Death by robot

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

A debate on drone strikes – a euphemism for an extremely effective, ultra-high-tech, chillingly impersonal form of state-sponsored assassination – finally seems to be emerging within the United States.

It’s about time because a practice once frowned upon by this country when carried out by the Bulgarian secret police or the Pinochet regime has become commonplace in the boundless U.S. “war on terrorism.”

Pioneered by the Bush administration and characteristic of its contempt for due process and international law, assassination through drone strikes have escalated dramatically under President Barack Obama, the constitutional lawyer from whom we had expected better. Independent reports indicate anywhere from 200 to 900 drone killings have been carried out so far.  

We thought we were through for good with this sort of thing after the 1970s when, in the wake of hearings that revealed a U.S. role in multiple assassination attempts against foreign leaders (Lumumba, Diem, Castro, and Trujillo among others), Congress passed legislation outlawing the practice.

But 9/11 ushered in a brave new world in which the United States felt entitled to disregard or even flaunt institutions and agreements that had been painfully constructed over many years to prevent the kinds of bloody conflicts that wracked Europe for centuries (culminating in the horrors of the Nazi aggression against its Eastern and Western neighbors as well its one-sided war mainly against the Jews but also against many other groups the Nazis considered undesirable) or at the very least to lay down rules to minimize the brutality of war.

Led by Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s legal lapdogs declared the provisions of the Geneva Conventions – a major achievement of Western civilization designed to curtail war atrocities – quaint and obsolete. That administration developed new language to redefine old and discredited practices that are illegal under international and/or U.S. law, including wars of aggression [see Nuremberg trials] which became preventive (or preemptive) wars, torture (enhanced interrogation techniques), and state-sponsored assassination.

The drone-strike “surge” under Obama has been not only a disappointment to many of his strongest supporters. It has also raised critical humanitarian, moral, constitutional and strategic questions.

Drone strikes kill not only committed terrorists. They also slay an unknown but significant number of other people – friends and relatives of combatants including wives and children, innocent bystanders, and occasionally even U.S. allies targeted by mistake.

What moral principle gives the U.S. government the right to suddenly and summarily end the lives of innocent people who represent no threat to Americans?

That the strikes have killed U.S. citizens raises the question of whether the Constitution allows such executions to be carried out without the benefit of a trial, a defense, an appeal, and other civil liberties’ guarantees. And a death sentence carried out robotically may “neutralize” not only the target but also have unintended victims. The drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen of Yemeni extraction allegedly associated with the perpetrators of at least two high-profile attacks against Americans (one of them foiled), also killed his 16-year-old son, also an American citizen.

What makes this picture even more chilling is the fact that virtually everything about the drone assassination program, including how the targets are picked, is secret. What is clear is that the process does not include any kind of judicial review and is based on intelligence that, as we have seen in recent years, can be tragically wrong.

Recent news reports indicate the Obama administration is belatedly considering creating a secret court on the model of the FISA court that would approves secret intelligence surveillance. This would be a step in the right direction, albeit a small one, given the apparent laxity with which such life and death decisions have been made to date. A macabre joke going around in U.S. government circles is that for the CIA three guys doing jumping jacks is a terrorist training camp. One problem with this is that in practice the FISA has functioned as a virtual rubber stamp, approving the overwhelming majority of government intelligence gathering requests.

But the fundamental problem is the very existence of the program itself and its ominous growth. State-sponsored assassination embodies the moral shabbiness of the death penalty raised to the nth power. Extra-judicial executions are the province of dictatorships like the Chilean and Argentinean juntas of the 1970s, not constitutional democracies. And while in the United States the death penalty is carried out only after a legal process that often lasts decades, drone killings involve no legal process and decisions tend to be made quickly, increasing the chance of error.

There is also an Orwellian cast to the drone program with its kill lists and remote-controlled slaughter. Moreover, there is not only a huge asymmetry but also an unseemly cast to a type of warfare in which one side constantly risks its life while the other faces no danger while doing its killing in air-conditioned offices thousands of miles away.

These conditions also lower the bar considerably when it comes to the decision to engage in armed conflict. At least since Vietnam, the prospect of American casualties and the political consequences thereof has been the major obstacle to presidents otherwise eager to engage in wars of choice. That will change if for the possessors of the technological genie warfare becomes more and more like just a violent video game.  

Even the effectiveness of the drone and other assassination programs is problematic. The notorious Phoenix assassination program carried out by the CIA in Vietnam succeeded in killing many Vietnamese but did not prevent the United States from losing the war. Today, in the case of countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, drone killings may be generating more terrorists than it eliminates. Add counterproductive to the bill of indictment against drone killings.

Maybe the most disturbing aspect of Obama’s drone surge is what New York magazine’s Frank Rich calls the "quiet acquiescence of most Americans, Democrats included, to the Obama administration’s embrace of drone warfare."

The shock of 9/11 seemingly effected an enduring change in the moral conscience of Americans lowering their level of tolerance for illegal and/or immoral state actions. That is a mentality that Bush’s lawless administration was all-too-willing to exploit and that now Obama has, disturbingly and disappointedly, chosen to take advantage of as well.