by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
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“Our trip to
Pakistan was the first time any Americans had been there to apologize for the
drone strikes,” said long-time peace activist Medea Benjamin Saturday, October
20 at the Church of the Brethren in City Heights, San Diego. Co-founder of
Global Exchange and Code Pink, Benjamin has just published a book, Drone
Warfare: Killing by Remote Control,
exposing not only the lethality of drones — remote-controlled aircraft, often
equipped with missiles that directly target individuals on the ground — but the
fundamental immorality of this sort of warfare and the way drones make war more
“thinkable” because with them, one country can attack another without putting
any of their own servicemembers at risk of death or injury.
“To have a group
of Americans go to such a dangerous place was remarkable,” Benjamin said. “We
had 60 people wanting to go and we didn’t think the Pakistani government was
going to give us visas. There were people putting pressure on from both the
U.S. and Pakistan, and we finally got our visas. … The U.S. government didn’t
want us to go on this trip, and they were very open about that. I’ve had
meetings with U.S. officials talking about ‘the alleged drones.’” Eventually
Benjamin’s group numbered 34, all but one of whom took the trip from Pakistan’s
capital, Islamabad, to the northwest frontier region of Waziristan, which has
suffered the greatest number of drone attacks.
“The acting U.S.
ambassador to Pakistan, Richard Hoagland, met with us and wanted to impress on
us how dangerous it was to go to Waziristan,” Benjamin recalled. “I said to the
group, ‘If anyone doesn’t want to make the trip to Waziristan, don’t do it.’ We
were going to have plenty of work to do in Islamabad, including meeting with
women’s groups and drone victims. Of the 34 people, 33 wanted to go. The day
before, the U.S. security person wanted to meet with us, and told us, ‘We have
credible information that the militants are going to attack you.’ I asked him
what the source of the information was, and he said he couldn’t tell me. Once
again, I told the members of the group they didn’t have to go on the trip, and
again everybody but one decided to go.”
Benjamin’s group
had a dual agenda for making the 14-hour trip from Islamabad to Waziristan. One
was to document the brutal effects of drone warfare on the villages and their
residents — information she said the mainstream U.S. media have carefully kept
from Americans. The other was to let people in the region know that there were
Americans who didn’t approve of the drone strikes. “When we talked with people
individually, it was remarkable how necessary it was to go to the areas where
the drones are used, and apologize,” Benjamin said. “We went to the tribal
regions, where no Americans had been since 9/11. After our first day, the
government blocked off the area where we had planned to go, so we held a rally
at our campsite and people were chanting, ‘Welcome, welcome, we want peace.’”
The trip to
Pakistan to visit the drone-targeted areas personally was, said Benjamin, “the
kind of citizen diplomacy that’s so important” to building a worldwide
constituency for peace. “For one week, we were front-page news in the Pakistani
press and on Pakistani TV,” she said. “There was a conservative guy who said,
‘If you are here to win the hearts and minds of the Pakistani people, you have
won mine.’ Another person said we had done more for the U.S.’s image in
Pakistan than all the aid money the U.S. has sent to the Pakistani government.”
Benjamin described the area she and her group visited as “Ground Zero for the
drones” — the place where there are more drone attacks than anywhere in the
world.
The Brave New World of
Drones
Though there
were experiments with unmanned military aircraft as early as World War I, and
in the 1930’s all the major powers were using remote-controlled planes to give
their pilots target practice, drone warfare really exploded after September 11,
2001. “When 9/11 happened, there were only 50 drones in the Pentagon’s arsenal;
today, there are over 10,000,” Benjamin said. She admitted that there are
potentially positive aspects to drones — “They can fight forest fires and find
illegal rainforest logging in Brazil” — but with drones, as with so many
aspects of modern technology, “the munitions industry is driving” drone
development. Indeed, the General Atomics plant in Poway, a San Diego suburb, is
where the Predator attack drone is made — and the San Diego Veterans for Peace
(SDVFP) is targeting the plant with a demonstration every Thursday, 4 to 6
p.m., on the corner of Scripps Poway Parkway and General Atomics Way. (For
information, visit the SDVFP Web site at http://www.sdvfp.org/.)
The original use
of drones in the U.S. “war on terror” was for surveillance, Benjamin explained,
but that changed when drone builders realized they could attach missiles to
them and fire them at targets on the ground, just like a conventional piloted
plane. “The war in Iraq provided the U.S. military a platform for perfecting
its own deadly drones,” Benjamin wrote in her book. “In 2003 and 2004, the Army
flew UAV’s [‘unmanned aerial vehicles,’ military-speak for drones] about 1,500
hours a month, according to USA Today;
by 2006, that number had risen to about 9,000 hours a month. … In Iraq, spy
drones were used for everything from protecting oil fields to tracking supposed
insurgents to distinguishing between ‘plastics production … and homemade
explosives production.’ Lethal drones were sent to target government buildings
in Baghdad and to kill militants firing upon U.S. positions.”
According to
Benjamin, the U.S. military became more
reliant on drones — not less — as it started to draw down its forces in Iraq in
2008. At the same time, as the war in Afghanistan heated up and President Obama
deployed massive numbers of new U.S. troops there in a copy of President Bush’s
“surge” strategy in Iraq, the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan became
increasingly reliant on drones. “By 2010 the Air Force was flying at least 20
Predator drones over stretches of hostile Afghan territory each day, providing
a daily dose of some 500 hours of video,” Benjamin wrote. “Most drones were
used for surveillance purposes … but they were also used to target low-level
Taliban fighters in remote areas and to support U.S. troops in firefights.
According to Air Force figures, there were 74 drone strikes in 2007, 183 in
2008, and 219 in 2009.”
While the U.S.
military has used video games to train its fighters for decades, by using
drones they’ve made the experience of actual combat into a grim sort of video
game. “It’s like bad science fiction become real, to think that the pilots of
these drones are sitting in air-conditioned rooms … for 10 to 12 hours a day,
looking at a screen,” Benjamin said. “They might be based outside of Creech Air
Force Base in Nevada, or Hancock Air Force base in upstate New York, or about a
dozen other bases, and these pilots are really doing this surveying and
pressing the kill button by day, and going home to their families at night.”
The only real difference between playing a video game and piloting a drone is
that when the drone pilot presses the controller button and fires a missile,
real people die on the other end.
According to
Benjamin, this remote-control killing puts a stress on the people doing it.
“Many of these pilots are getting PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] just
like soldiers on the battlefield,” she said. “And in some ways I would guess
that’s a good thing, because it’s hard for them to have this day job when
you’re killing, and then think you can go home and just be a good husband and
father, and it’s not going to affect you mentally. There are other pilots — and
I’ve talked to some of them — who think this is just dandy, it’s a great way to
do it and it’s nice to be able not to put your own life at risk. But the main
complaint the drone pilots had when a study was done was boredom. They said it
was really boring to be sitting and looking at these screens for hours on end,
when a lot of them signed up for the military because they wanted to be in the battle.”
Because they’re
physically thousands of miles away from the battlefield, Benjamin said, drone
pilots don’t have to know anything about the lives and culture of the people
they’re fighting and killing by remote control. “They’re told certain people
are on a ‘hit list’ developed by President Obama himself on what’s called
‘Terror Tuesday,’ where [Obama and his staff] look at profiles of alleged
terrorists and vote whether to put them on the ‘hit list,’” Benjamin explained.
“There is also the ‘signature strike,’ in which drone pilots are able to kill
people on their own authority, on the basis of ‘suspicious behavior’” — which,
she said, could mean something as simple as a group of bearded males wearing
long robes meeting outdoors.
Though the
countries where the U.S. has made the greatest use of drones are Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan, Benjamin said that they were also used in Libya —
where Obama said he didn’t need to ask Congress to authorize U.S. involvement
under the War Powers Act because he was “only” sending drones and therefore no
U.S. servicemembers were physically at risk. According to Benjamin, the U.S.
has also used drones in Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines, and is building
bases for drones in Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Burundi and Uganda. And
it’s not just the Army and the Air Force that are flying drone missions; a lot
of U.S. drone strikes are being run by the CIA, and since their drone
activities are secret there’s no way of knowing just how much the U.S. is using
drones, where they’re being used or what the U.S. is doing with them.
And the U.S.
isn’t the only country in the world that has or uses military drones. Israel
has used them against the Palestinians in the occupied territories for years.
Indeed, according to Benjamin, Israeli defense companies advertise their drones
for sale to other countries by saying they’ve been “battle-tested.” In her
book, Benjamin wrote that over 50 countries have the technological capability
to build drones, and many of them — including Russia, Turkey, China, India,
Iran, Great Britain and France — either have or are developing weaponized
drones. Iran is a special case because they got drone technology from the U.S.;
when an American drone was shot down over Iran, they were able to
reverse-engineer it and develop the ability to build copies.
What’s more,
there’s a major push to use U.S. drones in the United States itself. The
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had been loath to give permission for law
enforcement agencies and others to fly drones in American airspace, mainly
because of the possibility that drones will collide with commercial aircraft in
mid-air or crash and do damage when they fall to earth. But the military
contractors who build drones adopted a familiar solution to that problem: they
used their lobbyists to sell Congress on passing a bill overriding the pesky
regulators and allowing drones to fly over the U.S. It’s been an easy sell,
according to Benjamin, because war-industry lobbyists have been able to convince
Congressmembers that drones in their district mean jobs and economic growth.
The drone lobby
and what’s been called the “drone caucus” in Congress — officially known as the
Unmanned Systems Caucus — got a big Valentine’s Day present on February 14,
2012 when Obama signed an FAA reauthorization bill that specifically requires
the agency to integrate drones into U.S. airspace by September 15, 2015. “The
bill also requires expedited access for public users, like law enforcement,
firefighters and emergency responders,” Benjamin wrote in her book. “Within 90
days, it must allow them to fly drones under 4.4 pounds, as long as they are
kept under an altitude of 400 feet and meet other requirements. The U.S. drone
lobby group that helped draft the bill … was delighted; commercial airlines and
pilots were not. They worry that the quick push to integrate drones will not
only take away jobs, but lead to accidents.”
Even before this
bill passed, Benjamin said, law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. were
buying drones and using them for surveillance. The Miami-Dade Police Department
in Florida already bought a 20-pound drone in 2011 and applied to the FAA for
permission to get two more. Other police departments are buying helicopter
drones to photograph and videotape large swaths of countryside at will.
Benjamin’s book quotes Michael Buscher, CEO of drone maker Vanguard Defense
Industries, that future U.S. police drones will be equipped with Tasers and
so-called “stun batons” that will actually be able to shoot at and immobilize
people on the ground. Benjamin’s October 20 audience groaned at the thought of
who police are likely to target with this sort of drone technology: peace
activists, Occupy members, medical marijuana growers and anyone who looks like
a sort of person police officers don’t like. “By 2015, there might be 30,000
drones in American skies,” Benjamin said.
The Myth of “Smart
Drones”
According to
Benjamin, polls have shown that 83 percent of Americans, including a majority
of self-described “liberal Democrats,” approve their use against “terrorist
suspects” — even though, as she pointed out, the word “suspect” means someone
who hasn’t been convicted of anything or given any more “due process” than
being identified as a “terrorist” or “militant” by an itchy-fingered drone
pilot or by the Obama administration on “Terror Tuesday.” She cited a study by
Stanford and New York University, “Living Under Drones” (available online at http://livingunderdrones.org/download-report/)
that quoted President Obama’s “terror czar,” John O. Brennan, as saying that
missile-armed drones have an unprecedented ability to “distinguish …
effectively between an al-Qaeda terrorist and innocent civilians,” and that they
can conduct strikes with “astonishing” and “surgical” precision.
“This narrative
is false,” the “Living Under Drones” authors bluntly wrote. “Following nine
months of intensive research … this report presents evidence of the damaging
and counterproductive effects of current U.S. drone strike policies. Based on
extensive interviews with Pakistanis living in the regions directly affected,
as well as humanitarian and medical workers, this report provides new and
first-hand testimony about the negative impacts U.S. policies are having on the
civilians living under drones.” According to the “Living Under Drones” study,
of the 2,562 to 3,325 people killed by U.S. drones in Pakistan between June
2004 and September 2012, between 474 and 881 were civilians — including 176
children. The study also claimed that only 2 percent of the victims of U.S.
drone attacks in Pakistan were on the “high-value list” of known major
terrorists.
Benjamin claims
that the reason the Obama administration claims the drone strikes are targeting
“militants” is that they “have admitted that they consider every male of military age in the area where we’re using
drones to be a ‘militant.’” She also noted that the Stanford/NYU “Living Under
Drones” study documents the extent to which drones themselves are a weapon of
terror. “People’s lives are made miserable by drones hovering overhead 24/7,”
Benjamin said. “Some families are afraid to send their children to school, or
to go to markets, weddings, community gatherings or funerals, all of which are
being specifically targeted.” What’s more, she said, American drone pilots
routinely do so-called “double-tap” strikes, in which after they’ve hit a
target once they launch a second round of missiles to target the people coming
in to rescue the people hit in the first strike. She said that on her recent
trip to Pakistan she personally heard stories of people injured in drone
attacks waving away potential rescuers for fear the rescuers would be hit by
the “double-tap.”
In both her talk
and her book, Benjamin extensively documented several instances in which people
working against terrorism and for peace
were killed by drone strikes. “One jirga [tribal council] in which a number of tribal leaders came together to
resolve a mining dispute was targeted by a drone strike that killed over 40
community leaders,” she said. Her book tells the story of Karim Khan, who was
targeted as a suspected terrorist (apparently in a case of mistaken identity)
and whose house was hit by a drone strike. Khan wasn’t there that night — he
was in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad — but his brother and son were killed, as
was a stonemason from out of town who was doing repair work on the village
mosque and whom the Khans had put up for the night.
Benjamin also
tells the story of Tariq Aziz, a 16-year-old boy who traveled from south
Waziristan to Islamabad for a “Grand Waziristan Jirga,” in which over 350 villagers (including members of
60 families that had been victimized by drone strikes) and learned photography
so he could document the damage done by drones. “Tariq had a personal
motivation,” Benjamin wrote in her book. “Eighteen months earlier, his cousin
Anwar Ullah had been killed by an unmanned drone as he drove his motorcycle
through the village of Norak.” But just three days after he returned home, Aziz
and his 12-year-old cousin, Wahreed Rehman, were killed in their car by a
drone-launched missile just a few hundred yards away from the home of his
newlywed aunt, whom he had just visited.
“Thanks to the
fateful meeting in Islamabad days before, the death of those boys — unlike
other drone victims never mentioned or mourned beyond the village — was
reported in newspapers around the world,” Benjamin wrote. “American lawyer
Clive Stafford Smith, who had just met the boy in Islamabad, wrote a compelling
New York Times op-ed. … A U.S. official
acknowledged to ABC News that the attack was not a mistake — the CIA had chosen
this target because the two people in the car were supposedly militants. Pratap
Chatterje, a journalist … who met Tariq at the Islamabad meeting, was
dumbfounded. ‘If this 16-year-old was indeed a suspected terrorist, then why
wasn’t he arrested in Islamabad?’ Chatterje asked.”
The real reason why the U.S. is killing supposed “militants”
with drone strikes instead of arresting them, Benjamin suggested, is that U.S.
officials find it “cleaner” — that’s actually the word the Obama
adminstration’s lawyers use — to execute them summarily rather than take them
alive and then be faced with the knotty issue of when, where and how to try
them. (It’s been widely reported that the SEAL commando team that raided Osama
bin Laden were under orders to kill him, rather than take him alive, for the
same reason.) “Since he’s been President, Obama has only sent one person to
Guantánamo — because he’s decided it’s easier to kill people with drones,”
Benjamin acidly commented. She said the Obama administration has asserted it
has a right to kill anyone, anywhere in the world — including a U.S. citizen —
solely on its say-so, without any legal process involved.
Speaking two
weeks before Obama’s re-election, Benjamin made it clear that she regards him
as an enemy of freedom that deserves to be targeted by peace protesters just as
his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, was. “We cannot afford to give a
honeymoon to anyone who wins this
election,” she said. “We have to be out in the streets demanding an end to the
wars and the fossil-fuel economy, and a state of peace and a green-energy
economy. … We could cut our military budget in half and give every young
American a free college education. What we could do in the world to help people
would cost only a fraction of what we’re doing overseas now to get people to
hate us. … I know I’m speaking to the choir here, but sometimes the choir needs
to be re-energized.”
Jon Fanestil, San Diego Foundation for Change
