( Tomdispatch.com ) – “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”  

That’s what a young Pakistani boy named Zubair told members of Congress at a hearing on drones in October 2013. That hearing was during the Obama years at a time when the government had barely even acknowledged that an American drone warfare program existed. 

Two years earlier, however, a Muslim cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, both American citizens, were killed by U.S. drone strikes in Yemen just weeks apart. Asked to comment on Abdulrahman’s killing, Obama campaign senior adviser Robert Gibbs said: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”

Those are two of all too many grim tales of the brutality with which the United States has carried out its drone warfare program. Post-9/11 reiterations by the government of the danger we now live in (because the U.S. was attacked), have made the collective responsibility of Muslims and the callous dismissal of their deaths a regular occurrence.  

In 2023, this country’s drone warfare program has entered its third decade with no end in sight. Despite the fact that the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 is approaching, policymakers have demonstrated no evidence of reflecting on the failures of drone warfare and how to stop it. Instead, the focus continues to be on simply shifting drone policy in minor ways within an ongoing violent system.

The Inherent Dehumanization of Drone Warfare

In February 2013, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney justified drone strikes as a key tool of American foreign policy this way:  

“We have acknowledged, the United States, that sometimes we use remotely piloted aircraft to conduct targeted strikes against specific al-Qaeda terrorists in order to prevent attacks on the United States and to save American lives. We conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats, to stop plots, prevent future attacks, and, again, save American lives… The U.S. government takes great care in deciding to pursue an al-Qaeda terrorist, to ensure precision and to avoid loss of innocent life.”

More aggressively endorsing the use of such drones, Georgetown Professor Daniel Byman, who has held government positions, emphasized the necessity of such warfare to protect American lives. “Drones,” he wrote, “have done their job remarkably well… And they have done so at little financial cost, at no risk to U.S. forces, and with fewer civilian casualties than many alternative methods would have caused.”

In reality, however, Washington’s war on terror has inflicted disproportionate violence on communities across the globe, while using this form of asymmetrical warfare to further expand the space between the value placed on American lives and those of Muslims. As the rhetoric on drone warfare suggests, the value of life and the need to protect it are, as far as Washington is concerned, reserved for Americans and their allies.

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Since the war on terror was launched, the London-based watchdog group Airwars has estimated that American air strikes have killed at least 22,679 civilians and possibly up to 48,308 of them. Such killings have been carried out for the most part by desensitized killers, who have been primed towards the dehumanization of the targets of those murderous machines. In the words of critic Saleh Sharief, “The detached nature of drone warfare has anonymized and dehumanized the enemy, greatly diminishing the necessary psychological barriers of killing.” 

In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman focuses on the “mechanical distancing” of modern warfare, thanks to “the sterile Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical bugger that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim.” Scholar Grégoire Chamayou describes this phenomenon in even starker terms. Thanks to the distance between the drone operator and the victim, “One is never spattered by the adversary’s blood. No doubt the absence of any physical soiling corresponds to less of a sense of moral soiling… Above all, it ensures that the operator will never see his victim seeing him doing what he does to him.”  

Needless to say, drone technology has rendered those in distant lands so much more disposable in the name of American national security. This is because such long-range techno-targeting has created a profound level of dehumanization that, ironically enough, has only made the repeated act of long-distance killing, of (not to mince words) slaughter, remarkably banal.  

In these years of the war on terror, the legalities of drone warfare coupled with the way its technology capitalizes on an unfortunate aspect of human psychology has made the dehumanization of Muslims (and so violence against them) that much easier to carry out. It’s made their drone killing so much more of a given because it’s taken for granted that Muslims in “target sites” or conflict zones must be terrorists whose removal should be beyond questioning — even after a posthumous determination of their civilian status.

Responsibility, Not Accountability

At a 2016 press conference, President Barack Obama finally responded to a question about the increasing numbers of drone strikes by admitting: “There’s no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn’t have been.” Then he added, “In situations of war, you know, we have to take responsibility when we’re not acting appropriately.”

Rare as such admissions of “responsibility” have been, however, they remain quite different from accountability. In Obama’s case, all that was offered to the survivors among those who “shouldn’t have been” killed in such drone strikes was an utterly minimal acknowledgment that it was even happening.

While the use of drones in the war on terror began under President George W. Bush, it escalated dramatically under Obama. Then, in the Trump years, it rose yet again. Halfway through Trump’s presidency, drone strikes had already exceeded the total number in the Obama era. Though the use of drones in Joe Biden’s first year in office was lower than Trump’s, what has remained consistent is the lack of the slightest accountability for the slaughter of civilians.  

In 2021, as the U.S. was withdrawing chaotically from its 20-year Afghan War disaster, its military surveilled a white car driving around Kabul, believed it to be carrying explosives, and launched its final drone strike of that conflict, slaughtering 10 Afghans. Two weeks later, after reporting by the New York Times revealed what really happened, the Pentagon finally admitted that only civilians had been killed, seven of them children (but penalized no one). 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin later apologized to the families of those killed and offered compensation — one of the few times American officials had even bothered to acknowledge wrongdoing in Afghanistan in the last 20 years. True to form, however, the government’s pledge to compensate the impacted families has gone unfulfilled, a grim reminder that in none of those years has there been any semblance of justice for civilian survivors of such drone strikes.

A few weeks ago, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Biden administration was forced to release a redacted version of a presidential policy memorandum, signed in October 2022, that detailed the administration’s latest approach to drone warfare globally. At least some details about it were known prior to its release, however, thanks to an anonymous senior administration official. 

The Washington Post editorial board, among others, celebrated the memo, arguing that the restrictions in place are “smart rules of engagement” and a significant improvement over the Trump years when it comes to limiting civilian damage from drones. In reality, however, Biden’s memo is likely to do little to stem future drone warfare nightmares. In essence, the memo represents a return to Obama-era rules, including the supposed need to have “near-certainty” that the target of a drone strike is a terrorist and “near-certainty” that non-combatants won’t be injured or killed. The memo also includes other criteria that (at least theoretically) must be met before an individual is targeted, including an assessment that capture is not feasible.

In the case of Anwar Al-Awlaki, while the U.S. claimed his capture wasn’t possible, members of his family disputed this. In a Democracy Now interview, Al-Awlaki’s uncle Saleh bin Fareed stated, “I am sure I could have handed him over — me and my family — but they never, ever asked us to do that.” Needless to say, the lack of transparency has made it impossible to know if such standards are being met before a strike takes place and, worse yet, there’s no method of accountability if they aren’t.

That Biden administration memo does ban signature strikes that target individuals whose identities are unknown based on behavior suggesting they might be involved in terrorist activity. Still, we shouldn’t mistake a modestly better policy for a truly legal, moral, and ethical one, especially since the drone strike “mistakes” of the past haven’t led to any genuinely meaningful overhauls of the program.

Minimizing Civilian Deaths?

On September 20, 2001, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress in which he first used the phrase “war on terror,” while announcing a domestic and global campaign to be fought without borders or time constraints. Previewing what, years later, would become known as this country’s “forever wars,” he advised Americans that they “should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success.”

Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics — that is, the politics of death – catches the essence of the war on terror Bush launched as a way of life (and death) — “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.” With the invasion of Afghanistan and the designation of entire largely Muslim parts of the planet as the enemy, the Bush administration began a “war” in which Muslim deaths were necessary for the protection and preservation of American ones.  This set a precedent for the value of Muslim life when the act of killing them could be equated with the security of Americans and the protection of “the homeland.”

Twenty-two years later, drones continue to be instruments of civilian slaughter and the language deployed by successive administrations to describe such slaughter has served to sanitize that fact. Whether it’s the use of “target” or “collateral damage,” both minimize the reality that human beings are being murdered.  Taken together with a larger war-on-terror narrative in which Muslims have been strikingly demonized and criminalized, the result has been the production of killable bodies whose deaths elicit neither guilt, remorse, nor accountability. 

In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama explained why he put “prudent limits” on drone warfare, pointing out that Americans “will not be safer if people abroad believe we strike within their countries without regard for the consequence.” And how right he was.

As yet, however, there have been zero consequences for the air-strike deaths of tens of thousands of civilians globally and, as Obama’s statement suggests, the only real concern this caused American officials was the fear that too many such killings might, in the end, harm Americans.  

Grieving Muslim Lives

In Sana’a, Yemen, a wall with graffiti art shows a U.S. drone under which someone has written in blood-red paint, “Why did you kill my family?” in English and Arabic. The relentless American drone campaign has indeed left all too many civilians in Muslim-majority countries asking the same question. The only answer offered in Washington over all these years is that such killings were unavoidable collateral damage.

But imagine, for a moment, what Americans might do if their family members were regularly being killed by drones because another government claimed “near certainty” that they were terrorists? You know the answer, of course, given the response to the 9/11 attacks: this country would undoubtedly launch a catastrophic war of epic proportions with no conceivable end in sight. In contrast, Muslims targeted by American drones have been left to pick up the all-too-literal pieces of their loved ones, while risking the possibility of also being killed in a double- or triple-tap strike — a level of violence that should never be justified.  

We should all reject a war on terror committed to the disposability of Muslims because no one (including Muslims) should have to mourn the killing of civilians the U.S. has targeted for far too long. Muslim lives have inherent value and their deaths are worth grieving, mourning, and above all valuing. Drone warfare will never change that fact.

Copyright 2023 Maha Hilal

Via Tomdispatch.com

I was referring then to the war on terror’s CIA and military drone assassination programs, which first revved up in parts of the Greater Middle East in the years of George W. Bush’s presidency and only spread thereafter. In the process, such “targeted killings” became, as I wrote at the time, “thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president.” In Barack Obama’s years in the Oval Office, they were ramped up further as he joined White House “Terror Tuesday” meetings to choose individual targets for those attacks. They often enough turned out to involve “collateral damage”; that is, the deaths of innocent civilians, including children. In other words, “commander-in-chief” had, by then, gained a deadly new meaning, as the president personally took on the role of a global assassin.

I had little doubt eight years ago that this wouldn’t end soon — and on that I wasn’t wrong. Admittedly, our present commander-in-chief probably doesn’t have the time (given how much of his day he’s spent watching Fox News, tweeting his millions of followers, and, until recently, holding two hour press-briefings-cum-election-rallies on the coronavirus pandemic) or the attention span for “Terror Tuesday” meetings. Still, in his own memorable fashion, he’s managed to make himself America’s assassin-in-chief par excellence.

After all, not only have those drone programs continued to target people in distant lands (including innocent civilians), but they have yet again been ramped up in the Trump years. Meanwhile, still in our pre-Covid-19 American world, President Trump embraced the role of assassin-in-chief in a newly public, deeply enthusiastic way. Previously, such drones had killed non-state actors, but he openly ordered the drone assassination of Major General Qassim Suleimani, the top military figure and number-two man in Iran, as he left Baghdad International Airport for a meeting with the prime minister of Iraq.

Of course, for American presidents such a role was not unknown even before the development of Hellfire-missile-armed drones. Think of John F. Kennedy and the CIA’s (failed) attempts on the life of Cuban leader Fidel Castro or the successful killings of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, and Dominican Republic head Rafael Trujillo. Or, for a change of pace, consider the Vietnam War-era CIA assassination campaign known as the Phoenix Program in which tens of thousands of supposed “Vietcong” supporters (often enough, civilians swept up in the murderous chaos of the moment) were murdered in that country, a program that was no secret to President Lyndon Johnson.

And it’s true as well that, in this century, our commanders-in-chief have overseen endless conflicts in distant lands from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Yemen, Somalia, Niger, and beyond, none of them congressionally declared wars. As a result, they had the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of, at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilians, as well as for the uprooting of millions of their compatriots from settled lives and their flight, as desperate refugees, across significant parts of the planet. It’s a grim record of death and destruction. Until recently, however, it remained a matter of distant deaths, not much noted here.

A New Kind of Drone War on the Pandemic Front

However, the assassin-in-chief may now be coming home, big time, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Little did I imagine that, by 2020, an American president without a lick of empathy for other human beings, even Americans who loved him to death (so to speak), would be targeting not just civilians here in “the homeland” (as it came to become known after the 9/11 attacks), but his most fervent followers. In the age of Donald Trump, the assassin-in-chief now seems to be in the process of transforming himself into a domestic killer-in-chief.

That reality — at least for me — came into focus only recently. True, until then, even beyond those drone strikes, American presidents have had the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of startling numbers of civilians in faraway lands where the U.S. military has been making war (remarkably fruitlessly) for almost 19 years. The devastating use of American air power generally has only increased during the Trump years in, for instance, both Afghanistan and Somalia, where U.S. airstrikes have hit new levels of destructiveness, as Nick Turse reported recently at the Intercept — more of them in the first four pandemic months of 2020 than in all of the Obama years combined.

Still, historically speaking, killing Afghans or Iraqis or Syrians or Yemenis or Somalis has always been one thing, but Americans? That’s another story entirely, no?

As it happens, the answer is indeed no, not in 2020, and once again, in a sense, air power is at the heart of the matter. In this case, though, we’re talking about the spread of Covid-19, in part through respiratory droplets (think of them as microscopic Hellfire missiles). In that new air-powered context, with the equivalent of a drone virus in the hands of one Donald J. Trump, the president is bringing the role of assassin-in-chief home. He is, in fact, in the process of becoming a killer-in-chief for his very own base — anyone, that is, who listens to what he says and believes fervently in him. Set aside for a moment the deaths he’s undoubtedly responsible for because of, as Juan Cole put it recently at his Informed Comment website, “those two months he pissed away calling [Covid-19] a hoax and setting up the country for Vietnam War-level death tolls.” Put aside as well his repeated and dangerous medical advice to find and take anti-malarial drugs. Put aside as well his suggestion that perhaps people fearing they have the coronavirus should try to inject or internally take disinfectants (which, a recent study showed, do kill that virus on surfaces and in the air), an act medical experts assure us could result in death.

Think of each of those potential death sentences for his most fervent believers as a striking combination of grotesque ignorance and narcissism. But what about an actual decision, as commander-in-chief and president, to kill off members of his base?

Until a couple of weeks ago, that would have been harder to imagine — until, that is, President Trump noticed the first demonstrations against state shutdowns focused on preventing the deadly Covid-19 virus from spreading. Those protests against “stay-at-home” orders, organized or encouraged by what the New York Times describes as “an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the White House,” have continued to bring out demonstrators in Trump-election-like rallies by the dozens, hundreds, or even (in a few cases) thousands.

Often, the demonstrators are not wearing the very masks that the president has recommended for other people (but not himself); nor are they keeping the social distance he has also officially backed (but continues to find it impossible to keep). They sport bizarre signs (“Don’t cancel my golf season,” “My body/my choice, Trump 2020” [with an image of a face mask crossed out], “Give me liberty or give me Covid-19,” “We demand haircuts”), carry American flags and occasional Confederate ones, and are sometimes armed to the teeth (not exactly surprising, given that the protests have been supported by conservative pro-gun or armed militia groups).

The Donald was clearly pleased with the earliest of those demonstrations, being so eager himself to “reopen” America and “the greatest economy in the history of our country” (then headed for the pandemic subbasement). It mattered little that, despite the grim pressures of the moment, polling showed significant numbers of Americans, including Republicans, preferred to keep the U.S. largely shut down for now. In response, he tweeted: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” All were states run by Democratic governors. And his focus on supporting such demonstrations quickly got the media’s attention, as they began to spread elsewhere.

At one of his nightly coronavirus briefings, the president then said this of the demonstrators: “These are people expressing their views. I see where they are and I see the way they’re working. They seem to be very responsible people to me, but they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”

With his future election campaign undoubtedly in his sightlines and his base in the forefront of his brain, he then began to encourage more of the same from both protesters and governors — and the Republican governor of Georgia broke the ice, so to speak, by attempting to reopen everything down to nail salons and movie theaters (something even the president would later criticize), while the Republican governor of Florida reopened that state’s beaches.

Targeting His Base

Now, here’s the obvious thing in this pandemic moment: if you’re the president of the United States (no less the governor of Georgia, Florida, or other Republican administrations or legislatures in a hurry to reopen the country), you’re encouraging people to sicken and die. To support citizens turning out to protest without either protection or any sense of social distancing is to support people potentially giving each other Covid-19, a disease which clearly spreads best in close quarters like nursing homes, prisons, crowded housing of any sort, or assumedly protests of this very kind. As one epidemiologist put it in response to a gathering of perhaps 2,500 protesters in Seattle, Washington, “I predict a new epidemic surge (incubation time — 5-7 days before onset [of] symptoms, if any, and transmission to associates around that time, even among asymptomatics)… so increase in 2-4 weeks from now.”

At this point, in a country leading the world by a long shot in known cases of, and deaths from, Covid-19, none of this should exactly be rocket science. It’s beyond obvious that if you encourage such demonstrations, you’re increasing the odds that the protesters will both catch and pass on a disease that’s already killed 60,000 Americans, more than U.S. fatalities from 20 years of war in Vietnam.

And that, of course, makes the president of the United States a killer, too. Or thought of another way, the assassin-in-chief in distant lands has just transformed himself into an assassin-in-chief right here at home, a man who might as well have fired Hellfire missiles into such crowds or put a gun to the head of some of those protesters and their wives or husbands or lovers or parents or children (to whom the disease will undoubtedly be spread once they go home) and pulled the trigger.

The act of encouraging members of his base to court death is clearly that of a man without an ounce of empathy, even for those who love and admire him most — and so of a stone-cold killer. You couldn’t ask for more proof that the only sense of empathy he has lies overwhelmingly in his deep and abiding pity for himself (which matches his staggering sense of self-aggrandizement) and perhaps for his children, other billionaires, and fossil-fuel executives. Them, he would save; the rest of us, his base included, are expendable. He’d sacrifice any of us without a second thought if he imagined that it would benefit him or his reelection in any way.

But there’s no point in leaving it at that. After all, as he pushes for a too-swiftly reopened country, he’s declaring open season on Americans of all sorts. And every one of us who will die too soon should be considered another Covidfire missile death and chalked up to a president who, by the time this is over, will truly have given a new meaning to the phrase assassin-in-chief.

You could say, I suppose, that he’s just been putting his stamp of approval on the recent statement of Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, another politician in a rush to reopen his state not to business, but to the business of pandemics. Patrick classically summed up the president’s position (and those of the protesters as well) in this fashion: “there are more important things than living.” Indeed, how true, though not, of course, for Donald Trump, or the Trump Organization, or that hotel of his in Washington, or his other presently sinking properties, or for his reelection in November 2020.

As for the rest of us, in Covid-19 America, we are all now potential Suleimanis.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2020 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CGTN from last Fall: “Anti-Taliban raid kills at least 40 civilians at wedding”

Since the current armed conflict in Tripoli erupted in April 2019, the UAE has been conducting air and drone strikes to support the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), previously known as the Libyan National Army, one of two major Libyan parties to the conflict, some of which have resulted in civilian casualties. All casualties in the November incident were civilian factory workers, including 7 Libyans and 28 foreign nationals, all of them men.

Burned-out lorry and car after five missiles struck Al-Sunbulah biscuit factory on November 18, 2019 resulting in eight deaths and 27 injured factory workers; Wadi Al-Rabie, Libya, December 2019. © 2019 Human Rights Watch

“The UAE attacked a factory that makes food products, with no indication there were any military targets,” said Eric Goldstein, acting Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The failure to verify that the workers there were civilians and that there was no legitimate military target would show recklessness and bad intelligence.”

A Human Rights Watch researcher visited the scene of the attack in December 2019 and documented material damage to the factory from drone-launched guided missiles and found remnants of the weapons. Human Rights Watch did not observe any military targets in the area. The strikes damaged the building and destroyed a truck and a car. The factory stopped operating after the attack.

At the strike site, Human Rights Watch found remnants of at least four Blue Arrow-7 (BA-7) laser-guided missiles that were launched by a Wing Loong-II drone. In Libya only the UAE uses this type of drone and missile.

Human Rights Watch interviewed five people who had been at the site, who said there were five missiles, all launched within a few minutes. The researcher met with two employees of Al-Sunbulah company who were present on the day of the strike and with three other employees who had been injured during the attack and were recovering at a nearby facility belonging to the company.

The attack site is a factory compound with several industrial hangars mostly used as warehouses to store raw materials and equipment. The company produces over 20 types of food items. The surrounding area was mostly farmland, although Human Rights Watch saw some individual houses and other factories – including a paper napkin factory and a wheat mill – that were not near each other.

Satellite imagery taken since early April 2019 shows construction of a possible checkpoint on the main road running alongside the factory compound, about 75 meters east of the Omar Ibn al-Khatab mosque. Imagery since February 2020 shows barriers on the road in the vicinity of the possible checkpoint. When Human Rights Watch visited the site in December 2019 researchers saw no sign that armed groups had been at the facility. The employees interviewed said the closest military presence at the time of the attack was a field hospital at a different mosque at least 1.5 kilometers away. At the time of the visit, the researcher heard artillery shelling in the distance and employees said that the front line was 5 to 6 kilometers away.

Four of the employees said that seven of their co-workers died on the spot and that the eighth – from Bangladesh – died from his wounds about 10 days later in a Tripoli hospital. The UAE has not publicly commented on its role in the attack or offered compensation for the civilian losses.

According to media, UN, and other reports, the UAE has carried out at least five other strikes that resulted in civilian casualties since April 2019. These include a July attack against a migrant detention center in Tajoura, near Tripoli, that killed at least 50 migrants and asylum seekers of various nationalities. In addition to drones, the UAE has supplied the LAAF with weapons, ammunition, and other combat materials such as armored vehicles, in violation of a 2011 UN Security Council arms embargo that prohibits such transfers, according to reports from the UN Panel of Experts on Libya.

The UAE’s sustained military support for the LAAF, an eastern armed group with a well-established record of serious laws of war and human rights abuses, risks making the UAE complicit in these abuses and could expose it to scrutiny by international investigations, Human Rights Watch said. Human Rights Watch wrote to UAE authorities on April 17, 2020 requesting information about any investigation they may have conducted into the drone strikes of November 18 and any steps taken to minimize civilian harm; as of the time of publication we received no response.

Governance in Libya remains divided between two entities engaged in an armed conflict since April 2019: the internationally recognized and Tripoli-based Government of National Accord and the rival Interim Government based in eastern Libya that is affiliated with the (LAAF). Calls by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and others for a “humanitarian pause” in the armed conflict to allow authorities to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic that has started to spread in the country have so far gone unheeded.

To help end the cycle of impunity in Libya, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva should, during its upcoming session in June, establish an International Commission of Inquiry to document violations, identify those responsible, including external actors, preserve evidence where possible for future criminal proceedings, and publicly report on the human rights situation in Libya, Human Rights Watch said.

All parties to the conflict in Libya are obliged to abide by the laws of war. Civilians and civilian objects may never be the object of attacks. Warring parties are required to take all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians and civilian objects and to refrain from attacks that would disproportionately harm civilians or fail to discriminate between combatants and civilians.

Those who commit, order, assist, or have command responsibility for war crimes in Libya are subject to prosecution by domestic courts or the International Criminal Court, which has a mandate over war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed there since February 15, 2011.

“UAE drones and planes have been pounding Tripoli for a year now with apparent scant respect for civilian life,” Goldstein said. “There is a pressing need for the United Nations Human Rights Council to scrutinize the UAE’s bloody record in Libya.”

Parties to the Conflict

One of the two major opposing Libyan parties to the conflict, the eastern-based Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), under the command of Khalifa Hiftar, is supported by multiple armed groups, including from along the western Libyan coastal towns of Sebratha and Sorman, and from Tarhouna. On April 13, the internationally recognized Government of National Accord pushed Hiftar’s forces out of the western coastal towns and regained control. Militias with a strict Salafi Islamist agenda also support the LAAF.

The group has received military support from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Jordan, and Egypt despite the Libya arms embargo. The UAE operates a military airbase in eastern Libya, supplies weapons and ammunition to the LAAF, and its warplanes and armed drones have operated in support of the LAAF. Foreign fighters from Sudan and Chad and Russian fighters from a private security company reportedly support the armed group. Syrian fighters backed by Russia also reportedly support the group in Libya.

On the opposing side are the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord and affiliated armed groups from western Libya. Turkey, now also a party to the conflict, is the government’s main foreign backer, having signed two memorandums of understanding in late 2019 that outline maritime and security cooperation. Turkey provides weapons, armored vehicles, and Bayraktar TB2 armed drones, and reportedly deployed thousands of Turkey-backed Syrian fighters to support the GNA. The GNA has also reportedly contracted foreign fighters from Chad and Sudan to fight on its behalf.

The UN estimates that the year-long armed conflict in Tripoli has killed 356 civilians and wounded 329 as of March 31. The fighting has displaced more than 150,000 people, some of whom live in crowded and unsanitary shelters, unable to return home. The International Organization for Migration estimated that as of end of February, 373,709 people remained internally displaced in Libya.

The Al-Sunbulah Attack

An administrative employee who was at the factory on the day of the strike said that five missiles struck the factory compound a few minutes apart during working hours.

He said the first struck next to a warehouse hangar. Although the building was damaged, no one was killed or wounded. But, he said, a group of workers in the hangar were frightened and ran toward the open fields. The second missile appeared to target them and killed three. The third missile hit another group of fleeing workers, killing one. A fourth missile targeted a cement truck in the compound, killing one person. He said the fifth hit a nearby car whose driver was preparing to drive one of the wounded Bangladeshi workers to a hospital, killing them both.

Factory worker recovering from knee injury after a UAE drone attack on a biscuit factory in Tripoli outskirts resulted in the killing of 8 civilians and injuring of 27 more; December 2019, Wadi Al-Rabie, Libya. © 2019 Human Rights Watch.

Accounts by the three injured employees were consistent with the administrative employee’s account and corroborated the sequence of events. All three had been wounded by missile shrapnel.

One of the workers, 31, a Chadian national, whose left knee and ankle had been hit with missile fragments from the second missile, said that he fled the factory with a group of workers when the first missile struck:

A group of us ran out of the factory toward the open fields out of fear, after we heard the first missile strike. We were a group of seven or eight people. As we were running the second missile struck and three Libyans were killed by that missile. I was among the five others injured. There was a lot of blood. I crouched next to a wall until someone reached me and I was taken to a hospital. I needed surgery and spent a total of 12 days in a private clinic in Al-Zawiyah Street, in Tripoli.

He and another worker, a 25-year-old Chadian, said that there was no military presence at the factory compound and that the closest point where members of armed groups were present was a mosque some 1.5 km away that had been converted into a field hospital for wounded fighters. A third worker, 29, from Bangladesh, said that on November 27, 10 Bangladeshi workers from the factory were repatriated.

The Weapons Used

Human Rights Watch documented remnants of at least four Blue Arrow-7 (BA-7) laser-guided missiles fired from Wing Loong-II drone, both Chinese manufactured. Remnants seen by Human Rights Watch included distinctive wing brackets, servos – error sensing mechanisms – and gas cylinders specific to the Blue Arrow-7 missile. These remnants were identical to separate remnants of Blue Arrow-7 missiles documented in an earlier attack on a field hospital near Tripoli in July. According to the December 2019 report of the UN Panel of Experts of the Libya Sanctions Committee, “[T]he BA-7 air-to-surface missile is ballistically paired to be delivered by the Wing Loong II UCAV, and by no other aviation asset identified in Libya to date.” The Panel of Experts report cites Jane’s Defense Weekly as saying that the Blue Arrow-7 “is only in operational use in three countries: China, Kazakhstan and United Arab Emirates.”

These weapons were transferred from China and first spotted on satellite imagery by defense analysts while being operated in the region in late 2017.

UAE personnel operate these drones in support of the LAAF, according to the report of the Panel of Experts. Panel investigations confirmed that these drones and missiles were not directly supplied from the manufacturer or by the country of manufacture and found that the UAE is not complying with the Libya arms embargo imposed by the UN “for the post-delivery transfer of Wing Loong II UCAV and Blue Arrow (BA-7) systems to Libya.”

The same type of drone and missiles were reportedly used in a January 5 attack on a military college in al-Hadba, Tripoli, killing at least 30 military cadets and injuring 33 more. The Government of National Accord blamed the LAAF for the attack, but the LAAF denied responsibility. Human Rights Watch could not independently verify if armed groups were using the college compound for military purposes.

Washington, DC (AFP) – US President Donald Trump revoked a policy Wednesday that required the Central Intelligence Agency to account for civilian deaths from drone strikes.

The move reversed a two-year-old order by his predecessor Barack Obama, who came under pressure for greater transparency after sharply increasing the use of drones for targeted attacks in military and counterterrorism operations.

It could give the CIA greater latitude to conduct strikes as Trump increasingly relies on the spy agency, rather than the military, for lethal drone operations.

Rights groups immediately criticized the move, saying it reverses a hard-fought effort for transparency and accountability in drone strikes, which became central to US strategy in the wake of the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda attack on the United States.

“The Trump Administration’s action is an unnecessary and dangerous step backwards on transparency and accountability for the use of lethal force, and the civilian casualties they cause,” said Rita Siemion of Human Rights First.

Trump’s action rescinded the July 1, 2016 order by Obama requiring the US director of national intelligence to report annually the number of strikes taken against “terrorist targets” outside of active war zones, and give an assessment of combatant and civilian deaths that resulted.

Trump’s move though applied only to strikes by non-defense department agencies — the CIA, in effect.

It did not overturn requirements set by Congress for the Pentagon to account for civilian casualties in its operations.

Activists say the move could make the CIA even less accountable than in the past.

The agency took the lead role in drone strikes in post-9/11 counterterror activities, targeting Al-Qaeda and other extremists especially in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, with frequent reports of significant “collateral” civilian deaths.

Under pressure to rein in the scores of strikes annually, in 2016 Obama ordered tighter procedures for managing the strikes and reducing civilian casualties.

Around the same time he forced the CIA to slash its drone activities and put the military more in charge of them.

But after Trump took office in January 2017, the CIA’s drone attacks resumed, according to reports.

Its role could grow as US forces reduce their presence in Syria and Afghanistan.

Shannon Green, director of programs at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, called Trump’s order Wednesday “a blow to transparency.”

“While public reporting on the use of lethal force by all agencies is crucial, ensuring that all agencies are accountable for preventing civilian casualties and then responding to claims of harm is perhaps even more important,” she said.

© Agence France-Presse

Featured Photo: “A US Predator drone armed with a missile stands on the tarmac of Kandahar military airport in Afghanistan (AFP Photo/MASSOUD HOSSAINI)”

(Tomdispatch.com) – In the wake of the February 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 students and staff members, a teacher said the school looked “like a war zone.” And to many young Americans, that’s exactly what it felt like. But this shooting was different. Refusing to be victims, Parkland survivors disrupted the “thoughts and prayers” cycle by immediately rallying student activists and adults across the country, mobilizing them around such tragedies and the weapons of war that often facilitate them.

Recent history suggested that such a movement, sure to be unable to keep the public’s attention or exert significant pressure on lawmakers, would collapse almost instantly. Yet, miraculously enough, the same fear — of their school being next — that had kept young Americans paralyzed for almost 20 years was what drove these newly impassioned activists not to back down.

Let me say that, much as I admire them, I look at their remarkable movement from an odd perspective. You see, I grew up in the “school-shooting era” and now work for a non-profit called ReThink Media tracking coverage of the American drone war that has been going on for 17 years.

To me, the U.S. military and CIA drones that hover constantly over eight countries across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and regularly terrorize, maim, and kill civilians, including children, are the equivalents of the disturbed shooters in American schools. But that story is hard to find anywhere in this country. What reports Americans do read about those drone strikes usually focus on successes (a major terrorist taken out in a distant land), not the “collateral damage.”

With that in mind, let me return to those teenage activists against gun violence who quickly grasped three crucial things. The first was that such violence can’t be dealt with by focusing on gun control alone. You also have to confront the other endemic problems exacerbating the gun violence epidemic, including inadequate mental health resources, systemic racism and police brutality, and the depth of economic inequality. As Parkland teen organizer Edna Chavez explained, “Instead of police officers we should have a department specializing in restorative justice. We need to tackle the root causes of the issues we face and come to an understanding of how to resolve them.”

The second was that, no matter how much you shouted, you had to be aware of the privilege of being heard. In other words, when you shouted, you had to do so not just for yourself but for all those voices so regularly drowned out in this country. After all, black Americans represent the majority of gun homicide victims. Black children are 10 times as likely to die by gun and yet their activism on the subject has been largely demonized or overlooked even as support for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students rolled in.

The third was that apathy is the enemy of progress, which means that to make change you have to give people a sense of engagement and empowerment. As one of the Parkland students, Emma Gonzalez, put it: “What matters is that the majority of American people have become complacent in a senseless injustice that occurs all around them.”

Washington’s Expanding Drone Wars

Here’s the irony, though: while those teenagers continue to talk about the repeated killing of innocents in this country, their broader message could easily be applied to another type of violence that, in all these years, Americans have paid next to no attention to: the U.S. drone war.

Unlike school shootings, drone strikes killing civilians in distant lands rarely make the news here, much less the headlines. Most of us at least now know what it means to live in a country where school shootings are an almost weekly news story. Drones are another matter entirely, and beyond the innocents they so regularly slaughter, there are long-term effects on the communities they are attacking.

As Veterans for Peace put it, “Here at home, deaths of students and others killed in mass shootings and gun violence, including suicide gun deaths, are said to be the price of freedom to bear arms. Civilian casualties in war are written off as ‘collateral damage,’ the price of freedom and U.S. security.”

And yet, after 17 years, three presidents, and little transparency, America’s drone wars have never truly made it into the national conversation. Regularly marketed over those years as “precise” and “surgical,” drones have always been seen by lawmakers as a “sexy,” casualty-free solution to fighting the bad guys, while protecting American blood and treasure.

According to reports, President Trump actually expanded the U.S. global drone war, while removing the last shreds of transparency about what those drones are doing — and even who’s launching them. One of his first orders on entering the Oval Office was to secretly reinstate the CIA’s ability to launch drone strikes that are, in most cases, not even officially acknowledged. And since then, it’s only gotten worse. Just last week, he revoked an Obama-era executive order that required the director of national intelligence to release an annual report on civilian and combatant casualties caused by CIA drones and other lethal operations. Now, not only are the rules of engagement — whom you can strike and under what circumstances — secret, but the Pentagon no longer even reveals when drones have been used, no less when civilians die from them. Because of this purposeful opaqueness, even an estimate of the drone death toll no longer exists.

Still, in the data available on all U.S. airstrikes since Trump was elected, an alarming trend is discernible: there are more of them, more casualties from them, and ever less accountability about them. In Iraq and Syria alone, the monitoring group Airwars believes that the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS is responsible for between 7,468 and 11,841 civilian deaths, around 2,000 of whom were children. (The U.S.-led coalition, however, only admits to killing 1,139 civilians.)

In Afghanistan, the U.N. recently found that U.S. airstrikes (including drone strikes) had killed approximately the same number of Afghan civilians in 2018 as in the previous three years put together. In response to this report, the U.S.-led NATO mission there claimed that “all feasible precautions” were being taken to limit civilian casualties and that it investigates all allegations of their occurrence. According to such NATO investigations, airstrikes by foreign forces caused 117 civilian casualties last year, including 62 deaths — about a fifth of the U.N. tally.

And those are only the numbers for places where Washington is officially at war. In Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya, even less information is available on the number of civilians the U.S. has killed. Experts who track drone strikes in such gray areas of conflict, however, place that number in the thousands, though there is no way to confirm them, as even our military acknowledges. U.S. Army Colonel Thomas Veale, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, put it this way last year: “As far as how do we know how many civilians were killed, I am just being honest, no one will ever know. Anyone who claims they will know is lying, and there’s no possible way.”

After a U.S. strike killed or injured an entire Afghan family, the trauma surgeon treating a four-year-old survivor told NBC, “I am sad. A young boy with such big injuries. No eyes, brain out. What will be his future?”

In other words, while America’s teenagers fight in the most public way possible for their right to live, a world away Afghanistan’s teenagers are marching for the same thing — except instead of gun control, in that heavily armed land, they want peace.

Trauma Is Trauma Is Trauma

Gun violence — and school shootings in particular — have become the preeminent fear of American teenagers. A Pew poll taken last year found that 57% of teens are worried about a shooting at their school. (One in four are “very worried.”) This is even truer of nonwhite teens, with roughly two-thirds of them expressing such fear.

As one student told Teen Vogue: “How could you not feel a little bit terrified knowing that it happens so randomly and so often?” And she’s not exaggerating. More than 150,000 students in the U.S have experienced a shooting on campus since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, considered the first modern mass school shooting.

And in such anticipatory anxiety, American students have much in common with victims of drone warfare. Speaking to researchers from Stanford University, Haroon Quddoos, a Pakistani taxi driver who survived two U.S. drone strikes, explained it this way:

“No matter what we are doing, that fear is always inculcated in us. Because whether we are driving a car, or we are working on a farm, or we are sitting home playing… cards — no matter what we are doing, we are always thinking the drone will strike us. So we are scared to do anything, no matter what.”

Similar symptoms of post-traumatic stress, trauma, and anxiety are commonplace emotions in countries where U.S. drones are active, just as in American communities like Parkland that have lived through a mass shooting. Visiting communities in Yemen that experienced drone strikes, forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld found that 92% of their inhabitants were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, with children the most significantly affected. Psychologists have come up with similar figures when studying both survivors of school shootings and children who have been psychologically affected by school-lockdown drills, by the media’s focus on violence, and by the culture of fear that has developed in response to mass shootings.

The Voices Left Out of the Conversation

The Parkland students have created a coherent movement that brings together an incredibly diverse group united around a common goal and a belief that all gun violence victims, not just those who have experienced a mass shooting, need to be heard. As one Parkland survivor and leader of the March For Our Lives movement, David Hogg, put it, the goal isn’t to talk for different communities, but to let them “speak for themselves and ask them how we can help.”

The Parkland survivors have essentially created an echo chamber, amplifying the previously unheard voices of young African-Americans and Latinos in particular. At last year’s March For Our Lives, for instance, 11-year-old Naomi Wadler started her speech this way: “I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African-American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead the evening news.”

In 2016, there were nearly 39,000 gun deaths, more than 14,000 of them homicides and almost 23,000 suicides. Such routine gun violence disproportionately affects black Americans. Mass shootings accounted for only about 1.2% of all gun deaths that year. Yet the Parkland students made headlines and gained praise for their activism — Oprah Winfrey even donated $500,000 to the movement — while black communities that had been fighting gun violence for years never received anything similar.

As someone who spends a lot of her time engrossed in the undercovered news of drone strikes, I can’t help but notice the parallels. Stories about U.S. drone strikes taking out dangerous terrorists proliferate, while reports on U.S.-caused civilian casualties disappear into the void. For example, in January, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command claimed that a precision drone strike finally killed Jamel Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi, the alleged mastermind behind the deadly October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Within a day, more than 24 media outlets had covered the story.

Few, however, focused on the fact that the U.S. command only claimed al-Badawi’s death was “likely,” despite similar reports about such terrorists that have repeatedly been proven wrong. The British human rights group Reprieve found back in 2014 that even when drone operators end up successfully targeting specific individuals like al-Badawi, they regularly kill vastly more people than their chosen targets. Attempts to kill 41 terror figures, Reprieve reported, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people. That was five years ago, but there’s no reason to believe anything has changed.

In contrast, when a U.S. airstrike — it’s not clear whether it was a drone or a manned aircraft — killed at least 20 civilians in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in December, 2018, only four American media outlets (Reuters, the Associated Press, Voice of America, and the New York Times) covered the story and none followed up with a report on those civilians and their families. That has largely been the norm since the war on terror began with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. In the Trump years so far, while headlines scream about mass school shootings and other slaughters of civilians here, the civilian casualties of America’s wars and the drone strikes that often go with them are, if anything, even more strikingly missing in action in the media.

When Safa al-Ahmad, a journalist for PBS’s Frontline, was asked why she thought it was important to hear from Yemenis experiencing American drone strikes, she responded:

“I think if you’re going to talk about people, you should go talk to them. It’s just basic respect for other human beings. It really bothered me that everyone was just talking about the Americans… The other civilians, they weren’t given any names, they weren’t given any details. It was like an aside to the story… This is part of the struggle when you construct stories on foreign countries, when it comes to the American public. I think we’ve done [Americans] a disservice, by not doing more of this… We impact the world, we should understand it. An informed public is the only way there can be a functioning democracy. That is our duty as a democracy, to be informed.”

This one-sided view of America’s never-ending air wars fails everyone, from the people being asked to carry out Washington’s decisions in those lands to ordinary Americans who have little idea what’s being done in their name to the many people living under those drones. Americans should know that, to them, it’s we who seem like the school shooters of the planet.

Waking Up An Apathetic Nation

For the better part of two decades, young Americans have been trapped in a cycle of violence at home and abroad with little way to speak out. Gun violence in this country was a headline-grabbing given. School shootings, like so many other mass killings here, were deemed “tragic” and worthy of thoughts, prayers, and much fervid media attention, but little else.

Until Parkland.

What changed? Well, a new cohort, Generation Z, came on the scene and, unlike their millennial predecessors, many of them are refusing to accept the status quo, especially when it comes to issues like gun violence.

Every time there was a mass shooting, millennials would hold their breath, wondering if today would be the day the country finally woke up. After Newtown. After San Bernadino. After Las Vegas. And each time, it wasn’t. Parkland could have been the same, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids. Having witnessed the dangers of apathy, Gen-Z seems increasingly to be about movement and action. In fact, in a Vice youth survey, 71% of respondents reported feeling “capable” of enacting change around global warming and 85% felt the same about social problems. And that’s new.

For so long, gun violence seemed like an unstoppable, incurable plague. Fed up with the “adults in the room,” however, these young activists have begun to take matters into their own hands, giving those particularly at risk of gun violence, children, a sense of newfound power — the power to determine their own futures. Whether it’s testifying in front of Congress in the first hearing on gun violence since 2011, protesting at the stores and offices of gun manufacturers, or participating in “die-ins,” these kids are making their voices heard.

Since the Parkland massacre, there has been actual movement on gun control, something that America has not seen for a long time. Under pressure, the Justice Department moved to ban the bump stocks that can make semi-automatic weapons fire almost like machine guns, Florida signed a $400 million bill to tighten the state’s gun laws, companies began to cut ties with the National Rifle Association, and public support grew for stricter gun control laws.

Although the new Gen Z activists have focused on issues close to home, sooner or later they may start to look beyond the water’s edge and find themselves in touch with their counterparts across the globe, who are showing every day how dedicated they are to changing the world they live in, with or without anyone’s help. And if they do, they will find that, in its endless wars, America has been the true school shooter on this planet, terrorizing the global classroom with a remarkable lack of consequences.

In March 2018, according to Human Rights Watch, American planes bombed a school that housed displaced people in Syria, killing dozens of them, including children. Similarly, in Yemen that August, a Saudi plane, using a Pentagon-supplied laser-guided bomb, blew away a school bus, killing 40 schoolchildren. Just as at home, it’s not only about the weaponry like those planes or drones. Activists will find that they have to focus their attention as well on the root causes of such violence and the scars they leave behind in the communities of survivors.

More tolerant, more diverse, less trustful of major institutions and less inclined to believe in American exceptionalism than any generation before them, Generation Z may be primed to care about what their country is doing in their name from Afghanistan to Syria, Yemen to Libya. But first they have to know it’s happening.

Allegra Harpootlian is a media associate at ReThink Media, where she works with leading experts and organizations at the intersection of national security, politics, and the media. She principally focuses on U.S. drone policies and related use-of-force issues. She is also a political partner with the Truman National Security Project. Find her on Twitter @ally_harp.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2019 Allegra Harpootlian

Allegra Harpootlian is a media associate at ReThink Media, where she works with leading experts and organizations at the intersection of national security, politics, and the media. She principally focuses on U.S. drone policies and related use-of-force issues. She is also a political partner with the Truman National Security Project. Find her on Twitter @ally_harp.

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

TRT World: “Civilian deaths by US drone strikes will no longer be reported”

That was then, of course, and this is now. And what a now it is! With artificial intelligence, or AI, soon to play an ever-increasing role in military affairs, as in virtually everything else in our lives, the role of humans, even in nuclear decision-making, is likely to be progressively diminished. In fact, in some future AI-saturated world, it could disappear entirely, leaving machines to determine humanity’s fate.

This isn’t idle conjecture based on science fiction movies or dystopian novels. It’s all too real, all too here and now, or at least here and soon to be. As the Pentagon and the military commands of the other great powers look to the future, what they see is a highly contested battlefield — some have called it a “hyperwar” environment — where vast swarms of AI-guided robotic weapons will fight each other at speeds far exceeding the ability of human commanders to follow the course of a battle. At such a time, it is thought, commanders might increasingly be forced to rely on ever more intelligent machines to make decisions on what weaponry to employ when and where. At first, this may not extend to nuclear weapons, but as the speed of battle increases and the “firebreak” between them and conventional weaponry shrinks, it may prove impossible to prevent the creeping automatization of even nuclear-launch decision-making.

Such an outcome can only grow more likely as the U.S. military completes a top-to-bottom realignment intendedto transform it from a fundamentally small-war, counter-terrorist organization back into one focused on peer-against-peer combat with China and Russia. This shift was mandated by the Department of Defense in its December 2017 National Security Strategy. Rather than focusing mainly on weaponry and tactics aimed at combating poorly armed insurgents in never-ending small-scale conflicts, the American military is now being redesigned to fight increasingly well-equipped Chinese and Russian forces in multi-dimensional (air, sea, land, space, cyberspace) engagements involving multiple attack systems (tanks, planes, missiles, rockets) operating with minimal human oversight.

“The major effect/result of all these capabilities coming together will be an innovation warfare has never seen before: the minimization of human decision-making in the vast majority of processes traditionally required to wage war,” observed retired Marine General John Allen and AI entrepreneur Amir Hussain. “In this coming age of hyperwar, we will see humans providing broad, high-level inputs while machines do the planning, executing, and adapting to the reality of the mission and take on the burden of thousands of individual decisions with no additional input.”

That “minimization of human decision-making” will have profound implications for the future of combat. Ordinarily, national leaders seek to control the pace and direction of battle to ensure the best possible outcome, even if that means halting the fighting to avoid greater losses or prevent humanitarian disaster. Machines, even very smart machines, are unlikely to be capable of assessing the social and political context of combat, so activating them might well lead to situations of uncontrolled escalation.

It may be years, possibly decades, before machines replace humans in critical military decision-making roles, but that time is on the horizon. When it comes to controlling AI-enabled weapons systems, as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis put it in a recent interview, “For the near future, there’s going to be a significant human element. Maybe for 10 years, maybe for 15. But not for 100.”

Why AI?

Even five years ago, there were few in the military establishment who gave much thought to the role of AI or robotics when it came to major combat operations. Yes, remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), or drones, have been widely used in Africa and the Greater Middle East to hunt down enemy combatants, but those are largely ancillary (and sometimes CIA) operations, intended to relieve pressure on U.S. commandos and allied forces facing scattered bands of violent extremists. In addition, today’s RPAs are still controlled by human operators, even if from remote locations, and make little use, as yet, of AI-powered target-identification and attack systems. In the future, however, such systems are expected to populate much of any battlespace, replacing humans in many or even most combat functions.

To speed this transformation, the Department of Defense is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on AI-related research. “We cannot expect success fighting tomorrow’s conflicts with yesterday’s thinking, weapons, or equipment,” Mattis told Congress in April. To ensure continued military supremacy, he added, the Pentagon would have to focus more “investment in technological innovation to increase lethality, including research into advanced autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and hypersonics.”

Why the sudden emphasis on AI and robotics? It begins, of course, with the astonishing progress made by the tech community — much of it based in Silicon Valley, California — in enhancing AI and applying it to a multitude of functions, including image identification and voice recognition. One of those applications, Alexa Voice Services, is the computer system behind Amazon’s smart speaker that not only can use the Internet to do your bidding but interpret your commands. (“Alexa, play classical music.” “Alexa, tell me today’s weather.” “Alexa,turn the lights on.”) Another is the kind of self-driving vehicle technology that is expected to revolutionize transportation.

Artificial Intelligence is an “omni-use” technology, explain analysts at the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan information agency,“as it has the potential to be integrated into virtually everything.” It’s also a “dual-use” technology in that it can be applied as aptly to military as civilian purposes. Self-driving cars, for instance, rely on specialized algorithms to process data from an array of sensors monitoring traffic conditions and so decide which routes to take, when to change lanes, and so on. The same technology and reconfigured versions of the same algorithms will one day be applied to self-driving tanks set loose on future battlefields. Similarly, someday drone aircraft — without human operators in distant locales — will be capable of scouring a battlefield for designated targets (tanks, radar systems, combatants), determining that something it “sees” is indeed on its target list, and “deciding” to launch a missile at it.

It doesn’t take a particularly nimble brain to realize why Pentagon officials would seek to harness such technology: they think it will give them a significant advantage in future wars. Any full-scale conflict between the U.S. and China or Russia (or both) would, to say the least, be extraordinarily violent, with possibly hundreds of warships and many thousands of aircraft and armored vehicles all focused indensely packed battlespaces. In such an environment, speed in decision-making, deployment, and engagement will undoubtedly prove a critical asset. Given future super-smart, precision-guided weaponry, whoever fires first will have a better chance of success, or even survival, than a slower-firing adversary. Humans can move swiftly in such situations when forced to do so, but future machines will act far more swiftly, while keeping track of more battlefield variables.

As General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in 2017,

“It is very compelling when one looks at the capabilities that artificial intelligence can bring to the speed and accuracy of command and control and the capabilities that advanced robotics might bring to a complex battlespace, particularly machine-to-machine interaction in space and cyberspace, where speed is of the essence.”

Aside from aiming to exploit AI in the development of its own weaponry, U.S. military officials are intensely aware that their principal adversaries are also pushing ahead in the weaponization of AI and robotics, seeking novel ways to overcome America’s advantages in conventional weaponry. According to the Congressional Research Service, for instance, China is investing heavily in the development of artificial intelligence and its application to military purposes. Though lacking the tech base of either China or the United States, Russia is similarly rushing the development of AI and robotics. Any significant Chinese or Russian lead in such emerging technologies that might threaten this country’s military superiority would be intolerable to the Pentagon.

Not surprisingly then, in the fashion of past arms races (from the pre-World War I development of battleships to Cold War nuclear weaponry), an “arms race in AI” is now underway, with the U.S., China, Russia, and other nations (including Britain, Israel, and South Korea) seeking to gain a critical advantage in the weaponization of artificial intelligence and robotics. Pentagon officials regularly cite Chinese advances in AI when seeking congressional funding for their projects, just as Chinese and Russian military officials undoubtedly cite American ones to fund their own pet projects. In true arms race fashion, this dynamic is already accelerating the pace of development and deployment of AI-empowered systems and ensuring their future prominence in warfare.

Command and Control

As this arms race unfolds, artificial intelligence will be applied to every aspect of warfare, from logistics and surveillance to target identification and battle management. Robotic vehicles will accompany troops on the battlefield, carrying supplies and firing on enemy positions; swarms of armed drones will attack enemy tanks, radars, and command centers; unmanned undersea vehicles, or UUVs, will pursue both enemy submarines and surface ships. At the outset of combat, all these instruments of war will undoubtedly be controlled by humans. As the fighting intensifies, however, communications between headquarters and the front lines may wellbe lost and such systems will, according to military scenarios already being written, be on their own, empowered to take lethal action without further human intervention.

Most of the debate over the application of AI and its future battlefield autonomy has been focused on the morality of empowering fully autonomous weapons — sometimes called “killer robots” — with a capacity to make life-and-death decisions on their own, or on whether the use of such systems would violate the laws of war and international humanitarian law. Such statutes require that war-makers be able to distinguish between combatants and civilians on the battlefield and spare the latter from harm to the greatest extent possible. Advocates of the new technology claim that machines will indeed become smart enough to sort out such distinctions for themselves, while opponents insist that they will never prove capable of making critical distinctions of that sort in the heat of battle and would be unable to show compassion when appropriate. A number of human rights and humanitarian organizations have even launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots with the goal of adopting an international ban on the development and deployment of fully autonomous weapons systems.

In the meantime, a perhaps even more consequential debate is emerging in the military realm over the application of AI to command-and-control (C2) systems — that is, to ways senior officers will communicate key orders to their troops. Generals and admirals always seek to maximize the reliability of C2 systems to ensure that their strategic intentions will be fulfilled as thoroughly as possible. In the current era, such systems are deeply reliant on secure radio and satellite communications systems that extend from headquarters to the front lines. However, strategists worry that, in a future hyperwar environment, such systems could be jammed or degraded just as the speed of the fighting begins to exceed the ability of commanders to receive battlefield reports, process the data, and dispatch timely orders. Consider this a functional definition of the infamous fog of war multiplied by artificial intelligence — with defeat a likely outcome. The answer to such a dilemma for many military officials: let the machines take over these systems, too. As a report from the Congressional Research Service puts it, in the future “AI algorithms may provide commanders with viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the battle-space, which would enable faster adaptation to unfolding events.”

And someday, of course, it’s possible to imagine that the minds behind such decision-making would cease to be human ones. Incoming data from battlefield information systems would instead be channeled to AI processors focused on assessing imminent threats and, given the time constraints involved, executing what they deemed the best options without human instructions.

Pentagon officials deny that any of this is the intent of their AI-related research. They acknowledge, however, that they can at least imagine a future in which other countries delegate decision-making to machines and the U.S. sees no choice but to follow suit, lest it lose the strategic high ground. “We will not delegate lethal authority for a machine to make a decision,” then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work told Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security in a 2016 interview. But he added the usual caveat: in the future, “we might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to delegate authority to machines than we are and as that competition unfolds, we’ll have to make decisions about how to compete.”

The Doomsday Decision

The assumption in most of these scenarios is that the U.S. and its allies will be engaged in a conventional war with China and/or Russia. Keep in mind, then, that the very nature of such a future AI-driven hyperwar will only increase the risk that conventional conflicts could cross a threshold that’s never been crossed before: an actual nuclear war between two nuclear states. And should that happen, those AI-empowered C2 systems could, sooner or later, find themselves in a position to launch atomic weapons.

Such a danger arises from the convergence of multiple advances in technology: not just AI and robotics, but the development of conventional strike capabilities like hypersonic missiles capable of flying at five or more times the speed of sound, electromagnetic rail guns, and high-energy lasers. Such weaponry, though non-nuclear, when combined with AI surveillance and target-identification systems, could even attack an enemy’s mobile retaliatory weaponsand so threaten to eliminate its ability to launch a response to any nuclear attack. Given such a “use ’em or lose ’em” scenario, any power might be inclined not to wait but to launch its nukes at the first sign of possible attack, or even, fearing loss of control in an uncertain, fast-paced engagement, delegate launch authority to its machines. And once that occurred, it could prove almost impossible to prevent further escalation.

The question then arises: Would machines make better decisions than humans in such a situation? They certainly are capable of processing vast amounts of information over brief periods of time and weighing the pros and cons of alternative actions in a thoroughly unemotional manner. But machines also make military mistakes and, above all, they lack the ability to reflect on a situation and conclude: Stop this madness. No battle advantage is worth global human annihilation.

As Paul Scharre put it in Army of None, a new book on AI and warfare, “Humans are not perfect, but they can empathize with their opponents and see the bigger picture. Unlike humans, autonomous weapons would have no ability to understand the consequences of their actions, no ability to step back from the brink of war.”

So maybe we should think twice about giving some future militarized version of Alexa the power to launch a machine-made Armageddon.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His most recent book is The Race for What’s Left. His next book, All Hell Breaking Loose: Climate Change, Global Chaos, and American National Security, will be published in 2019.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2018 Michael T. Klare

Via Tomdispatch.com

——

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Tech Insider: “We Talked To Sophia — The AI Robot That Once Said It Would ‘Destroy Humans'”

They are like the camel’s nose, lifting a corner of the tent. Don’t be fooled, though. It won’t take long until the whole animal is sitting inside, sipping your tea and eating your sweets. In countries around the world — in the Middle East, Asia Minor, Central Asia, Africa, even the Philippines — the appearance of U.S. drones in the sky (and on the ground) is often Washington’s equivalent of the camel’s nose entering a new theater of operations in this country’s forever war against “terror.” Sometimes, however, the drones are more like the camel’s tail, arriving after less visible U.S. military forces have been in an area for a while.

Scrambling for Africa

AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s Africa Command, is building Air Base 201 in Agadez, a town in the nation of Niger. The $110 million installation, which officially opens later this year, will be able to house both C-17 transport planes and MQ-9 Reaper armed drones. It will soon become the new centerpiece in an undeclared U.S. war in West Africa. Even before the base opens, armed U.S. drones are already flying from Niger’s capital, Niamey, having received permission from the Nigerien government to do so last November.

Despite crucial reporting by Nick Turse and others, most people in this country only learned of U.S. military activities in Niger in 2017 (and had no idea that about 800 U.S. military personnel were already stationed in the country) when news broke that four U.S. soldiers had died in an October ambush there. It turns out, however, that they weren’t the only U.S soldiers involved in firefights in Niger. This March, the Pentagon acknowledged that another clash took place last December between Green Berets and a previously unknown group identified as ISIS-West Africa. For those keeping score at home on the ever-expanding enemies list in Washington’s war on terror, this is a different group from the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), responsible for the October ambush. Across Africa, there have been at least eight other incidents, most of them in Somalia.

What are U.S. forces doing in Niger? Ostensibly, they are training Nigerien soldiers to fight the insurgent groups rapidly multiplying in and around their country. Apart from the uranium that accounts for over 70% of Niger’s exports, there’s little of economic interest to the United States there. The real appeal is location, location, location. Landlocked Niger sits in the middle of Africa’s Sahel region, bordered by Mali and Burkina Faso on the west, Chad on the east, Algeria and Libya to the north, and Benin and Nigeria to the south. In other words, Niger has the misfortune to straddle a part of Africa of increasing strategic interest to the United States.

In addition to ISIS-West Africa and ISGS, actual or potential U.S. targets there include Boko Haram (born in Nigeria and now spread to Mali and Chad), ISIS and al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Libya, and Al Mourabitoun, based primarily in Mali.

At the moment, for instance, U.S. drone strikes on Libya, which have increasedunder the Trump administration, are generally launched from a base in Sicily. However, drones at the new air base in Agadez will be able to strike targets in all these countries.

Suppose a missile happens to kill some Nigerien civilians by mistake(not exactly uncommon for U.S. drone strikes elsewhere)? Not to worry: AFRICOM is covered. A U.S.-Niger Status of Forces Agreement guarantees that there won’t be any repercussions. In fact, according to the agreement, “The Parties waive any and all claims… against each other for damage to, loss, or destruction of the other’s property or injury or death to personnel of either Party’s armed forces or their civilian personnel.” In other words, the United States will not be held responsible for any “collateral damage” from Niger drone strikes. Another clause in the agreement shields U.S. soldiers and civilian contractors from any charges under Nigerien law.

The introduction of armed drones to target insurgent groups is part of AFRICOM’s expansion of the U.S. footprint on a continent of increasing strategic interest to Washington. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European nations engaged in the “scramble for Africa,” a period of intense and destructive competition for colonial possessions on the continent. In the post-colonial 1960s and 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union vied for influence in African countries as diverse as Egypt and what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Today, despite AFRICOM’s focus on the war on terror, the real jockeying for influence and power on the continent is undoubtedly between this country and the People’s Republic of China. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “China surpassed the United States as Africa’s largest trade partner in 2009” and has never looked back. “Beijing has steadily diversified its business interests in Africa,” the Council’s 2017 backgrounder continues, noting that from Angola to Kenya,

“China has participated in energy, mining, and telecommunications industries and financed the construction of roads, railways, ports, airports, hospitals, schools, and stadiums. Investment from a mixture of state and private funds has also set up tobacco, rubber, sugar, and sisal plantations… Chinese investment in Africa also fits into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s development framework, ‘One Belt, One Road.’”

For example, in a bid to corner the DRC’s cobalt and copper reserves (part of an estimated $24 trillion in mineral wealth there), two Chinese companies have formed Sicomines, a partnership with the Congolese government’s national mining company. The Pulitzer Center reports that Sicomines is expected “to extract 6.8 million tons of copper and 427,000 tons of cobalt over the next 25 years.” Cobalt is essential in the manufacture of today’s electronic devices — from cell phones to drones — and more than half of the world’s supply lies underground in the DRC.

Even before breaking ground on Air Base 201 in Niger, the United States already had a major drone base in Africa, in the tiny country of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen. From there, the Pentagon has been directing strikes against targets in Yemen and Somalia. As AFRICOM commander Gen. Thomas Waldhauser told Congress in March, “Djibouti is a very strategic location for us.” Camp Lemonnier, as the base is known, occupies almost 500 acres near the Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport. U.S. Central Command, Special Operations Command, European Command, and Transportation Command all use the base. At present, however, it appears that U.S. drones stationed in Djibouti and bound for Yemen and Somalia take off from nearby Chabelley Airfield, as Bard College’s Center for the Study of the Drone reports.

To the discomfort of the U.S. military, the Chinese have recently established their first base in Africa, also in Djibouti, quite close to Camp Lemonnier. That country is also horning in on potential U.S. sales of drones to other countries. Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab emirates are among U.S. allies known to have purchased advanced Chinese drones.

The Means Justify the End?

From the beginning, the CIA’s armed drones have been used primarily to kill specific individuals. The Bush administration launched its global drone assassination program in October 2001 in Afghanistan, expanded it in 2002 to Yemen, and later to other countries. Under President Barack Obama, White House oversight of such assassinations only gained momentum (with an official “kill list” and regular “terror Tuesday” meetings to pick targets). The use of drones expanded 10-fold, with growing numbers of attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as well as in the Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian war zones. Early on, targets were generally people identified as al-Qaeda leaders or “lieutenants.” In later years, the kill lists grew to include supposed leaders or members of a variety of other terror organizations, and eventually even unidentified people engaged in activities that were to bear the “signature” of terrorist activity.

But those CIA drones, destructive as they were (leaving civilian dead, including children, in their wake) were just the camel’s nose — a way to smuggle in a major change in U.S. policy. We’ve grown so used to murder by drone in the last 17 years that we’ve lost sight of an important fact: such assassinations represented a fundamental (and unlawful) change in U.S. military strategy. Because unpiloted airplanes eliminate the physical risk to American personnel, the United States has embraced a strategy of global extrajudicial executions: presidential assassinations on foreign soil.

It’s a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well at so little cost (to us) that it must be all right to kill people with them.

Successive administrations have implemented this strategic change with little public discussion. Critiques of the drone program tend to focus — not unreasonably — on the many additional people (like family members) who are injured or die along with the intended targets, and on civilians who should never have been targets in the first place. But few critics point out that executing foreign nationals without trial in other countries is itself wrong and illegal under U.S. law, as well as that of other countries where some of the attacks have taken place, and of course, international law.

How have the Bush, Obama, and now Trump administrations justified such killings? The same way they justified the expansion of the war on terror itself to new battle zones around the world — through Congress’s September 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). That law permitted the president

“to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Given that many of the organizations the United States is targeting with drones today didn’t even exist when that AUMF was enacted and so could hardly have “authorized” or “aided” in the 9/11 attacks, it offers, at best, the thinnest of coverage indeed for such a worldwide program.

Droning On and On

George W. Bush launched the CIA’s drone assassination program and that was just the beginning. Even as Barack Obama attempted to reduce the number of U.S. ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, he ramped up the use of drones, famously taking personal responsibility for targeting decisions. By some estimates, he approved 10 times as many drone attacks as Bush.

In 2013, the Obama administration introduced new guidelines for drone strikes, supposedly designed to guarantee with “near certainty” the safety of civilians. Administration officials also attempted to transfer most of the operational responsibility for drone attacks from the CIA to the military’s only-slightly-less-secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Although the number of CIA strikes did drop, the Agency remained in a position to rev up its program at any time, as the Washington Post reported in 2016:

“U.S. officials emphasized that the CIA has not been ordered to disarm its fleet of drones, and that its aircraft remain deeply involved in counterterrorism surveillance missions in Yemen and Syria even when they are not unleashing munitions.”

It’s indicative of how easily drone killings have become standard operating procedure that, in all the coverage of the confirmation hearings for the CIA’s new director, Gina Haspel, there was copious discussion of the Agency’s torture program, but not a public mention of, let alone a serious question about, its drone assassination campaign. It’s possible the Senate Intelligence Committee discussed it in their classified hearing, but the general public has no way of knowing Haspel’s views on the subject.

However, it shouldn’t be too hard to guess. It’s clear, for instance, that President Trump has no qualms about the CIA’s involvement in drone killings. When he visited the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the day after his inauguration, says the Post, “Trump urged the CIA to start arming its drones in Syria. ‘If you can do it in 10 days, get it done,’ he said.” At that same meeting, CIA officials played a tape of a drone strike for him, showing how they’d held off until the target had stepped far enough away from the house that the missile would miss it (and so its occupants). His only question: “Why did you wait?”

You may recall that, while campaigning, the president told Fox News that the U.S. should actually be targeting certain civilians. “The other thing with the terrorists,” he said, “is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” In other words, he seemed eager to make himself a future murderer-in-chief.

How, then, has U.S. drone policy fared under Trump? The New York Times has reported major changes to Obama-era policies. Both the CIA’s and the military’s “kill lists” will no longer be limited to key insurgent leaders, but expanded to include “foot-soldier jihadists with no special skills or leadership roles.” The Times points out that this “new approach would appear to remove some obstacles for possible strikes in countries where Qaeda- or Islamic State-linked militants are operating, from Nigeria to the Philippines.” And no longer will attack decisions only be made at the highest levels of government. The requirement for having a “near certainty” of avoiding civilian casualties — always something of a fiction — officially remains in place for now, but we know how seriously Trump takes such constraints.

He’s already overseen the expansion of the drone wars in other ways. In general, that “near certainty” constraint doesn’t apply to officially designated war zones (“areas of active hostility”), where the lower standard of merely avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties prevails. In March 2017, Trump approved a Pentagon request to identify large parts of Yemen and Somalia as areas of “active hostility,” allowing leeway for far less carefully targeted strikes in both places. At the time, however, AFRICOM head General Thomas D. Waldhauser said he would maintain the “near certainty” standard in Somalia for now (which, as it happens, hasn’t stopped Somali civilians from dying by drone strike).

Another change affects the use of drones in Pakistan and potentially elsewhere. Past drone strikes in Pakistan officially targeted people believed to be “high value” al-Qaeda figures, on the grounds that they (like all al-Qaeda leaders) represented an “imminent threat” to the United States. However, as a 2011 Justice Department paper explained, imminence is in the eye of the beholder: “With respect to al-Qaeda leaders who are continually planning attacks, the United States is likely to have only a limited window of opportunity within which to defend Americans.” In other words, once identified as an al-Qaeda leader or the leader of an allied group, you are by definition “continually planning attacks” and always represent an imminent danger, making you a permanentlegitimate target.

Under Trump, however, U.S. drones are not only going after those al-Qaeda targets permitted under the 2001 AUMF, but also targeting Afghan Taliban across the border in Pakistan. In other words, these drone strikes are not a continuation of counterterrorism as envisioned under the AUMF, but rather an extension of a revitalized U.S. war in Afghanistan. In general, the law of war allows attacks on a neutral country’s territory only if soldiers chase an enemy across the border in “hot pursuit.” So the use of drones to attack insurgent groups inside Pakistan represents an unacknowledged escalation of the U.S. Afghan War. Another corner of the tent lifted by the camel’s nose?

Transparency about U.S. wars in general, and airstrikes in particular, has also suffered under Trump. The administration, for instance, announced in March that it had used a drone to kill “Musa Abu Dawud, a high-ranking official in al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” as the New York Times reported. However, the Times continued, “questions about whether the American military, under the Trump administration, is blurring the scope of operations in Africa were raised… when it was revealed that the U.S. had carried out four airstrikes in Libya from September to January that the Africa Command did not disclose at the time.”

Similarly, the administration has been less than forthcoming about its activities in Yemen. As the Business Insider reports (in a story updated from the Long War Journal), the U.S. has attacked al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) there repeatedly, but “of the more than 114 strikes against AQAP in Yemen, CENTCOM has only provided details on four, all of which involved high value targets.” Because Trump has loosened the targeting restrictions for Yemen, it’s likely that the other strikes involved low-level targets, whose identity we won’t know.

Just Security, an online roundtable based at New York University, reports the total number of airstrikes there in 2017 as 120. They investigated eight of these and “found that U.S. operations were responsible for the deaths of at least 32 civilians — including 16 children and six women — and injured 10 others, including five children.” Yemeni civilians had a suggestion for how the United States could help them avoid becoming collateral damage: give them “a list of wanted individuals. A list that is clear and available to the public so that they can avoid targeted individuals, protect their children, and not allow U.S. targets to have a presence in their areas.”

A 2016 executive order requires that the federal director of national intelligence issue an annual report by May 1st on the previous year’s civilian deaths caused by U.S. airstrikes outside designated “active hostility” zones. As yet, the Trump administration has not filed the 2017 report.

Bigger and Better Camels Coming Soon to a Tent Near You

This March, a jubilant Fox News reported that the Marine Corps is planning to build a fancy new drone, called the MUX, for Marine Air Ground Task Force Unmanned Aircraft System-Expeditionary. This baby will sport quite a set of bells and whistles, as Fox marveled:

“The MUX will terrify enemies of the United States, and with good reason. The aircraft won’t be just big and powerful: it will also be ultra-smart. This could be a heavily armed drone that takes off, flies, avoids obstacles, adapts and lands by itself — all without a human piloting it.”

In other words, “the MUX will be a drone that can truly run vital missions all by itself.”

Between pulling out of the Iran agreement and moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Trump has made it clear that — despite his base’s chants of “Nobel! Nobel!” — he has no interest whatsoever in peace. It looks like the future of the still spreading war on terror under Trump is as clear as MUX.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, and Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead.

Copyright 2018 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com

Featured Photo via defense.gov.

Civil rights group calls the transparency clampdown “deeply disturbing”

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The US has quietly stepped up secrecy over its air wars in Afghanistan and Yemen since President Donald Trump entered office.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the new practices – discovered by the Bureau through interviews with past and present US military officials – “deeply disturbing”.

Towards the end of the Obama administration, US military officials began to communicate in a more transparent way with the Bureau about their counterterrorism campaigns. For over a year, the Bureau received detailed monthly reports on air strikes in Afghanistan, broken down into different types of strike.

The Pentagon’s Central Command (CENTCOM), meanwhile, announced its intention to launch a monthly tally of strikes in Yemen. Although this was abandoned shortly after Trump took office, Centcom continued to provide detailed information on Yemen strikes on an ad hoc basis.

By the end of 2017, specifics had started to fade out from the US military’s communications on Yemen and Afghanistan. Officials from Resolute Support, the US mission in Afghanistan, said that the Bureau would have to rely on data simply showing the number of weapons released in Afghanistan, which provides a much less clear picture of the war. A spokesman for Resolute Report explained that they no longer wanted to give so much detail to the enemy.

In February this year, a Centcom spokesman responded to a request for information on the location and casualty estimates of a spate of strikes in Yemen with a press release which simply stated the number of strikes that had occurred. The spokesman said he had been “advised” not to give out detailed information on strikes. “Secretary Mattis has made it clear we are not providing numbers or tactics that gives our adversaries any advantage”, the spokesperson said.

The explanations by military officials echo remarks in a press conference given by General Mattis, the US Secretary of Defense, on November 9 2017, in response to a question about troop numbers.

General Mattis said: “I don’t want to talk specific numbers…basically, I don’t give the enemy information they could use to their advantage.” He added: “And I’m told by some, ‘Well, people used to do that.’ That’s not me.”

When asked by the Bureau whether General Mattis’s comments about not providing information to the enemy amounted to a formal instruction, the Office for the Secretary of Defense simply said the November remarks “stand as guidance” for commanders.

It is not clear whether the change in practice was as a result of Mattis’s remarks, or whether they simply represent a more public expression of a new culture at the Pentagon. Nor is it clear that the new practice amounts to a formal policy.

Captain Thomas Gresback, a Resolute Support spokesperson in Afghanistan, told the Bureau that their decision to restrict the flow of information was “made locally…based on the circumstances in the area of operation.”

On the other hand the US military command in Africa, Africom, has said it will continue to release detailed information on strikes in Somalia, in the interests of transparency. Detailed information is also still being released about strikes in Iraq and Syria.

The restriction of information makes it harder for the Bureau to gain a proper picture of the war in Afghanistan and Yemen and hold operations in those countries to account as they increase in intensity.

A US military official derided the idea that the level of detail once provided would give the enemy an advantage.

“The enemy knows a strike happened. It’s ridiculous”, the official told the Bureau, adding: “the policy for US forces is that you can confirm what happened yesterday – that’s how we’ve been trained”.

Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, called the new practice “deeply disturbing.”

“It hides the costs and consequences of US lethal force from the public in whose name the military conducts operations”, said Shamsi.

“At the same time, civilians who are wrongly or mistakenly harmed say that it is the absence of transparency and accountability that weighs most heavily on them.”

The amount of information made available by the Pentagon about its overseas operations has fluctuated over the years, and it could be that the practices in place since late last year are just a one swing of the pendulum.

But they resonate with a wider picture of decreasing military transparency under the Trump administration.

On 1 March 2018, the Air Force ordered an overhaul of its public affairs operations aimed at preventing the release of information deemed sensitive.

The March guidance, which was obtained by Defense News, said: “In line with the new National Defense Strategy, the Air Force must hone its culture of engagement to include a heightened focus on practicing sound operational security. As we engage the public, we must avoid giving insights to our adversaries that could erode our military advantage.”

Military watchdog SIGAR meanwhile reported in October last year that the US had begun to withhold data on the size and attrition (also known as churn) rate of the Afghan security forces. In January 2018, SIGAR reported that the release of other key metrics of the war in Afghanistan once available had also been restricted, including the number of districts under Taliban control. The US later said this had been a human error in labelling and released some of the data.

The clampdown comes as the use of US air power has increased – the Bureau’s data shows that strikes doubled in Afghanistan and tripled in Yemen last year compared to the previous one.

Header photograph: US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis speaks with President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence following a meeting of the National Security Council at the Pentagon, July 20, 2017. From Department of Defense/Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro

Via Bureau of Investigative Journalism

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is an independent, not-for-profit media organisation that educates the public and holds power to account. We tell the stories that matter. To help defend quality reporting and spark change: become a Friend of the Bureau

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Africanews from last week:U.S. airstrike kills two suspected terrorists in Libya

The number of US air strikes jumped in Yemen and Somalia in 2017, pointing to an escalation of the global war on terror.

President Donald Trump inherited the framework allowing US aircraft to hit suspected terrorists outside of declared battlefields from his predecessor, Barack Obama. Bar some tinkering, his administration has largely stuck within the framework set by the previous one.

However, the quantity of operations has shot up under President Trump. Strikes doubled in Somalia and tripled in Yemen.

In Afghanistan, where the Bureau has been monitoring US airstrikes since it was officially declared a noncombat mission at the end of 2014, the number of weapons dropped is now approaching levels last seen during the 2009-2012 surge.

Meanwhile, there are signs that the drone war may be returning to Pakistan, where attacks were also up, compared with 2016.

A satellite image of Barirre, Somalia

Via Google Maps

Somalia

Ruins in the desert in the Yemen province of Shabwah

Photo by Dianadrz via Flickr

Yemen

Chinook helicopter flying near Jalabad, Afghanistan

Capt. Brian Harris via US Central Command

Afghanistan

Aerial view of Kashmir mountains, near the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan

Jason Langley / Alamy Stock Photo

Pakistan