The Killing Fields I

Trey Smith

As I am apt to do from time to time, the next few posts are derived from one specific article. This time around the featured article comes from the excellent website, Global Research.

Much is being written both for and against America’s use of drones to assassinate those whom Americans consider to be anti-American combatants. Although there is no doubt on which side the moral arguments lie, what’s being written strikes me as nugatory. Pious platitudes, legalistic niceties, and sophistical rationalizations appear to be written by the guilty to convince themselves that they are not the people evil to the marrow that they are, and the dying and the dead couldn’t care less. To them, being killed by a bullet or a bomb fired from an AK-47 or a drone makes no difference whatsoever. Dead is dead. Death cannot be sanitized by pronouncements.

The so called advantages of using drones to kill are undeniable; so are the disadvantages. Arguing about these is futile. The fundamental question is not about the advantages or disadvantages of the means, it is about the rightness or wrongness of the end. In the end, what good does killing do?

Although no one seems to have noted it, I find it interesting that so many of Al-Qaeda’s “senior commanders” were killed by drones while Osama bin Laden, once located and identified, was not. Why? Was it because killing by drone is too unreliable to be trusted for the task? In fact, killing from the air is always unreliable. During World War II, American pilots often mistakenly attacked American instead of German positions. In Paths of death and glory, Charles Whiting quoted people as having said, “American pilots are idiots.

This has happened so often that maybe the US should rethink the whole ‘flying’ thing. Obviously they can’t do it worth a damn,” and the American Ninth Air Force, which flew out of England, was nicknamed the American Luftwaffe because it regularly mistakenly bombed American troops in Normandy. Just imagine the propaganda catastrophe that would have resulted if a drone had been used and missed or killed bin Laden’s wives and children but not him. The entire rationale for the drone program would have been shattered So as good as drones are, there were not good enough for Osama bin Laden.
~ from Retributive Warfare: Mistaking Killing and Revenge for Justice by John Kozy ~

What an insightful point! It's one I certainly never thought of. And it does beg the question: If the use of drones is so precise and effective -- as we continuously are told -- why wasn't a drone used to take out Osama bin Laden?

Putting a commando team into bin Laden's compound exposed those soldiers to the possibility of injury and death. The whole rationale behind the use of drones is to minimize or completely remove one's exposure to direct retaliation. Since it seems patently obvious that the mission was not to apprehend bin Laden but to kill him, couldn't a drone have been dispatched to the deed instead of placing the Seal team in harm's way?

The very fact that the military apparatus and the President thought it was of the utmost importance to place boots on the ground to get the job done should inform us of the lack of precision and efficacy of drone warfare. They needed to be sure they got the right man and the only way they could be certain is to place some eyeballs directly on the scene.

When one compares the murder of bin Laden with that of other suspected Al-Qaeda members, it should tell us that, despite our government's assurances that the individuals killed were those intended, this may not be the case at all! With no eyeballs on the scene to make direct identification, we can only guess who we rubbed out.