something rebellions.

Seriously.

In case anyone missed the John Brennan confirmation hearing it's probably worse than you thought likely but exactly what you feared:

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Brennan_Hearing#ixzz2KgAFHhdi

It's fun to kick him for this, but the CIA doesn't have authority against American citizens within the borders of America anyway. I get the ire they're trying to stoke, but that's not Brennan's problem.

Right but as his previous job was as counter terrorism advisor to the president his opinion on whether it was likely, 'legal', or even just being considered as 'acceptable' for the president to authorise a drone strike on a domestic terrorist is absolutely of interest.

Turns out the answer is what passes in intelligence circles for a yes.

CBS Poll shows broad bipartisan support for American's drone campaign. :(

Maybe if they polled on America's child murder campaign it would get less support.

The potential for killing political opponents domestically or running a coup without any sort of oversight is precisely what makes Obama's assasination policy so dangerous. At least when Nixon moved in that direction (without actually assassinating US citizens) his actions were illegal.

Under our current policy? Completely legit, with only a president's vague assurance that "Oh, I would never abuse that". And sure, Obama probably won't -- but what about those after him? I don't think anyone like Dick Cheney would have much trouble with it, and such maniacs have a disturbing habit of getting elected.

Yeah. Actually, Karl Rove was defending Obama's drone assassination policy, and merely accurately pointing out that many (nominally) on the left -- like you -- are only mildly nonplussed by it when done by a Democratic president.

Pretty much, yes -- you'd have to take a stand on the issue and not be so Tribal. Generally you come out swinging against anyone who'd say anything bad about a Democratic president, despite in not too distant memory lambasting a certain Republican president for the same things.

[Edit: Ack! Fixed backward logic in the last paragraph]

I have two main problems with that:
- Do you trust the CIA to stay within the scope of its authority? It's proven repeatedly that it doesn't feel particularly bound by such things as law. Iran Contra scandal, etc.
- Some of us travel abroad.