Washington: The Drones in Commission

It is hard to think of a better object that embodies the present time and its permanent war: Alien agents spreading out lethal Western justice from the sky. The drone is the technological mock-up of a rampant post-9/11 totalitarian drift — a technology that is quietly announcing a new geopolitical supremacy as a fact, far from parliamentary deliberations, from debates, from democracy. Now for the first time in the United States, the drones are subjected to public debate in front of a Senate investigation committee to examine the criteria that were used and the geopolitical and constitutional implications of these flying Terminators.

Besides the remote-controlled death that the drones have disseminated on their faraway objectives, they have a slightly noxious effect on the nation that built them — a nation that is firmly a warmonger but also traditionally a just protector of civil liberties — that after 9/11 was easily enticed by the secret of special powers, a fatal attraction also and especially for Obama. So much so that the war in Central Asia was quietly outsourced to the CIA and to its contractors, and the drones, glorified as a revolutionary technological solution to terrorism, became the “default” weapon. The criticisms made of the drones recently became an unexpected point of convergence between the progressives on the left and the libertarians close to the tea party ideology on the right, for whom the flying robots that are hunting down citizens represent the incarnation of a paranoid version — maybe even more so now — of an evil and omnipotent central government.

In front of an increasing number of pressures, President Obama had promised major transparency regarding the drones in his State of the Union address at the beginning of his term and subsequently transferred jurisdiction from the CIA to the Armed Forces. But it was made possible only after the dramatic protest from conservative Senator Rand Paul, who began the 13-hour filibuster in Congress. A few days ago, a federal court ordered the White House to make public the documents that were linked to the “kill list,” but the Obama administration keeps stonewalling. In fact, no spokesperson from the government has taken part in the Senate committee hearings, a decision that Rosa Brooks, a member of the committee, commented on: “Right now we have the executive branch making a claim that it has the right to kill anyone anywhere on Earth at any time for secret reasons based on secret evidence in a secret process undertaken by unidentified officials.”

The absence of a spokesperson for Obama has only served to shift the focus on the testimony of a Yemeni writer, Farea al-Muslimi who described the drones’ destructive effect on his country and the life in villages under the permanent buzz of those flying machines, able to make a lethal raid at any moment at the incontestable discretion of some operatives from the other side of the world.