Friends,
For years, I have been trying to convince Baltimore’s
public radio station WYPR to give more coverage to peace and justice issues,
including the fact that Johns Hopkins University is the #1 military contractor
among colleges. Its Applied Physics Laboratory is involved in about a
billion dollars of military research on swarming drones, nuclear weapons and
other weapons of war. I have had limited success, despite writing
frequently to the general manager, the news department and hosts of local
shows. You should note that the local media and The Baltimore Sun
consciously avoid mention of the APL and its nefarious weapons contracts.
The only recent success is that Tom Hall has interviewed
Elizabeth McAlister, a member of the Kings Bay Plowshares. Before
Christmas I made my latest request to employees of WYPR. Below is the
only response I received, which was from Tom, a very good liberal. If you
want to see the email I sent to station personnel, let me know.
Kagiso, Max
Tom Hall [mailto:THall@wypr.org]
Friday, December 20, 2019 10:56 AM
RE: Looking forward to coverage of the APL, Back from the Brink and the 2020
NDA
Thanks Max. To be candid, Hopkins and APL isn’t a story we
are planning to cover in the near future. We will continue to cover the
Kings Bay 7.
Like you, I too pray that peace breaks out in 2020. Thanks
for listening to our show and for your passionate advocacy for peace.
Tom
MERRY CHRISTMAS, AMERICA! LET’S REMEMBER
THE CHILDREN WHO LIVE IN FEAR OF OUR KILLER DRONES.
December
25 2019, 6:00 a.m.
THE MOVIE “LOVE ACTUALLY” has some good advice: At
Christmas, you tell the truth. It’s the perfect day to be honest
about what you’ve done in the past year, what that says about who you are, and
what it means about where you’re heading.
So, let’s tell
the truth about America. The truth is that, through a worldwide drone war we commenced two decades ago, we’ve invented
a new form of terror for millions of people across the world. The truth is that we
continued to escalate this war in 2019, yet there’s no
way to say exactly how much, because the U.S. government refuses to tell its
citizens the basic facts about it. The truth is that the best sources of
information on this war are two underfunded outfits — the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Airwars—
that aren’t even based in the United States.
The truth is
that these journalists can’t be sure which airstrikes are being carried out by
drones and which by conventional manned aircraft. The truth is that our drone
war is like some underseas leviathan, the nature and size of which we can only
guess at when parts of it briefly surface.
The truth that
is our fleet of killer drones is likely aloft on Christmas Day, right now,
circling endlessly as intelligence analysts decide whether to pronounce a death
sentence on people thousands of miles away. The truth is that, as we open
presents, these death machines might as well — for all the space they occupy in
our consciousness — not exist at all. The truth is that there have been six
Democratic presidential debates this year, and during these six debates, the
number of times our worldwide drone war was debated is zero.
IT’S POSSIBLE THAT you heard
about a U.S. drone strike a few weeks ago in the Khost District in eastern
Afghanistan. A 25-year-old Afghan woman there named Malana had recently given
birth to her second child. When Malana developed postpartum complications at
home, her father-in-law, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law took her in a car to
a clinic. On their way back home, all four family members, plus the car’s
driver, were killed by an American missile launched from a weaponized drone.
All were burned to ashes. Al Jazeera reported that
Malana’s father, Gulu, is now looking after her two young children.
This was
horrific enough to merit a brief article in the New York Times. It
was so bad, in fact, that the article included Malana’s name. It was not bad
enough for it to include the names of America’s four other victims.
Eighteen years
after September 11, 2001, this is the pattern with our drone war: The worst of
the atrocities briefly make an appearance in the media. “We are aware of the
allegations of civilian casualties and working with local authorities to
determine the veracity of these claims,” Col. Sonny Leggett, a
military spokesperson, said about Malana’s death. The news flits across the screen that 30 Afghan
pine-nut farmers were killed by a U.S. drone strike. “We are aware of
allegations of the death of noncombatants and are working with local officials
to determine the facts,” Leggett said about them.
Then for
Americans, the murders subside into the electronic maelstrom, never to be heard
of again. (The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment on whether any
progress has been made in the investigation of the death of Malana.)
For the most
part, our drone war grinds on with no notice taken here at all. Meanwhile,
people in an uncertain number of countries live under the unblinking gaze of
drones. We can say that the military’s overt program has conducted drone
strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Syria,
and Libya. In addition, the CIA has a classified program that it does not
acknowledge. Through news coverage, we know of alleged CIA strikes in
Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and beyond. (Oddly, the New York Times reported in 2017 that the CIA, sensing
opportunity as the Trump administration began, sought to expand its operations
into Afghanistan for “the first time.”) CIA strikes may be spreading further into West Africa,
as the CIA runs counterterrorism missions out of Niger and Somalia.
Once upon a
time, humans killed each other with rocks, close up. Then swords, then guns,
then planes. But even with bombing campaigns of the past, there were humans up
there, and eventually they had to fly away. Today, swaths of countries live
under drones monitoring them around the clock. Their constant, distant
humming quietly informs the people beneath them that they and everyone around
them might be killed at any time by invisible strangers across an ocean.
“From the
ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as
they circle overhead,” according to David Rohde, who was
kidnapped and held captive for months by the Taliban. “The buzz of a distant
propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death. Drones fire missiles that
travel faster than the speed of sound. A drone’s victim never hears the missile
that kills him.”
“When [children]
hear the drones, they get really scared, and they can hear them all the time so
they’re always fearful that the drone is going to attack them,” explained a man in Pakistan who collected
his cousin’s body after a drone strike. “Because of the noise, we’re
psychologically disturbed — women, men, and children. … Twenty-four hours, [a]
person is in stress and there is pain in his head.”
ONE OF THE first
attacks by an armed U.S. drone took place in Afghanistan in February 2002 — near
Khost, as it happens. Three men were walking in the mountains. One of them
looked tall, and someone at the CIA thought he might be Osama bin Laden. So we
killed all three of them. It turned out they were extremely poor local
civilians looking for scrap metal from previous
American airstrikes.
The use of
drones strikes grew slowly for the rest of President George W. Bush’s
administration. Then Barack Obama took office and dramatically escalated the
program. Just three days after taking office, Obama approved two strikes in
Pakistan. One of them, according to the book “Kill or Capture,” hit the wrong target: the
home of a village elder who belonged to a “pro-government peace committee.” He
was killed, along with four other members of his family, two of them his
children.
This did not
dissuade Obama. He authorized as many CIA drone attacks
during his initial nine and a half months in office as Bush did in his final
three years.
Four years ago,
in 2015, The Intercept published “The Drone Papers,” based on a large cache of
leaked classified documents. That reporting provided, for the first time, a
glimpse into Obama’s secretive kill list and assassination program. It was
shocking, for anyone with the capacity to be shocked.
The Obama
administration eventually released official numbers for its drone program.
Between the time Obama took office until the end of 2015, it said, the U.S.
killed 2,436 people in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. Between 64 and 116
were civilians. That official civilian death toll appears low, and that was the
point. From the “Drone Papers” reporting, we learned that the U.S. policy was
to declare anyone killed in those strikes as an “enemy killed in action,” or
EKIA. They remained on the books as such, unless posthumously proven otherwise.
One of the leaked documents revealed that according to the Pentagon’s own
numbers, nine out of 10 people killed in “Operation Haymaker” in Afghanistan
during a five-month period were not the “intended targets.”
The president, according to Obama, could even kill American
citizens by drone with no judicial review.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimated
a somewhat higher total toll: 2,753 people. But the number of civilians killed,
it determined, was six times higher than what the Obama administration claimed.
Most
significantly, Obama did not create a legal framework that
placed any outside restrictions on the executive branch’s use of drones.
The president, according to Obama, could even kill American citizens by drone
with no judicial review. The theory, to the degree there was one, held that
U.S. presidents would always be trustworthy enough to use this power wisely.
Then Donald Trump was elected — and inherited all that power.
On November 11,
2016, the week after Trump became president-elect, a documentary on
U.S. drone warfare, “National Bird,” was released. A young man, only called
Daniel, is prominently featured in the film. As a former signals intelligence
analyst, he describes on camera his deep frustration with the inability to
really tell who was killed in these drone strikes.
“When it comes
to high-value targeting, every mission is to go after one person at a time. But
anybody else that’s killed in that strike is just blatantly assumed to be an
associate of the targeted individual,” Daniel explains. Under the rules of
engagement, he says, anyone who appears to be male and over the age of 16 is a
legitimate target: “If that strike occurs and kills all of them, they just say
that they got ’em all.”
This past May,
Daniel Everett Hale was charged in an Alexandria, Virginia court under the
Espionage Act with sharing classified material regarding the drone program with
a reporter. While the indictment does not name a news organization, Trump
administration officials, in leaks to reporters, linked Hale to The Intercept’s
reporting. Hale sought to have the case dismissed by arguing that the Espionage
Act suppressed the freedom of the press. This month, the Associated Press reported that a judge
has allowed prosecutors to move forward with their case against him.
Under his
current charges, Hale faces up to 50 years in prison.
TO THE DEGREE that we
can say what Trump has done with his power, it is exactly what you would
expect. He has formally lowered the necessary threshold of
evidence needed to justify drone strikes. The Air Force received a 63 percent increase in
Hellfire missiles, the main weapon used by drones, in Trump’s 2017 budget.
Through
executive order, Trump has made drone strikes less transparent by eliminating
an Obama-era mandate that compelled the Defense Department to report its
civilian death toll estimate every year. The New York Times described this as a move that increases
“the secrecy that cloaks one of the most contentious aspects of the fight
against terrorists.”
What we do know
is that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that the U.S. carried
out about 1,000 airstrikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen in 2016
— that is, strikes by both drones and manned aircraft. So far in 2019, they
believe that the U.S. has conducted 5,425 airstrikes, five times as many. In
the month of September, the U.S. upped the pace to almost 40 airstrikes per day.
That brings us
to where we are today.
Even the left
wing of the leading presidential hopefuls would keep at least some parts of the
status quo alive. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has not ruled out drone strikes.
In 2015, he endorsed their use to assassinate
“important terrorists.” This year, in response to an American Civil Liberties
Union survey, Sanders answered that he would issue an executive
order prohibiting the CIA from conducting drone strikes, giving the
responsibility exclusively to the military.
Sen. Elizabeth
Warren, D-Mass., went further, explaining that “we must also
dramatically curtail their use, institute protections to prevent civilian
casualties; and provide maximum transparency when they do occur.” South Bend,
Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg responded that he would not forbid the
CIA from conducting drone strikes because “it is imprudent to be unflinchingly
categorical when it comes to dynamic national security challenges.” Former Vice
President Joe Biden did not answer the survey at all.
During last
week’s Democratic presidential debate, the candidates were asked specifically
about U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan. Not a single question or response
mentioned increased drone strikes and conventional airstrikes, the loss of
civilian life, or recent reporting on abuses seen at the hands of CIA-backed Afghan militia units.
ENJOY THE TWINKLING lights
today — the gingerbread houses, carols, gifts, and being around those you love.
That’s part of the truth of America.
Please, though,
do what you can to consider other truths about ourselves. Try to face the
reality that there are people on the other side of the world today that,
because of us, are experiencing a type of dread that has never existed in
America. Try to imagine being surrounded by your family, all of you filled with
acid anxiety about the buzzing far overhead, the persistent staring eye above
your home, that may at any moment obliterate you and everything you love.
That likely won’t make it a merry Christmas.
But it will make it something far more meaningful: an honest one.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
"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
