Monday, January
25, 2016
Drones
and 'What Makes Us Different'
The
documentary Drone makes painfully clear that it is
the U.S. government’s ability to kill at a distance—with impunity and
with widespread support, or at least resignation,
of the citizenry—that "makes us different" from other nations. (Still
image: Drone, The Documentary)
Seven years ago
this month and three days after Barack Obama assumed the presidency on January
20, 2009, the first drone strike of his administration took place--in a small
village in the region of Pakistan known as North Waziristan. It targeted the
family compound of Faheem Qureshi, fracturing the young teen’s
skull and destroying one of his eyes, while killing, among others, two of his
uncles and a 21-year-old cousin. The White House’s intended target, it was
later revealed, was not, nor had he ever been, present at the site. About ten
months later, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its decision to award Obama the annual Peace
Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and
cooperation between peoples.”
In his speech at the Oslo City Hall upon
accepting the prize on December 10, 2009, Obama insisted that “the United
States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war,”
suggesting that U.S. war-waging is somehow superior, more ethical, than those
of the country’s adversaries. “That is what makes us different from those whom
we fight,” he proclaimed. “That is a source of our strength.”
No doubt there are
many things that distinguish the United States—not least the enormity of
its military budget, and its global network
of military bases. But as the documentary Drone (which
premiered in the United States and Canada in late November and which includes
footage from Obama’s speech) makes painfully clear, it is the U.S. government’s
ability to kill at a distance—with impunity and with widespread support, or at least resignation,
of the citizenry—that also “makes us different.”
Just as white
America must be made to overcome... an “endemic anti-black bias” to help
bring an end to the grossly disproportionate killing of African
Americans by police, so, too, must the United States as a whole be made ... to
stop the Pentagon’s killing ways abroad.
Remotely piloted
aircraft, what are popularly known as drones, allow the Pentagon and the U.S.
intelligence apparatus to track and monitor individuals from afar with little
risk. According to Brandon Bryant, a former drone operator interviewed in the
film states, “We’re the ultimate voyeurs, the ultimate peeping toms. No one is
going to catch us.”
It also allows the
Pentagon to engage in what is effectively a global assassination program with
little domestic cost. “It’s never been easier for an American president to
carry out a killing operation at the ends of the earth at any time in American
history,” explains Mark Mazzetti, a reporter with The New York Times.
“And when you define the world as a battlefield, that’s a very broad range of
operations you can carry out.”
An explosive series of
articles published in October by The
Intercept shows just how far-reaching—and, perhaps most
damningly, indiscriminate—these operations are. Based on classified documents
leaked to the online magazine by an unnamed whistleblower within the U.S.
intelligence apparatus, the series exposes the falsehoods underlying official
Washington’s spin on drone strikes. While Obama administration officials claim
that civilian casualties are not common in drone strikes, the documents make
clear that the Pentagon typically does not know who it has killed.
U.S. airstrikes
carried out in northeastern Afghanistan between January 2012 and February 2013
(as part of Operation Haymaker), for example, killed more than 200 people, only 35 of
whom were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation,
according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in
airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S.
has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are
the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.
That the U.S.
government can and does kill in this way, and often in countries with which the
United States is not even at war, with little protest at home, demonstrates one
of the ways imperialism functions: the deaths of “others,” particularly those
associated, even if only by virtue of where they happen to reside, with people
and places constructed as threats, are not only undeserving of sympathy,
they’re also barely noticed.
Writing soon after the November release
of the video of the horrific police murder of
17-year-old Laquan McDonald—shot 16 times as he was moving away from Chicago
police officers—New York Times columnist Charles Blow argues that the
“only reason that these killings keep happening is because most of American
society tacitly approves or willfully tolerates it. There is no other
explanation. If America wanted this to end, it would end.”
Blow goes on to
say that the “exceeding sad and dreadfully profound truth is that America — the
majority of America, and that generally means much of white America — has
turned away, averted its gaze and refused to take a strong moral stance in
opposition. That’s the same as granting silent approval.”
These observations
could just as easily apply to the Obama administration’s brutality toward
Faheem Qureshi and the killing of his loved ones—and of so many others around
the world. Just as white America must be made to overcome what Blow calls an
“endemic anti-black bias” to help bring an end to the grossly disproportionate killing of African
Americans by police, so, too, must the United States as a whole be made to “see
the issue [in this case drones] as an intolerable human cruelty” to stop the
Pentagon’s killing ways abroad.
Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the
London-based human rights organization Reprieve,
offers a similar analysis while speaking to a crowd of Pakistanis during the
film Drone: “Until America sees your children as they see my children, we will
never get justice in the world.”
Realizing the
radically egalitarian vision implied by these words is obviously no easy task.
This makes it all the more important that those of us who see all children, and
adults, as being inherently of equal worth back the efforts of those opposing
killer drones—from those of courageous U.S. air force veterans publicly
denouncing the drone program to peace groups such as CODEPINK.
Supporting
such efforts would be one small way to acknowledge what the United States has
done to Faheem Qureshi and his family, something the Obama administration has
thus far refused to do, and constitute a step in
the long journey to a more just world. As Brandon Bryant, one of the air force
whistleblowers has asserted, “At the end of our pledge of
allegiance, we say ‘with liberty and justice for all.’ I believe that should be
applied to not only American citizens, but everyone that we interact with as
well, to put them on an equal level and to treat them with respect.”
In other words, we
need to act in a fundamentally different way than one which involves the
nationalist proclamation of “what makes us different” (and supposedly better).
This work is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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