Unmanned drones making U.S. a Predator nation
An MQ-9 Reaper drone takes off Aug. 8, 2007, at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nev. / Getty Images
(TomDispatch) Here's the essence of it: you can trust America's creme de la creme, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands. No need to constantly look over their shoulders.
Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could create a living nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they lead to measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in which bad things are (with rare and understandable exceptions) done only to truly terrible types. In the process, you simply couldn't be better protected.
And in case you were wondering, there is no question who among us are the best, most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and judicious people: the officials of our national security state. Trust them implicitly. They will never give you a bum steer.
You may be paying a fortune to maintain their world -- the 30,000 people hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country, the 230,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, the 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, the 4.2 million with security clearances of one sort or another, the $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center that the National Security Agency is constructing in Utah, the gigantic $1.8 billion headquarters the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency recently built for its 16,000 employees in the Washington area -- but there's a good reason. That's what's needed to make truly elevated, surgically precise decisions about life and death in the service of protecting American interests on this dangerous globe of ours.
And in case you wondered just how we know all this, we have it on the best authority: the people who are doing it -- the only ones, given the obvious need for secrecy, capable of judging just how moral, elevated, and remarkable their own work is. They deserve our congratulations, but if we're too distracted to give it to them, they are quite capable of high-fiving themselves.
We're talking, in particular, about the use by the Obama administration (and the Bush administration before it) of a growing armada of remotely piloted planes, a.k.a. drones, grimly labeled Predators and Reapers, to fight a nameless, almost planet-wide war (formerly known as the Global War on Terror). Its purpose: to destroy al-Qaeda-in-wherever and all its wannabes and look-alikes, the Taliban, and anyone affiliated or associated with any of the above, or just about anyone else we believe might imminently endanger our "interests."
In the service of this war, in the midst of a perpetual state of war and of wartime, every act committed by these leaders is, it turns out, absolutely, totally, and completely legal. We have their say-so for that, and they have the documents to prove it, largely because the best and most elevated legal minds among them have produced that documentation in secret. (Of course, they dare not show it to the rest of us, lest lives be endangered.)
By their own account, they have, in fact, been covertly exceptional, moral, and legal for more than a decade (minus, of course, the odd black site and torture chamber) -- so covertly exceptional, in fact, that they haven't quite gotten the credit they deserve. Now, they would like to make the latest version of their exceptional mission to the world known to the rest of us. It is finally in our interest, it seems, to be a good deal better informed about America's covert wars in a year in which the widely announced "covert" killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is a major selling point in the president's re-election campaign.
No one should be surprised. There was always an "overt" lurking in the "covert" of what now passes for "covert war." The CIA's global drone assassination campaign has long been a bragging point in Washington, even if it couldn't officially be discussed directly before, say, Congress. The covertness of our drone wars in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere really turns out to have less to do with secrecy -- just about every covert drone strike is reported, sooner or later, in the media -- than assuring two administrations that they could pursue their drone wars without accountability to anyone.
A Classic of Self-Congratulation
Recently, top administration officials seem to be fanning out to offer rare peeks into what's truly on-target and exceptional about America's drone wars. In many ways, these days, American exceptionalism is about as unexceptional as apple pie. It has, for one thing, become the everyday language of the presidential campaign trail. And that shouldn't surprise us either. After all, great powers and their leaders tend to think well of themselves. The French had their "mission civilisatrice," the Chinese had the "mandate of heaven," and like all imperial powers they inevitably thought they were doing the best for themselves and others, sadly benighted, in this best of all possible worlds.
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Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" as well as "The End of Victory Culture," runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is "The United States of Fear" (Haymarket Books). This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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These drones are a bunch of crap. I love this article. All those departments are fabrications of George EVIL Bush's fake 9/11 strike. Look where we are now? Our rights are screwed, our privacy is screwed and our pockets aren't doing much better.
One of these days, one of them countries is gonna smack back and I wouldn't want to be there when it happens because America's false arrogance will be dropped to the floor when we get beat at our own game.
I'm EMBARRASSED to be an American anymore. This non-stop war stuff must stop. This terrorist campaign is such a lie and so is the war against drugs.
You all think you are in command now, but give it time. America will have it's nation back someday and you can take that to your banks and melt it down because it your fortunes in oil won't be worth a penny anymore.
1984;Orwell was about 30 years off, but we have arrived. Big Brother is watching. If you get too far out of line, he'll send a Hellfire your way.
Be afraid. (I am looking out my window at the sky as I write this.)
All that b.s. brainwashing our young men and women get about defending America? What a crock of crap. Our military is to ensure the super rich stay super rich. If we hadn't completely turned the Middle East into a war zone over 50 years by arming some of the craziest idiots that have ever lived on this planet there wouldn't be the hate towards us that caused 9/11.
I beleive this is the tip of the iceberg. One day a generation of American's will see the Chinese military off of one coast and the Russian military off the other coast, along with many other countries that are completely exhausted from the super rich in America exercising their dominance in other countries through the U.S. military.
Sadly enough, if we won't humble ourselves, we will someday be humbled. And once again, the common man will suffer while the super rich buy and bribe their way out of trouble.
You think because we use an armada of drones to kill the bad guys it makes us somehow immoral? A man who speaks about wars but has never served in one but after all you don't need to be in a war to understand what happens...just study at Yale and Harvard!
Arrogance prevails in this article that Tom knows best even while we should not have any troops on the ground and using every drone weapon the country can build while bringing home the troops.
This country can rule from it's borders if we start using the modern weaponry we have at our hands. That means every American military member on American soil and less personnel to run it and the machine. No need for loss of life anymore.
Tom when you can get the religous zealots from outside our borders to stop waging their terrorist fight against the innocent then you might have a point...but in the mean time....Drone Away!