John Brennan, Obama's killing czar, opposes drone war?

President Obama listens to Brennan's report. Credits: Public domain.

John O. Brennan's official title is Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, as well as assistant to the president.  Unofficially, the Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf has dubbed Brennan the Obama Administration's Killing Czar. And according to Friedersdorf, even Brennan has qualms about the drone war:

In Djibouti, a small East African country on the Gulf of Aiden, the United States launches killer drones that strike in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. Last spring, as one of the drones sat on a runway, it suddenly came alive "without any human direction, even though the ignition had been turned off and the fuel lines closed," the Washington Post reports. "Technicians concluded that a software bug had infected the 'brains' of the drone, but never pinpointed the problem." It's an anecdote that underscores how easily things can go wrong as America rapidly expands drone fleets and missions. It isn't just that drones are frequently crashing, sometimes on urban neighborhoods, in the part of the world where John Brennan, the top counterterrorism adviser to President Obama, says that he's been most successful controlling the unmanned program. It's that a drone there isn't or wasn't entirely under the control of its minders!

With that in mind, let's turn to Pakistan, where America has carried out more drone strikes than anywhere else. Remarkably, the man who has more power than anyone save Obama over America's kill list has unwittingly made an air-tight argument that the drone war, as presently waged, is deeply problematic. That's what I gleaned from a close reading of the three-part Washington Post series on kill lists, which quotes Brennan and others familiar with his thinking at length.

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Syrian activist nails the difference between vengeance and justice in Qadaffi’s death

Photo courtesy of newson6.com

Scanning the mostly shallow online news coverage this morning celebrating Qaddafi’s violent death, I was heartened to read David Kirkpatrick’s report from Tunisia on the front page of the NY Times. Kirkpatrick quotes a Syrian activist who points out the difference between vengeance and justice in how Qaddafi died – a distinction American and other world leaders appear to have forgotten since 9/11.

Kirkpatrick writes:

TUNIS — Like the flight of Tunisia’s dictator or the trial of Egypt’s, the capture of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi on Thursday afternoon captivated the Arab world, giving a renewed sense of power and possibility. But the photographs of his bloody corpse that circulated just moments later on cellphones and television screens quickly tempered that exhilaration with a reminder of the many still-unresolved conflicts that the Arab Spring has also unleashed.

“This isn’t justice,” Mustafa Haid, 32, a Syrian activist, said as he watched Al Jazeera’s broadcast in a Beirut office. Colonel Qaddafi should have been put on trial, his crimes investigated, Libya reconciled to trust in the law, he said, as though he still hoped better from the regional uprising that began with peaceful displays of national unity in Tunis and Cairo. 

Across the region, Colonel Qaddafi’s bloody end has brought home the growing awareness of the challenges that lie ahead: the balancing of vengeance against justice, impatience for jobs against the slow pace of economic recovery, fidelity to Islam against tolerance for minorities, and the need for stability against the drive to tear down of the pillars of old governments. 

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Another Al Quaeda leader murdered in America’s permanent robotic global war

Anwar Al-Awlaki

The Obama Administration is celebrating this morning the murder of yet another Al Quaeda leader, U.S. born Anwar Al-Awlaki, who had been operating from Yemen. 

Although it took a crew of Navy Seals to execute Osama bin Laden, American forces reportedly took out Al-Awlaki with a drone attack on a convoy in which he was traveling. 

But hold on: the AP reports that civil liberties groups are questioning our government’s authority to kill an American without trial.

We have to ask ourselves, where and when will the violence come to an end. In a post here several years ago, I quoted Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, who, in his book, Calming the Fearful Mind: a Zen Response to Terrorism, wrote:

Many of us claim to be disciples of the Buddha, of Jesus Christ, of Mohammed, but we don’t listen to their teachings. Hatred cannot overcome hatred. Violence cannot overcome violence. The bible, the Koran, the Torah, and the Sutras teach us that. But we don’t always believe in our spiritual path. We must think that our spiritual teachings are not realistic, because we have put so much faith in military and financial power. We think that money and weapons can make us strong. But our country has a lot of weapons and a lot of money and we are still very afraid and insecure.

America’s love affair with drones as our weapon of choice in the so-called war on terror, both abroad and possibly here at home, is evidence of our escalating fear and insecurity. 

Tom Engelhardt offers a chilling post on the latest in guarding the empire:

In the world of weaponry, they are the sexiest things around.  Others countries are desperate to have them.  Almost anyone who writes about them becomes a groupie.  Reporters exploring their onrushing future swoon at their potentially wondrous techno-talents.  They are, of course, the pilotless drones, our grimly named Predators and Reapers

As CIA Director, Leon Panetta called them “the only game in town.”  As Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates pushed hard to up their numbers and increase their funding drastically.  The U.S. Air Force is already training more personnel to become drone “pilots” than to pilot actual planes.  You don’t need it in skywriting to know that, as icons of American-style war, they are clearly in our future -- and they’re even heading for the homeland as police departments clamor for them. 

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Obama’s Afghanistan speech (video)

Let me repeat: along with most of the members of my congregation, I signed a resolution opposing the invasion of Iraq, but unlike Rep. Barack Obama, not once did I consider myself qualified for the presidency.

The issue arose again this evening in President Obama’s speech to the nation regarding the draw down of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. As Chris Good at the Atlantic points out, “The spectacle of this speech, in many ways, centered on Obama's identity as an anti-Iraq-war politician, and his efforts to bridge the gap between his anti-war appeal in 2008 and his needing to steward a difficult effort in Afghanistan today."

In his takeaways from this evening’s oration, Good failed to mention that on President Obama’s watch, as noted recently by Walter Russell Mead, our nation is embroiled in five shooting wars: “in Afghanistan, tribal Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and now, apparently, Yemen.”   

And that’s only a couple of years after the president received the Nobel Peace Prize for his good intentions. There’s also that little dustup going on regarding the War Powers Act of 1973 as it applies to the conflict in Libya.

But never mind all that. Good does give a concise summary of tonight’s speech and in case you missed it, I’ve included the video.

President Obama appeared before network TV cameras at the White House Wednesday night to answer one of the biggest questions of his presidency: how many troops will come home from Afghanistan beginning next month, and how fast will they leave?

Since Obama announced his "surge" of 30,000 troops to that country in December of 2009 -- a move the U.S. public supported, but not by overwhelming margins -- the pace of Afghan withdrawal, and the public's acceptance of whatever plan he chooses, has been seen as a major factor in Obama's long-term prospects for public confidence in his presidency and his hopes for reelection in 2012. With security gains in Afghanistan described to Congress this spring by Gen. David Petraeus as "fragile and reversible," and with a majority of Americans now favoring immediate withdrawal for the first time, President Obama explained Wednesday night that 10,000 troops will return this year, with 30,000 returning by next year.

Now that he's made this announcement, here are 10 short takeaways from his brief speech to the nation:

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Al Qaeda tongue-tied in the face of uprisings in the Arab world

New challenges to bin Ladenism

NY Times foreign affairs correspondent Tom Friedman raises some good questions about U.S. involvement in the Middle East and the Arab world.

In this morning's op-ed, Friedman asks:

When one looks across the Arab world today at the stunning spontaneous democracy uprisings, it is impossible to not ask: What are we doing spending $110 billion this year supporting corrupt and unpopular regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are almost identical to the governments we’re applauding the Arab people for overthrowing?

He continues:

Ever since 9/11, the West has hoped for a war of ideas within the Muslim world that would feature an internal challenge to the violent radical Islamic ideology of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That contest, though, never really materialized because the regimes we counted on to promote it found violent Muslim extremism a convenient foil, so they allowed it to persist. Moreover, these corrupt, crony capitalist Arab regimes were hardly the ideal carriers for an alternative to bin Ladenism. To the contrary, it was their abusive behavior and vicious suffocation of any kind of independent moderate centrist parties that fueled the extremism even more. 

Now the people themselves have taken down those regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and they’re rattling the ones in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman and Iran. They are not doing it for us, or to answer bin Laden. They are doing it by themselves for themselves — because they want their freedom and to control their own destinies. But in doing so they have created a hugely powerful, modernizing challenge to bin Ladenism, which is why Al Qaeda today is tongue-tied. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.

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Pulitzer prize-winning Friedman’s educational background gives him additional credibility on today’s topic: he received a B.A. degree in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975 and in 1978 he received a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford.