by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
At her appearance at the First Church of the Brethren in San
Diego August 16 — the third time in less than a year she’s come to town as part
of her campaign against drones — activist Medea Benjamin recalled a time before
she was a U.S. Senate candidate (for the Green Party against Dianne Feinstein
in 2000) or the co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink. “When I worked on
clothing workers’ issues,” she remembered, “the most powerful word we could use
was ‘sweatshops.’ When we lobbied Starbucks, the most powerful thing we could
say to get them to buy free trade coffee was, ‘Starbucks sells sweatshop
coffee.’” In her current incarnation as an activist against drones, Benjamin
said, the word “drone” itself has taken on the same power as “sweatshop” had
when she was working on fair wages and safety protections for textile workers
and coffee growers.
“We have managed to penetrate the veil of secrecy and turned
this cool new technology into a four-letter word,” Benjamin boasted. “They
don’t want us to use the word ‘drones.’ They come up with new terminology every
two months and they have highly paid P.R. people trying to get people not to
use ‘drones.’ … They hate the word ‘drone’ so much that the password to their
computer system is, ‘Don’t say “drones.”’ You know you’re winning when they can’t
stop people from saying ‘drone’ — or from turning it into a verb.”
Benjamin’s campaign against drones first brought her to San
Diego last October for another First Church of the Brethren appearance to
promote her then-new book, Drone Warfare.
She came for a follow-up visit in April and then an update August 16 that also
contained a reading of a 25-minute playlet about drones. One key part of
Benjamin’s strategy is to travel to countries which the U.S. has targeted with
drone attacks — first Pakistan and now Yemen — and interview surviving family
members of drone victims. But she began her August 16 talk with an account of
how she disrupted President Obama’s big speech last May 23 supposedly
“resetting” and putting limits on the so-called “war on terror.”
“When I heard President Obama was going to give a major
foreign policy speech on Guantánamo and drones May 23, I did manage to get inside,” Benjamin said. “It was a
really surreal experience. There I was for three hours in a room full of media.
People looked over and wondered, ‘Why is she here?,’ while they were waiting for the President.
The media had reported that he might say things like the CIA would no longer be
allowed to have their own drones and they’d ban ‘signature strikes,’ which have
killed a lot of civilians.” “Signature strikes,” she later explained, are drone
attacks against specific individuals not because there’s any evidence that
they’re terrorists or members of al-Qaeda but only because their actions
supposedly fit a “profile” associated with terrorism.
Instead, Benjamin said, Obama “skirted around the issues” of
Guantánamo and drones. “It was a lot of justification of the drones without an
admission that we make mistakes.” Obama also repeated his excuse that Congress
has prevented him from closing the detention center at Guantánamo — even though
nothing is stopping him from releasing
the 86 detainees (out of 166 total) who have already been “cleared” by the U.S.
military. Benjamin spoke up during the speech and pointed out that inconvenient
fact, “and I was suddenly surrounded by security people putting their hands on
me. ‘You’re hurting me and I’m about to scream,’ I said. They let me go and
that gave me some time to talk about drones.”
Benjamin’s odd attempt to fulfill her constitutional right
to petition the head of her government for a redress of grievances — and the
Secret Service security detail’s attempt to stop her — got even odder when
“they showed me their badges and said, ‘You are about to be arrested’ — which,
given the number of times I’ve already been arrested, didn’t especially bother
me. I said, ‘I’m having a dialogue with the president of the United States and
I don’t think he wants you to pull me away.’ It took time to drag me out, and
on my way out I said, ‘Are you going to apologize to the families of the people
you’ve killed?’ He said, ‘Young woman’ — I’m 10 years older than he is — ‘I
think her voice should be listened to.’ The reporters said I was being ‘rude,’
and I said, ‘It’s rude to kill civilians and stuff force-feeding tubes down
people’s throats at Guantánamo.’”
Though progress has been made on the drone issue, Benjamin
said, it’s been two steps forward and one step back. Obama not only made the
May 23 speech, he’s cut back on the number of drone strikes and been more
careful about targeting them, she explained. Also, support for drone attacks
among the U.S. people has dropped from the stratospheric levels she described
in her books — 80 to 90 percent — to 60 percent. What’s more, Benjamin said,
the drone issue has developed a gender gap: “The majority of American women are
against the drone strikes.” Another hopeful sign was the near-passage by the
House of Representatives of an amendment that would have stopped the National
Security Agency (NSA) from collecting records on the phone calls and e-mails of
virtually all Americans.
On the negative side was the most recent “terror alert,”
based on so-called “chatter,” which Benjamin suggested was an excuse by the
government to raise the perception of fear among the American people and boost
support for drone strikes and NSA spying. “I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it
seems not to be a coincidence that this happened just when we were gaining
momentum,” Benjamin said. “They said the ‘attack’ would come from Yemen and it
would be revenge against a drone strike. Then they reacted by a worldwide
travel alert, closing 21 embassies, making it harder to repatriate the Yemenis
[many of the ‘cleared’ Guantánamo detainees are from Yemen], and increasing the drone strikes. In the last two weeks there have
been nine drone strikes from Yemen, and for the first time drones have been
flying over the capital.”
According to Benjamin, drones themselves are a terror
weapon. “Drones don’t just kill people; they terrorize the entire population,”
she said. “There are two dozen al-Qaeda leaders the U.S. says are living in
Yemen, and since 2009 we have been pounding Yemen with drones and air strikes.
We have killed between 6.000 and 20,000 people in Yemen, and only four have
been top al-Qaeda leaders. We’re killing innocent people and low-level al-Qaeda
members.”
As she’s done earlier in Pakistan and other countries
subjected to U.S. drone attacks, Benjamin traveled to Yemen to meet with the
families of drone victims. “One was a man whose brother drove a cab and picked
up some strangers,” she recalled. “The drone struck the cab and killed everyone
in it.” Benjamin’s interviewee brought two of his dead brother’s children and
tried to bring the widow as well, “but she’s non-functional.” According to
Benjamin, her interviewee offered to provide proof to the Yemeni government
that his brother was not a terrorist, and insisted that under the tribal
culture of Yemen the U.S. has an obligation to admit the error, apologize and
pay compensation to the family of the person they wrongly killed.
Benjamin also cited the case of a man she met in Pakistan as
proof that, far from helping end terrorism, drone strikes are increasing the terrorist threat by making the surviving members
of families of drone victims more anti-American and therefore more likely to
join al-Qaeda and similar groups. “Karim Khan told us about his son and brother
being killed in a drone strike,” Benjamin said. “He speaks perfect English, and
we wanted to invite him to tell his story in the U.S. — until someone sent me a
video he made in which he said, ‘If God gives me a chance to kill Obama, I
will. He killed my brother and my son, and in my culture the punishment for
killing is to be killed.’”
According to Benjamin, there is “tremendous opposition” to
the drone strikes among the Yemeni people. She cited one woman, a journalist
and delegate to Yemen’s parliament, “who got in trouble with al-Qaeda because
she said religion and politics shouldn’t mix.” She got into so much trouble
with al-Qaeda, Benjamin explained, that they put out a fatwa calling on the faithful to kill her, and she escaped
only by wearing traditional Muslim coverings. “She hates al-Qaeda because
they’re against everything she stands for,” Benjamin said, “but she said, ‘When
you kill al-Qaeda [people] with drone strikes, you’re turning criminals and
thugs into martyrs. In my vision of a democratic Yemen, drone strikes don’t
exist.’”
There are a lot of Yemenis who agree with her, Benjamin
said. Since Yemen’s long-time pro-U.S. dictator was overthrown in an Arab
Spring-type popular uprising a year or two ago, the Transitional Committee of
the National Democratic Conference — essentially a convention of 565 delegates
working on writing a new constitution for Yemen — passed a ban on drone strikes
inside Yemen. Later the full assembly of the National Democratic Conference
also passed it — an especially remarkable achievement given that according to
the rules of the National Democratic Conference, it takes at least 90 percent
of the vote to pass anything.
What makes it even more ironic is that the National
Democratic Conference is being funded with “democracy promotion” money from the
U.S. government — but the U.S. government is ignoring the drone ban on the
authority of Yemen’s current president, who was the vice-president under the
former regime. “Obama would rather listen to the previous president than the
democratic process the U.S. is funding,” Benjamin said.
What can be done to stop the drones? Boycotting companies
that make drones isn’t a viable strategy, Benjamin explained, because most of
them are purely defense contractors and don’t make anything sold in the
civilian marketplace. There are a few exceptions, like General Electric and a
California company that makes both miniature surveillance drones and chargers
for electric Nissans, but for most drone makers “the vast majority of their
income comes from the Department of Defense.
One key development Benjamin is waiting for is the
increasing United Nations interest in drones. Its secretary-general, Ban
Ki-Moon, “has been working on a statement that drones should be regulated,” she
said. A U.N. agency is “looking at 25 cases [of drone attacks] by the U.S. and
Israel and seeing if these constitute war crimes,” she added.
Another avenue is lobbying for change within the U.S.
government — and Benjamin said there are some surprising allies within the
military who may not want to see the drone program eliminated but at least want
it cut back. “There are people in the U.S. military who want to see the drones
taken away from the CIA,” Benjamin said. “There are people who talk about
working against the ‘worst abuses,’ like signature strikes. Divest the military
and the CIA from being able to attack people based only on ‘suspicious behavior’
and you’ll have curbed a lot of abuses.”
Benjamin also thinks there’s a lot of sentiment for banning
so-called “double-tap” strikes, in which the U.S. launches a second drone
attack right after the first one, thereby often killing first responders, aid
workers, nurses and paramedics doing rescue work. Though the two taps in the
infamous “Collateral Murder” video leaked by Bradley Manning were from an
on-scene helicopter rather than a drone, the concept of the “double tap” will
be familiar to anyone who saw that grisly video. It’s a violation of the
internationally agreed-on laws of war to target rescue workers on purpose, and
there may be leverage within the military to stop “double tap” strikes for that
reason.
But the main part of U.S. behavior that has to change — and
that activists against drones and other abuses in the “war on terror” have to
get to change — is the whole screw-you attitude the U.S. has assumed towards
the rest of the world. “A lot of people around the world sees us as a country
that doesn’t respect other people,” Benjamin said. What’s more, though Barack
Obama took office as president having promised to end some of the more glaring
abuses of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” very little has changed.
The Guantánamo detention center is still open, and people the U.S. military
have actually “cleared” for release are not only still there but are being
force-fed in response to their hunger strike.
People in other countries who once looked on Obama as a
beacon of hope have given up on him and written him off as just another
insensitive overlord, Benjamin said. “That’s why, when I confronted Obama, I
asked him if he would be willing to say whether the lives of Muslim children
are as precious as the lives of his own.” As long as America’s answer is that
they aren’t — that the president of the United States reserves for himself or
herself the right to order the summary execution of anyone in the world, regardless of where they are or how
many others are going to be killed with them — drone strikes and other
so-called “anti-terror” attacks will only sustain the rest of the world’s
hatred of America and serve as al-Qaeda’s most effective recruiting tools.
