At a debate at Fordham Law School Monday night, former Bush administration lawyer and Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith said that the United States' drone war "is actually not controversial" because the American public strongly supports it.
As you might imagine, the U.S. drone war is much less popular in Pakistan.
Why should we care? Because that could create some serious problems for the United States and its "war on terror."
As a new NYU and Stanford Law School report points out, the vast majority of those living in the regions where drones hover above their head threatening to drop bombs at any moment are appalled by the CIA's remote-controlled killing campaign. And even while some Pakistanis appreciate the U.S. effort to eradicate extremists in their midst, 97 percent say the U.S. drones are bad policy.
As the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, it's not clear whether Pakistan has consented to the U.S. actions in their airspace, which also raises the question of whether the U.S. has legal authority to act there.
Similar concerns have emerged in Yemen.
This might not matter to many Americans, who see the drone war as essentially cost-free. But the terrorist threat is coming from Muslim countries with growing anti-U.S. sentiment, as recent protests in Pakistan and Yemen demonstrate. It's time for the United States to rethink what it's doing in that part of the world.
For example, are we at war in Yemen?
The U.S. government won't say. Although it's well known the U.S. government has used drones to bomb there since 2001, killing up to 1,026 people, according to the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, U.S. officials have never really explained why. A series of speeches from administration officials over the last year have assured the American public that we needn't worry, it's all perfectly legal, either because the U.S. is in an armed conflict in Yemen or because it's acting in self-defense. But government officials have never explained how three failed attempts by an al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen to attack targets in the United States rises to the level of a war. Nor will they explain why hundreds or possibly over 1,000 people the U.S. has killed there were targeted.
Targeted killings abroad may be justified, whether done by drone or otherwise. Under international law, the U.S. government can kill members of enemy armed forces it's at war with, or because the individual targeted poses an imminent threat to American lives. But a growing number of both journalistic and academic reports suggest the U.S. drone program is targeting far more broadly than that.
And the consequences are serious. As a Pakistani photojournalist told the NYU/Stanford researchers: "When people are out there picking up body parts after a drone strike, it would be very easy to convince those people to fight against America."
In Yemen, al Qaeda affiliates have grown rapidly as the U.S. has stepped up its drone program. As Yemeni activist Ibrahim Mothana writes in the New York Times:
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had just a few hundred members in 2009, and controlled no territory. Today it has, along with Ansar al-Sharia, at least a thousand members and substantial operational spaces in Abyan and Shabwa, in addition to a presence in Mareb, Rada, Hadramout and other regions of Yemen.
It's time to start challenging the myth of the cost-free "surgical" drone strikes. Goldsmith insisted the other evening at Fordham that they allow U.S. bombing to be "more precise than it's ever been before." Perhaps, but it's still illegal (and unwise) to bomb a country if we're not in a war there and the target doesn't present an imminent threat to the United States.
U.S. officials insist every strike meets one of those criteria. But that's just not plausible. As Micah Zenko, who's been closely tracking the drone war at the Council on Foreign Relations told Noach Shachtman at Wired:
The claim that the 3,000+ people killed in roughly 375 non-battlefield targeted killings were all engaged in actual operational plots against the U.S. defies any understanding of the scope of what America has been doing for the past ten years.
It's also a fiction to call the strikes "surgical."
You don't do surgery with bombs. Missiles fired from drones hovering high in the sky destroy much more than just the intended individual target. The NYU/Stanford report notes that the "blast radius from a Hellfire missile can extend anywhere from 15-20 meters; shrapnel may also be projected significant distances from the blast."
The missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs. Those who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss.
In Yemen, U.S. drones have reportedly killed four U.S. citizens. Only one of them, Anwar al-Awlaki, was an intended target. Three U.S. citizens -- including Awlaki's 16-year-old son -- were "collateral damage."
Indeed, although the United States says it's targeting only high-level al Qaeda leaders, studies show that's not most of who's being killed. (A New America Foundation study found only two percent are high-level "militants;" a Brookings Institute study concluded about 10 civilians are killed for every "mid and high ranking" terrorist leader.)
Recent protests against the U.S. government in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere were sadly sparked by a stupid anti-Muslim video. But they reflect a much deeper antagonism toward the United States, which is viewed as meddling in the Middle East and North Africa and trampling on Muslim values in the process. The United States' covert killing campaigns there aren't helping.
The United States needs to show that we all share at least one very important value: the sanctity of human life. If the Obama administration believes killing Muslims in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere via remote-controlled drones is truly necessary to protect the U.S. homeland, then it needs to do a far better job of explaining why.
Follow Daphne Eviatar on Twitter: www.twitter.com/deviatar
Hanna Trudo: Yemeni President Offers Washington-backed Drone Endorsement
Drone strikes in Pakistan have killed many civilians, study says
Drone strikes kill, maim and traumatize too many civilians, US study says
Mankind at war with self
Torture, mass murder, inhumanity punctuates our own self imposed downfall. http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/promo.html
The types of crimes committed by the fbi/cia/dod,etc., as I have witnessed over the course of my lifetime are not new to mankind; indeed, for as long as man has walked on the face of the earth he has been confronted with his own savagery and inhumanity to fellow man. War has become legal; fbi/cia covert intelligence operations (including mass murder and other assassinations & tortures) are well known by many but never spoken about in polite conversations because they are also legal by awful custom. Thus, the end game for man is now being shaped by the most barbaric feature of his character: man's criminal urge to destroy one another for myriad purposes. Mark Twain perhaps captured this truth as he said,
" A crime preserved in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law."
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/intellectualgian.html
http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/part4-worldinabo.html
http://hamsayeh.net/society/2176-amerika-is-dead.html
http://phillyimc.org/en/must-prosecute-fbicia-assassins-clandestine-murders-0
But restrict its use to US territory.
No need to offend other people if you don't have to.
But you’ll hear none of this in the presidential debates. Perhaps the candidates will mention that obsolete, ineffective, and wildly expensive weapons systems could be cut, . The problem is: it wouldn’t put a real dent in national defense spending. Currently almost one-fifth of every dollar spent by the federal government goes to the military.
GPS, Search Warrants, you know all the little details.
if its a legitimate war then drones are ok.
anyway war can't be "illigal", thats a joke.
anyway it sosn't work that way.ask history.
Take the Yemen case. 4 years ago, there were maybe 10 activists fleeing Saudi Arabia and finding refuge in some tribal area in Yemen. Now potentially thousands are roaming the countryside, the country is disintegrating, in turmoil, the central gov't has even less sway than it held before. Utter chaos and destruction. Hundreds of thousands are antagonized by the US, where they looked to the US to support their non-violent campaign for democracy before.
Way to go.
Even on a practical, non-moral level, this policy is totally counterproductive.
As usual. US foreign policy, invariably producing results the opposite of what was intended.
Even the Vietnam war was entirely preventable, and especially, communism could have been prevented from spreading, if not for the completely misguided US intervention.
Yep, that's what victory in the Clash of Civilizations looks like.
They get tired of being contemptible, and want to change, To produce change, they reach for restructuring. To achieve restructuring, they allow openness, Then their walls fall.
It worked with the former Jailhouse of Nations; it can work with the Spiritual Jailhouse.
The Vietnamese independence struggle first looked for support to the US; it declined, preferring to support French colonialism; so the decolonization movement was forced to look elsewhere for support. It was no surprise they ended up under communist (Soviet Union and Chinese) influence.
Had the US supported the non-communist resistance outright from the beginning, there would have never been a Vietnam war. On the contrary, it would have won a staunch ally.
It's very simple. You kill people, their loved ones want revenge. Exponentially so. In the end, you'll have to kill hundreds of millions of people.
All this is made possible because of racism. Non-western lives are worth not even 1/100th of western lives. They are subhumans. They are not men, women, children, grandparents, husbands and wives. They do not want a middle class life for themselves. They do not want to live like Americans. They do not love, fear, regret, hope, aspire.
They are subhumans and we can do anything. Because they can't touch us.
This is shooting at a mosquito with a cannon. On the off chance someone might be planning an attack on US citizens, we kill thousands of innocents, thousands of miles from home, and call that 'self-defense'. Goebbels couldn't have put that better.
The more you kill, the bigger the chance someone might actually want to take revenge, where these people wouldn't have dreamed of becoming violent before.
This policy is completely immoral.
There is no war, other than US bloodlust, hysteria and paranoia.
'I just pushed a button, I didn't actually kill someone, it was just a video game screen'