The use of drones and after many other civilian deaths, the killing of two hostages

And Malala told the President to stop using drones.

It’s the stuff of nightmares that President Barack Obama, honored early on with a Nobel Peace Prize for good intentions, developed a personal kill list and authorized drone weaponry in the U.S. arsenal. I was as shocked by Obama’s decision to use drones as I was by Dubya’s approval of the CIA’s use of torture under his regime.

In A Brief History of Drones, John Sifton concludes that the “unique technology” of drones “allows the mundane and regular violence of military force to be separated further from human emotion. Drones foreshadow the idea that brutality could become detached from humanity—and yield violence that is, as it were, unconscious.”

Unconscious violence? I guess Sifton was referring to the possibility that a U.S. drone might miss its mark and take out a couple of Western hostages in northern Pakistan; I watched President Obama, our drone master, offer a personal apology for the deaths this morning, and I hope his words ease the pain of the grieving families of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto. Obama said:

“As president and as commander in chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations,” the grim-faced president told reporters as television cameras broadcast his words. “I profoundly regret what happened,” he added. “On behalf of the United States government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.”

Lest we forget – lest we forget – Juan Cole at Informed Comment reminds us:

Contrary to assurances given by President Obama a couple of years ago, the US government admits that it had no idea who it was targeting when it hit that building. Indiscriminate fire is a recognized war crime, and it seems to characterize the US drone program.

These are the figures for the US drone assassination program in Pakistan, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

Total strikes: 415
Obama strikes: 364
Total killed: 2,449-3,949
Civilians killed: 423-962
Children killed: 172-207
Injured: 1,144-1,722

That is, as many as a fourth of those killed by US drone assassinations are non-combatants.

Cole continues:

Death by drone is inherently lawless. There is no constitutional or legal framework within which the US government can blow people away at will. For a while in the 1970s through 1990s, assassination was outlawed.

Now it is back, but has taken this freakish form where bureaucrats thousands of miles away fire missiles from large toy airplanes. The US is not at war with Pakistan, so this action is not part of a war effort. You can’t be at war with an organization– a state of war has a technical legal definition.

It took Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, a teenager and also the youngest Nobel Prize winner, to stand up to President Obama about his use of drones. The young social activist said:

"I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees," she said in the statement. "I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact."

It would seem, however, that President Obama continues to use drones to pursue those terrorists unfortunate enough to make his secret kill list, plus any civilians who get in the way. What was it that historian John Sifton said about drones – “Drones foreshadow the idea that brutality could become detached from humanity—and yield violence that is, as it were, unconscious.”

The complementarity of social justice and mindfulness meditation

Chaos in Iraq, June 11, 2014.

Amanda Mills: public domain.

Say, friends, you may have noticed the variety of posts at Katalusis that rank as the 10 most popular - current topics include housekeeping mindfully, animal rights (see Raju the elephant), sex trafficking, racism, the Dalai Lama, and the Charter for Compassion.

The diversity in my subject matter at Katalusis notwithstanding, I’ve been following the daily news since childhood when an older brother was pulling combat duty during the Korean War. My father listened to the news on the hour whenever he was home from work, and I picked up the habit. Meanwhile, I developed a strong commitment to social justice.

Lately, listening to Diane Sawyer’s World News (ABC) program at 5:30 p.m. weekdays and scanning emails from politicos begging for money while trashing their opponents in 2014 might be depressing if I lacked the resources to stay centered most days and thereby respond more effectively- hey, Iraq is falling apart, and the Israelis and Palestinians continue to kill one another off.

Which is why I practice mindfulness meditation, keep a literary type novel on hand for downtime instead of TV, work out regularly, journal daily, and hangout with upbeat people whenever possible – I especially enjoy keeping company with my meditation group.

A little reminder here: the daily practice of spiritual disciplines is not antithetical to taking a stand for social justice on behalf of marginalized people, which includes women, who represent 51 percent of America’s population.

Don’t take my word for it – search the database here at Katalusis. You might start with the topic of drones.

Drones allow America to violate national borders for selective killing

The chief selling point for America's drone program is that rather than the mass killing of all out war, drones allow us to violate the boundaries of other nations, e.g., Pakistan, and kill targeted individuals. Of course, that's based on the either-or fallacy that all out war or drone attacks are the only U.S. options. It seems the White House, under both Bush and Obama, has consistently refused to consider a comprehensive approach to fighting terrorism, which would include education and outreach.

Was anyone listening recently when Mallala Yousafzai told President Obama that drones create terrorists?

Today the Huffington Post headline above Matt Sledge's article reads: Why did America kill my mother?

Sledge writes:

WASHINGTON -- He thought little of the U.S. drone buzzing over his family's house one day last year, its incessant sound just one more addition to the rhythm of daily life in northwest Pakistan. 

As he walked home from school, his grandmother told him to eat a snack before coming to the field to help her pick okra. It was the eve of one of the holiest holidays in Islam, when they would gather for a favorite family dish. He went outside.

Dum, dum -- the sounds of missiles pierced the air.

"All of a sudden things became very dark," Zubair Rehman, 13, remembered. The next thing he knew, his grandmother, Mamana Bibi, was gone. "It was like she was exploded to pieces."

Read more:

Barack Obama as the Drone Ranger...

The editors of Mad Magazine think it's a shame that Obama is talking about scaling back his use of drones:

Courtesy of madmagazine.com.

Read more:

Obama's drone program rooted in Eisenhower era's assassinations of foreign leaders

Image courtesy of salon.com.

I'm glad at least a few in the media continue to investigate the Bush/Obama drone program with its targeted killing of "suspected" terrorists. Steve Coll at the New Yorker finds roots to today's use of drones in the Eisenhower era when Ike directed the CIA to assassinate foreign leaders perceived to be unfriendly to U.S. interests. Coll writes:

In the summer of 1960, Sidney Gottlieb, a C.I.A. chemist, flew to Congo with a carry-on bag containing vials of poison and a hypodermic syringe. It was an era of relative subtlety among C.I.A. assassins. The toxins were intended for the food, drink, or toothpaste of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s Prime Minister, who, in the judgment of the Eisenhower Administration, had gone soft on Communism. Upon his arrival, as Tim Weiner recounts in his history of the C.I.A., Gottlieb handed his kit to Larry Devlin, the senior C.I.A. officer in Léopoldville. Devlin asked who had ordered the hit. “The President,” Gottlieb assured him. In later testimony, Devlin said that he felt ashamed of the command. He buried the poisons in a riverbank, but helped find an indirect way to eliminate Lumumba, by bankrolling and arming political enemies. The following January, Lumumba was executed by the Belgian military.

For Eisenhower, who had witnessed the carnage of the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge, and later claimed to “hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can,” political assassinations represented an alluring alternative to conventional military action. Through the execution or overthrow of undesirable foreign leaders, the thinking went, it might be possible to orchestrate the global struggle against Communism from a distance, and avoid the misery—and the risks of nuclear war—that out-and-out combat would bring. 
Assassination was seen not only as precise and efficient but also as ultimately humane. Putting such theory into practice was the role of the C.I.A., and the agency’s tally of toppled leftists, nationalists, or otherwise unreliable leaders is well known, from Mohammad Mosadegh, of Iran, in 1953, and Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, of Guatemala, in 1954, to Ngo Dinh Diem, of South Vietnam, in 1963, and Salvador Allende, of Chile, in 1973. Not all the schemes went according to plan; a few seemed inspired by Wile E. Coyote. The C.I.A. once planned to bump off Fidel Castro by passing him an exploding cigar.

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Should drones be used as a law enforcement surveillance tool?

Courtesy of RealClearPolitics.

This is scary news from the FAA:

The heavens will soon be thick with drones.

That, at least, is the confident expectation of the Federal Aviation Administration and a slew of states and companies competing for a coveted designation as one of six U.S. sites that will test the capability and safety of unmanned aircraft. The FAA anticipates there will be at least 10,000 of these aircraft in the domestic skies by 2020.

The promoters of drones avoid calling them by that name, preferring the duller technical description of “unmanned aerial vehicles,” or UAVs. That’s because “drone” to most people means the deadly remote-controlled missile launcher that is the Obama administration’s weapon of choice in waging war on terrorists. Even before their current military use, drones were a staple of science fiction, often as spy vehicles and sometimes as something much more sinister.

Nick Palatiello, spokesman for the Reston, Va.-based Management Association for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors (MAPPS), decries what he calls this “movie image” and observes that unmanned aircraft are useful in mapmaking, mining, agriculture, forestry and scientific research.

A farmer, for instance, might be able to improve crop yields by monitoring his fields to see if they are being devoured by insects or sufficiently watered. In the view of Palatiello and Kyle Snyder of the NextGen Air Transportation Center at North Carolina State University, such beneficial uses of unmanned aircraft do not violate privacy. “Corn doesn’t care,” Snyder said.

Civil libertarians on both left and right do care, especially about using drones to track suspected criminal activity, including potential terrorism. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis expressed interest in using drones for surveillance purposes at next year’s race.

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How the non-politician Obama plays politics with his addiction to drones

John Brennan, official portrait.

How could someone who got elected president in the first place with a holier than thou campaign declaring himself above politics now be maneuvering so skillfully to avoid transparency on his addiction to using drones for targeted killing abroad in order to secure John Brennan's appointment as CIA Director?

The NY Times article below points out: "At issue is the critical question of how Congress conducts oversight of a shadow war against people suspected of being terrorists."

Here's the story:

 WASHINGTON — The White House is refusing to share fully with Congress the legal opinions that justify targeted killings, while maneuvering to make sure its stance does not do anything to endanger the confirmation of John O. Brennan as C.I.A. director.

Rather than agreeing to some Democratic senators’ demands for full access to the classified legal memos on the targeted killing program, Obama administration officials are negotiating with Republicans to provide more information on the lethal attack last year on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, according to three Congressional staff members. 

The strategy is intended to produce a bipartisan majority vote for Mr. Brennan in the Senate Intelligence Committee without giving its members seven additional legal opinions on targeted killing sought by senators and while protecting what the White House views as the confidentiality of the Justice Department’s legal advice to the president. It would allow Mr. Brennan’s nomination to go to the Senate floor even if one or two Democrats vote no to protest the refusal to share more legal memos. 

At issue is the critical question of how Congress conducts oversight of a shadow war against people suspected of being terrorists. The administration routinely reports on its lethal drone strikes to both the Senate and the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, but it has long rebuffed Congressional attempts to see the legal opinions that authorize the strikes — let alone requests to make them public. 

Read more:

Finally - the UN investigates our nation's use of drones and targeted assassinations

America's Predator drone.

We've been saying for some time here that Barack Obama, who won the Nobel peace prize for his good intentions, has been leading the U.S. down the road toward becoming the biggest terrorist nation of all with its increasing reliance on drones and targeted assassinations.

We note the irony in our president's recent leadership on the gun control issue in opposition to violence in our own backyards and school buildings while he continues to violate international boundaries to murder those he judges - without trial - our enemies.

Whereas the Obama Administration continues to ignore the outcries of sane members of our society against the use of drones, we can only applaud the UN's decision to intervene in the matter:

WASHINGTON -- The United Nations opened a major new investigation on Thursday into the United States' use of drones and targeted assassinations.

The U.N. investigation, led by special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights Ben Emmerson, is expected to focus on the legal justification for America's expansive drone program, which has largely remained secretive and unexamined.

"The exponential rise in the use of drone technology in a variety of military and non-military contexts represents a real challenge to the framework of established international law," Emmerson said in a statement released by his office.

"It is therefore imperative that appropriate legal and operational structures are urgently put in place to regulate its use in a manner that complies with the requirements of international law, including international human rights law, international humanitarian law (or the law of war as it used to be called), and international refugee law."

Human rights observers have long objected to the use of drones to target suspected terrorists because they often result in wider civilian deaths than administration officials have acknowledged.

But more practical concerns -- about the legality and efficacy of the program, as well as the White House's lack of transparency -- have also been growing.

The United States is by far the leading user of drones and unmanned vehicles for targeted assassinations, but it is not the only one. Drone use is expected to expand widely around the world -- China and Iran already are known to have the capability -- and there have been growing calls for the U.S. to clarify its own internal rules for the appropriate use of the technology.

Read more:

 

MLK jr: "guided missiles and misguided men"

via thethoughtexperiment.wordpress.com

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. have to say about Obama's escalation of the use of drones in four countries to murder - without benefit of trial - those our president declares as America's enemies?

Yes, Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama has outdone George W. Bush in his use of drones, thereby reminding us of MLK's warning about "guided missiles and misguided men."

At the Huffington Post, Norman Solomon highlights the use of drones by a president who campaigned on his superior judgment in opposing the Iraq War Resolution (never mind that he was not a US Senator at the time the resolution passed.)  

Solomon begins:

A simple twist of fate has set President Obama's second inaugural address for January 21, the same day as the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday.

Obama made no mention of King during the inauguration four years ago -- but since then, in word and deed, the president has done much to distinguish himself from the man who said "I have a dream."

After his speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, King went on to take great risks as a passionate advocate for peace.

After his inaugural speech in January 2009, Obama has pursued policies that epitomize King's grim warning in 1967: "When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men."

But Obama has not ignored King's anti-war legacy. On the contrary, the president has gone out of his way to distort and belittle it.

In his eleventh month as president -- while escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, a process that tripled the American troop levels there -- Obama traveled to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. In his speech, he cast aspersions on the peace advocacy of another Nobel Peace laureate: Martin Luther King Jr.

Read more:

Obama’s big boy pants

disquietreservations.blogspot.com.

Winner of the Nobel peace prize for his good intentions, our president is fast achieving the kind of notoriety that Dubya momentarily commanded with his “mission accomplished” swagger. 

Neocons praise Obama for putting on his big boy pants the first time he made a secret kill list and checked it twice before unleashing Predator drones programmed in the name of anti-terrorism to unleash acts of terror against other nations

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf urges Congress to wake up to Obama’s dramatic expansion of executive power, which, of course, includes the right to maintain the above secret kill lists:

Even the Obama Administration agrees that the lethal drone program it runs permits the executive branch to kill too easily. Its officials felt it urgent to codify various constraints when they thought Mitt Romney might win the election, The New York Times recently reported, quoting one official who said, "There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands."

The story went on to report that the efforts are less urgent now that President Obama has won reelection (as if he alone is trustworthy enough to extrajudicially kill all willy-nilly, or to delegate that power to unerring paragons of good judgment like retired CIA Director David Petraeus). Still, the effort goes on with as much transparency as you'd expect: "The draft rule book for drone strikes that has been passed among agencies over the last several months is so highly classified, officials said, that it is hand-carried from office to office rather than sent by e-mail."

So consider this.

The Obama Administration thinks that on the president's authority it can adopt secret rules to a secret killing program, and that the rules will bind future presidents to Obama's notions of prudence?

That isn't how it works. Some David Addington/Harold Koh type could write up a memo demolishing any prudent safeguard the next president found hobbling in no more than a week or two.

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Busting the myth of President Obama as peacemaker and Secretary Clinton as warmonger

Saying no to both the above.

As noted elsewhere on this blog, I’m scheduled for knee replacement surgery tomorrow morning and may not be able to post for a few weeks. Yep. That’s right. Surgery on election day, but I’m ahead of the game; I voted absentee the other day.

The final presidential debate left me no choice but to vote third party. In the concluding minutes of the debate, Gov. Romney enthusiastically voiced his support of the Obama Administration’s use of drones and presumably the president’s kill list, which he continues to develop. I could not in good conscience vote for either of these men.

And keep in mind, if you will, that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton early on urged Obama to cut back on the use of force and develop a more comprehensive approach to fighting terrorism.

So much for the myth of Obama as peacemaker and Hillary as warmonger that Obama loyalists continue to perpetuate despite the growing evidence to the contrary.

America's use of terrorism to fight terrorism abroad

Justice Party's  Rocky Anderson.

The Washington Post's article on the Obama Administration's long term plans for continuation of using drones to take out those on the president's kill list and any innocent civilians who get in the way is scary and sickening stuff to read - it's referred to in the article as America's developing blueprint for fighting terrorism. In other words, America is using terrorism to fight terrorism?

In the final presidential debate Monday night, Gov. Romney expressed his support of the Obama Administration's policy of using drones for targeted killing of suspected terrorists abroad.

Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson, a former Democrat, got it right when he said: “The Constitution has been eviscerated while Democrats have stood by with nary a whimper. It is a gutless, unprincipled party, bought and paid for by the same interests that buy and pay for the Republican Party."

When I completed my absentee ballot the other day, I could not in good conscience vote for either Obama or Romney. I voted instead for the Justice Party ticket: Rocky Anderson and Louis Rodriguez.

 
Read more about Rocky Anderson here.

Commercial drones for hire in the land of the free

The photo on the right shows an armed drone,

America’s current weapon of choice; 

so far, the recently authorized commercial drones are unarmed.

It had to happen, I guess. Once the Obama Administration embraced the hunt down and kill capacity of armed drones in the skies over Pakistan and elsewhere, commercial interests in America would seize on the unmanned aircraft for its own purposes. 

And it being an election year and our malleable president eager to please the people with the bucks, it's understandable that he would hasten to sign a law making it legal for your local real estate agent to check out your back yard without your knowledge, much less your permission.

The New York Times reports this morning:

A new federal law, signed by the president on Tuesday, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors — from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones.

But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises new worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below — and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns like midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue. 

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The hypocrisy of the Left

Peter Daou wants to know if Democrats and so-called liberals are hypocrites on civil liberties. Peter effectively answers that question, while leading off with another:

Glenn Greenwald has spent the duration of Obama’s presidency asking a fundamental question of the left: why are George W. Bush’s transgressions acceptable when President Obama embraces – and expands – them?

Glenn’s latest post on the topic goes directly at the intellectual dishonesty he sees reflected in a new Washington Post poll:

During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the “assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution”: so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices — rather than a big, bad, scary Republican — all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates. …

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Gaddafi’s violent death (video)

After watching the video (see below) of the violent death of Libya's former leader Muammar Gaddafi shown at dinner time on the CBS Evening News. I'm left once again longing for the day when humanity recognizes that when we choose to mete out “eye for an eye”  justice, we lower ourselves to the level of our enemy.

That day appears to be far off as world leaders, including our president and secretary of state, increasingly use the word “kill” as casually as one might order buttered toast and coffee for breakfast at the local diner.

The trend took off when the Bush Administration launched the so-called war on terror, but the real terror is the growing acceptance of barbaric behavior in achieving our goals – behavior that includes the Obama Administration’s love affair with Predator drones, that “tool for assassination from 10,000 feet.”