Holocaust 2.0

The twilight of the American Empire, it thus appears, will be remembered for its endless kill lists and its codification of murder. -Ben Schreiner 

It is high time we learned to read the signs of the times. The epitaph above is taken from the recent Counterpunch article "Obama's Endless Kill List." In that article Schreiner briefly illuminates some of the key facts about Obama's drone program, including the administrative policy defining any military age male in so-called combative area as combatants, and the assumption of guilt unless proven innocent. Schreiner goes on to call our attention to the total credulity of those in government, and the absolute lack of challenge from the Republican quarter. Whatever the differences Obama and Romney both agree that killing poverty-stricken people in Pakistan is a good thing. And that is all that was said in the presidential debates, maybe not in those words.

The mainstream American media is onboard too, perpetuating an incredibly callous attitude human life, which, as an aside, I remember all too well from the attitudes of people around me at the onset of the Iraq war. Because the people being killed are so far away it is easy to lump them into some indiscriminate category of "the enemy" as though the people in question were simply elements in a video game. (This in fact was the exact attitude of some of the people who attended my high school.) Schreiner has this to say:

The callous absence of doubt is just apparently just as prevalent among elite U.S. media. For instance, in an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe Tuesday, Time columnist Joe Klein chillingly sought to justify the gravest horror's of Obama's drone program. 

In a debate over drones with right-wing host Joe Scarborough Klein went on to aver: "The bottom line, in the end, is this: whose four-year old gets killed. What we're doing is limiting the possibility that four year olds here are going to get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror." 

The very fact that rationalizing the killing of children can freely emanate from amongst "respectable" circles in Washington is indicative of the severe moral deterioration from which the  Obama administration's drone program was born. (Obama's Endless Kill List)  

This is disgusting. The subtext of Klein's statement is perfectly clear; it is okay to kill the poor Arab Muslim child. But of course it isn't okay. When anyone, even a liberal American, starts to justify the murder of children then it is time to stop listening to that person. It is time to denounce them as cold-hearted killers and face the facts of what is going on. Murder is murder. Obama's drone program is not a foreign policy it is a brutally vicious extermination program. There are lists, lists of people who are condemned to die at the say-so of the American president without evidence, without trial, without justice. Anyone who gets in the way is "collateral damage."

The technology may have changed, but the game is the same. Welcome to Holocaust 2.0.

Review: Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control

 Medea Benjamin Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control 

New York: OR Books, 2012. 

A recent article in the New York Times, entitled "A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a Word Away" chronicles some of the psychological disturbances facing drone pilots, as they routinely confront an "enemy" across the world from the safety of a computer screen. While critics may argue that drones turn war into a video game reality, the piece seems to contend, the high-resolution cameras bring intimate footage of the people these pilots are attacking. An  excerpt from the piece suggests that:

Among the toughest psychological tasks is the close surveillance for  aerial sniper missions, reminiscent of the East German Stasi officer absorbed by the people he spies on in the movie "The Lives of Others." A drone pilot and his partner, a sensor operator who manipulates the aircraft's camera, observe the habits of a militant as he plays with his children, talks to his wife and visits his neighbours. They then try to time their strike when, for example, his family is out at the market. (Elizabeth Bumiller, "A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away. New York Times, July 29, 2012)  

There is, certainly, a great deal of truth to Bumiller's presentation of the changing psychology  warfare. What she presents, ever, gives a far too sanitized picture of what is really going on. The extensive use of military and surveillance drones is not simply a minor adjustment in how soldiers carry out their "day jobs." It entails a fundamental shift in how war is carried out and how it is perceived by both soldiers and civilians. And the idea that the only psychological trauma experienced by the drone pilots is the reality of having killed "bad guys, is absolutely false.

In Drone Warfare, a haunting piece of investigative journalism, Medea Benjamin puts to rest any illusions of drones being a more humane and precise way of engaging in war and points to the reality of human suffering, of villages being destroyed because of alleged connections to "militant" groups. People are reduced to demographics and mercilessly slaughtered by someone behind  a computer a world away. And this happens, in the main, without even the formalities of war. It is instead an assassination program, of highly dubious legality, whose collateral damage or unintended consequences are the many destroyed villages, the wounded and the dying.

Benjamin goes into some detail describing the clandestine assassination program and its participants, the ever-notorious CIA, the mercenary group Blackwater (now Academi) and a secretive wing of the military known as the Joint Special Operations Command. These agencies execute their directives without Congressional oversight, a fact which Medea outlines as part of a broader erosion of democracy in America. Even American citizenship is no deterrent for the President ordering up an execution, as in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were assassinated by one of the CIA's Predator Drones in Yemen in 2011. Benjamin writes:

Ironically, the CIA is forbidden under US law from spying on Americans - that's left to the FBI. It seems that the agency can, however, murder Americans overseas at the behest of the president without so much as a whimper of "impeachment." (Benjamin, 66)

President Obama emerges from Benjamin's book as perhaps the most ironic winner of the Nobel Peace Prize the world has yet seen. If Obama learned anything from the Bush administration, Benjamin suggests, it was that you don't take prisoners. Benjamin goes on to highlight the numerous ways that drone attacks are in clear violation of international law as well as the American Constitution. This was particularly evident in the assassination of al-Awlaki, where the "Law of 9/11" trumped all Constitutional rights and vestiges of legal process.

Behind it all is the insidious face of corporate greed. The drone market is a growth market, and is set to become even bigger. In the meantime in the theoretical world of robotics a brave new future is being envisioned when drones may be equipped with technology that can "hunt, identify, and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. (Benjamin, 159)

Confronting the horrifying reality, and disturbing visions of the future, Benjamin raises a call to action. Governments must not be allowed to murder with impunity, noxious technologies should not be unquestionably accepted under the all-encompassing rubric of "security." The barbarism of sitting in an air-conditioned room destroying the livelihoods of others thousands of miles away is perverse and will come back to haunt America. We must not allow killing to be made easy. Benjamin warns:

Drones aren't a unique evil - but that's just the point. Drones don't revolutionize surveillance; they are a progressive evolution in making spying, at home and abroad, more pervasive. Drones don't revolutionize warfare; they are, rather, a progressive evolution in making murder clean and easy. That's why the increased reliance on drones for killing and spying is not to be praised, but refuted. And challenged. (Benjamin, 215.) 

Drone Warfare is a clearly written analysis of the dismal reality underlying the banal rhetoric of the "war on terror." It is a wake-up call to the ongoing, excessive, and racist violence perpetrated by the military-industrial complex under the (increasingly thinning) auspices of democratic government.  It is a call to create a more human world.