Tag: collateral damage

Drone warfare: Immoral? Unjust?

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Michael Furtado

Drone launched from U.S. Navy ship
Drone launched from U.S. Navy ship. Image in public domain.

My most fundamental concern about drones relates to the question of moral proportionality.

Granted there are terrorists, but to battle them with unmanned weapons of destruction smacks of policing and preemptive attack rather than honoring the principles of the just war. It places the U.S. in the position of being the world’s police-person while protecting its own interests, which is the kind of binary that sets up a conflict of interest.

Not that I support the just war theory in an era when collateral damage is routine. To wreak this damage with unmanned remote surveillance aircraft appears to be particularly intrusive and punitive, and unmanned intrusions into another country’s airspace are a clear breach of sovereignty.

Moreover, part of that sovereignty entails providing guarantees to citizens about protecting their human rights, especially their right to life and limb. The power imbalance ensuing when one party can ride roughshod over another by invading its airspace and killing its citizens completely out-trumps any secondary considerations regarding rationales for the invasion.

At best, arguments justifying such a transgression claim a need to protect soldiers engaged in peace-keeping assignments. However, the greater likelihood is that drones are used because of the high cost and increasing non-viability of stationing U.S. troops around the world for search and destroy missions.

Because of the surveillance technologies drones employ, they also intrude beyond all reasonable expectation and justification into the private lives of third parties, which ought to be a freedom that is sacrosanct.

Michael Furtado has served as education officer (Peace, Justice & Development) for the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane, Australia, and contributed to peace and human rights education projects in Catholic schools as with the Catholic Archdiocesan Justice and Peace Commission in Queensland.

The U.S. government’s assault on children

Posted on by kathiemm

We’ve heard considerable rhetoric recently about the vileness of subjecting children to poison gas–and vile it is. So are other means by which children are maimed and murdered, and the government of the United States is complicit in vile acts against the world’s children.

For example, being burned to death–as happened to thousands of children in the World War II firebombing of cities in Japan and Germany–is ghastly, whether it kills or scars for life.

Being born with birth defects related to Agent Orange, or being killed or maimed by unexploded ordinance (a continuing scourge for children in Vietnam) is a legacy of U.S. government intervention.

An article in the Independent reports, “Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.”

According to a 2012 Children’s Defense Fund report [opens as pdf], “In 2008, 2,947 children and teens died from guns in the United States and 2,793 died in 2009 for a total of 5,740—one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 55 every week for two years.” Any government that does not fight the gun lobby is complicit.

There is an international chemical weapons convention to which our government has alluded in trying to make its case for bombing Syria.

There is also a convention that prohibits the use of anti-personnel mines, which the U.S. has failed to ratify. How does a government that has authorized widespread “collateral damage” have the moral authority to unilaterally punish other violators of international conventions?

Let us hope and pray that the current administration listens to the millions of American voices calling for a nonviolent alternative to raining terror on children and other innocent civilians in yet another Middle Eastern country.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Morally disengaging from drone warfare

Posted on by kathiemm

The headline of a Sunday New York Times article by national security reporter Scott Shane declares “The Moral Case for Drones.” A more appropriate title might well be “A Case Study in Moral Disengagement.”

The arguments in the article illustrate many of the principles of moral disengagement  previously discussed in this blog, including:

Drone launched off Navy ship
Drone launched off U.S. Navy ship. Image in public domain.

Shane begins by noting that critics of President Obama’s drone program focus on issues such as “collateral damage” (a favorite euphemism for killing children and other innocent civilians). He then comments that people may be surprised to learn that “some moral philosophers, political scientists and weapons specialists believe armed, unmanned aircraft offer marked moral advantages over almost any other tool of warfare.”

As an example of a moral philosopher, he cites Bradley Strawser, a former officer in the Air Force and assistant professor of philosophy in the Naval Postgraduate School who told him that using drones “to go after terrorists” was “not only ethically permissible but also might be ethically obligatory.”

Why? Drones are advantageous for “identifying targets and striking with precision.”  In making such a statement, Strawser is using euphemisms for murder (“striking targets”) while framing it in pseudo-moral language (“ethically obligatory”).

Strawser identifies “targets” as “terrorists” and “extremists who are indeed plotting violence against innocents” (demonization). He says drones are better than any other weapon in avoiding collateral damage (advantageous comparison), and suggests that drone operators can time their strikes so that innocents will not be nearby and can even divert a missile if a child happens to wander into the target area (misrepresentation of consequences).

Most historians seem to agree that one of the major causes of World War I was not the killing of an archduke, but the eagerness of weapons specialists in different countries to try out their great new weapons and prove how invincible they were.

One can argue that World War II ended up with the U.S. trying out its great new atomic weapon to prove how invincible it is—and thereby initiating an arms race that continues to threaten life on earth.

Might we make better moral choices than unleashing the favored weapon of the hour?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Rampages, drones, and moral insanity (Part 2)

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Dean Hammer, Psy.D.

Drones ready for launch. Image in public domain

The escalation of drone warfare by the Obama administration is 
not being scrutinized by the same moral compass as the rampage of Robert Bales.

Conservative estimations 
indicate that there have been minimally three to four hundred innocent 
civilians killed by drone assassinations.

The public is dealt the expected 
rationalizations. We are told that these military interventions are 
sanctioned as “acceptable risks” in the war against terror. The mounting 
civilian deaths are written off as “collateral damage” and “incidental 
killing.” Unlike Bales, who was acting with severe cognitive deficits, Obama appears to be an intelligent person with intact cognitive capacities.

So how do we understand the errant 
leadership of those justifying the drone killing fields?

 In 1835, physician James Cowles Prichard coined the term “moral 
insanity” to denote abnormal emotions and behavior in the apparent absence 
of intellectual impairments. He highlighted that this type of madness 
entailed morbid perversion of feelings, habits, and moral behavior.

The 
construct of moral insanity helps us to understand a dimension of the 
impaired leadership of our government.

 Faithful peace activists continue to challenge the 
drone assassinations (e.g., the ongoing resistance campaign at Hancock Air 
Base in Syracuse, NY). However, the steamrolling of our government’s war machine threatens to overshadow the protesters’ voice of sanity.

As electoral fever mounts, the electorate 
has a critical responsibility to raise questions regarding the immorality of drone warfare. Amidst the cacophony (the “droning,” if you will) of the debates between Obama and Romney, we need to put them to the test to see if either recognizes that drone warfare is unacceptable and insane behavior.

The Fourth Geneva Convention (adopted by the United Nations in 1949) grew out of the bloody wars of the 20th century. This body of international law mandates the protection of civilian populations in war zones. These codes of ethics are a critical safeguard against falling into the clutches of a collective form of moral insanity.

Reclaiming an ethical plumb line that includes the protection of innocent civilians is essential to any sense of true democracy and sanity.

Dean Hammer practices and teaches clinical psychology in Vermont and New Hampshire. He is a member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. 
Contact information: dhammer2@tds.net