Military
Use of drones

New Stanford/NYU study documents the civilian terror from Obama's drones ... New research shows the terrorizing impact of drones in Pakistan, false statements from US officials, and how it increases the terror threat

Burgess COMMENTARY
I was a young child in London when Hitler's Luftwaffe was bombing London. I have had a deep hatred of bombs, bombing and bombers ever since. I am rarely an apologist for anything related to bombing.

But I have been trying to understand the recent growth in military use of drones, and my early prejudice against their use has become quite significantly modified.

First of all, the rise of powerful non-statew actors in international affairs changes the balance of power equations that drive military tactics and strategy in a very profound way. While I usually criticize what Rumsfeld has done, I acknowledge that he did drive the military into some important rethinking about how the military strength of the United States should be modified to reflect the technology of the 21st century. It seems to me that the US drone strategy is probably an outcome of Rumsfeld's work in this area.

In my view, the war in Iraq ... the US invasion of Iraq ... was an unmitigated disaster. In the first 100 hours the US military with support from a small coalition of allies, was militarily brilliant. It was followed by a period of occupation that was totally disastrous both in concept and in execution. I have written about it ... and I am appalled at what was attempted and disgusted at what was done.

I am not sure that the writers of this report are fully aware of the capabilities of the drone technology ... nor perhaps, the geography of the areas where the drones are mainly being used. I am also somewhat sceptical of what I believe to be the research methodology ... a methodology that can be used to 'prove' almost anything that one is looking for ... while indeed also being a methodology that is very useful in telling an important story that is worth telling.

Whether 'drones' satisfy what might be considered established norms of law ... I don't know. But I am no fan of 'rule of law' since it is used far too much to make legal what is ... by any reasonable measure ... absolutely wrong.

'War' allows for a very different set of rules of law than are used every day in the conduct of the ordinary business of society. Non-state terrorists opened the 'war' with an attack on 9/11/2001 and the USA declared a 'war against terrorists'. Of course this 'war' was never voted on by the Congress so it is not clear whether the USA is at war or not. For the soldiers, sailors and airmen involved ... it looked like war, sounded like war and killed like war. For civilians caught up in this war where there were tens of thousands of heavily armed 'boots on the ground', they were going to be collateral damage. Extricating the USA from this was never going to be easy. I like to think that progress is being made to get out of this 'boots on the ground involvement' and I like to think that the goal is to do this without leaving total chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan ... and I like to think that the goal is also to ensure that the world is not a good place for anti-USA anti-West terrorists to incubate, train and ready deadly attacks.

I don't 'like' drones, and a military strategy that uses drones, but they are probably a whole lot better than the alternatives. I believe ... hope ... that drones are used more to learn and understand what is going on more than merely being devices to blanket areas with high explosives quite indiscriminately.
Peter Burgess

New Stanford/NYU study documents the civilian terror from Obama's drones New research shows the terrorizing impact of drones in Pakistan, false statements from US officials, and how it increases the terror threat

Glenn Greenwald: 'A one-day attack on US soil eleven years ago unleashed a never-ending campaign of violence around the world from the target and its allies.'

IMAGE Photograph: Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty

A vitally important and thoroughly documented new report on the impact of Obama's drone campaign has just been released by researchers at NYU School of Law and Stanford University Law School. Entitled 'Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan', the report details the terrorizing effects of Obama's drone assaults as well as the numerous, highly misleading public statements from administration officials about that campaign. The study's purpose was to conduct an 'independent investigations into whether, and to what extent, drone strikes in Pakistan conformed to international law and caused harm and/or injury to civilians'.

The report is 'based on over 130 detailed interviews with victims and witnesses of drone activity, their family members, current and former Pakistani government officials, representatives from five major Pakistani political parties, subject matter experts, lawyers, medical professionals, development and humanitarian workers, members of civil society, academics, and journalists.' Witnesses 'provided first-hand accounts of drone strikes, and provided testimony about a range of issues, including the missile strikes themselves, the strike sites, the victims' bodies, or a family member or members killed or injured in the strike'.

Here is the powerful first three paragraphs of the report, summarizing its main findings:

Whilte noting that it is difficult to obtain precise information on the number of civilian deaths 'because of US efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability', the report nonetheless concludes: 'while civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.'

But beyond body counts, there's the fact that 'US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury':

In other words, the people in the areas targeted by Obama's drone campaign are being systematically terrorized. There's just no other word for it. It is a campaign of terror - highly effective terror - regardless of what noble progressive sentiments one wishes to believe reside in the heart of the leader ordering it. And that's precisely why the report, to its great credit, uses that term to describe the Obama policy: the drone campaign 'terrorizes men, women, and children'.

Along the same lines, note that the report confirms what had already been previously documented: the Obama campaign's despicable (and likely criminal) targeting of rescuers who arrive to provide aid to the victims of the original strike. Noting that even funerals of drone victims have been targeted under Obama, the report documents that the US has 'made family members afraid to attend funerals'. The result of this tactic is as predictable as it is heinous:

'Secondary strikes have discouraged average civilians from coming to one another's rescue, and even inhibited the provision of emergency medical assistance from humanitarian workers.'

Perhaps worst of all, the report details at length that the prime excuse offered by Obama defenders for this continuous killing - it Keeps Us Safe™ by killing The Terrorists™ - is dubious 'at best'; indeed, the opposite is more likely true:

All the way back in 2004, the Rumsfeld Pentagon commissioned a study to determine the causes of anti-US terrorism, and even it concluded: 'Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies.' Running around the world beating your chest, bellowing 'we're at war!', and bombing multiple Muslim countries does not keep one safe. It manifestly does the opposite, since it ensures that even the most rational people will calculate that targeting Americans with violence in response is just and necessary to deter further aggression.

A one-day attack on US soil eleven years ago unleashed a never-ending campaign of violence around the world from the target and its allies. Is it really a challenge to understand that continuous bombings and civilian-killing assaults over many years, in many Muslim countries, will generate the same desire for aggression and vengeance against the US?

Time and again, those who have attempted to perpetrate attacks on US soil have cited the Muslim children and other innocent human beings extinguished by Obama's drones. Recall the words of the attempted Times Square bomber, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, at his sentencing hearing when the federal judge presiding over his case, Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, asked incredulously how he could possibly use violence that he knew would result in the deaths even of innocent children -- as though she were literally unaware that her own government continuously does exactly that:

''Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don't see children, they don't see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It's a war, and in war, they kill people. They're killing all Muslims' . . . .

''I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I'm avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.''

Perhaps most importantly, the report documents the extreme levels of propaganda used by the western press to deceive their citizens into believing pure myths about the drone campaign. As I've argued before, the worst of these myths is the journalistic mimicry of the term 'militants' to describe drone victims even when those outlets have no idea who was killed or whether that term is accurate (indeed, the term itself is almost as ill-defined as 'terrorist'). This media practice became particularly inexcusable after the New York Times revealed in May that 'Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.'

Incredibly, even after that radical redefinition was revealed, and even after the Obama administration got caught red-handed spewing demonstrable falsehoods about the identity of drone victims, US media outlets continued to use the term 'militant' to describe drone victims. The new report urges that this practice stop:

Significantly, the report says the prime culprit of these evils is what it calls the 'dramatic escalation' of the drone campaign by the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate - escalated not just in sheer numbers (in less than four years, Obama 'has reportedly carried out more than five times' the number ordered by Bush in eight years), but more so, the indiscriminate nature of the strikes. As Tuesday's Guardian article on this report states: it 'blames the US president, Barack Obama, for the escalation of 'signature strikes' in which groups are selected merely through remote 'pattern of life' analysis.'

The report is equally damning when documenting the attempts of the Obama administration to suppress information about its drone victims, and worse, to actively mislead when they deign selectively to release information. Recognizing the difficulty of determining the number of civilian deaths with exactitude - due to 'the opaqueness of the US government about its targeted killing program' as well as the inaccessibility of the region - it nonetheless documents that 'the numbers of civilians killed are undoubtedly far higher than the few claimed by US officials.' In other words, the administration's public statements are false: 'undoubtedly' so. As the LA Times summarizes the study's findings today: 'Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged.'

(The report is particularly scathing about the patent unreliability of the New America Foundation and its leading drone-and-Obama cheerleader, Peter Bergen, also of CNN, who has been amply rewarded with lucrative access by the administration he dutifully defends. Echoing a recent article by the Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf and an analysis from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the report concludes that scrutiny of Bergen's key claims 'has since revealed omissions and inconsistencies in New America Foundation's dataset, calling its widely publicized conclusions into question.' It documents 'several other glaring omissions from New America Foundation's data' used to depict Obama's drone campaign as far more benign than it actually is.)

Finally, the report notes the threat to democratic accountability posed by the Obama administration's refusal to allow any transparency or judicial oversight regarding who the president orders killed: 'The opaque position of the US government on civilian casualties is also emblematic of an accountability and democratic vacuum.' In that regard, the report - as its final paragraph - quotes the question I have often asked about this state of affairs, an answer to which I have never heard from Obama's drone defenders:

What has always made that question particularly pressing for me is that American progressives cheered loudly when a similar question was posed by Al Gore in a widely celebrated 2006 speech he gave on the Washington mall denouncing the Bush/Cheney assault on civil liberties:

''If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?''

Democrats spent several days at their convention two weeks ago wildly cheering and chanting whenever President Obama's use of violence and force was heralded. They're celebrating a leader who is terrorizing several parts of the Muslim world, repeatedly killing children, targeting rescuers and mourners, and entrenching the authority to exert the most extreme powers in full secrecy and without any accountability -- all while he increases, not decreases, the likelihood of future attacks. This new Stanford/NYU report is but the latest in a long line of evidence proving all of that.