Pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency hasn’t swayed The New York Times; this past weekend the daily newspaper published the names of those responsible for the American intelligence agency’s program of drone attacks.
The NYT explains that it acted in this way because of the people’s “roles in one of the government’s most significant paramilitary programs.”
The most emblematic character is Michael D’Andrea, who, as the newspaper points out, is a “convert to Islam,” while having first been the head of the CIA’s targeted killing program as part of its counterterrorism strategy, before being the head, for the last few years, of the CIA’s drone operations in Pakistan and in Yemen.
Michael D’Andrea has just been replaced in his position in the drone program by Chris Wood, a leader in the fight against al-Qaida and the CIA interrogation program, which a recent official report revealed resorts regularly to the use of torture.
The Drone, Weapon of the Obama Era
These men’s pasts as part of the most controversial operations of the American armed services during the Bush administration show to what point American strategy has been sliding in the direction of drones, which have become the ultimate weapon of the Obama administration.
An infographic from The New York Times illustrates the spectacular progression of American drone strikes in the tribal zones of Pakistan, targeting members of al-Qaida and the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban after 2004, but especially after the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House in January 2009, when the newly elected president was trying to withdraw from the war in Afghanistan.
The rise of drone attacks provokes fierce condemnation in the targeted countries, in particular Pakistan and Yemen — with whom the United States is not officially at war — but drones are part of a fairly wide unspoken consensus in North America, if only because they don’t put the lives of American pilots in danger.
The problem is that the assumption at the heart of drone usage — that it allows much more targeted strikes — has been seriously called into question by the revelation last week of the death of two Western hostages, an American and an Italian, being held by al-Qaida, during an attack in Pakistan.
“Often Unsure About Who Will Die”
The strike was targeting an American member of al-Qaida, who was, in fact, killed, but American intelligence didn’t know that hostages were being held in the same house. Barack Obama had to make a speech to express his condolences, and the United States is going to compensate the two families concerned.
But the incident especially showed that “Drone Strikes Reveal Uncomfortable Truth: U.S. Is Often Unsure About Who Will Die,” as The New York Times rightly titled its article. In addition, “[e]very independent investigation of the strikes has found far more civilian casualties than administration officials admit.”
For each admitted mistake that leaves Western victims, how many unknown ones are there, concerning local civilians or even children? Everything indicates that American military authorities systematically underestimate the civilian losses called collateral, and even hide them when they have to do with CIA decisions.
It just so happens that President Obama’s admission coincided with the release of “Good Kill,” the film by Andrew Niccol, which portrays a fighter pilot turned drone pilot in a metal container on the outskirts of Las Vegas.
Right to Life or Death
Outside of the debatable cinematographic aspects of the film, it’s the first realistic Hollywood vision of the role of drones in modern American warfare, with a pedagogical dimension that has been lacking up until this point.
Through it, we understand with precision the formidable power that this 24-hour-a-day mastery of the sky represents. It never puts the pilot, who is situated 10,000 km from the action, in danger.
But through it we also understand the artistic fuzziness that surrounds a part of the decision-making, that is to say, the right to life or death of these people who resemble characters in video games, but who are, in fact, real in the camera lens of the drone.
We also perceive the risk of the unpredictability, or the cynicism, of those who give orders to fire a missile, as soon as they deal with “targets” that maneuver in the midst of a civilian population and not in a theater of war.
The development of drones has been dramatic in the last few years, to the point where the U.S. Navy recently announced that it would not be recruiting more naval aviators, instead replacing planes with drones; and Europe is trying to catch up by launching a Franco-British program so as to be part of the “market.”
This proliferation of drones, however, has not been the subject of any public debate, has had very little publicity and has not had any international regulation, unlike other types of weaponry, such as nuclear, chemical and germ warfare.
A Heavily Implicated German Base
Thus, the Germans discovered, thanks to revelations of the site The Intercept and the magazine Der Spiegel, that the nerve center of the drone program is located in their country, on the American base of Ramstein, the biggest foreign U.S. base.
The documents from 2012, those of the Snowden affair, which were revealed on journalist Glenn Greenwald’s site, show that the Ramstein base is implicated in almost every American drone attack in the world. And an American source confirms that the program couldn’t continue in this way without the German base.
This is what an infographic from Der Spiegel illustrates. It shows how the Ramstein base is linked by cable to the drone headquarters in Creech, close to Las Vegas, and by satellite to the drones in operation.
The problem is that German Chancellor Angela Merkel denied that Ramstein had any operational role as soon as the first rumors started circulating two years ago. Who is lying?
The debate about the role of drones in military strategies, in the American, European and also Chinese, Russian or Israeli armies, is only just beginning – provided that public opinion takes over the issue, which is too important to be left solely to those in the military.
Drones make the idiocy of war posturing just that much more apparent.