In his speech, President Obama also allowed that "America cannot take strikes wherever we choose -- our actions are bound by consultations with partners, and respect for state sovereignty." Pakistan might differ on that one. After the Datta Khel strike, some of the victims' families filed suit, resulting in a ruling by the Pakistan court that the strikes are illegal.
In fact, the president opened his speech by proclaiming that "our alliances are strong, and so is our standing in the world." Well, the world's a big place. And there are some places where our standing has larger implications for our national security than others. In Pakistan, for instance, according to a recent Pew Foundation poll, 74 percent consider the U.S. to be an enemy. In the last year of the Bush administration, the U.S. was regarded favorably by 19 percent of the Pakistan people. By 2012, that had fallen to 12 percent. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and now a scholar at Brookings, says the strikes are "deadly to any hope of reversing the downward slide in ties with the fastest growing nuclear weapons state in the world."
The president also claimed that "conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage." Wrong again. In the Guardian last week, Spencer Ackerman reports on a study by Larry Lewis, of the Center for Naval Analysis, that found that drones strikes in Afghanistan were 10 times more likely to cause civilian casualties than strikes from manned fighters. "Drones aren't magically better at avoiding civilians than fighter jets," said study co-author Sarah Holewinski. "When pilots flying jets were given clear directives and training on civilian protection, they were able to lower civilian casualty rates."
In his speech, President Obama also said that "we must make decisions based not on fear, but hard-earned wisdom." The hard-earned wisdom the drone study was based on -- data in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011 -- was presumably available to the administration. Had the White House been interested in finding out which method was safer, they could have. But they chose not to and instead just repeated the self-serving, conventional -- and demonstrably wrong -- "wisdom." It's hard to grant the mantle of actual wisdom to that kind of decision-making.
But the president also said that he was going to explore "other options for increased oversight," and that he'd signed "clear guidelines" for "oversight and accountability" just the day before. "Before any strike is taken," he declared, "there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured -- the highest standard we can set."
Though signature strikes were not mentioned, some assumed language like "near certainty" and "highest standard" meant they were no longer going to be used. That assumption was proven wrong as just days later an administration official told the New York Times that signature strikes will continue in Pakistan, a statement the Times' Andrew Rosenthal wrote "seem[ed] to contradict the entire tenor of Mr. Obama's speech."
Two weeks later, on June 9, a drone struck a vehicle in Yemen, killing not only several supposed militants, but also a boy named Abdulaziz. He was 10 years old. "Near certainty" and those new "clear guidelines" apparently weren't enough for Abdulaziz. The administration refused to comment on the boy's death, or the strike itself. So much for accountability and transparency. And just last week, a strike in Waziristan killed 16 people and wounded five others.
In addition to asking some of those "hard questions" about the war on terror, it's time to start admitting some clearly obvious hard truths. And one of those is that the assumption that drone strikes make us safer -- even when they're on target and used with a threshold of absolute certainty -- just isn't true. So, it's not a choice, as the administration would have us believe, between safety and compassion. "As Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives," said Obama in his speech. "To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties." As if those are our only choices -- killing boys like Abdulaziz or doing nothing.
The president continued: "Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes."
But he says that as if "the terrorists" are some set pool of people, and all we have to do is find them and kill them. Yes, given that terrorists target civilians, how about policies that don't create more terrorists in the first place? After that strike in Datta Khel, what do you suppose happened to the support of any moderate or pro-American or pro-democracy leaders in the community? (I'm speaking of the ones who weren't killed, of course.) Was their standing enhanced? Did the strike help them make their case?
Sure, we killed some people. Some of them were undoubtedly "bad guys" -- but has this made us safer? In the video, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, says it's not about casualty numbers. "The Vietnam body count as a metric was flawed," he says, "and the drone strikes are the same way ... Tell me how we are winning if every time we kill one, we create 10? That's not a metric that tells you if you're winning. What tells you if you're winning is if Muslims decide not to support the radical fringe." David Kilcullen, former senior advisor to General David Petraeus, agrees: "[T]he blowback and the aspect of political destabilization -- those things ultimately do make us less safe."
It seems clear that the White House doesn't want debate on this issue any more than it welcomed debate, as the president claimed, on the NSA's surveillance program after the Snowden revelations. What the administration seems to want is to make speeches in which they claim good intentions, high standards, and a commitment to transparency -- and then declare everything else classified and off-limits.
That's why Greenwald's new video is so valuable. It gives us a glimpse, even if the White House won't, of what's being done in our name. "We are working," Greenwald told me, "to use the video to get Congress to introduce legislation to ban signature strikes." So watch it, and then start the debate the president claims to want. The missiles from the drones might be exploding in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Yemen, but the fallout will impact us here at home for years to come.
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