Certain Doubt

Drone Diplomacy

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

The recent article in the Wall Street Journal stating that the White House and the Pentagon are actively considering the deployment of unmanned drones as part of “hunter killer” teams in Yemen is an interesting development in the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

It is not a development for the better.

Under this proposal the military would cede authority over elite special forces units to the C.I.A. to allow them to operate in foreign countries extra judicially… that is with out oversight, accountability and most importantly, without asking permission of the governments in which they conduct their operations.

Recognizing the increasingly questionable nature of the reporting in the Wall Street Journal – neither the White House nor the Yemeni Government deigned to comment on their claims – the mere notion that the White House might even be considering this move should be enough to send chills up the spines of tribal muslims around the globe. The deployment of special forces teams or even just a squad of armed drones under the auspices of the C.I.A. would cement the precedent set in Pakistan to allow the President to issue targeted assassination orders of foreign nationals in secret with no accountability whatsoever. In other words it would give the president his own personal hit squad.

My own feeling is that even if drones in Yemen is only a trial balloon it is one that should be punctured without delay.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right off. Unmanned drones are lousy as tools of statecraft. If you want to have a drone circle a battle field for hours and then blow things up without putting soldier’s lives at risk then arguably they are an effective weapon. No one can argue that American soldier’s live are in jeopardy when the operators of the drones are half a world away slipping Big Gulp Slurpies in air-conditioned comfort the deserts of New Mexico.

If your goal is to build things, like roads, bridges, and hospitals or if you desire to bring stability to a region through democratic nation building or if you merely wish to win over hearts and minds, drones will not do you any good. The ability to blow up a building without putting yourself in harm’s way is hardly the way to make peace, build infrastructure, or get people to like you. In fact, as many observers and counter terrorism experts have noted, the use of drones as a weapon against insurgents is wildly ineffective and even counter productive. Every time a drone attack kills innocent civilians it acts as a recruiting tool for the militants whom you are fighting. And drones always kill civilians.

To use unmanned drones as we have been, for targeted, extra-judicial killing is contrary to every known international law one can think of. If one has any respect for the laws of other nations one has to condemn the use of drones as tools of state sponsored assassination. It matters not that we have been flying them over areas where the “state” government is a loose and unruly collection of tribal councils. If we were to fly drones over Ottowa, Cancun, or London in an effort to assassinate those we suspect of harboring ill will against our country, we would be just as guilty as we are blowing up militants in the Tribal areas of Waziristan. Every time we use drones to run an assassination mission over a sovereign nation we are guilty of a crime under international law. It’s that simple.

If it is illegal to use drones as assassination tools, then it is perforce immoral as well. Let me put it bluntly. Assassination is murder. You can call it extra-judicial killing but that doesn’t make it any more ethical. In order to put any kind of legitimacy on the taking of a life by the United States government we must first make such an order comply with the full weight of the law. The process must be transparent, or at least be controlled by some independent body with oversight capability. This does not happen with drones. The targets are chosen in secret. The death sentence decrees are handed down in secret. The affected parties are incinerated with no ability to face their accuser declare their innocence or refute the evidence against them. Indeed, if the person blown to glory is innocent, he or she may go to their reward never even knowing they were suspected of being a militant. And of course, the innocent bystanders who die as a result of any attack never get a say in the matter at all.

To be able to use any weapon without oversight or accountability, virtually insures that the weapon in question will be used with less reservation than if controls and oversight were in place. If any one requires proof of this, simply look at the statistics for frequency of drone attacks by the United States. Since the introduction of drones as a tool for targeting insurgents was introduced, their use has steadily increased. For Presidents like Obama and Bush before him, the ability to wipe out inconvenient people in foreign countries without having to ask permission or provide any reason to the leaders of the countries in question is like a powerful drug – one with dangerous side effects.

To sum up,
1) using drones for state assassination is illegal and immoral.

4) Finally, when used as a weapon of war, drones are excellent for blowing things up. However, they are useless for putting things back together, thus they are lousy as instruments of Statecraft, nation building, and bringing stability to a region.

The use of unmanned armed drones as tools for targeted assassination virtually assures instability and lawlessness in a region. The president, the Pentagon, and the manufacturers of unmanned areal vehicles may try to push them on us as effective at producing peace. However, the truth is the escalating use of unmanned assassination drones as a substitute for diplomacy will produce a much, much more dangerous world and make us all less safe.

Tags: Assassination, diplomacy, Drone Diplomacy, Ethics, government, law, Morality, Thomas Vincent, Vincent, Wall Street Journal, war, warfare
Posted in Daily Rant, Ethics, Politics, law, warfare | 2 Comments »

Sweden: Wikileaks Safe Haven?

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

When Wikileaks made the decision to base their servers in Sweden, the media all dutifully reported that the site was choosing the country “to take advantage of laws protecting whistleblowers and a culture supportive of online mavericks.” The inference was that Sweden would be some kind of neutral safe haven from which Assange and his fellow compilers could ply their trade, free from the slings and arrows (both literal and figurative) that the C.I.A. and the Pentagon would surely unleash.

Assange and Wikileaks’ reasoning seemed sound enough. To quote an AP article of August 18,

“The Pirate Party, a small Swedish political group that holds a seat in the European Parliament, on Tuesday offered Wikileaks to use its servers. Their reasoning was that it would be even more difficult for authorities to seize servers owned by a political group.
Assange has said WikiLeaks routes its material through Sweden and Belgium because of the whistleblower protection offered by laws in those countries. He was in Sweden this week in part to prepare an application for a publishing certificate that would make sure the site is fully protected by the Swedish laws…

However, the AP article goes on to note that while: “…Swedish laws allow prosecutors to intervene against publication of material deemed harmful to national security. It’s unclear whether that could also include the security of a friendly nation. The U.S. argues the secret documents risks the lives of coalition forces and Afghans helping them.”

The article stresses that: “Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said the U.S. has not contacted Sweden about WikiLeaks.” And, “Any complaint against the site would be a matter for Swedish judicial authorities — not the government, Bildt said…”

Given Assange’s inability to get those same judicial authorities to dismiss rape charges against him, one wonders just how sympathetic they will be when it comes time to stand up against the tsunami of lawyers, lobbyists, and diplomats the White House will flood the country with to stop Wikileaks from continuing to release embarrassing documents.Of course the AP article notes that, “Swedish ministers typically refrain from getting involved when foreign governments complain about material published by the country’s media. Last year, Bildt dismissed demands by Israel for the government to condemn a Swedish newspaper article that claimed Israeli soldiers harvested organs from dead Palestinians.”

Nevertheless, with all the Justice ministry officials’ independent sounding statements, it must give Wikileaks pause when they read the following headline in “The Local:”

Swedish police Raid Filesharing ‘Scene’

“The Local: Swedish police raided locations across the country on Tuesday, including WikiLeaks’ ISP PRQ, acting on information from Belgian police in an international operation targeting the filesharing network known as “The Scene”.

While the raid was not aimed specifically at Wikileaks, the fact that PRQ, Wikileaks’ server was raided at all means when push comes to shove, the Swedish Justice Department may not be as independant as Wikileaks might hope.

“The purpose of the raids in the Stockholm area and in Umeå were to gather information about specific IP addresses,” said Fredrik Ingblad. He added that police also seized computers and servers in the raids.

As the AP article demonstrates, the existing laws in Sweden do provide some protections for sites like Wikileaks.

Swedish law enforcement cannot issue an injunction to close a website before a court has convicted the publishers of a crime, but can seize a server as part of a criminal investigation, said Johan Lundmark, deputy director at the Justice Ministry. He questioned whether it could be considered a crime in Sweden to leak classified U.S. documents…
That indicates U.S. officials may only be able to target WikiLeaks’ servers by demanding legal assistance from Swedish police for their own criminal investigation.

“At the end of the day, it will all boil down to some kind of interpretation by some authority, which will consider … if there is a possibility to assist the American police with the support of existing rules,” Lundmark said. “This is a complicated issue and there are loads of questions that could pop up.”

Still, the existing rules proved no obstacle in the case of file sharing website The Pirate Bay after: “…extensive communication took place between lobby groups for the U.S. entertainment industry and the Swedish government before the prosecutor pressed charges against the operators.” As the article notes: “The four men behind The Pirate Bay last year were sentenced to one year in prison each and ordered to pay combined damages of 30 million kronor ($4.1 million). They have appealed and the website is still running while they await a retrial.”

If the U.S. entertainment industry can achieve such success at convincing the Swedish Justice ministry to crack down on a bunch of guys swapping movies, imagine the full court press that the Pentagon and C.I.A. will be able to muster, arguing that Wikileak’s release of classified material constitutes a “War Crimes.”

Assange’s personal problems in getting the Justice department to drop rape charges would pale in comparison to the legal challenges he and Wikileaks face should the Swedish Justice department bow to pressure from the White House. Assange’s bold prediction in August that “The will of the Swedish people is with us,” not withstanding, it is ultimately the Swedish Government – specifically the Justice Ministry – that will decide whether Sweden proves to be the safe Haven that Wikileaks needs.

Julian Assange may feel comfortable leaving his fate up to “the will of the people,” but if Wikileaks is staking all their hopes for the future on a bunch of Swedish bureaucrats standing up to the will of the United States….

Let’s just say, I hope for Wikileaks sake, they have a back up plan in place.

Tags: AP, Assange, government, justice, law, rape, ssfe haven, Sweden, The Local, Thomas Vincent, Vincent, White House, wikileaks
Posted in Daily Doubt, Ethics, Politics, law, media, warfare | 1 Comment »

R.I.P. Rule of Law

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

“Democratic societies must espouse an unwavering commitment to human rights and reject the extra-judicial killing of any person; particularly, the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of persons arbitrarily identified as “criminals,” regardless of the nature and circumstances of their allege(d) crime. This is an international crime that is unacceptable in any civilized society. The rule of law requires that a person accused of a crime be charged and placed before a court of law.” Rickford Burke

If one needed any more evidence to support the notion that democracy and the rule of law are extinct in America one need only look at the Obama administration’s attitudes toward extra-judicial killing of suspected terrorists and militants, even those who are American citizens. As Scott Shane of the New York Times reports:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki who is believed to have shifted (emphasis mine)from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.

The significance of this statement can’t be overstated. As Glenn Greenwald notes in a piece for Salon in January:

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.” They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?

Sadly, Greenwald’s call for controversy has been met with deafening silence by virtually all of the media. Even the Congress has been mute, the lone exception being Representative Dennis Kucinich whom Jeremy Scahill quotes in The Nation:

“The assassination policies vitiate the presumption of innocence and the government then becomes the investigator, policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner all in one. That raises the greatest questions with respect to our constitution and our democratic way of life.”

Kucinich says the case of al-Awlaki is an attempt to make “a short-cut around the Constitution,” saying, “Short-cuts often belie the deep and underlying questions around which nations rise and fall. We are really putting our nation in jeopardy by pursuing this kind of policy.”

With characteristic bluntness, Kucinich notes that even from a practical standpoint the idea of allowing extrajudicial killing is questionable:

“In the real world, things don’t work out quite so neatly as they seem to in the heads of the CIA,” says Kucinich. “There’s always the possibility of blowback, which could endanger high-ranking US officials. There’s the inevitable licensing of rogue groups that comes about from policies that are not strictly controlled and that get sloppy–so you have zero accountability. And that’s not even to get into an over-arching issue of the morality of assassination policies, which are extra-constitutional, extra-judicial. It’s very dangerous from every possible perspective.”

Despite being touted as a constitutional law scholar when he was a candidate and despite professing loudly and often that under his administration the rule of law would be sacrosanct, by his actions, President Barrack Obama has shown a marked tendency to accept the rule of law only as long as it doesn’t conflict with his political agenda. For example, while he is quick to claim the legal and moral high ground when rejecting torture, in other areas his morality appears more flexible.

…beginning with his rather startling declaration that he will work to create a system of “preventive detention” for accused Terrorists without a trial, in order to keep locked up indefinitely people who, in his words, “cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.” In other words, even as he paid repeated homage to “our values” and “our timeless ideals,” he demanded the power (albeit with unspecified judicial and Congressional oversight) to keep people in prison with no charges or proof of any crime having been committed, all while emphasizing that this “war” will continue for at least ten years.

Regardless of where one comes down on the morality and efficacy arguments, one thing is undeniable: Murder by Presidential fiat is not an expression of “unwavering commitment to human rights.” Whether one claims self-defense, executive privilege, or the divine right of kings, extra judicial killing – the right of a leader to kill anyone, anywhere, at anytime with no trial, no burden of proof and no questions asked – is nothing more than a frank admission that democracy and the rule of law are not absolutes but are merely concepts of convenience to be discarded, like plastic wrap, whenever they interfere with America’s “vital national interests.”

In the final analysis, it is hard to know which is more disturbing, that our president claims the right to kill American citizens without a trial merely by declaring them “terrorists,” or that everyone seems to be lining up like bobble-heads and agreeing that he has the legal right to do so.

Either way, you can kiss democracy and the rule of law goodbye.

Tags: Awalaki, citizen, democracy, extrajudicial, Greenwald, killing, Kucinich, law, murder, Obama, trial
Posted in Daily Rant, Ethics, Politics, law | No Comments »

The Drones of War

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

The recent attempt by the Obama administration to justify its policy of drone strikes against Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, did little to answer the basic legal questions surrounding the issue.

Speaking before the American Society of International Law, State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh cited the right to “self-defense” as a rationale, for the continued use of unmanned aerial drones in targeted killings of Taliban and al Qaeda leaders:

“…[I]t is the considered view of this administration…that targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war.

… the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks….

[T]his administration has carefully reviewed the rules governing targeting operations to ensure that these operations are conducted consistently with law of war…”

The main problem I have with Koh’s defense argument is that it relies on his assertion that we are at war with al Qaeda and the Taliban. Despite President Obama’s parroting repetition that our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq constitute war, there has never been universal acceptance of this fact. Defining the terrorist attack on 9-11 as “an act of war” was a debatable claim when the Bush administration made it. It’s equally debatable now.

Citing the example of the WWII targeting of the plane containing the “architect of Pearl Harbor,” Koh attempts – none too subtly – to once again equate 9-11 with the attack by Japan that sparked our entry into World War II. But, as many commentators have rightly pointed out, the two events are in no way equivalent. A handful of fundamentalists with box cutters – or a lone individual with explosive underwear – cannot be compared to an armada of aircraft carriers and dive bombers bent on destroying our entire pacific fleet. It is worse than apples and oranges; it is more like watermelons vs poppy seeds.

If we are not at war, however, Koh’s argument supporting targeted killing becomes a three legged stool with one leg missing. If one accepts the notion that terrorists are criminals who are guilty of crimes, it is hard to make the argument that they should be treated as “belligerent combatants” who can be legally assassinated using sophisticated weapons of war. If we are not at war, then the targeted killing of al Qaeda and Taliban leaders is most definitely extra-judicial and must be considered illegal under international law.

In his speech, Mr. Koh didn’t even address the fact that many of the “belligerents” we are targeting – i.e. Taliban leaders – have never declared war on the United States. They didn’t invade our country. We invaded and occupied theirs! By any measure, we have been the military aggressors in the Middle East. If anyone has the right to the claim of self-defense it would have to be the Taliban, not us.

Finally, while it is certainly understandable for a President to want to keep his population safe, it seems to me that by defining terrorists like al Qaeda as “belligerent combatants” who can be legally killed, we risk opening a Pandora’s Box to new and more bizarre uses for unmanned drone attacks. If the Taliban and al Qaeda are considered targetable, then what is to keep the government from defining other groups of terrorists as belligerent and marking them for assassination as well?

The U.S. State department currently lists some 45 Groups that are designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations – including the FARC in Columbia and the IRA in Ireland. There are eight such groups in Palestine alone. Are we to assume by Mr. Koh’s legal pronouncement that any terrorist group that the State Department decides might wish to cause us harm is eligible to have their leaders snuffed with hellfire missiles launched from unmanned drones? If it starts, where does it end?

I am under no illusions about the usage of cutting edge technology in war. The United States is the world leader in weapons production and research. If our army develops a technological advantage that helps us to defeat enemies on the battlefield, I have no doubt the pentagon will attempt to justify its use.

As a citizen, I am less interested in hearing a State Department Lawyer expound on why our use of weapons like unmanned drones to target Taliban leaders is legal.

I am more interested in hearing the government elaborate about instances where they would consider the use of these weapons to be illegal.

Tags: Al Qaeda, Assassination, Drones, koh, law, Policy, UAVs, war
Posted in Daily Doubt, Politics, law, warfare | No Comments »