The price of becoming addicted to drones

Πηγή: Washington Post
By David Ignatius
Sep. 21 2011


What “rules of war” should apply to Predator drones, the eerily efficient weapons that cruise the skies and target adversaries with the precision of a sharpshooter’s bullet? It’s an urgent question — not simply for the United States, which is expanding its use of drones, but for dozens of other nations that may soon use them to target their own “bad guys.”

Although drones have been controversial abroad, there has been relatively little public debate about them in America. That’s partly because U.S. officials usually won’t discuss their operations, which are highly classified. But officials affirm privately that they have been highly effective against al-Qaeda’s leadership in the tribal areas of Pakistan — and that they are being used in Yemen and Somalia in an escalating campaign against al-Qaeda affiliates there.

These weapons, which project power without risking “boots on the ground,” can become addictive. According to a report last year by a U.N. special rapporteur, more than 40 countries now have drone technology, and nations seeking to arm drones with missiles include Israel, Russia, Turkey, China, India, Iran, Britain and France.

“We have to be extremely careful and prudent about how we use this technology. It’s very efficacious in killing terrorists, but there are significant risks of blowback from its widespread use that could harm our counterterrorism efforts,” argues Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who served in the George W. Bush administration’s Justice Department.

A drone debate, of sorts, took place behind the scenes in preparation for a speech last Friday by John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser. He argued that U.S. legal authority to use force against al-Qaeda wasn’t “restricted solely to ‘hot’ battlefields like Afghanistan” but could be expanded to other theaters “without doing a separate self-defense analysis each time.”

On the eve of Brennan’s speech, the New York Times reported a split within the Obama administration. The Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, was said to have urged broad targeting against groups anywhere that are aligned with al-Qaeda, while the State Department’s legal adviser,Harold Koh, reportedly recommended a more limited rule that, outside Afghanistan and Pakistan, would authorize targeting only individuals actually plotting to strike America.

These disagreements were resolved by Brennan’s speech, which took a hard-line view. Brennan conceded that some key allies, though “converging” toward U.S. legal arguments, “take a different view of the geographic scope of the conflict, limiting it only to the ‘hot’ battlefields.”

Here’s the real question, according to current and former officials: As the United States steps up Predator attacks over Yemen and Somalia, should it adopt the same “signature” targeting it uses over Pakistan? Under this approach, the drones can strike al-Qaeda training camps and fighters not on the list of specific targets compiled by the CIA. The signature approach is more aggressive, but it risks creating what terrorism analyst David Kilcullen calls “accidental guerrillas” — and thereby widening the war.

To understand the debate, some background is useful. The CIA’s legal authority (it conducts attacks over Pakistan and will probably have similar responsibility in Yemen and Somalia) dates to a lethal covert-action “finding” signed days after Sept. 11, 2001. The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center compiles a list of approved targets, usually numbering less than several dozen, based on intelligence that they pose a serious, continuing threat to the United States. That list is reviewed every six months, and names come on and off.

Legal review is done by the CIA’s general counsel, who in turn consults with the White House counsel. Signature targeting was added in 2008, using the same 2001 presidential finding, which was renewed by President Obama in 2009. The rules call for notifying the National Security Council (including the attorney general) if a U.S. person is a target. Such a broader review apparently took place when Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen in Yemen who is a seniorofficial in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was added.

Here’s the real problem with drones. They may indeed reduce collateral damage, as their proponents argue, because of their precision and surveillance. And America’s growing use of them against al-Qaeda may be legal under international law that allows self-defense. But what is legal isn’t always wise.

A world where drones are constantly buzzing overhead — waiting to zap those deemed threats under a cloaked and controversial process — risks being, even more, a world of lawlessness and chaos. Drones have been America’s best weapon against al-Qaeda, but one to use sparingly — against people U.S. intelligence knows are seeking to kill others.

The Libya War argument

Πηγή: Salon
BY GLENN GREENWALD
MONDAY, AUG 22, 2011 07:23 ET

In April, 2003, American troops entered Baghdad and Saddam Hussein was forced to flee; six months later, the dictator was captured ("caught like a rat in a hole," giddy American media outlets celebrated) and eventually hanged. Each of those incidents caused massive numbers of Iraqis who had suffered under his decades-long rule to celebrate, and justifiably so: Saddam really was a monster who had brutally oppressed millions. But what was not justifiable was how those emotions were exploited by American war advocates to delegitimize domestic objections to the war. Even though opposition to the war had absolutely nothing to do with doubt about whether Saddam could be vanquished by the U.S. military -- of course he could and would be -- the emotions surrounding his defeat were seized upon by Iraq War supporters to boastfully claim full-scale vindication (here's one of my all-time favorites from that intellectually corrupt genre).

So extreme was this manipulative way of arguing that then-presidential-candidate Howard Dean was mauled by people in both parties when he dared to raise questions about whether Saddam's capture -- being hailed in bipartisan political and media circles as a Great American Achievement -- would actually make things better. Dean's obvious point was that Saddam's demise told us very little about the key questions surrounding the war: how many civilians had died and would die in the future? What would be required to stabilize Iraq? How much more fighting would be unleashed? What precedents did the attack set? What regime would replace Saddam and what type of rule would it impose, and to whom would its leaders be loyal? That a dictatorial monster had been vanquished told us nothing about any of those key questions -- the ones in which war opposition had been grounded -- yet war proponents, given pervasive hatred of Saddam, dared anyone to question the war in the wake of those emotional events and risk appearing to oppose Saddam's defeat. That tactic succeeded in turning war criticism in the immediate aftermath of those events into a taboo (the same thing was done in the wake of Mullah Omar's expulsion from Afghanistan to those arguing that the war would result in a "quagmire").

As I've emphasized from the very first time I wrote about a possible war in Libya, there are real and important differences between the attack on Iraq and NATO's war in Libya, ones that make the former unjustifiable in ways the latter is not (beginning with at least some form of U.N. approval). But what they do have in common -- what virtually all wars have in common -- is the rhetorical manipulation used to justify them and demonize critics. Just as Iraq War opponents were accused of being "objectively pro-Saddam" and harboring indifference to The Iraqi People, so, too, were opponents of the Libya War repeatedly accused of being on Gadaffi's side (courtesy of Hillary Clinton, an advocate of both wars) and/or exuding indifference to the plight of Libyans. And now, in the wake of the apparent demise of the Gadaffi regime, we see all sorts of efforts, mostly from Democratic partisans, to exploit the emotions from Gadaffi's fall to shame those who questioned the war, illustrated by this question last night from ThinkProgress, an organization whose work I generally respect:




The towering irrationality of this taunt is manifest. Of course the U.S. participation in that war is still illegal. It's illegal because it was waged for months not merely without Congressional approval, but even in the face of a Congressional vote against its authorization. That NATO succeeded in defeating the Mighty Libyan Army does not have the slightest effect on that question, just as Saddam's capture told us nothing about the legality or wisdom of that war. What comments like this one are designed to accomplish is to exploit and manipulate the emotions surrounding Gaddafi's fall to shame and demonize war critics and dare them to question the War President now in light of his glorious triumph.

Of course, ThinkProgress could have just as rationally directed its question to President Obama's own Attorney General, Eric Holder, and his Office of Legal Counsel Chief, Caroline Krass, and his DOD General Counsel, Jeh Johnsen, all of whom argued that the war was illegal on the same grounds as Boehner did. Or they could have directed their comment to the numerous House Democrats who vehemently protested the war's illegality, and to the 60% of House Democrats who voted to de-fund it. Or they could have even directed it to ThinkProgress' own Matt Yglesias, who repeatedly expressed doubts about both the legality and wisdom of the Libya war, and last night wrote:

Let’s wish the best of luck to the people of Libya. Part of the problem with this intervention has always been that the fall of a dictator seems to me just as likely to lead to a bloody civil war or a new dictatorship as the emergence of a humane and stable regime. The effort to build a better future really only starts today.

Those are among the key questions that remain entirely unanswered. No decent human being would possibly harbor any sympathy for Gadaffi, just as none harbored any for Saddam. It's impossible not to be moved by the celebration of Libyans over the demise of (for some at least) their hated dictator, just as was the case for the happiness of Kurds and Shiites over Saddam's. And I've said many times before, there are undoubtedly many Libya war supporters motivated by the magnanimous (though misguided) desire to use the war to prevent mass killings (just as some Iraq War supporters genuinely wanted to liberate Iraqis).

But the real toll of this war (including the number of civilian deaths that have occurred and will occur) is still almost entirely unknown, and none of the arguments against the war (least of all the legal ones) are remotely resolved by yesterday's events. Shamelessly exploiting hatred of the latest Evil Villain to irrationally shield all sorts of policies from critical scrutiny -- the everything-is-justified-if-we-get-a-Bad-Guy mentality -- is one of the most common and destructive staples of American political discourse, and it's no better when done here.


UPDATE: Former MSNBC Donahue producer Jeff Cohen, in his book "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media,” documented the following from MSNBC in April, 2003, as U.S. forces entered Baghdad:

On April 10, three weeks into the war which he portrayed as mission accomplished, [Joe] Scarborough delivered a wacky commentary demanding that "disgraced" war skeptics like Jimmy Carter and Dennis Kucinich admit that “their wartime predictions were arrogant . . . misguided . . . and dead wrong.” This on a show in which he spoke of Iraq possessing WMD. Scarborough was gleeful that antiwar "elitists" like Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Janeane Garofalo were facing cancellations and boycotts. [Michael] Savage joined the conversation to say that "Hollywood idiots" are “absolutely committing sedition and treason." Scarborough responded, "These leftist stooges for anti-American causes are always given a free pass. Isn't it time to make them stand up and be counted for their views?"

With Gadaffi reportedly on the verge of falling, there certainly is a lot of similar chest-beating and boastful demands that war critics confess their shameful error -- as though anyone ever doubted that Gadaffi would fall -- and it all seems every bit as premature and manipulative as this April, 2003, orgy of self-celebrating war dances that took place on the MSNBC precinct of The Liberal Media.