Atrocities Can Be Expensive

The brief video at the beginning of this post is horrifying but worthy of 15 seconds of your time.

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq. Credit U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton

There’s thousands, maybe millions of them, out there. Some of them, invisible to you, are soaring around right now, doing their dirty business—spying and killing. And thousands more are still waiting to be set free to wreak death and destruction on babies, children, and adults who have the misfortune of being somewhere government operatives have decided to target.

Question: What allows the US drone program to get away with murder?

Answer: the usual thing. Tom Greening says it well:

PROFITEER

It¹s true I am a profiteer
from wars, and yes I know you sneer
at my crass immorality
that helps me live in luxury.
I feel no need to be defensive‹
atrocities can be expensive.
I revel in ill-gotten gains
from helping bad guys purchase planes,
and drones and bombs and other stuff‹
they never seem to get enough.
I must the politicians thank
for all the dirty cash I bank.

Tom Greening

Neither the death and destruction nor the dirty cash are featured in the corporate media but they are real enough.

I know your days are full of activities, and it is probably impossible to do all the things you should do, but if your government is going to do things in your names, things that are inhuman and violate international human rights, you might find it worthwhile to stroll a bit down the avenues where you can find some information—for example,  droneswatch.org  and  nodronesnetwork.blogspot.com.

For the military industrial complex, drone warfare is a great way to terrorize civilians in an area they want to control without stirring up the people back home and with a minimum of American casualties, but even drone operators, presumably safely behind their computers, can suffer from participating in murder.

Let’s get stirred up over the latest killing technology and welcome efforts to get more hard facts from the government about their missions of death.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Drone warfare: Immoral? Unjust?

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.

In need of a moral compass (Drone warfare, Part 2)

By guest author Dr. Mike Corgan

On War by Carl von ClausewitzAll our legal and moral strictures about ethics and laws in war presume that war is, in a Clausewitzian sense, a state to state activity. Both Scott Shane and Tom Junod do not fully come to grips with this reality.

What happens when a state, like the US, faces a non-state adversary, like al Qaeda? With whom are we “at war”? Where is what we might call a “war zone”? Who is a “soldier”‘ and thus liable to violent action?

The dilemma is one of our own making. The US has become so militarily powerful that few will try to challenge us in a conventional military way through conventional state actions.

Non-state actors like al Qaeda present threats less than conventional military force but well beyond the current capabilities of domestic police forces. Modern communications and technology have enabled such groups to be as deadly as smaller states once were. Perhaps even more so.

Identifying how to deal with  non-state actors who can do a country great harm is not a new dilemma. Even Carl von Clausewitz himself saw this with the Spanish guerrillas in the Napoleonic Wars. And he had no answer.

However, the time is now at hand to confront the issue before drone warfare is more widely available. We must learn how to preserve the security of a country’s people without undoing security altogether by the methods used.

These are uncharted waters and a moral compass is badly needed.

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of International Relations, Boston University