Calling Out Drone War as a War Crime

By Dennis J Bernstein, Consortium News

08 June 16

 

Night and day, U.S. “pilots” sit in cushioned chairs near Las Vegas, commanding drones on the other side of the planet, tracking and killing people, what retired Col. Ann Wright and other activists call a war crime, writes Dennis J Bernstein.

eading the charge against the U.S. “drone war” — now a key part of the Pentagon’s forward fighting strategy — is an unlikely individual, Colonel Ann Wright, who spent most of her adult life as a diplomat, working in the U.S. State Department.

Colonel Wright reopened the U.S. embassy in Kabul in 2001. But in 2003 she took an action that would transform her life. She resigned her position in opposition to the then-impending U.S. invasion of Iraq. Since then, she has become a full time global peace activist.

She also is one of the most vocal and convincing opponents of U.S. drone policy, a collection of activists who call themselves Creechers because – for seven years – they have marched on Creech Air Force Base, also known as Creech Drone Base, in the Nevada Desert, just 60 miles outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. Creech is a key part of the extensive and expanding U.S. drone war operation, which launches lethal drone strikes half a world away.

The protests are spearheaded by Code Pink and are always peaceful, but militant and intense. They consider the U.S. drone war, supervised directly by President Barack Obama, as an ongoing war crime. They do not consider this hyperbole. They say it is a clear-cut case of the slaughter of hundreds of innocent civilians, with many fleeing women and children among the victims.

We caught up with Colonel Wright on her way to an anti-drone symposium at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Law School entitled “Inside Drone Warfare: Perspectives of Whistleblowers, Families of Drone Victims and Their Lawyers.” The symposium would include people who were formally a part of the United States Drone Program. Among them, Christopher Aaron, a former counter-terrorism officer for the CIA’s drone program, and Shawn Westmoreland, who was with the U.S. Air Force’s drone program.

DENNIS BERNSTEIN: Set the Scene. As a former diplomat, somebody who spent a good deal of time in the military, what brings you and Code Pink to Creech for the seventh year in row? What’s at the core for you?

COLONEL ANN WRIGHT: Well, it’s this weapons system. The weapon system that the president of the United States is using as kind of his personal assassination tool.

He has become the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and the executioner of people around the world, who the United States intelligence agencies have identified as people who are doing something that is against U.S. interests. And we certainly know that our intelligence community is not infallible, and they’ve made lots of mistakes.

We also know for a fact that the drone program kills lots and lots and lots of people who are no threat to the United States. In fact, many of us through Code Pink, Women for Peace, and Veterans for Peace, have traveled to the areas where the United States has used these drones, in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen.

And we’ve talked with the families of some of the victims of these drone strikes and we know, for a fact, they are not militants, not all of them. Some of them, maybe. But there is a huge number of people that are called ‘collateral damage’ by our country, as they kill them.

DB: So, just to keep a human face on this: Tell us more precisely about one or two of the people who you met during your global journey against US Drone use.

AW: Yes, well, we’ve had lengthy talks with a man named Fizel from Yemen, whose family was killed. In fact, you can probably hear a drone overhead now. I don’t know if you hear it in the background.

DB: Just a little bit.

AW: You don’t hear these things so much. But they’re flying very low here at Creech Drone Base because the trainee pilots are practicing piloting them. And they come in for “touch and goes,” so you can hear them here, whereas in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other places, they are usually flying quite high.

You may be able to hear a little buzz, but you don’t hear it like you do here. And then the next thing that you hear is a Hellfire missile being fired, or exploding as it hits a family, a wedding party in the case of Fizel from Yemen. And we’ve had him and some other members of his family come to the United States to speak about what happened, about how this mistake could happen to a wedding party.

You know, supposedly, how these drones have very accurate cameras, cameras that can hone in very minutely into people and objects. And how they can make the mistake of identifying a wedding party as a group of militants that are going to be doing something harmful to U.S. interests–this is something that mystifies us. And why the president of the United States continues to believe these [kill] lists that are given to him Tuesdays, Terror Tuesday, by our 17 intelligence agencies. It mystifies me.

DB: Tell me more about the fatal wedding. Who was getting married? Are there other stories like this?

AW: It was one of Fizel’s sons that was getting married. We’ve talked to families that were in Pakistan.

In fact, one young man was attending an international drum conference in Islamabad. He and several other people, a lot of people, had been brought from Waziristan, where the drones usually strike, and had been brought by an international lawyer to Islamabad to talk about what had happened to their family.

His cousin and an uncle had been killed. He was 16 years old, and two days later, when he went back to Waziristan, the car that he was riding in was targeted by the United States, and he and another cousin were killed.

Here’s these 16 year old kids who had just testified before international journalists about what had happened and then the United States either purposefully killed him because he told what happened to his family, or, it was another mistake of the intelligence agency.

So they’ve gotten the wrong people. They’ve gotten people that have nothing to do with violence in their home country, or violence against the United States. They’ve done this all too many times.

When you start doing that…and as a military person…I mean you always have to watch out for weapon systems that have blowback potential. And I think we can say that’s happening with the drones.

There are people who are taking actions against the United States specifically because the United States is using these drones and is killing lots and lots of people with them.

DB: Before I let you go, I really want to tap into your military expertise, and where that comes in, in terms of the work you do based on your conscience. I know you’ve had an impressive military career, and as a diplomat.

Please give your perspective on what this kind of a warfare looks like. What this means to the culture. What this does to society, to the people who carry out these Drone strikes. Is there something specific about this kind of warfare that really puts you to the edge?

AW: Well, I think it’s that our government is always saying that its surveillance programs–their invasion of our own privacy by surveillance through cell phones or through drone actions here in the United States–how precise it is, you know, “very few violations of constitutional rights.”

And yet when you look at what we are doing in other countries where, “Oh, it’s very precise and we’re only killing those people that we know have done something wrong. But we can’t tell you exactly what they did wrong, and we can’t tell you how many other people get killed as we killed them.”

Now it is not one of the priorities of the United States that you bring a person to justice to let a neutral court try whether or not the evidence that is presented is sufficient to convict them of whatever charge it is. What we’re doing is using charges […] or allegations brought by the intelligence community of what this person possibly did and we don’t have a neutral advisor.

We don’t seem to have anyone that adjudicates the evidence. We just have the president of the United States who now has taken the authority to make that decision on whatever is written on this little piece of paper, on a Tuesday, to determine whether a person lives or dies, and along with that person anyone else that might be in that circle.

So it’s very imprecise […] and it in no way correlates to our own judicial look at what humanity is supposed to be doing to each other. There’s no opportunity for that person to defend themselves, to offer evidence to say “Hey, you got the wrong person. Here’s the evidence that shows that I didn’t do anything that you are alleging.” They don’t have that chance at all. They are just blown away.

And people that are in the car with them, are in the house with them, the kids, the relatives, the mothers, the grandfathers are disappeared because our intelligence agency, which is not infallible, has made a mistake. So, those are things that concern me, as a former military, retired military, former State Department person.

We are using a weapons system […] that doesn’t equate at all to what we’ve always thought that our system was supposed to be doing. Which is to give everybody a chance to refute any charges the government comes up with.

DB: I’m wondering if this kind of piloting, if this kind of “remote control murder” by drones, as it has been labeled, has special impact on the people, especially the pilots […] when they find out they just murdered, wiped out, a wedding party of innocents. I’m wondering if this has a special impact on the psyche, if there’s a struggle here, going on at that level?

AW: I think there is. And we have heard from many pilots, and the two that will be speaking tonight were not actually pilots but they were a part of the whole process. One of them was a communications technician that put the communications links up so the drone pilots could be in communication with the incident analyst that might be a continent away.

But we know that the attrition rate on people associated with the drone program is very high. And that indicates that there’s a moral component to this that people are evaluating in their own minds and consciousness and saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

And so the attrition rate is high. The Air Force now trains more drone pilots than it does fixed wing air craft pilots. The incentive to sign up to be in the drone program is very high. Bonuses of $100,000 are not uncommon to get young men and women to join up with the drone program. And yet the attrition rate is very high. So it indicates there’s a moral component here that the drone program probably is touching more than any other weapons system that we have.

DB: Finally, if you had sixty seconds with the President, what do you think you’d say?

AW: I would say, as a military officer with 29 years’ experience, and a U.S. diplomat, that we have a weapons system that is causing blowback to the interests of the United States. Using the assassin program is making the United States more insecure rather than secure. That it is harming our national security, not enhancing it. And that we should stop this drone program. And he, as president of the United States, should stop being the sign-off person on this, because, in my opinion, it’s illegal and he could be put up on war crimes charges. That’s what I would tell him.

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Dennis J Bernstein is a host of Flashpoints on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.  You can access the audio archives at  www.flashpoints.net.

Muhammad Ali Was a Hero, but His Enemies Have a Legacy Too

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

08 June 16

 

Pentagon learned from the epic mistake of making a martyr of the world's most gifted and famous athlete

hen I was growing up, it was impossible to imagine anyone cooler than Muhammad Ali. He had the perfect looks of a rock star, was hilariously funny, and was beautiful to watch in the ring. My friends and I used to pop in tapes of his fights and double over laughing watching his opponents flail about in search of that infuriatingly pretty face of his.

As is the case with many people who are reflecting on Ali's legacy right now, Ali for me later in life also defined what it meant to stand on a principle. The story of how he defied the government and risked jail because he refused to kill on command was easy even for a young person to understand.

So I was saddened to hear of his death earlier this weekend. It's unlikely we'll ever see anyone like Ali again, and not just because he was a billions-to-one marvel of physical and mental gifts.

It's also because his enemies learned from the mistake they made, and spent a generation making sure that the next of his ilk, in the unlikely event that he or she ever comes along, won't become so powerful a dissenting influence.

Ali was famously a person who could make a stage out of anything. Even his weigh-ins turned into acts worthy of Carnegie Hall. But on April 28, 1967, the U.S. government handed him the biggest stage of his life.

At an armed forces examining station in Houston, he refused to step forward to a white line when his name was called. That one step would have signified his willingness to be drafted.

The awesome drama of that moment made Ali hated at the time, but also turned him into a martyr to history. The symbolism of a man who made his living fighting refusing to fight was extraordinarily powerful.

Ali furthermore brilliantly used the moment to link America's bloody quagmire overseas to the domestic warfare that had broken out in places like Watts, Rochester, Newark, Cleveland, Detroit, and Division Street, Chicago.

"My conscience won't let me shoot my brother or some darker people," Ali said. "And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger."

Asking Ali to step forward that day in Houston was an epic strategic blunder. The last thing Lyndon Johnson or his successor Richard Nixon needed was to have Americans of any age, but particularly young people, making a connection between racism at home and wars of colonial domination abroad.

But by demanding that a man as prideful and magnetic as Ali submit to becoming a cheerleader for the bloodshed in Vietnam, that's exactly what they did.

Even stripped of his title, Ali had enormous influence. He grew up in the dawn of the television age, for which his outsized personality was perfectly suited. He was one of the first people to understand the power of celebrity in the mass-media age, and became one of the first truly international media icons, more famous than JFK, Elvis, Khrushchev or the pope.

After refusing induction, Ali used that celebrity to become a dangerous and persuasive critic of the American state. Right away, he received public statements of support from people like Jim Brown, Lew Alcindor (the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Bill Russell and Martin Luther King, instantly giving him credibility with young people, particularly nonwhite young people.

King, incidentally, had pivoted toward criticism of the war right around the same time that Ali was refusing induction. He gave a speech in 1967 called "Beyond Vietnam" that made a lot of the same points Ali did.

"We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society," King said at Riverside Church in New York on April 4th of that year, "and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."

A year after that, unrest over the war essentially cost Lyndon Johnson his presidency. Abroad, the Tet Offensive sent American troops reeling toward a crushing defeat.

And later on, media efforts like the horrific "running girl" photo and the documentary Hearts and Minds helped confirm in the minds of large numbers of Americans a previously unthinkable idea: that the United States, savior of the world in the war against Nazism, was now the bad guy in the movie, a villain state that had murdered hundreds of thousands or even millions of poor civilian farmers for the sake of — what exactly?

The lesson the government should have learned from this disastrous episode was not to try to project power and influence by military occupation. Instead, the Pentagon saw Vietnam as a public relations failure. What military leaders thought they learned from the Indochinese fiasco is that wars are won on the airwaves as much as on the battlefield.

It's not a terribly well-advertised fact, but the Pentagon has the single largest public relations budget in the world, annually spending billions to make sure that what happened in the Sixties does not happen again.

It's being said a lot in the wake of Ali's death that his counterparts today would never make the sacrifices he made. "Today's transcendent athletes are too busy protecting their bank statements to make a political statement," is how Christopher Gasper of the Boston Globe put it.

That might be true, but it's also true that today's athletes haven't been asked to do what Ali was asked to do. Nobody is asking LeBron James to step forward to any white line. Nobody tried to draft Randy Moss or Albert Pujols to fight in Iraq. Who knows what might have happened if someone had?

The government eliminated that variable decades ago. In 1971, just as a comebacking Ali was preparing for the "fight of the century" against Joe Frazier, Richard Nixon signed a new selective service law that led to the end of the draft and the volunteer army. No more Ivy Leaguers or mouthy celebrities would be sent off to fight. It would be mostly poor kids from farms and inner cities on the front lines from now on.

Later on, the military instituted a series of new rules governing the behavior of the press in war zones, of which the ban on photographing military coffins was only the most famous. The Pentagon tightly controlled the imagery that was sent home, making sure that our living rooms weren't filled with footage of young Americans, to say nothing of foreign civilians, being shot and mutilated.

The all-volunteer army, coupled with the new media rules, allowed America to go to war in Iraq without the same level of virulent dissent it felt during Vietnam. One of the particular successes of the new PR strategy was the near-total lack of outrage or empathy over the deaths of Iraqi civilians.

Muhammad Ali in the Sixties easily penetrated Pentagon propaganda about the enemy in the jungle by pointing out that he personally had no quarrel with the Vietnamese. He forced Americans to think about the moral consequences of killing other human beings half a world away who really had nothing to do with us, until we started herding them into "strategic hamlets."

But a generation later, we Americans mostly lack the instinct to even ponder those questions. We sit through movies like American Sniper that tell us that Iraqis are villains because they shoot at our soldiers. The question of why we were ever there in the first place to shoot or be shot at is not talked about as much.

In large part that's because the government has successfully sanitized the use of force. The brutality and ugliness of war is mostly kept separate from pop culture. Wars look like video games to young people today. This isn't an accident. It's the result of billions of dollars of research and propaganda devoted to the problem of preventing the wholesale attacks of conscience that broke out during the Sixties.

Ali wasn't a perfect person. His cruel treatment of Joe Frazier in the runup to their three epic fights is a particular stain on his legacy. That Ali himself came to understand this only slightly diminishes the fact.

But he was still a hero, flaws and all. He would have been larger than life anyway, but his defiant stand against his own government amplified his legend as a fighter of bottomless will and courage, and made him a towering figure in our history.

When he's laid to rest later this week, most people will remember how much he was beloved for those qualities. But let's not forget that not everyone loved him, or found him and his defiance so charming. His detractors have a legacy as well, one that sadly enough might outlast his.

We remember Muhammad Ali in his own words of wisdom and bravado.

Watch here.