[News] Obama’s Robotic Assassins

[Anti-Imperialist News]

June 13, 2012

A Lethal Hypocrisy


Obama’s Robotic Assassins

by VIJAY PRASHAD
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/13/obamas-robotic-assassins/

“It’s drones, baby, drones.”  - (former) United 
States Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, March 2011.

Unmanned U.S. aircraft now routinely fly over 
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Their 
cameras record the presence of men in motion. A 
commander sitting in a base thousands of 
kilometres away gives the kill order. The U.S. 
President had previously been over lists of 
alleged terrorists and marked off those who can 
be killed. This is the “kill list”. If only one 
person is to be killed, the execution is called a 
“personality strike”. If the drone kills more 
than one person, it is called a “signature strike”.

On September 30, 2011, two U.S. Predator drones 
fired Hellfire missiles at a car in Yemen’s 
al-Jawf province. The missiles destroyed the car. 
Among the four dead were two U.S. citizens, the 
cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and the editor of Al 
Qaeda’s English language magazine Inspire, Samir 
Khan. Two weeks later, on October 14, another 
U.S. drone fired at a group who were on their way 
to dinner. Among the 10 dead were 16-year-old 
Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, the son of the cleric, 
and his 17-year-old cousin Abdulrahman.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) 
estimates that between 2001 and 2012, the U.S. 
launched about a hundred drone strikes in Yemen, 
killing between 317 and 826 people. The civilian 
casualty is estimated to be anywhere between 58 
and 138, of them 24 being children. These are all 
very poor numbers, as the Bureau acknowledges. 
The U.S. has not released any firm data; indeed 
the U.S. continues to have an ambiguous attitude 
regarding its assassination policy. It takes 
credit for the killings, but does not take 
responsibility for the programme itself.

In a stinging 29-page report in 2010, former 
United Nations special representative on 
extrajudicial executions Philip Alston asked the 
major powers to lay out the legal limits to 
extrajudicial assassinations. In a statement that 
accompanied the report, Alston described the 
political problem for the U.S.: “I’m particularly 
concerned that the United States seems oblivious 
to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding 
entitlement for itself to target individuals 
across the globe. But this strongly asserted but 
ill-defined licence to kill without 
accountability is not an entitlement which the 
United States or other states can have without 
doing grave damage to the rules designed to 
protect the right to life and prevent 
extrajudicial executions.” In the quiet rooms of 
the U.N., such language is rare: it asserted that 
the continual U.S. use of drones was not only a 
violation of current norms but a threat to the 
architecture of conflict resolution and the rules of war.

The BIJ collected data not only from Yemen but 
also from Pakistan and Somalia. In Pakistan, U.S. 
drones have killed between 2,462 and 3,145 
people, among whom 482 to 830 were civilians 
(including 175 children). The numbers of those 
injured are upwards of 3,000. After the North 
Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in 
Chicago, the U.S. struck in Waziristan about 
seven times (by June 3). In Somalia, the U.S. 
conducted a handful of drone strikes, with deaths 
reported in the hundreds (among them three 
children). The BIJ’s method is eclectic; it uses 
news reports and speeches. These are, therefore, 
not exact numbers, only indications of a trend. 
With no information forthcoming from the U.S., 
there is no way to have better figures.

The first public admission of extrajudicial 
executions came with the killing of Osama bin 
Laden in 2011, and the first public admission of 
the use of drones came from President Barack 
Obama in an Internet interview on January 30 this 
year. Of the drone attacks, Obama said, “This is 
a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a 
list of active terrorists who are trying to go in 
and harm Americans, hit American facilities, 
American bases and so on.” He said geographical 
conditions necessitated these attacks. According 
to him, the alleged terrorists are in a region in 
Pakistan that is not amenable to a simply 
military operation. “Obviously a lot of these 
strikes have been in the FATA [Federally 
Administered Tribal Areas] and going after Al 
Qaeda suspects who are up in very tough terrain 
along the border between Afghanistan and 
Pakistan.” The key phrase in his statement was 
that he had a “list of active terrorists” who 
could be killed by the unmanned drones.

Lengthy process

On May 29, 2012, Jo Becker and Scott Shane of The 
New York Times confirmed the existence of this 
“kill list”. Two dozen counterterrorism officials 
meet every Tuesday in the White House Situation 
Room to go over the “kill list”, a scroll of 
names with biographies distilled onto “baseball 
cards”. These lists are derived after a lengthy 
process. Once a week, a hundred members of the 
national security apparatus gather to study the 
biographies of suspects and to recommend who 
should be put on the kill list. “This secret 
‘nominations’ process is an invention of the 
Obama administration,” write Becker and Shane, “a 
grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint 
slides bearing the names, aliases and life 
stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch 
in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab 
militia
. A parallel, more cloistered selection 
process at the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] 
focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency 
conducts strikes.” The nominated go onto the kill 
list that Obama and his counterterrorism chief 
John Brennan study and approve. Obama personally 
“signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia 
and also on the more complex and risky strikes in 
Pakistan – about a third of the total.”

Obama came to office promising to end the illegal 
aspects of the War on Terror. He campaigned 
against the extraordinary rendition programme and 
promised to shut down both the “black prisons” 
and the Guantanamo detention camp in Cuba. A 
concern for legality motivated some of these 
rhetorical gestures. Obama suggested that he was 
worried about the civilian casualties – not just 
in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they had begun to 
add up to totals that boggled the mind, but also 
through aerial strikes against alleged terrorists 
in Pakistan, Yemen and eastern Africa.

On January 22, 2009, a few days after he took 
over as President, Obama gave orders for a strike 
in Pakistan. The first strike from a Predator 
drone hit two houses in the village of Zharki in 
Waziristan. It killed 10 people. A second attack, 
a few hours later, struck another village in 
Waziristan and killed eight. Most of those dead 
were civilians. The President apparently asked 
his advisers: “I want to know how this happened.” 
The CIA promised to be more precise in its 
targets. Their claims of “precision” were 
overblown. Civilians (including children) 
continue to fall victim to the drone strikes.

As a result of the failure to target the alleged 
terrorists better, the Obama team has now come up 
with a unique method to define the kill zone. The 
administration “counts all military-age males in 
a strike zone as combatants,” note Becker and 
Shane, “unless there is explicit intelligence 
posthumously proving them innocent.” This is a 
remarkable standard. Anyone near an alleged 
terrorist is now a terrorist. The only way to 
know if they are terrorists or not is after they 
are dead. It is because of this that the Obama 
team accepts very low numbers for civilian deaths (as collateral damage).

This extraordinary standard makes it impossible 
for anyone to be a non-terrorist at the moment of 
the strike. This is the reason why after a strike 
the officials call everyone who has been killed a 
militant. It is also the reason why U.S. Foreign 
Service officials are bewildered by the new 
policy. The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron 
Munter, apparently complained that he “didn’t 
realise his main job was to kill people”.

Extending the use of drones into uncharted 
territory matches another inflation of arms in 
the Obama presidency. Since 2006, the U.S. has 
experimented with cyberwarfare, notably against 
Iran. In his new book Confront and Conceal: 
Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of 
American Power (Crown Books, June 2012), the 
journalist David Sanger details the use of 
cyberweapons such as the Stuxnet. Once more in 
the White House Situation Room, Obama goes over 
detailed plans to strike at the Iranian nuclear 
production facilities and its grid with the 
scientists who planned this operation called 
Olympic Games. “From his first days in office,” a 
senior administration official told Sanger, “he 
was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian 
programme – the diplomacy, the sanctions, every 
major decision. And it’s safe to say that 
whatever other activity might have been under way 
was no exception to the rule.” In other words, 
the President was at the centre of the cyberwar 
against Iran, including against the Natanz site 
in the summer of 2010. At the time, the U.S. 
denied use of cyberweapons, just as it now denies 
that the Flame virus is its invention. Several 
participants in the Situation Room meetings told 
Sanger that Obama “was acutely aware that with 
every attack he was pushing the United States 
into new territory, much as his predecessors had 
with the first use of atomic weapons in the 
1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s 
and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly 
expressed concerns that any American 
acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons – 
even under the most careful and limited 
circumstances – could enable other countries, 
terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.”

The use of drones and cyberweapons is significant 
because they allow the U.S. to use these lethal 
methods without a formal declaration of war. The 
U.S. denies that it is at war in Iran, Pakistan, 
Yemen and Somalia, and yet it uses deadly 
technology to kill and maim. It is this 
technology that enables the U.S. to flout the 
rules of war and its own constitutional 
provisions that mandates Congressional approval 
for war-making. Drones and cyberworms befuddle 
the certainties of the existing laws of war. The 
U.S. has the political power to use these weapons 
(from atomic bombs to cyberworms) first before it 
gets sanctimonious about how they must be used 
and who must have access to them.

With infinite complacency, the U.S. 
administration has stretched and broken the rules 
of war, settling its little affairs in the name 
of a justice that is regularly undermined. Kill 
lists, signature kills, personality kills, 
beacons, electronic moats: a new vocabulary for a 
dangerous and destabilising new kind of warfare. 
With moral outrage, the U.S. turns against 
terrorists who use roadside bombs and suicide 
vests but reserves little of that moral fire to 
turn against aerial bombs and cybershocks. The 
hypocrisy sits uneasily on the surface. A senior 
U.S. official recognised this, but did not use 
the word “hypocrisy” to describe it. He used the word “irony”.

Vijay Prashad’s new book, Arab Spring, Libyan 
Winter , is published by AK Press.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20120613/af9954c8/attachment.htm>