At this point, however, the drones were simply machines for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. They were just eyes, not weapons. The metamorphosis came about almost by chance, between Kosovo and Afghanistan, as the new millennium began. As early as 1995, General Atomics had invented a new remote-controlled spy plane prototype, the Predator. Despite its disquieting name, the beast was not yet equipped with claws or teeth. In Kosovo, where it was deployed in 1999, the drone limited itself to filming targets and illuminating them by means of lasers, allowing the F-16 planes to strike.
But it would take a "'different kind of war' to make the Predator into a predator." No more than a few months before September 11, 2001, officers who had seen the Predator at work in Kosovo had the idea of experimentally equipping it with an antitank missile. Writes Bill Yenne in his history of the drone, "On February 16, 2001, during tests at Nellis Air Force Base, a Predator successfully fired a Hellfire AGM114C into a target. The notion of turning the Predator into a predator had been realized. No one could imagine that, before the year was out, the Predator would be preying upon live targets in Afghanistan."
Barely two months after the outbreak of hostilities in Afghanistan, George Bush was in a position to declare: "The conflict in Afghanistan has taught us more about the future of our military than a decade of blue ribbon panels and think-tank symposiums. The Predator is a good example" Now it is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles."
The Principles of Manhunting
"Individual will research and incorporate current manhunting experiences and procedures in order to provide an educational forum for manhunting issues" Must possess a SECRET level clearance and be able to obtain a TOP SECRET/SCI security clearance."
-- Job description for a special operations manhunting program analyst in an advertisement published by the military contractor SAI in 2006
In 2004, John Lockwood set up a website called Live-Shot.com. The idea was at once simple and innovative. By subscribing online for a few dollars, the Internet surfer could become a "virtual hunter." Thanks to a camera fixed to a mobile forearm, itself connected to a remote control device, one could, without stirring from home, shoot live animals let loose for the occasion on a ranch in Texas.
When it made the news, there was a rush to condemn it. The editor-in-chief of the magazine Outdoor Life, acknowledging the profound "ethical problems" that such a venture presented, set out a fine definition of what hunting meant for him: "To me, hunting isn't just about pulling the trigger on an animal. It's about the total experience" Hunting is about being out there, not about pulling the trigger with the click of a mouse."
A Wisconsin lawmaker took up the theme, giving the definition a strangely environmentalist twist: "To me, hunting is being out in nature and becoming one with nature." Even the extremely conservative National Rifle Association expressed its opposition, joining with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in an unusual alliance: "We believe that hunting should be outdoors and that sitting in front of a computer three states away doesn't qualify as 'hunting.'" A Houston police officer was even more adamant, saying, "It's not hunting. It's killing" Someone gets a computer and pushes a button and something dies for no reason."
Lockwood protested, claiming that his foremost purpose had been to allow handicapped people who were passionate about hunting to indulge in their favorite pastime and mentioning an American soldier in Iraq who had thanked him for offering such a fine opportunity, saying that he had no idea when he might be able to go hunting again. But it was all in vain. Hunting online was forbidden. Lockwood, disappointed, tried to salvage his scheme by suggesting that his clients should fire at cardboard targets representing Osama bin Laden. However, his intended Internet audience shifted to other, no doubt more exciting, online pleasures, and the little venture that had seemed so promising collapsed.
The triggers of moral indignation are quite mysterious sometimes. While the virtual hunting of animals was almost universally condemned as scandalous, the remote-controlled hunting of human beings was at the same moment taking off without any of those same people making any objections.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, George W. Bush had predicted that the United States would embark upon a new kind of warfare, "a war that requires us to be on an international manhunt." Something that initially sounded like nothing more than a catchy Texas cowboy slogan has since been converted into state doctrine, complete with experts, plans, and weapons. A single decade has seen the establishment of an unconventional form of state violence that combines the disparate characteristics of warfare and policing without really corresponding to either, finding conceptual and practical unity in the notion of a militarized manhunt.
Reaping the (Human) Prey
In 2001, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had become convinced that "the techniques used by the Israelis against the Palestinians could quite simply be deployed on a larger scale." What he had in mind was Israel's programs of "targeted assassinations," the existence of which had recently been recognized by the Israeli leadership. As Eyal Weizman explains, the occupied territories had become "the world's largest laboratory for airborne thanatotactics," so it was not surprising that they would eventually be exported.
But one problem remained. "How do we organize the Department of Defense for manhunts?" Rumsfeld asked. "We are obviously not well organized at the present time." In the early 2000s, the U.S. military apparatus was not yet ready to roll out on a worldwide scale the sort of missions that normally are assigned to the police within a domestic framework: namely, the identification, tracking, location, and capture (but in actual fact the physical elimination) of suspect individuals.
Within the United States, not all the high-ranking officers who were informed of these plans greeted them with enthusiasm. At the time, journalist Seymour Hersh noted that many feared that the proposed type of operation -- what one advisor to the Pentagon called "preemptive manhunting" -- had the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program, the sinister secret program of murder and torture that had once been unleashed in Vietnam.
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