Author: Lucy Steigerwald

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.

In the U.S., our job for today is clear. It’s Memorial Day and there are a solemn thoughts to have and wreaths to lay. “Ultimate sacrifice” must be repeated again and again. And as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes learned last year, best not to raise even the smallest question of whether  painting each and every dead soldier with a broad “hero” brush is accurate.

President Obama visited the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and gave a speech  mourning the fact that war touches so few American lives these days. Not, mind you, because that makes wars harder to stop, but because “not all Americans may always see or fully grasp the depths of sacrifice, the profound costs that are made in our name, right now, as we speak, every day.” It’s true that war is dull and endless to much of America now, and that soldiers who return from war broken and riddled with PTSD are tucked away out of sight. But discomfort with the reality of war — even its effects on “our” guys and gals — has never stopped celebration and perpetuation of its theoretical gloriousness.

There are are a lot of dead to consider on a day like today — certainly they weren’t all bad people, even when the cause was American imperialism and they were — at best — draftees too scared to drop everything and run to Canada. (What about all those dead draftees? Aren’t there a few peeved young dead men wondering why they’re being celebrated today?)

So what’s Memorial Day for? We already have Veteran’s Day. November 11 once celebrated something solemn and tangible — the end of a war. Not a well-ended war, considering how easily it lead to the worst one in history. But honoring the stoppage of that carnage — albeit too little, too late for 15 million men — is a truer celebration than a non-specific day of thanking veterans for their “service.” Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 declaration to mark the day was war mongerish, but the 1926 Joint Resolution by Congress about Armistice Day was downright dovish:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; […]

We used to actually celebrate the end of a war in America. What a strange concept. But after World War II and Korea, veterans were included in the honoring, and Armistice Day turned to Veteran’s Day.

Funny also how Decoration Day turned to Memorial Day. After the Civil War, mourning families put flowers on the graves of their fallen. But that personal sorrow, too, became a generic “celebration” instead of a response  — albeit one officially respectful to the cause — to the blood and misery of the Civil War. Now you needn’t think about World War I or the Civil War, or try to picture them. Just consider nice ideas like the bravery of veterans and the solemnity of memorializing dead soldiers in between carefully browning each side of your barbecuing bratwurst. If we’re all mourning dead soldiers today, and honoring living ones in November, what does it matter how they die, or who they’ve killed? With one sweep, it’s all honorable, and it’s all tragic, and that turns reality into a bumper sticker.

Over at Free Association, Sheldon Richman is celebrating the day as he always does, by watching the film The Americanization of Emily. This masterpiece goes beyond a Catch-22-type absurdest critique of the lunacy of war, and  more daringly critiques the dangers of memorializing soldiers the way that we do. Says the main character at one point:

I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades . . . we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows’ weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices….

Yet another thing that war robs from family members of dead soldiers is a way to mourn their loved ones without helping to prop up the very system that had them killed. It is not morally neutral to join the military, and so it’s not morally neutral to mourn war dead. At least not while this dangerous cult of adoration exists. And not while every dead American soldier is a tragedy, and a young, brave life taken, but every dead foreigner is a shame at best, but usually just a number, just one forgotten number out of hundreds, thousands, and millions.

The 1993 Waco siege is often categorized as one of the more violent, militaristic, domestic actions by U.S. law enforcement in recent memory. And it should be. At the Branch Davidian’s “compound” a fatal combination of government arrogance, fear, impatience, and aggression lead to 76 bodies, including 20 children.

A less bloody confrontation took place in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985 — but the relatively low body count in the MOVE standoff (11 people, including 5 children) was no thanks to law enforcement. MOVE were a group of black activists who were anti-technology and government, pro-environmentalist, and who had a history of confrontations with law enforcement. Their neighbors had complained the group was loud and messy and aggressive. On May 13, attempts to evict MOVE and serve arrest warrants for four of the members led to an armed standoff. And when law enforcement grew too impatient to wait out the group, they simply dropped a C4/Tovex bomb on the house — ostensibly to dislodge a wooden structure on the roof — which turned into a fire that spread unchecked  and took out 60-some homes, the entire block.

Like Waco, this standoff with so-called radicals involved disputed who-fired-first exchanges of gunfire; it also involved members being jailed, while government and law enforcement officials got — at best — a stern talking-to. By 1999, when law enforcement finally admitted they had used incendiary devices at Waco, many people felt that the standoff had been a disaster. But nobody in the ATF, FBI, or Department of Justice was ever charged. And nine surviving Branch Davidians went to jail, one for 15 years.

There are more parallels with Waco: accusations that the MOVE members set a fire themselves, counter-accusations that police held firefighters back (this was definitely true at Waco and MOVE both).

Today CBS Philly has an interview with one of two survivors of the standoff, Ramona Africa:

“The whole house shook, but we didn’t know what it was,” says Africa, recalling the moment the city dropped explosives on the MOVE home on Osage Avenue. “We didn’t even know initially that there was a fire.”

Africa says she was in the basement when the bomb hit.

She and her family were holed up, in a standoff with police and other city officials.

Africa says the authorities employed water tactics and tear gas…then the explosives.

“We tried to get our children, our animals, ourselves out of that blazing inferno,” she says. “And as the cops saw us coming out, they opened fire.”

Accounts of the day vary. Philadelphia police have disputed Africa’s account. She escaped, with injuries, along with one child survivor, Birdie Africa, who was 13 at the time.

“We never saw Birdie again after that until my criminal trial,” she says. “He testified. His mother was killed in the bombing.”

Africa spent seven years in prison for her part in the standoff, but no one from the city was ever charged. She filed a civil lawsuit against the city and won after years of litigation.

The rest over here.

The point? Only that law enforcement began militarizing before there was a Department of Homeland Security to offer plush grants for cool new tech. And while Waco may have been a high-water mark in domestic brutality, MOVE also deserves to be remembered. Both incidents serve to underline the point that long before terrorism was the excuse for a “war at home,” that war was already happening for unsympathetic groups in the United States. And as in any war, if the casualties are not members of a favorite elite, their deaths are nothing more than unfortunate collateral damage.

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, Thomas E. Ricks, meet David Sirota. Sirota, meet the other three people in the United States who regret the 40 years of conscription-free living Americans have enjoyed.

Over at Salon, Sirota, a liberal author and blogger (who took some flak last month for his less-terrible “Let’s Hope the Boston Bomber is a White American”) has asked, as is fashionable every 6-12 months, “Was ending the draft a mistake?” The subhede elaborates: “Without conscription war has become an abstraction, enabling a new “era of persistent conflict”. Drones didn’t do that, warmongering politicians didn’t do that, weak Congresses that gave the power to make war to the executive branch didn’t do that. Nope. It was ending the draft.

This column contains the same sentiments about the draft advocated by Gen. McChrystal, Ricks, and (incessantly) Congressman Rangel. Namely, if everyone, black white rich poor (now) men women, suffered the effects of war together, people would stop fighting them so damned often. (Sirota even uses Dwight Elliott Stone, the last man forced into Vietnam, to cement his case that the draft should menace everyone. Poor Stone apparently grew to embrace this idea years after trying desperately to evade conscription.)

The idea that the draft would stop perpetual war  is tempting to consider for a minute. After all, wasn’t it that sword of Damocles hanging over every middle class kid that finally made Americans say enough was enough during Vietnam? Isn’t it worth a try?

No. Because you don’t end mass-murder by enslaving enough people to maybe, eventually, piss off the masses.

War drones, for all their horrors, are at least not hundreds of thousands of enslaved men forced to fight. Piloting drones requires training. Most aspects of warfare now require much more training than in Vietnam days. This is one reason the draft is no longer popular among government. Nor is it popular among respondents to Gallup polls.

Sirota’s short piece is not as obviously offensive as Rangel’s alarming February comments about going into the military  screaming and coming out saluting the flag. But it’s nasty and sneaky and scary all the same. He’s too timid to say “Let’s Draft Our Kids” as Ricks did in The New York Times last year. Some want a draft — or “national service” — because they believe that 18-year-olds belong to the country, not themselves. Those national greatness morons — or just people who think terrorists are that powerful —  are more similar to Sirota than he might think, and they’re more honest. Sirota ends his piece with:

Well-meaning people can certainly disagree about whether a modern-day draft is a good idea or not (and it may not be). But 40 years into the all-volunteer experiment, it is clear that ending conscription was as much about giving citizens the liberty to abstain from as about quashing popular opposition to martial decisions. By design, it weakened our democratic connection to the armed forces, a connection that is the only proven safeguard against unbridled militarism.

Experiment. The implication that not enslaving men aged 19-26 is a fluke, tried, and now to be discarded. Never mind Richard Nixon, or the military, or anyone else’s motives in lifting the threat of military service off of the general population in order to make war “an abstraction.” Consider the definition of the draft — the mandate that you serve the government in the most servile fashion. You are more directly the hand of the state than in any other job.

And you may die. In Vietnam, 30 percent of the men killed were drafted (around 17,000 people). Countless men also signed up knowing they were going to be forced into the armed forces, in order to pick the least loathsome choice of branch. To say nothing of 2 million Vietnamese killed during the war, look how many American men were sacrificed  and how many — men and women, if Rangel had his way — would it take next time in order to stop the next war?

Ostensibly Sirota’s motivations for wanting a draft are good; the end of the worst thing in the world. But they’re twisted. Instead of starving the beast of militarism he wants to shove a few thousand people down its throat until it (hopefully) chokes.

Would it work? It’s possible. But it didn’t work during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. Or, it didn’t work in time for scores upon scores of thousand of men. What about them? Isn’t preventing their enslavement and slaughter also a part of opposing war?

If people suggesting a return to conscription are serious about ending war and all its miseries, they will stop spinning their wheels on bullshit columns like Sirota’s; stop coyly suggesting unpopular plans that make them sound grave and determined; and they will start opposing war, period.

The September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), ostensibly a vehicle for the U.S. to go after the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC., turns out to have been a whole hell of a lot more than that nearly 12 years on. That simple joint resolution has been stretched very thin during the War on Terror. The original text gives the President permission to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” Fair enough (ish).

But since September, 2001, we’ve had 12 years of war in Afghanistan. The Bush administration also used the AUMF to justify Gitmo and still-unknown levels of NSA spying on Americans. Bush began the drone program cautiously (relatively speaking), and the Obama administration’s drone strikes have continued and dramatically increased the scope and scale of those attacks — branching out into strike in Yemen, Somalia, Mali, and elsewhere. In short, the AUMF has served as a sturdy pillar of support for the potentially endless and apparently geographically limitless War on Terror.

So, knowing that, it’s almost tempting to take talk of an “update” to the resolution as good news. Could it be any worse?

Sure could. Most of the folks wanting to fix AUMF are notoriously hawkish. Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham being the most obvious — and alarming — examples of powerful folks who believe the president’s war powers are being forever constrained. Graham seems to miss no opportunity to clamor for more powers for the president. After the Boston Marathon bombing,he repeatedly demanded that surviving suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be treated as an enemy combatant. Sen. Bob Corker is also touting the “update” AUMF line heavily. And has McCain met a warmaking power he doesn’t like, at least in the past 13 years?

Today it was reported that McCain, Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin, along with Graham and Corker, gathered for the initial planning stages of a potential new AUMF. On May 16 there will be a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on this matter.

Noted Politico, optimistically:

A new resolution could call for military action only against al Qaeda or affiliate groups, or organizations designated by Congress as terror backers, according to sources close to the talks. Obama would still be authorized to hold terror detainees, but there would be more congressional oversight of the U.S. struggle against such terror threats, a particularly sensitive issue in light of the recent Boston Marathon bombing.

The problem with messing with the AUMF has been pointed out by various sources in the last few months, including Antiwar’s Kelley B. Vlahos who wrote “Beware of Lawyers Bearing AUMF Fix” in April. Vlahos noted that various Senators, unnamed Obama sources, and the Brookings Institution are all repeating the line that the AUMF is “obsolete” and needs to be updated in order to explicitly authorize new foreign adventures against groups with –at best — tertiary ties to Al-Qaeda.  (Similar agenda, or just terrorists in general, the point is why have broad powers of war stifled by the need for a tie to 9/11?)

In March, Slate reminded us that Congress may be asking for new definitions of Obama’s war-fighting power in order to control it, but they have a laughable track record in that particular area. (See: a large chunk of the 20th century, the start of this one.)

The killing takeaway from the Politico article was also spotted by Empty Wheel, who noted the disturbing overlap between those who crafted the indefinite detainment portion of the 2012 NDAA,and those who think the AUMF isn’t strong enough.

Politico:

Some Democrats, for their part, worry that vocal Obama critics like [Sen. Rand] Paul and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — or dozens of House Republicans — would use such a debate to attack the president’s policy on all military and national security issues, not just terror-related topics.

“Can you imagine what Paul or Cruz would do with this?” said one top Democratic aide. “It could be a disaster. And it would be worse in the House.” [emphasis added]

There you have it. Nobody hankering to rewrite the rules of war should be trusted in this task, especially not these guys. The only thing to do with the AUMF is repeal it.

Director Kathryn Bigelow’s cinematic valentine to dogged CIA sisters doin’ it and taking out Osama Bin Laden for themselves, Zero Dark Thirty, was controversial long before it was released last December. Initially there were rumors the film would be released two months before the 2012 election, ideally placed to give Obama a Bin Laden-killing bump. The movie ended up being released a month after Obama won his second term, but neither that nor half a dozen Oscar nominations, nor a collection of plum reviews could make everyone forget that the CIA had a hand in the movie. Newly released memos obtained by Gawker’s Adrian Chen confirm that, and further detail the level of the agency’s involvement in the production.

As Sean A. McElwee noted last month at Antiwar, U.S. Army involvement in Hollywood is nothing new. CIA is newer, but that still happened previous to Bigelow and writer Mark Boal’s production. Additionally, the difference between Army involvement in, say Pearl Harbor as opposed to Zero Dark Thirty is that the story of the former is much more widely known — there were thousands of witnesses to the Japanese attack — and has had sixty years to simmer. Plus, the incentive for filmmakers to work with military “minders’ is usually access to shiny Pentagon goods. Access in this case means access to the truth that rest of us are not permitted to know in its entirety.

We’re just a few days past the second anniversary of the killing of Bin Laden. And you don’t have to be Alex Jones to wonder  if there aren’t a few things we just don’t know about the events that transpired that day. We certainly aren’t to be trusted with photographic proof that Bin Laden was killed just as they said.

As Chen reports, these memos — obtained through Freedom of Information requests — describe how CIA public officials “corrected” Bigelow and Boal on certain portrayals, after the latter “verbally shared” what was to take place in their film.  Scenes changed after CIA input resulted in the main character (played by Jessica Chastain) shown not participating in the torture of a detainee, and the removal of a scene where a prisoner is threatened by a dog. As Chen points out:

The CIA might not have done it, but threatening detainees with dogs was a well-known feature of the War on Terror, even allowed in certain circumstances by U.S. Army interrogation manuals. The technique was pioneered in Guantanamo Bay and cruelly elaborated upon at Abu Ghraib. Some of the most disturbing photos from the Abu Ghraib scandal featured military dogs menacing naked prisoners.

Another scene changed had originally portrayed CIA officials getting drunk and being reckless with firearms, obviously something the CIA wouldn’t want on screen. And, most crucially, left unchanged — to Bigelow and Boal’s credit — were scenes of Chastain’s character putting together crucial intelligence by watching taped interrogations. The CIA PR person claimed that such things are not recorded, though supposedly didn’t ask for the scene’s removal. Chen reminds us:

(This is itself a lie of course—the CIA did record 92 tapes, totaling hundreds of hours, of the interrogation and torture of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. It subsequently destroyed them.)

Any of the changes that did take place could be true. Perhaps the still-covert agent “Maya” upon whom Chastain’s character was based never participated in torture. Not everyone in Intelligence is going to get their hands dirty in that way. And maybe the CIA didn’t use dogs. (Though why is that accusation worse than anything we know the CIA did?) The actual lie the CIA told was ignored by Boal and Bigelow.

What’s so wrong here? Just that the CIA has every reason in the world to guide the filmmakers into the best possible portrayal of their agency. Neither their suggestions — or “fact checks” if you prefer — nor the filmmakers’ end result can be trusted as a portrayal of reality.  The CIA wanted to look better, and the filmmakers wanted access the rest of us lacked.

The killing of Bin Laden is much too new, and the circumstances around it are much too hazy. Bigelow and Boal’s talents were wasted on a movie that looks good, and feels gritty and “real,” but is impossible to watch without a feeling of being misled.