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<font size=4><b>America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill <br>
</font><font size=3>On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing<br>
<br>
</b>By <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/tom">Tom
Engelhardt</a><br>
</font><font size=1>
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175541/tomgram:_engelhardt,_predator_nation/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=60cd1fc1b5-TD_Engelhardt5_13_2012&utm_medium=email#more" eudora="autourl">
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175541/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_predator_nation/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=60cd1fc1b5-TD_Engelhardt5_13_2012&utm_medium=email#more<br>
<br>
</a></font><font size=3>Here’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s
<i>crème de la crème</i>, the most elevated, responsible people, no
matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands. No need
to constantly look over <i>their</i> shoulders.<br><br>
Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could create a
living nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they lead to
measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in which bad things are (with
rare and understandable exceptions) done only to truly terrible
types. In the process, you simply couldn’t be better
protected.<br><br>
And in case you were wondering, there is no question who among us are the
best, most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and judicious people: the
officials of our national security state. Trust them
implicitly. They will never give you a bum steer.<br><br>
You may be paying a fortune to maintain their world -- the
<a href="http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/06/national-security-state/">
30,000</a> people hired to listen in on conversations and other
communications in this country, the 230,000 employees of the Department
of Homeland Security, the
<a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/">
854,000 people</a> with top-secret clearances, the
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/politics/awlaki-killing-is-awash-in-open-secrets.html">
4.2 million</a> with security clearances of one sort or another, the
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1">
$2 billion</a>, one-million-square-foot data center that the National
Security Agency is constructing in Utah, the gigantic
<a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/gregg-easterbrook/2011/01/20/undisciplined-spending-in-the-name-of-defense/">
$1.8 billion</a> headquarters the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
recently built for its 16,000 employees in the Washington area -- but
there’s a good reason. That’s what’s needed to make truly elevated,
surgically precise decisions about life and death in the service of
protecting American interests on this dangerous globe of ours.<br><br>
And in case you wondered just how we know all this, we have it on the
best authority: the people who are doing it -- the only ones, given the
obvious need for secrecy, capable of judging just how moral, elevated,
and remarkable their own work is. They deserve our congratulations,
but if we’re too distracted to give it to them, they are quite capable of
high-fiving themselves.<br><br>
We’re talking, in particular, about the use by the Obama administration
(and the Bush administration before it) of a
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175489/">growing armada</a> of
remotely piloted planes, a.k.a. drones, grimly labeled Predators and
Reapers, to fight a nameless, almost planet-wide war (formerly known as
the Global War on Terror). Its purpose: to destroy
al-Qaeda-in-wherever and all its wannabes and look-alikes, the Taliban,
and anyone affiliated or associated with any of the above, or just about
anyone else we believe might
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175447/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_washington%27s_field_of_screams/">
imminently</a> endanger our “interests.”<br><br>
In the service of this war, in the midst of a
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174965">perpetual</a><b>
</b>state of war and of wartime, every act committed by these leaders is,
it turns out, absolutely, totally, and completely legal. We have
their say-so for that, and they have the documents to prove it, largely
because the best and most elevated legal minds among them have
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/middleeast/secret-us-memo-made-legal-case-to-kill-a-citizen.html">
produced that documentation</a> in secret. (Of course, they dare not show
it to the rest of us, lest lives be endangered.)<br><br>
By their own account, they have, in fact, been covertly exceptional,
moral, and legal for more than a decade
(<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/07/john-yoo-jose-padilla-torture-lawsuit/">
minus</a>, of course, the odd
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer">
black site</a> and
<a href="http://news.antiwar.com/2012/05/09/destroyed-videos-showed-us-torture-victim-vomiting-and-screaming/">
torture chamber</a>) -- so covertly exceptional, in fact, that they
haven’t quite gotten the credit they deserve. Now, they would like
to make the latest version of their exceptional mission to the world
known to the rest of us. It is finally in our interest, it seems,
to be a good deal better informed about America’s covert wars in a year
in which the widely announced “covert” killing of Osama bin Laden in
Pakistan is a major selling point in the president’s reelection
campaign.<br><br>
No one should be surprised. There was always an “overt” lurking in
the “covert” of what now passes for “covert war.” The CIA’s global
drone assassination campaign has long been a
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/cia-chief-drones-only-game-in-town-for-stopping-al-qaeda/">
bragging point</a> in Washington, even if it
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/politics/awlaki-killing-is-awash-in-open-secrets.html">
couldn’t officially be discussed</a> directly before, say,
Congress. The covertness of our drone wars in the Pakistani tribal
borderlands, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere really turns out to have less
to do with secrecy --
<a href="http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/us-drone-strikes-kills-17-al-qaeda-militants-in-abyan">
just about every</a> covert drone strike is reported, sooner or later, in
the media -- than assuring two administrations that they could pursue
their drone wars without accountability to anyone.<br><br>
<b>A Classic of Self-Congratulation<br><br>
</b>Recently, top administration officials seem to be
<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/06/opinion/la-oe-mcmanus-column-transparency-on-drones-20120506">
fanning out</a> to offer rare peeks into what’s truly on-target and
exceptional about America’s drone wars. In many ways, these days,
American exceptionalism is
<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/02/opinion/la-oe-engelhardt-american-exceptionalism-20111202">
about as unexceptional</a> as apple pie. It has, for one thing,
become the everyday language of the presidential
<a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/02/obama-rebuffs-romney-on-exceptional-america/">
campaign trail</a>. And that shouldn’t surprise us either.
After all, great powers and their leaders tend to think well of
themselves. The French had their “<i>mission civilisatrice</i>,”
the Chinese had the “mandate of heaven,” and like all imperial powers
they inevitably thought they were doing the best for themselves and
others, sadly benighted, in this best of all possible worlds.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608461548/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
<img src="http://www.tomdispatch.com/images/managed/fear2.gif" alt="[]">
</a>Sometimes, though, the American version of this does seem... I hate
to use the word, but exceptional. If you want to get a taste of
just what this means, consider as Exhibit One a
<a href="http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/the-efficacy-and-ethics-us-counterterrorism-strategy">
recent speech</a> by the president’s counterterrorism
<a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048317,00.html">
“tsar,”</a> John Brennan, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars. According to his own account, he was dispatched to the
center by President Obama to provide greater openness when it comes to
the administration’s secret drone wars, to respond to critics of the
drones and their legality, and undoubtedly to put a smiley face on drone
operations generally.<br><br>
Ever since the Puritan minister John Winthrop first used the phrase in a
sermon on shipboard on the way to North America,
“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill">a city upon a
hill</a>” has caught something of at least one American-style dream -- a
sense that this country’s fate was to be a blessed paragon for the rest
of the world, an exception to every norm. In the last century, it
became “a shining city upon a hill” and was regularly cited in
presidential addresses.<br><br>
Whatever that “city,” that dream, was once imagined to be, it has
undergone a largely unnoticed metamorphosis in the twenty-first
century. It has become -- even in our dreams -- an up-armored
garrison encampment, just as Washington itself has become the heavily
fortified bureaucratic heartland of a war state. So when Brennan
spoke, what he offered was a new version of American exceptionalism: the
first “shining drone upon a hill” speech, which also qualifies as an
instant classic of self-congratulation.<br><br>
Never, according to him, has a country with such an advanced weapon
system as the drone used it quite so judiciously, quite so -- if not
peacefully -- at least with the sagacity and skill usually reserved for
the gods. American drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are
“ethical and just," "wise," and "surgically precise”
-- exactly what you’d expect from a country he refers to, quoting the
president, as <i>the</i> preeminent “standard bearer in the conduct of
war.”<br><br>
Those drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are based on staggeringly
“rigorous standards” involving the individual identification of human
targets. Even when visited
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/anwar-al-awlakis-family-speaks-out-against-his-sons-deaths/2011/10/17/gIQA8kFssL_story.html">
on American citizens</a> outside declared war zones, they are invariably
“within the bounds of the law,” as you would expect of the preeminent
“nation of laws.” <br><br>
The strikes are never motivated by vengeance, always target someone known
to us as the worst of the worst, and almost invariably avoid anyone who
is even the most mediocre of the mediocre. (Forget the fact that,
as Greg Miller of the <i>Washington Post</i>
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-seeks-new-authority-to-expand-yemen-drone-campaign/2012/04/18/gIQAsaumRT_story.html">
reported</a>, the CIA has recently received permission from the president
to launch drone strikes in Yemen based only on the observed “patterns of
suspicious behavior” of groups of unidentified individuals, as was
already true in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.)<br><br>
Yes, in such circumstances innocents do unfortunately die, even if
unbelievably rarely -- and for that we couldn’t be more regretful.
Such deaths, however, are in some sense salutary, since they lead to the
most rigorous reviews and reassessments of, and so improvements in, our
actions. “This too,” Brennan assured his audience, “is a reflection of
our values as Americans.”<br><br>
“I would note,” he added, “that these standards, for identifying a target
and avoiding... the loss of lives of innocent civilians, exceed what is
required as a matter of international law on a typical battlefield.
That’s another example of the high standards to which we hold
ourselves.”<br><br>
And that’s just a taste of the tone and substance of the speech given by
the president’s leading counterterrorism expert, and in it he’s no
outlier. It catches something about an American sense of self at
this moment. Yes, Americans may be
<a href="http://ap-gfkpoll.com/uncategorized/may-2012-poll-findings">ever
more down</a> on the Afghan war, but like their leaders, they are high on
drones. In a February <i>Washington Post</i>/ABC News poll,
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-finds-broad-support-for-obamas-counterterrorism-policies/2012/02/07/gIQAFrSEyQ_story.html">
83%</a> of respondents supported the administration’s use of
drones. Perhaps that’s not surprising either, since the drones are
generally presented here as the
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175507/tom_engelhardt_remotely_piloted_war">
coolest of machines</a>, as well as cheap alternatives (in money and
lives) to sending more armies onto the Eurasian mainland.<br><br>
<b>Predator Nation<br><br>
</b>In these last years, this country has pioneered the development of
the most advanced killing machines on the planet for which the national
security state has
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175195/nick_turse_the_drone_surge">
plans</a> decades into the future. Conceptually speaking, our
leaders have also established their “right” to send these robot assassins
into any airspace, no matter the
<a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b4a8cc3c-96c0-11e1-847c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1ubYwZkbC">
local claims</a> of national sovereignty, to take out those we define as
evil or simply to protect American interests. On this, Brennan
couldn’t be clearer. In the process, we have turned much of the
rest of the planet into what can only be considered an American
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175535/tom_engelhardt_the_Obama_conundrum">
free-fire zone</a>.<br><br>
We have, in short, established a remarkably expansive set of drone-war
rules for the global future. Naturally, we trust ourselves with
such rules, but there <i>is</i> a fly in the ointment, even as the
droniacs see it. Others far less sagacious, kindly, lawful, and
good than we are do exist on this planet and they may soon have their own
fleets of drones. About
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/19/opinion/cortright-drones/index.html">
50 countries</a> are
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sunday-review/coming-soon-the-drone-arms-race.html">
today</a> buying or
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/drone-world/?pid=859&viewall=true">
developing</a> such robotic aircraft, including Russia, China, and Iran,
not to speak of Hezbollah in Lebanon. And who knows what terror
groups are looking into suicide drones?<br><br>
As the <i>Washington Post’s </i>David Ignatius
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/politicizing-the-drone-debate/2012/05/02/gIQArTMTxT_story.html">
put it</a> in a column about Brennan’s speech: “What if the Chinese
deployed drones to protect their workers in southern Sudan against rebels
who have killed them in past attacks? What if Iran used them against
Kurdish separatists they regard as terrorists? What if Russia used them
over Chechnya? What position would the United States take, and wouldn’t
it be hypocritical if it opposed drone attacks by other nations that face
‘imminent’ or ‘significant’ threats?”<br><br>
This is Washington’s global drone conundrum as seen from inside the
Beltway. These are the nightmarish scenarios even our leaders can
imagine <i>others</i> producing with their own drones and our
rules. A deeply embedded sense of American exceptionalism, a
powerful belief in their own special, self-evident goodness, however,
conveniently blinds them to what they are doing right now. Looking
in the mirror, they are incapable of seeing a mask of death. And
yet our proudest export at present, other than Hollywood
<a href="http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Official-Avengers-Box-Office-Numbers-Even-Bigger-Than-You-Thought-30796.html">
superhero films</a>, may be a stone-cold robotic killer with a name
straight out of a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093773/">horror
movie</a>.<br><br>
Consider this as well: those “shining drones” launched on campaigns of
assassination and slaughter are increasingly the “face” that we choose to
present to the world. And yet it’s beyond us why it might not shine
for others.<br><br>
In reality, it’s not so hard to imagine what we increasingly look like to
those others: a Predator nation. And not just to the parents and
relatives of the more than
<a href="http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/11/more-than-160-children-killed-in-us-strikes/">
160 children</a> the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has documented as
having died in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. After all, war is
now the only game in town. Peace? For the managers of our
national security state, it’s neither a word worth mentioning, nor an
imaginable condition.<br><br>
In truth, our leaders should be in mourning for whatever peaceful dreams
we ever had. But mention drones and they light up. They’re
having a love affair with those machines. They just can’t get
enough of them or imagine their world or ours without them.<br><br>
What they can’t see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is
this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of
death. And death, visited from the skies, isn’t precise. It isn’t
glorious. It isn’t judicious. It certainly isn’t a shining vision.
It’s hell. And it’s a global future for which, someday, no one will
thank us.<br><br>
<i>Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the
<a href="http://americanempireproject.com/">American Empire Project</a>
and the author of</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608460711/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s</a> <i>as well
as</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The End of Victory Culture</a><i>, runs the Nation Institute's
</i><a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/">TomDispatch.com</a><i>. His
latest book is</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608461548/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The United States of Fear</a> <i>(Haymarket Books).<br><br>
</i>Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch">Facebook.</a><br><br>
Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt<br><br>
<br><br>
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