David Swanson / War Is a Crime & Lynn Feinerman / Tikkun Magazine – 2013-02-01 20:33:55
http://warisacrime.org/content/drones-are-local-issue
Drones Are a Local Issue
David Swanson / War Is a Crime
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (January 31, 2013) — No city is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.
I write from Charlottesville, Va., but am hopeful that this message applies to your city, town, or county as well.
In the absence of state or federal laws, localities around the United States are proceeding to put unmanned aerial vehicles in our skies as they see fit. The federal government has authorized the flight of 30,000 drones, and the use of drones up to 400 feet by police departments, at least 300 of which already have surveillance drones in operation.
States and localities can ban or regulate such actions. Or they can proceed to endanger our health and our civil rights.
In Montgomery County, Texas, the Sheriff showed off a drone to the media but crashed it into his armored vehicle (thereby, I guess, proving that he needed an armored vehicle).
When the Dept. of Homeland Security challenged the University of Texas-Austin to hack into a drone and take control of it, the response was “No problem,” and it was quickly done.
Drones are not safe. Surveillance by drones cannot comply with the Fourth Amendment. And the arming of drones with tear gas and rubber bullets, already underway in many US localities, is an outrageous threat to our First Amendment right to assemble and petition our governments for a redress of grievances.
If Charlottesville were to remain silent while (how shall I put this delicately?) crack-pot cities continue setting de facto law, we would all be worse off.
Charlottesville City Council routinely informs the state general assembly of its wishes. That state assembly has already been considering legislation on drones. Charlottesville has a responsibility to speak up, as well as to act locally on its own behalf.
Moreover, Charlottesville’s influence spreads. Its past resolutions on Iraq, military spending, uranium, and other matters have inspired other localities and the US Conference of Mayors to raise their voices as well. Some of these resolutions have been directed to the federal government, to which the residents of Charlottesville pay taxes and whose laws the residents of Charlottesville are subject to.
This is how our republic is supposed to work. City council members in Virginia take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Cities and towns routinely send petitions to Congress for all kinds of requests.
This is allowed under Clause 3, Rule XII, Section 819, of the Rules of the House of Representatives. This clause is routinely used to accept petitions from cities, and memorials from states, all across America. The same is established in the Jefferson Manual, the rule book for the House originally written by Thomas Jefferson for the Senate.
In 1967 a court in California ruled (Farley v. Healey, 67 Cal.2d 325) that “one of the purposes of local government is to represent its citizens before the Congress, the Legislature, and administrative agencies in matters over which the local government has no power. Even in matters of foreign policy it is not uncommon for local legislative bodies to make their positions known.”
Abolitionists passed local resolutions against US policies on slavery. The anti-apartheid movement did the same, as did the nuclear freeze movement, the movement against the PATRIOT Act, the movement in favor of the Kyoto Protocol, etc.
We are not an island. If we become environmentally sustainable, others will ruin our climate. If we ban assault weapons, they’ll arrive at our borders. And if the skies of the United States are filled with drones, it will become ever more difficult for Charlottesville to keep them out.
Just over a year ago, the Charlottesville City Council passed a resolution calling for an end to “foreign ground and drone wars.” US drone wars are now under investigation by the United Nations as possible crimes. We now know that individuals are targeted without so much as identifying their names.
We now know that hundreds of children have been killed. We now know that at least three Americans have been targeted and killed. The view of our city should be restated in the context of local and state actions on drones. This is an action desired by local people, affecting local people, and costing the local budget exactly nothing.
Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.
David Swanson’s books include “War Is A Lie.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/drone-warfare-medea-benjamins-new-book-reveiwed-by-lynn-feinberman
Obeying a Higher Law: Making the Case Against Drone Warfare
Lynn Feinerman / Tikkun Magazine
DRONE WARFARE: KILLING BY REMOTE CONTROL
by Medea Benjamin (OR Books, 2012)
(June 17, 2012) — I had already determined I wanted to review Medea Benjamin’s new book Drone Warfare when I encountered three guys on a Bay Area waterfront who were test-driving a remote controlled miniature drone toy. The drone was about two or three feet in wingspan, styled like an F16, and had an intrusive, loud — well, dronelike — buzz.
It had the rapt attention of everyone on the waterfront. People walking their dogs stopped to marvel at the drone as it flew over the bay and returned to buzz around, about a hundred feet over my head.
Curious, eh? I had just received Benjamin’s book, and now a drone was buzzing right above me. I got a creepy sense of what it might be like to be in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Palestine, Somalia, Honduras, or the Philippines in the wrong place at the wrong time, under drone surveillance or violence.
I imagined myself a denizen of Gaza, for example, feeling trapped, imprisoned, or even tormented on a psychological level, by the constant buzzing presence of an Israeli drone or the threat of a drone’s arrival.
In Drone Warfare, there are many firsthand accounts from people who have been the targets of drones, or near the targets of drones. One comes from a Palestinian father in Gaza:
“It’s continuous, watching us, especially at night,” said Nabil al-Amassi, a Gaza mechanic and father of eight. “You can’t sleep. You can’t watch television. It frightens the kids. When they hear it they say, “It is going to hit us.”
What a different response came from the little boy of about nine years old who was ecstatic over the drone I saw on the waterfront. Jumping up and down and shouting, he ran to beg his father to buy him one for his birthday. “Oh please, Dad? Oh my god, please?”
And as Benjamin’s thoroughly researched, hard-hitting book tells us, most of the United States is in the same euphoria over drones and Drone Warfare:
Asked if they approve the use of unmanned “drone” aircraft against terrorist suspects overseas, eighty-three percent said yes, including seventy-seven percent who call themselves liberal Democrats. Even more stunning is that seventy-nine percent approved of using drones even if those suspected terrorists are American citizens living in other countries.
Contrast the anecdote of that little boy’s excitement with the following account from the introduction to Benjamin’s book:
Roya never had time for sports, or for school. Born into a poor family living on the outskirts of Kabul, her father was a street vendor. Her mother raised five children and baked sweets for him to sell…. One day while her father was out selling candies, Roya and her two sisters were trudging home carrying buckets of water. Suddenly they heard a terrifying whir and then there was an explosion: something terrible had dropped from the sky, tearing their house apart and sending the body parts of their mother and two brothers flying through the air.
Roya and her family were not terrorists. Most of the people killed by drones, as Benjamin’s book makes clear, are not terrorists.
The little boy on the waterfront — who so longs for a drone toy — is not endangered by a drone. So why should he worry about a little girl whose life was ruined by a drone — a little girl who doesn’t feel excitement at all, but profound, traumatic, long-lasting grief?
That smug, oblivious sense of safety is a big selling point for Drone Warfare, touted as a way to save the lives of US soldiers. They can continue being boys sitting at their sophisticated PlayStations, pushing buttons. And they can push the horrifying results of their “play” into the recesses of their reptilian brains.
When by chance a thought emerges about the innocent, unknowing victims of the latest military toy — indeed, whenever the public even starts to think of the pain and death we are causing far away — the corporate- industrial-military-government propaganda machine jolts into gear to convince us that the Drone Warfare is pinpoint accurate, that it only kills “bad guys.”
So why, as I write this review, are there thousands of Pakistanis protesting Drone Warfare, telling the world that over 500 innocent civilians were killed by drones in Pakistan already, 175 of them children? Why are they determined to stop the use of drones in Pakistan?
Drone Warfare presents all of the information about who has died or been wounded by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), who is being surveilled, and where drones might be used in the future. What emerges from Benjamin’s inquiry is the clear recognition that drones are no different from land mines or weapons fitted with depleted uranium: they are extremely unsafe for civilians and they do not, in fact, differentiate between “noncombatants” and “combatants.”
And as Benjamin also makes very clear in her consideration of the legal issues in the use of drones, the United States and all other nations of the world are legally required to use weaponry and war tactics that make that differentiation — under penalty for war crimes.
In the conclusion to Drone Warfare, Benjamin puts the “mainstream media” front and center, exposing them as corporate sycophants and faddists:
The mainstream media, after cheerleading for war and enthusiastically covering the initial shock-and-awe volley of missiles, quickly became bored with America’s imperial exploits. And with the use of Drone Warfare that poses no risk to Americans, they aren’t about to spend time covering blown-up foreigners, especially when there’s something important like a celebrity breakup to report.
Illuminating the pivotal reason why her articulate book is so very timely, and so very much needed, she informs us that drones are not silent like the press. They are not voiceless. They have a vocal advocacy group in Congress: the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus. Yes, these machines have their own caucus!
“It seems that, like corporations, robots are people too,” quips Benjamin.
That quip cuts deeply, to the underlying reality of our nation: Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned us about it. He warned us back in the ’50s that the United States was not disarming after World War II. We chose instead to militarize in order to jump-start a lagging post-war economy, sucking our taxes into obscene military budgets, with rampant corporate profiteering from “endless war” manufacture, and with a Congress and executive branch going right along with the program.
The United States is hooked on war. Its so-called “economy” is deeply tied into the vicious cycle of ravaging the world for oil, feeding the war machine with that oil and our taxes, and then going out to ravage again for oil. As a result, the problems of the innocent civilians it harms don’t really amount to a “hill of beans” in most media (as Bogart said in Casablanca).
Benjamin is realistic in her understanding that drones are here to stay, in some capacity. She enumerates some of the positive, helpful uses to which they’ve already been put: for example, they have been used as monitoring devices after floods in Australia and after the Fukushima disaster, and as patrolling devices used by environmental advocacy groups to detect illegal whaling and other covert abuses.
Her point is that what drives the explosion in drone technology is their potential military uses. And that is what motors the explosive corporate competition to manufacture them. Billions upon billions of dollars of profits. So a small group fattens its pockets while the vast majority of us are vulnerable to the violent devices stoking their desires.
We have desperately lacked visionary leadership from the White House in the decades wherein drones have come of age. The informed, democratic discussion that is crucial to a healthy society, and the cri de Coeur of conscience that maintains our spiritual health, must come from the courageous faith-based groups, human rights groups, and veterans groups and other military activist groups that have done whatever they could to force the United States to wake up to its infatuation with military might.
Benjamin’s own activist organization, Code Pink, has been at the vanguard of citizen movements against Drone Warfare in particular. Her book provides extensive information and stories about the activism that has so far moved drone issues closer to the media spotlight.
One of those groups, the “Creech 14,” entered the Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas Nevada in April of 2009 to protest and stop teams of soldiers remotely operating the US killer drones abroad. Being mostly priests and nuns, the protesters invited the staff on base to share a Good Friday meal with them. They were arrested, jailed, and had a high-profile trial about a year later.
Benjamin gives a detailed account of that trial, in which the defendants created a debate about the use of drones, inviting distinguished witnesses and establishing that according to the post-World War II Nuremberg protocols, individuals are morally and legally bound to disobey orders and laws that entail crimes against humanity.
One of the witnesses they called to testify was Bill Quigley, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Citing the historical duty of civilians to reign in the military, Quigley said of the “Creech 14” and other civilian dissidents: “In the long run we honor them for obeying a higher law, for helping to bring us toward justice.”
Drone Warfare strives for the same goal, attempting to reawaken our sleeping consciences, our compassion for others in the world. Its core goal is, in the final analysis, to reach into that reptilian brain and communicate spirit, faith and the memory of our moral promises.
I heard excellent programming on Drone Warfare on the Flashpoints program of KPFA radio, wherein a commentator urged more of the faith community to join in the outcry against Drone Warfare. My effort to join that protest comes in the form of this book review for Tikkun, which was created in the Jewish community and which emphasizes the infusion of spirituality into politics and culture.
Benjamin hints at the next developments in Drone Warfare — the manufacture of drones as small as hummingbirds and the trend toward using drones here in the United States. Plans for the domestic use of drones have awakened significant unease in the press — even in the most militaristic corners of the press.
Even Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano recently offered a complaint:
When drones take pictures of us on our private property and in our homes, and the government uses the photos as it wishes, what will we do about it? … If the military personnel see something of interest from a drone, they may apply to a military judge or “military commander” for permission to conduct a search of the private property that intrigues them… What’s next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the US?
That from a commentator for Fox News! Perhaps the United States will not deeply consider the issues in Drone Warfare and surveillance until they come home to roost. As Benjamin warns in her book, “Watch out America. What goes around comes around.”
Lynn Feinerman is a writer and media maker, and has been an active member of the Jewish Renewal community for twenty-five years. She’s written for Tikkun on other subjects.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
