Month: May 2013

Airplanes have been used to rain death down onto hundreds of thousands of people in their 100-odd years of existence. They also changed the way that people travel. A six month wagon trip turned into a three day train trip turns into a six hour plane flight. That’s airplanes, a morally neutral technology that is both mankind’s greatest dream (flying! like the birds!) and a great tool for his stupidest God damn habit (killing people).

Drones are not as obviously useful as airplanes, since they are not for ferrying humans across countries, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have real purpose. Their defenders are right — drones can be used for film-making, search and rescue, crop-dusting, perhaps even war journalism. But people who confuse the technology with the dead Pakistani children, or with a lying government are forgiven for being unable or unwilling to remember that it’s not the drones themselves that are the problem (mostly, the tech is new…).  The killing, the surveillance  the lobbyists (yep), and the uneven application in the law is and will remain the bigger problem with drones. But they will not be un-invented, so what now?

There’s promise in drones, but it’s easy to see why their threat currently feels bigger; simple precedent. You may like the notion of the Parks Department using a drone to save a lost hiker from death by exposure, but it’s a lot more likely (or more often) that drones in the great outdoors will scope out hidden marijuana fields. And in a world where government spying on potentially everyone is forgiven, but leaking government documents means you’re a criminal, who do you think is going to horde all the surveillance muscle with drones?

A few weeks ago, the Mercatus Institute’s Jerry Brito wrote a piece advocating for freedom and innovation with drones. Brito compared drones to libertarians and tech-Utopianists’ favorite new toy, the 3D printer. Certain people — the State Department, liberals — are terrified by the concept of 3D printed objects like guns, and the aforementioned libertarians et al. are enchanted by their lawless (in a good way!) potential. Drones, Brito argues, are similarly full of possibilities. So to restrict them with even well-meaning laws will be clipping the wings of innovation. If we do that, we’ll never know how far these babies can fly.

Brito’s piece is worth reading, and the concept of wait before you regulate would do the world a lot of good. But if we still want to put the breaks on cop and state use of drones, can we? Can we really pick and choose whose drone use we are restricting? That seems sadly unlikely.

In recent months, there has been a distinct back-lash against drone use. Much of this is based on sound fears of government  and police overreach. But if we pass laws too sloppily, what Brito fears may come true — drones restricted for you and I may not mean the local police department won’t find their way into acquiring one.

As The Verge reported today, Texas’ newly passed anti-drone law now waiting for Gov. Rick Perry signature is very uneven:

The Texas Privacy Act makes it a misdemeanor the use aerial surveillance bots to film any person or private property “with the intent to conduct surveillance.” But it also carves out a whopping 40 exemptions. According to the bill’s text, law enforcement officers will have wide authority to use surveillance drones both with and without a warrant, in order to survey crime scenes or pursue individuals when police have “reasonable suspicion” that they have committed a crime — among a host of other circumstances. The bill also has broad exemptions for oil and electrical companies, real estate agents using drones for “marketing purposes,” educational institutions, and surveilling areas within 25 miles of the Mexican border.

But private citizens, journalists, and other organizations wouldn’t get the same treatment.

It’s nice to think about putting off the drone-topia that everyone is sure will appear. But cops and military always find a way to get the hottest new tech. And John Yoo’s is wrong (what a surprise!), private drone use may present some problems, but that’s not what should be keeping privacy advocates, peaceniks, or libertarians up at night. Like cameras, drones in the hands of private citizens could prove to be powerful weapons against government overstepping. And like cameras, or guns, or 3D printers, governments are going to be very interested in taking that weapon out of the hands of civilians. A great way to do that might just be hasty laws like the one passed in Texas.

National security reporter Josh Rogin published a big scoop on Syria yesterday: “The White House has asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for a no-fly zone inside Syria.”

According to one administration official, “The White House is still in contemplation mode but the planning is moving forward and it’s more advanced than it’s ever been.”

Haven’t we been seeing these headlines warning of a U.S. war in Syria ‘any minute now’ for a long time? About a month ago, The Washington Post reported “President Obama is preparing to send lethal weaponry to the Syrian opposition and has taken steps to assert more aggressive U.S. leadership among allies and partners seeking the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad.” People thought the final straw had broken the camel’s back. I thought, ‘I’ve heard that before.’

David Kenner at Foreign Policy provides a short round-up of such dire “scoops” going back more than a year ago:

May 3, 2013: “U.S. Considering Arming Syria Rebels.” –Radio Free Europe

April 5, 2013: “The White House … is reviewing a new set of potential military options for assisting rebels in Syria.” –Wall Street Journal

March 15, 2013: “CIA begins sizing up Islamic extremists in Syria for drone strikes” –Los Angeles Times

Feb. 26, 2013: “U.S. moves toward providing direct aid to Syrian rebels” –Washington Post

Feb. 7, 2013: “Pentagon leaders favored arming Syrian rebels” –Washington Post

Dec. 3, 2012: “The White House has been loath to make a direct intervention in Syria but clearly indicated Monday that the use of chemical weapons could change the equation.”-AFP

Nov. 28, 2012: “The Obama administration, hoping that the conflict in Syria has reached a turning point, is considering deeper intervention to help push President Bashar al-Assad from power.” –New York Times

Feb. 22, 2012: “Shelling of Homs resumes as U.S. signals possibility of arming Syrian opposition” –Al-Arabiya

Feb. 8, 2012: “International ‘militarisation’ in Syria growing closer, warns US official” –Telegraph

As I’ve consistently argued, the Obama administration’s policy of indirectly arming the rebels through Saudi Arabia and Qatar and meddling in neighboring Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey has worsened the situation considerably. But the rather obvious reluctance to get involved in Syria militarily arises out of a sober reckoning of stark realities which have yet to change. And therefore, there has been little to no change in actual policy.

To get a better idea of where the Obama administration is on Syria, we’d do better to ignore such sensational media headlines and pay close attention to what administration officials and their public advisers say. The President himself has stated U.S. military intervention “could trigger even worse violence,” adding that, “We are not going to be able to control every aspect of every transition and transformation” in conflicts around the world.

Obama’s chief of staff and foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough told The Washington Post this week that, “the reason that the president is being very discerning about how we react to the situation in Syria” has “very much to do with the president’s humility in recognizing the challenges of intervention in this region of the world, which is shown, I think in stark relief, with the situation in its neighbor — namely, Iraq.”

On arming the rebels, a senior White House official told The New Yorker‘s Dexter Filkins earlier this month, “If we’re not careful about who gets weapons, we’ll be cleaning that up for years. We saw that movie in Afghanistan.”

“In Syria, the regime-controlled areas are interspersed with the rebel-controlled areas, so a no-fly zone is not going to stop the killing,’’ [Benjamin] Rhodes [Obama’s deputy national-security adviser] told Filkins. “Once the violence became sectarian, you can’t cover every neighborhood from the air.” And, “What happens when the rebels keep losing?’’ a senior defense official asked reporter Dexter Filkins rhetorically. “What happens when civilians keep getting killed? They will ask us to do more. And we’ll already be in. We will be invested in an outcome.”

Robert Gates, former Obama administration official, told CBS earlier this month that intervention in Syria would be “a mistake.” Summing it up nicely, he asked “Why should it be us” that intervene?

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Carter adviser who has been known to advise the Obama administration on foreign policy, wrote in Time magazine earlier this month that a U.S. intervention “would simply make the situation worse,” and that, “none of the proposals would result in an outcome strategically beneficial for the U.S.”

The realities on the ground which have led Obama to conclude that a U.S. war would be too costly and conspicuously ineffective have not changed. The administration probably leaks out these scary headlines of impending U.S. action to the American press in order to frighten the Assad regime into cooperating in the Geneva negotiations planned for next month.

The pressure on the administration to intervene is increasing by the day, and it could conceivably work, eventually. But for now, the same scary headlines we’ve been seeing for more than a year should be taken with a grain of salt.

For too long I’ve been focused on the ruthlessness of President Obama’s drone war. Indeed, he targets individuals he can’t even identify and, out of the approximately 4,000 people killed, less than 2 percent have been senior al-Qaeda members. The administration assumes that every military-age male killed in a strike zone is an enemy combatant, unless posthumously proved innocent. The unprecedented application of this sweeping, unaccountable robot war conducted almost entirely in secret does have its problems.

But in my fixation on Obama’s murderous policies, I’ve forgotten how much more extreme the other end of the political spectrum can be.

At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf points to a recent National Review piece by John Yoo, George W. Bush’s legal adviser who gave the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld gang the green light on torturing people. Yoo is unsatisfied because Obama’s approach to the drone war – get this – is overly concerned with avoiding civilian casualties.

Now, the U.S. will only use drone strikes against terrorists who “pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” where there is a “near certainty” that the target is present, and there is a “near certainty” that civilians “will not be injured or killed.”

The president risks rendering impossible the only element of his counterterrorism strategy that has bred success. An obvious problem is that there is almost never a “near certainty” that a target is the person we think he is and that he is located where we think. President Obama either is imposing a far too strict level of proof on our military and intelligence officers or the standards will be rarely followed. But worse, if the U.S. publicly announces that it will not attack terrorists if civilian casualties will result, terrorists will always meet and travel in entourages of innocent family members and others — a tactic adopted by potential targets of Israeli targeted killings in the West Bank. Neither of these standards — near certainty of the identity of the target or of zero civilian casualties — applies to wartime operations. President Obama is placing impossible conditions on the use of force for what can only be assumed to be ideological reasons.

Friedersdorf notes sarcastically, “How shameful that policy-making is so ideological these days. You can’t even shoot Hellfire missiles at foreigners whose identities you’re not quite sure about anymore, just because they might be innocent.”

Yoo actually misrepresents the Obama administration’s standards for drone strikes. As outlined in a leaked Justice Department memo, “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” That standard contradicts the legal prerequisite for the use of force by states, that it aim to obstruct an actually imminent attack.

But Yoo’s flippant attitude toward killing civilians is noteworthy in two ways. First – the obvious – is that it reveals a truly sick disregard for the killing of innocent human beings. They can be ripped to shreds, Yoo thinks, if they are near a so-called terrorist.

The second reason it is noteworthy is that Yoo argues trying to avoid killing civilians who are in the vicinity of enemy combatants doesn’t apply “to wartime operations.” Leave aside the legal reasoning for a moment and consider if Yoo would support the same standard in reverse. By his own logic, given that the United States and “the terrorists” are at war, it is also acceptable – indeed, it is a moral obligation – for al-Qaeda to go ahead and bomb the Pentagon City metro stop in Washington, DC because there are a lot of active duty U.S. soldiers there. The fact that those soldiers are hiding among civilians shouldn’t matter to al-Qaeda operatives, according to Yoo’s logic. It’s also fine to bomb a U.S. diplomatic building, granted there are U.S. soldiers there too. How about an attack on the U.S. Capitol, even if there is a tour guide and 50 civilian visitors there as well?

Or does Yoo mean to suggest that standards inherent in “wartime operations,” should only apply to U.S. actions on them, and not the other way around?

Either way, knowingly targeting civilians because they happen to be in the vicinity of an often unidentified suspect presumed to commit some future harm comes dangerously close to the strategy employed by al-Qaeda.

In 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg stated the following, in language that was introduced by Judge Robert Jackson, the lead American prosecutor of Axis war criminals:

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

This means that those who launch a war of aggression are responsible for far more than just the initial death and destruction caused by the war. They should be held responsible for all of the “accumulated evil” that follows and that would not have otherwise occurred. This is a very succinct and intuitive ethical precept that is virtually impossible to argue against. But while this injunction can’t seriously be disputed, it can be ignored, and, in fact, often is by powerful states. Unfortunately, Jackson’s own government has never taken his words seriously, and this has never been more evident than in the case of Iraq.

The United States launched a preventive – not preemptive, contrary to what we often read – war against Iraq in March of 2003. This is now considered old news. Most people are aware that the attack resulted in death and misery on a massive scale – millions of refugees, well over 100,000 dead civilians, an exponential increase in terrorism, and so on. Nevertheless, talk about Iraq has all but disappeared in the mainstream, following the U.S.’s much-ballyhooed “withdrawal” from the country in 2011. The general feeling seems to be that Iraq was a tragic episode, one of the worst “blunders” in the annals of American foreign policy, but is now thankfully behind us. No American service member has been killed in Iraq since November of 2011.

However, the war is far from over for the people of Iraq. They are living with the consequences of the war every day, and will be for quite some time. The country is, to this day, terrorized by suicide bombings, which, crucially, did not exist in Iraq prior to the American invasion. In early 2008, Robert Fisk called the acute reality of suicide terrorism in Iraq “perhaps the most ghoulish and frightening legacy of George Bush’s invasion.” Now, more than five years later, the “perhaps” can safely be removed from that sentence. On Tuesday, 16 more Iraqis were pointlessly killed in several bombings and shootings. The previous day was even more deadly, with a “wave” of bombings killing 58 and wounding 187. The death toll from sectarian violence has just passed 500 for this month alone. Iraq is, by any measure, one of the most dangerous countries in the world, far more dangerous than it was under Saddam. The United States and its allies have direct moral culpability for this state of sheer hell in which millions of Iraqis are living.

Shockingly little attention has been paid to the “evil” that is still very much ”accumulating” in Iraq. It’s virtually impossible to imagine that any of the individuals responsible for carrying out this massive war crime will ever be brought to justice. In fact, the person more responsible than any other just had a fancy new library built in his name, and was the subject of lavish praise from his fellow American statesmen at the opening ceremony. It was a day for Bush to “bask in the sun,” according to the New York Times report on the celebration. Naturally, “Iraq” was one word that “never passed Bush’s lips, or those of the other four presidents who spoke.” That would have been such a buzz-kill.

Judge Jackson’s morally eloquent words are destined to be ignored, because powerful actors generally do as they please, and turning themselves in for war crimes is typically not high on the agenda. At the very least, though, as responsible citizens, we can express, in a variety of ways, outrage and disapproval at our political class pushing the unconscionable horrors the U.S. has inflicted on the Iraqi people under the rug. Minimal standards of compassion and solidarity demand that much.

Justin Doolittle writes a political blog called Crimethink. His writing has appeared on Alternet, Common Dreams, and Counterpunch.

As Eric mentioned on the blog last week, Charley Reese has passed away. He was one of the nation’s best newspaper columnists. I never met him in person but he and I exchanged a few letters.  He struck me as the incarnation of a thoughtful, considerate, Southern gentleman.

Charley’s antiwar bias was in part  the result of his classical understanding of freedom. I especially appreciated Charley’s courage in labeling U.S. government abuses and foreign policy debacles. He had spent too many years dealing with hard facts to be swept away by the latest political mania.  One of Charley’s best columns has been bouncing around lately on the web and is reprinted below:

Politicians, as I have often said, are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Everything on the Republican contract is a problem created by Congress. Too much bureaucracy? Blame Congress. Too many rules?

Blame Congress. Unjust tax laws? Congress wrote them.

Out-of-control bureaucracy? Congress authorizes everything bureaucracies do. Americans dying in Third World rat holes on stupid U.N. missions? Congress allows it. The annual deficits?

Congress votes for them. The $4 trillion plus debt? Congress created it.

To put it into perspective just remember that 100 percent of the power of the federal government comes from the U.S. Constitution. If it’s not in the Constitution, it’s not authorized.

Then read your Constitution. All 100 percent of the power of the federal government is invested solely in 545 individual human beings. That’s all. Of 260 million Americans, only 545 of them wield 100 percent of the power of the federal government.

That’s 435 members of the U.S. House, 100 senators, one president and nine Supreme Court justices. Anything involving government that is wrong is 100 percent their fault.

I exclude the vice president because constitutionally he has no power except to preside over the Senate and to vote only in the case of a tie. I exclude the Federal Reserve because Congress created it  and all its power is power Congress delegated to it and could withdraw anytime it chooses to do so. In fact, all the power exercised by the 3 million or so other federal employees is power delegated from the 545.

All bureaucracies are created by Congress or by executive order of the president. All are financed and staffed by Congress. All enforce laws passed by Congress.

All operate under procedures authorized by Congress. That’s why all complaints and protests should be properly directed at Congress, not at the individual agencies.

You don’t like the IRS? Go see Congress. You think the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agency is running amok? Go see Congress.

Congress is the originator of all government problems and is also the only remedy available. That’s why, of course, politicians go to  such extraordinary lengths and employ world-class sophistry to make you think they are not responsible. Anytime a congressman pretends to be outraged by something a federal bureaucrat does, he is in fact engaging in one big massive con job. No federal employee can act at all except to enforce laws passed by Congress and to employ procedures authorized by Congress either explicitly or implicitly.

Partisans on both sides like to blame presidents for deficits, but all deficits are congressional deficits. The president may, by custom, recommend a budget, but it carries no legal weight. Only Congress is authorized by the Constitution to authorize and appropriate and to levy taxes. That’s what the federal budget consists of: expenditures authorized, funds appropriated and taxes levied.

Both Democrats and Republicans mislead the public. For 40 years Democrats had majorities and could have at any time balanced the budget if they had chosen to do so. Republicans now have majorities and could, if they choose, pass a balanced budget this year. Every president, Democrat or Republican, could have vetoed appropriations bills that did not make up a balanced budget. Every president could have recommended a balanced budget. None has done either.

We have annual deficits and a huge federal debt because that’s what majorities in Congress and presidents in the White House wanted. We have troops in various Third World rat holes because Congress and  the president want them there.

Don’t be conned. Don’t let them escape responsibility. We simply have to sort through 260 million people until we find 545 who will act responsibly.

Continue reading “Freedom Champion Charley Reese, RIP”

In an interview with The Daily Caller, NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake the Obama administration’s targeting of journalists, their sources, and government whistleblowers is an attack on the First Amendment.

“[R]eporters have shared with me privately that some of their most trusted sources within government are increasingly afraid to speak with them, even off-the-record, for fear that they will be monitored and surveilled,” Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the National Security Agency and a whistleblower who was prosecuted by the Obama administration, told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview.

“That’s self-censorship,” he said.

Drake explained to TheDC that he sees a “soft tyranny” enveloping the United States through the federal government’s targeting of journalists and their sources.

Drake accurately describes himself as someone who “became a criminal and was labeled an enemy of the state because I was calling out government wrongdoing and illegality.” Someone that has gone through that experience can be expected, at this point, to be calling out the Obama administration attacks on press freedoms.

But consider what CBS’s Bob Schiefer, your run of the mill, toe-the-line, stenographic broadcast “reporter,” – hardly a brave dissident like Drake – said about Obama’s cold disdain for the press (via Kevin Gosztola):

People often ask me, of all the administrations you’ve covered which was the most secretive and manipulative? The Nixon administration retired the trophy, of course. Since then my answer is whichever administration is currently in power. Information management has become so sophisticated every administration learns from the previous one, each finds new ways to control the flow of information. It’s reached the point that if I want to interview anyone in the administration on camera, from the lowest-level worker to a White House official, I have to go through the White House press office.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out last week, this “establishes a standard where the only information the public can learn is what the U.S. government wants it to know, which is another way of saying that a classic propaganda model has been created.”