Boston & Cowardice & America the Blind

As I write this, we still don’t know who was responsible for the horrific bombing attack in Boston. Perhaps it will turn out to be the work of home grown rightwing nuts; perhaps it’s the act of foreign terrorists. But, whatever the source, what strikes me is the number of times the barbaric assault is being denounced as “cowardly”

As in Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis’s warning that “This cowardly act will not be taken in stride.”

Indeed, “Cowardly” is the epithet being used by political figures across the United States; it was used by an editorial writer in Kansas City Star and a spokesman for the United Maryland Muslim Council in Baltimore.

“Cowardly” is the term being used in messages of support from abroad, from the Prime Minister of India to the Prime Minister of Italy.

After all, what could be more cowardly than for some unknown, unseen, unannounced  killer to blow apart and maim innocent men women and children, without any risk to himself.   

But, if that be the definition of cowardice, what could be more cowardly, than the now cliché image of the button-down CIA officer agent driving to work in Las Vegas to assume his shift at the controls of a drone circling high over some dusty village on the other side of the world?

How different are the images produced by such attacks—shattered bodies, dismembered limbs, severed arteries, frantic aid givers and terrified survivors—how different from the moving images of the tragedy in Boston now being broadcast and rebroadcast on TV stations around the globe?

With those scenes in mind, I would ask you to read a portion of a blog on Drone Wars I posted a few weeks ago, citing the fact that over the past few years, U.S. drones have made mincemeat out of an estimated 3000 to 4000 people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.  At least 200 of them were children.

“The figures are very rough because no one--certainly not the U.S. government--is releasing an accurate count.  The London based Center for Investigative reporting, which attempts to track the drone strikes, has been able to identify by name only a few hundred of the actual victims. Who knows what their political affiliations really were? Or even less, what considerations—legal and otherwise—went into justifying their demise?

“It’s a terrifying situation.” Jennifer Gibson told me. She’s an American lawyer in London with Reprieve, an organization taking on the “drone war” issue. “There are villages in Pakistan,” she says “that have drones flying over them 24 hours a day. Sometimes they’ll stay for weeks. But my clients and people there have no way of knowing if they are being targeted. Or what kind of behavior is likely to get them killed.

“They don’t know if the person riding beside them in a car or walking with them in the marketplace may be a target. It’s terrorizing entire communities. Even after an attack, there is no acknowledging by the U.S. government, no response at all, absolutely no accountability. And the vast majority of casualties don’t even have names attached to them.”

“Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards. He suggested that some strikes may even constitute “war crimes”.

“But, few Americans seem to carry about U.N. rapporteurs. It’s only when Americans are potential targets for those drones, that Congress and the media get stirred up.

“And they’re probably right. A recent poll taken by Farleigh Dickinson University’s Public Mind, found that by a two to one margin (48% to 24%) American voters say they think it’s illegal for the U.S. government to target its own citizens abroad with drone strikes.

“But, when it comes to using drones to carry out attacks abroad “on people and other targets deemed a threat to the U.S.” voters were in favor of a margin of six-to-one [75% to 13%].

(You may be interested in checking out another blog I wrote-“Drone Wars: The End of History?”)

Since I first posted  this blog, a reader, Jim Rissman has sent me the link to a brief news article about a drone strike in Pakistan on Sunday--day before the Boston attack:

A US drone strike killed four militants on Sunday in the Datta Khel tehsil of North Waziristan Agency.

A security official said the US drone fired two missiles at a compound in Manzar Khel area of Datta Khel, some 40 kilometres towards west of Miramshah, the headquarters of the agency.

Tribesmen recalled seeing six drones hovering in the air since the afternoon, spreading panic and fear in the area. One of the drones fired two missiles at around sunset, killing at least four militants.

The compound caught fire after the strike leaving all the bodies burnt.

The last drone strike occurred in the agency on March 22, when US drones targeting a vehicle in Datta Khel killed four militants.

A UN envoy last month said US drone attacks violate Pakistan’s sovereignty.

Mali: Mission Accomplished! Hollande’s Bush Moment:

Still No Crazy Glue in Sight

As Colin Powell famously warned George H.W. Bush on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, “if you break it, you own it.” 

France is not responsible for “breaking” Mali. The country was already a West African basket case long before the French intervention.

But France, which enraged many Americans by refusing to participate in the invasion of Iraq, now finds itself stuck with the results of their own intervention.  And there’s no crazy glue in sight.

That’s what I wrote a couple of months ago after President Francois Hollande dispatched French troops to Mali. 

The irony today is that not only is there no obvious solution to Mali’s plight, but Hollande himself is having enormous problems running his own deeply troubled country. 

Back in January Hollande’s aides hoped that a forceful intervention in Mali would give the lie to the charge that he was a feeble, indecisive leader.

But now, in mid April, with 4,600 French troops in Mali, the magazine L’Express is running an abject photo of Holland on the cover, over the humiliating headline: “M. FAIBLE.” (Mister WEAK). Similar devastatingly mocking jibes fill the media—from all sides of the political spectrum.

Indeed, with Hollande confronting a major domestic political crisis, after his Budget Minister-in charge of collecting taxes--admitted to having stashed money in secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Singapore, the president’s popularity is still plummeting (now about 20%).

It’s being driven ever lower by France’s abysmal economic situation,  mounting crime and racial tensions. With three of Hollande’s own ministers now publicly challenging the government’s economic program, the ineluctable conclusion is that no one’s really in charge.

Yet this is the same man who is supposedly leading the battle to save Mali from ruin.

When France intervened in January, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius vowed the action would be over in “a matter of weeks.”

Now in mid April, 4,600 French troops are still in the country, supported by about 6,000 soldiers from several African states. Led by the French, they’ve retaken most of the major population centers from the jihadists who had threatened to overrun the country. They’ve also pummeled rebel redoubts in the North, reportedly killing hundreds of radicals and destroying tons of equipment.

Yet the situation is still tense. Islamists who had faded into the villages and rugged mountains are still capable of deadly hit-and-run attacks. And the ethnic Tuaregs in the North, who began the rebellion, are still demanding autonomy or independence.

Hollande  is also out on a limb. Though he claimed he was acting to protect Europe from radical Islam spreading in Africa, he has received precious little support from his European allies. Nor—aside from some important intelligence and logistics support—has he received much real backing from the United States.  After Iraq and Afghanistan, no one is rushing to get involved in yet another quagmire.

Meanwhile the Mali adventure is costing France—whose budget is already in disarray-- close to three million Euros a day—probably much more. By this summer, the cost will probably have risen to at least half a billion Euros…and counting.  

Hollande’s predicament now is not that different from the one facing President Obama in Afghanistan: how to drastically decrease France’s involvement in Mali without making it look like France has cut and run, leaving an unseemly chaos in his wake.

The solution: France will turn over the mess in their former colony, as soon as possible, to a new “democratically-elected” Malian government.  

Thus it was that Hollande dispatched Foreign Minister Fabius to Bamako to lay down his dictat to the major political actors:  presidential and legislative elections were to be held by July.

The rebel Tuaregs were supposed to lay down their arms, though they still occupy Kidal and a part of Northern Mali; a French reaction force would stay in place to ensure that “the terrorists” didn’t come back.

We imagine the plans also include a kind of George W. Bush “Mission Accomplished” moment: A beaming Hollande attending the inauguration of Mali’s new leaders. He salutes the sacrifice of the heroic French and African troops, vows undying support for the future of France’s former colony--and continues to withdraw French troops.

By the end of 2013 only 1000 French troops will be left to work with a UN Peacekeeping Force from other mainly African countries.

That’s the deal. The problem, according to many observers, is that attempting to hold meaningful--never mind democratic-- elections by July is just a wishful figment of Hollande’s desperate imagination--a frail fig leaf for France.

Even if Mali were secure, the idea that it might be possible to organize a real campaign in a country twice the size of France, draw up lists of electors when at least 400,000 Malians from the north have fled south or to their African neighbors, is a chimera.

With no time for new political leaders or parties to organize and present themselves, the field is left to the same threadbare, corrupt politicians who presided over the country’s ruin and final collapse in 2012.

After that debacle, it turned out that what had once been trumpeted as a showcase for post-colonial government in Africa, was in fact a  “Potemkin” democracy—all façade, no substance.

Which will probably be the upshot of the elections scheduled for July (if they actually take place.)

The scenario after that: those 1,000 French troops, with 10,000 soldiers and police from the new U.N. force—many of them poorly equipped and trained—will somehow maintain order in Mali’s restive towns and cities and vast hinterlands, while the new government struggles to resolve the country’s huge problems, made even more desperate by the changing climate of the Sahel.   

Bottom line: fifty years after it became independent, Mali has still to rely on its former colonial ruler to keep the country intact.   

But after half a century, France, like the other once great powers, no longer has the appetite nor the resources to play a colonial role. Hollande, as we’ve noted, is having a hell of a time, just attempting to rule his own restive nation.

Nor for that matter does the United States have much in the way of state-building zeal these days. President Obama would much rather deal with terrorist threats through killer drones, than boots on the ground and massive aid programs.

Which means that imposing elections for July on Mali, though a flawed, cynical step, may be the only realistic way forward. It may at least get some kind of political process sputtering again. 

And France and the rest of the world will provide some aid, some investment, some military training—and Mali and its peoples will almost certainly endure decades more of political turbulence and strife.

Their desperate situation will be mirrored in the turmoil, which may also last for decades, of failing states across the region, from Tunis to Libya to Egypt to Syria.

After all, the reverberations of the French Revolution, which took place in 1789, are still being felt in France to this day. 

Drone Wars: Ragheads--4000 vs Americans- 3

Earlier this week, NBC News revealed a secret Department of Justice memo entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force.” 

NBC’s scoop has since fueled mounting outrage over the Obama administration’s drone policy. What is most troubling about the indignation, however, is how much it’s focused on the fact that, my God, President Obama is even using drone’s to knock off his own people.

Or as a shocked Rachel Maddow put it, “Even an American citizen can be killed.”

Senator Ron Wyden proclaimed, “Americans have a right to know when their government thinks it’s allowed to kill them.”

The American the Justice Department memo referred to was Nasser al-Awlak, a radical Islamic cleric and American and Yemeni citizen, suspected of being head of operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusula. He was also implicated in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood Texas and the attempted 2011 Times Square bombing by Faisal Shahzad.

Two weeks after he was blown apart in Yemen in 2011, his 16 year-old son was obliterated in another drone strike, also directed under the CIA’s secret guidelines.

The son’s death was much more shocking than his father’s.

One other American has also been killed by Drone strikes.

But, much more shocking is the fact that over the past few years, U.S. drones have made mincemeat out of an estimated 3000 to 4000 others—non Americans--in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.  At least 200 of them were children.

The figures are very rough because no one--certainly not the U.S. government--is releasing an accurate count.  The London based Center for Investigative reporting, which attempts to track the drone strikes, has been able to identify by name only a few hundred of the actual victims. Who knows what their political affiliations really were? 
Or even less, what considerations—legal and otherwise—went into justifying their demise?

“It’s a terrifying situation.” Jennifer Gibson, an American lawyer in London with Reprieve, an organization taking on the “drone war” issue. “There are villages in Pakistan,” she says “that have drones flying over them 24 hours a day. Sometimes they’ll stay for weeks. But my clients and people there have no way of knowing if they are being targeted. Or what kind of behavior is likely to get them killed. They don’t know if the person riding beside them in a car or walking with them in the marketplace may be a target.It’s terrorizing entire communities. Even after an attack, there is no acknowledging by the U.S. government, no response at all, absolutely no accountability. And the vast majority of casualties don’t even have names attached to them.”

Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards. He suggested that some strikes may even constitute “war crimes”.

But, few Americans seem to carry about U.N. rapporteurs. It’s only when Americans are potential targets for those drones, that Congress and the media get stirred up.

And they’re probably right. A recent poll taken by Farleigh Dickinson University’s Public Mind, found that by a two to one margin (48% to 24%) American voters say they think it’s illegal for the U.S. government to target its own citizens abroad with drone strikes.

But, when it comes to using drones to carry out attacks abroad “on people and other targets deemed a threat to the U.S.” voters were in favor of a margin of six-to-one [75% to 13%].

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Centre for Constitutional Rights (The CCR) have been demanding a court hearing in the United States to determine whether the former head of the CIA Leon Panetta was guilty of having depriving Nasser al-Awlak and his son of their constitutional right to life.

Maria LaHood, an attorney with the CCR frankly admitted to me that they are concentrating on the two American cases, because that’s the really the only way to get Americans to focus on the problem. Also because that’s really the best hope they have of getting an American court to actually agree to hear their case.

‘What we’re also hoping” she says, “is that if we do get anywhere with this case, then we can get a legal interpretation from the court that would apply to everyone--not just Americans. But getting a court to hear this case is going to be a battle in itself.”

Reprieve is also active in the courts—in Pakistan. Though the Pakistani ambassador in Washington has complained about the drone strikes, his government has done little to prevent them.  Reprieve now is backing a case in Peshawar to oblige the Pakistani government to take action against the drones--to protect the constitutional right to life of its own citizens.

What particularly concerns Reprieve attorney Jennifer Gibson is the very nature of the convoluted 16-page memo that describes the Justice Department’s rationale for okaying the killing of an American, even outside of a war zone.

“If the U.S. has such vague, ambiguous standards where Americans are concerned, if they they’ve set the bar so low for their own citizens, who knows what the standards are for killing non Americans?”

In other words, if Justice Department lawyers labored so mightily on producing a memo setting the guidelines for killing an American citizen, one can only presume that the guidelines must be much different for those who inhabit the rest of the world.

When do we see that memo?

Drone Wars: the end of History?

Drone Wars: the end of History?

NYT Jan 25, 2013LONDON — A prominent British human rights lawyer [Ben Emmerson] said on Thursday that a United Nations panel he leads would investigate what he called the “exponential rise” in drone strikes used in counterterrorist operations, “with a view to determining whether there is a plausible allegation of unlawful killing….”

“This form of warfare is here to stay, and it is completely unacceptable to allow the world to drift blindly toward the precipice without any agreement between states as to the circumstances in which drone strike targeted killings are lawful, and on the safeguards necessary to protect civilians.”

Awesome Engineering Co.

Memo To all Sales Staff:

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Big News!

The Liquidator, our new unmanned aerial vehicle, is now in full production. But we’re after far more than the U.S. market. More than seventy countries already have drones—armed and unarmed. That’s just for starters. Every self-respecting head of state is going to want his own fleet.  

And the Liquidator will be the flavor of the decade.

It can takeoff, land and hover for a week without need of a human operator.

And it can't be fooled.  From six miles up, thanks to our new Awesome Laser Optical Scanner (ALOS), it can zoom in to photograph the face of anyone below, as well as capture the underlying bone structure, with amazing resolution.

This means there is no way the bad guys (or gals) can conceal their identity by growing beards, dyeing their hair, losing weight, or undergoing radical plastic surgery.

The next sales point is also sensational: The Liquidator can work totally on its own. Its scanner can instantly interface with a database of all known or suspected bad guys in any intelligence agency’s files, or from the new global terrorist data base that we offer as an additional service. At the same time, the ALOS can also assess the area around the target for risk of “collateral damage.” [cd]  

Note: for an extra 1$million per unit, we will equip the Liquidator with a CDR (collateral damage regulator) that permits the operator to dial in the degree of cd judged acceptable for any given assignment.

The operator then has an option. A.  Let the Liquidator run on “auto-kill” . That means that once is positive confirmation of the bad guy target, and the cd is acceptable, the on-board missile is automatically fired. Absolutely no time-wasting intervention required from the operator.

Option B. Of course, the operator can also make the kill decision himself, if there is, for instance, the need clearance from higher up the command chain.

Most of our clients follow the precedent established by President Barrack Obama, who established his own terrorist kill list. This enables him to wipe out the bad guys without encumbering legal procedures, yapping congressmen, or public trials that provide a soapbox and cheap publicity for the “terrorists” or whatever and their hysterical rants.

We expect this system to continue spreading worldwide. [In fact, we know of one European country where the wife of the President gets to have her own kill list; and another state where the Prime Minister gave kill privileges to his 16 year old mistress—though she only gets to have five people on the list at a time.]

As part of this presentation, we include a new interactive: How the history of the world would have been totally changed—maybe even ground to a halt--if kings, czars, sheikhs, imams, tribal chiefs, presidents, and dictators-for-life, had had something like The Liquidator at their disposal in years gone by.  

The Brits, for example, could have blown to smithereens early on Jomo Kenyatta, No way he would have survived to become glorified as the founding father of Kenya. Ditto Robert Mugabe branded as a “terrorist” in what used to be known as Rhodesia. Ditto Michael Collins of the IRA.

In the 1940’s, London also could have knocked off a couple of future Israeli Prime Ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir , who organized the bloody-minded Irgun revolt against England, bombing a hotel and murdering British police.

Going back even earlier, George III could have nipped the Boston Tea Party in the bud; taken out Paul Revere before he’d even saddled up. Hell, America might still be British.

In the same way, the French would have dispatched Ben Bella, wiped out the FLN before most people even knew what FLN stood for, and Algeria would still be French. So, perhaps, would Vietnam, if they’d targeted Ho Chi Minh when they should have.

And the Germans, if they’d had the Liquidator the Warsaw Ghetto uprising would have been still born, Jean Moulin and the French Resistance would have been turned into road kill. Same thing for the Soviets:  No Hungarian revolution. No Prague Spring. 

Best of all, they’d have shredded Osama Bin Laden, long before he’d even thought about turning his bearded crazies against America.

Batista would have splattered Fidel and Che all over the Sierra Maestra in Cuba.

Same story for jokers like Geronimo, Zapata, and Pancho Villa.

And Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1861 in Virginia would also have been instantly squelched: No need to put him into the history books by publicly hanging the guy, then flaying and beheading the corpse. The Liquidator would have accomplished all that, and more--but discretely.

 I mean, guys, when you think about it, what we’re really offering our clients is a real shot at The End of History.