The dark future foretold by drones: detaching brutality from humanity

The Reaper drone. Photo credits: Public Domain.

In A Brief History of Drones at The Nation, John Sifton points out the frightening linguistics associated with America’s unmanned aircraft:

The weapons’ names suggest ruthless and inhumane characteristics. The first drone aircraft deployed by the CIA and Air Force after 2001 was the Predator, a rather coarse name even for a weapons system, suggestive that the enemy was not human but merely prey, that military operations were not combat subject to the laws of war but a hunt. (Some of the computer software used by the military and the CIA to calculate expected civilian casualties during airstrikes is known in government circles as Bug Splat.) The Predator’s manufacturer, General Atomics, later developed the larger Reaper, a moniker implying that the United States was fate itself, cutting down enemies who were destined to die. That the drones’ payloads were called Hellfire missiles, invoking the punishment of the afterlife, added to a sense of righteousness.

Sifton continues:

But the real issue is the context of how drones kill. The curious characteristic of drones—and the names reinforce this—is that they are used primarily to target individual humans, not places or military forces as such. Yet they simultaneously obscure the human role in perpetrating the violence. Unlike a missile strike, in which a physical or geographic target is chosen beforehand, drones linger, looking precisely for a target—a human target. And yet, at the same time, the perpetrator of the violence is not physically present. Observers are drawn toward thinking that it is the Predator that kills Anwar al-Awlaki, or its Hellfire missiles, not the CIA officers who order the weapons’ engagement. On the one hand, we have the most intimate form of violence—the targeted killing of a specific person, which in some contexts is called assassination—while on the other hand, the least intimate of weapons.

This characteristic, the distance between targets and CIA executive officers at Langley, is the defining characteristic of drones. They are the zenith of the technological quest that runs back to the invention of slings and arrows thousands of years ago, efforts of the earliest perpetrators of violence to get away from their victims. That process, which brought catapults and later artillery, reached its first peak with the development of intercontinental nuclear missiles; but those are weapons of limited tactical use and have never been used. Drones allow all the alienation of long-range missions but with much more flexibility and capacity for everyday use. The net result is everyday violence with all the distance and alienation of ICBMs. This is disturbing perhaps because alienation is disturbing.

Sifton concludes:

The issue is not that armed drones are more terrible or deadly than other weapons systems. On the contrary, the violence of drones today is more selective than many forms of military violence, and human rights groups recognize that drones, in comparison with less precise weapons, have the potential to minimize civilian casualties during legitimate military strikes.

Nor is the issue the remote delivery of weapons: alienation from the effects of violence reached a high-water mark in World War I. What makes drones disturbing is an unusual combination of characteristics: the distance between killer and killed, the asymmetry, the prospect of automation and, most of all, the minimization of pilot risk and political risk. It is the merging of these characteristics that draws the attention of journalists, military analysts, human rights researchers and Al Qaeda propagandists, suggesting something disturbing about what human violence may become. The unique technology 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.

In this sense, drones foretell a future that is very dark indeed.

America’s enemies: “Just give them death”

Romney: "Bin Laden got what he deserved, a bullet in the head.

Roger Simon at Politico has tapped into America’s bloodlust and thirst for revenge that’s still going strong more than ten years after 9/11. 

Simon highlights the fact that Republicans and Democrats are bipartisan on the issue, although he needn’t have brought religion into it. 

We all know the Quakers, the Religious Society of Friends, represent the sane folks within the Christian tradition. 

Simon said:

Just in case you sometimes get Mormons and Quakers confused, Mitt Romney cleared things up Monday night.

“Bin Laden got what he deserved,” Romney, a Mormon, said at a Republican debate in South Carolina. “A bullet in the head.”

The crowd, as debate crowds sometimes do, went wild.

The audience assembled in Myrtle Beach at a Fox News/Wall Street Journal debate seemed so amped up even before the debate began, in fact, that I thought they were going to have to string up chicken wire to protect the candidates.

The primary is Saturday, and it is generally agreed that if Romney wins — it would be his third victory in a row — the Republican nominating race effectively will be over, just 18 days after it began.

So spirits are running high, and all the other Republicans are running hard at Romney.

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The deterioration of the United States since 9/11

Posting hours after bin Laden’s death was announced on May 2, I suggested the notorious one may have won the battle he led against the Western world. Bob Burnett, Berkely writer and retired Silicon Valley executive would agree. Burnett writes:

The death of Osama bin Laden is an opportunity to reflect upon the deterioration of the United States since the attacks on September 11, 2001. We've entered into an endless state of war and our economy teeters on the brink of collapse. And, as a people, we've developed a distinctive derangement.

America's craziness developed in four stages over an eleven-month period: First, on November 7, 2000, there was a controversial presidential election. On December 9th the US Supreme Court intervened, and, as a result, George W. Bush became president. Bush had had an undistinguished business and political career and was the least qualified presidential candidate in eighty years.

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Time to sober up and reassess the price we’ve paid since 9/11

In the midst of celebrating bin Laden’s death, someone is actually pausing to assess the cost of America’s war on terror since 9/11. Dan  Froomkin at the Huffington Post has the story and folks, it’s time to sober up:

 (Psst - it wasn't Social Security and Medicare that caused the great recession.)

WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden's death doesn’t end the post-9/11 era, but it does provide an occasion to look back at everything that’s happened since the attacks nearly 10 years ago and reassess the costs.

It’s been a long, grueling and enormously expensive time for this country, a time of endless war and massive fortification, of borrowed money and of missed opportunities.

There’s the human toll. More than twice as many Americans -- over 6,000 -- have now died in the two wars that followed 9/11 than did in the original attacks, along with more than 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans. Over three million Iraqis and 400,000 Afghans remain displaced. Several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers suffer from long-term war-related injuries and health problems, with more than 200,000 diagnosed with traumatic brain injury alone.

And there’s the extraordinary financial toll. Indeed, even as Washington officials panic about the growing deficit, much of the problem can be traced back to 9/11 -- not to the attack itself, but to the response, and particularly to the decision to go to war in Iraq.

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