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<h1>Lie: Drones Are Not A Better Way Of War</h1>
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<span class="cat-date-line3"> <a
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<span class="cat-date-line4">By Brian Terrell, <a
href="http://vcnv.org/force-protection-alpha-in-effect"
target="_blank">www.vcnv.org</a><br>
June 1st, 2014</span><br>
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<p>Above photo: A victim of a drone attack in Pakistan. Daniel
Berehulak/Getty</p>
<h2>Force Protection Alpha in Effect.</h2>
<p style="color: #222222;">On April 15, 2014, when the story broke
on the world that the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert
program of assassination by remotely controlled drones is not
distinct from the drone program of the U.S. Air Force as we had
been told, I was on the “Sacred Peace Walk,” an event sponsored
each spring by the Nevada Desert Experience, a 70 mile trek from
Las Vegas to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. Creech Air Force Base
is along the way and we had already made plans for a protest
there the next morning. While the CIA’s drone program is
shrouded in secrecy, the Air Force supposedly has been using
drones strictly as a weapon for waging war against combatants in
recognized areas of conflict such as Afghanistan and formerly in
Iraq, under a chain of command that is accountable to elected
officials. Some who condemn the CIA’s assassinations by drones
as illegal give a pass to or even laud the Air Force use of
drones as a more restrained way to fight war.</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">This distinction has now been exposed
as a lie. In a new documentary film released in Europe, “Drone,”
former Air Force drone operators, veterans of a super-secret
Squadron 17 at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, reveal that
“it’s always been the Air Force that flies” the CIA’s missions,
“the CIA might be the customer, but the Air Force has always
flown it.”</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">The fact that airmen at Creech are
carrying out assassination missions and extrajudicial executions
far from declared zones of conflict on orders from unknown and
unnamable bureaucrats did not come as a surprise. Neither was
the news a “game changer” in regard to the actions we had
planned, although we quickly revised the indictment listing the
war crimes committed at Creech that some of us would attempt to
deliver to the base commander.</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">My arrest at Creech along with eight
others on April 16 was a “return to the scene of the crime” (the
Air Force’s crime, not mine) for me, as I was among the “Creech
14” in April 2009, the first nonviolent direct action against
drones in the U.S. Creech was then one of only a few sites from
which drones were controlled by the U.S. and by the United
Kingdom, which has a wing of the Royal Air Force stationed there
to fly their own drones. Since then the use of armed drones has
been proliferating around the world and so has the number of
drone operation bases in communities around the U.S. My work
with Voices for Creative Nonviolence has brought me to the
scenes of the crime in Afghanistan, the CIA headquarters at
Langley, Virginia and at the gates of drone bases in New York,
Iowa, Missouri and in England as well.</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">The latest revelation is but the
exposure of one more lie, one more layer of criminality and
venality of this corrupt and dangerous program. Over the years
since April 2009, the promises of a new era of better war
through drone technology have been steadily unravelling, each of
them proving false. It is increasingly clear that rather than
limiting the scope of war, drones are expanding and
proliferating it, killing more civilians both on battlefields
and far from them, endangering our soldiers and the safety of
our communities. Instead of keeping the horrors of war at a safe
distance, drones bring the war home in unprecedented ways.</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">President Obama, in an address before
the National Defense University May 23, 2013, described this new
technology as more precise and by implication more humane than
other weaponry: “By narrowly targeting our action against those
who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are
choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss
of innocent life.” There is an understandable appeal to the idea
of a weapon that can discriminate between the good and the bad
people and limit regrettable “collateral damage.” It is
understandable too, that a nation weary of sending its sons and
daughters to fight on battlefields far away, risking injury,
death or the debilitating effects of post-traumatic stress,
might look to embrace a new method of war whereby the warriors
fights battles from safe distances. Thousands of miles beyond
the reach of the enemy, drone combatants often do not even have
to leave their hometowns and are able to return to homes and
families at the end of a shift.</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">In his National Defense University
speech, the president contended that “conventional airpower and
missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause
more civilian casualties and local outrage.” A few weeks later a
study published by the same National Defense University refuted
his claim. Drone strikes in Afghanistan, the study found, were
“an order of magnitude more likely to result in civilian
casualties per engagement.” Despite the president’s assurances
to the contrary, drone strikes cause immense “local outrage” in
the countries where they happen, turning America’s allies into
enemies. “What scares me about drone strikes is how they are
perceived around the world,” said former commander of US and
NATO forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal. “The
resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes … is much
greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on
a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen
the effects of one.”</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">Former defense secretary Robert M.
Gates also warns of the seductive power and precision of armed
drones that leads many to perceive war as a “bloodless, painless
and odorless” affair. “Remarkable advances in precision
munitions, sensors, information and satellite technology and
more can make us overly enamored with the ability of technology
to transform the traditional laws and limits of war. A button is
pushed in Nevada and seconds later a pickup truck explodes in
Kandahar.” Defense experts and policy makers, Gates warns, have
come to view drone warfare as a “kind of video game or action
movie. . . . In reality, war is inevitably tragic, inefficient
and uncertain.” General Mike Hostage, chief of the US Air Combat
Command, claims that while weaponized drones are useful in
assassinations of terror suspects, they are impractical in
combat. “Predators and Reapers are useless in a contested
environment,” Hostage said.</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">Some enlisted personnel are also
questioning the use of drones. Heather Linebaugh, a drone
operator for the US Air Force for three years says: “Whenever I
read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial
Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I
could ask them a few questions. I’d start with: ‘How many women
and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?’
And: ‘How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to
make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from
severed legs?’ Or even more pointedly: ‘How many soldiers have
you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our
ever-so-accurate UAVs were unable to detect an IED [improvised
explosive device] that awaited their convoy?’”</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">Distance from the battlefield does not
isolate soldiers from post-traumatic stress or the moral injury
of war. Heather Linebaugh speaks of two friends and colleagues
who committed suicide and another former drone operator, Brandon
Bryant, said that his work had made him into a “heartless
sociopath.” While drone pilots are at a greater distance from
their victims than other soldiers, he says, the video feed they
watch brings them closer: “Artillery doesn’t see the results of
their actions. It’s really more intimate for us, because we see
everything.”</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">The Air Force is relegating much of its
drone operations to Air National Guard units in various states,
creating virtual war zones in local communities. “In an F-16,
your whole mission was to train to go to war,” said a pilot of
an Ohio Air Guard wing that made a conversion from fighters to
drones. “In this mission, we go to war every day.” Foreign
postings of state National Guard units are usually made public,
but where in the world these citizen soldiers will be fighting
from now on will be shrouded in secrecy, hidden even from their
families. Reason and the rules of war both suggest that
assassinations and acts of war on sovereign nations carried on
by local National Guard units will make their communities into
legitimate targets of war.</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">Drone warfare is based on the lie that
war can be made more exact, limited and humane through
technology. Our civilian and military authorities, proliferating
drone attacks around the globe from more and more American
bases, are acting recklessly and in defiance of domestic and
international law. They are acting without regard for the safety
and well-being of our troops, of American civilians or of people
in faraway places who otherwise would mean us no harm. Rather
than limiting war, being an answer, drones perpetuate and
multiply the horrors of war and bring them home into our
communities.</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">As our band of walkers approached
Creech Air Force Base on the morning of April 16, we were
greeted by a large sign at the gate that read “Force Protection
Alpha in Effect,” announcing that the base was in its highest
security alert. We were also met by an impressive contingent of
military police and sheriff’s officers, heavily armed and some
on horseback, which easily exceeded in number our little band
that left Las Vegas on foot four days earlier. These public
servants were clearly responding to a perceived threat to public
safety and so were we. Our purposes were disjointed, though, in
that we were at Creech in response to a clear and present danger
presented by the murderous crimes of Squadron 17 somewhere in
the depth of this desert outpost. The official and ostensible
law enforcement squad, on the other hand, was there in response
to the threat that a few unarmed citizens might step across an
arbitrary and ever shifting line on the pavement.</p>
<div style="width: 446px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img
class="image preview" title="Brian at Creech AFB: Photo
credit: John Amidon"
src="cid:part15.06040108.06060206@comcast.net" alt="Brian at
Creech AFB: Photo credit: John Amidon" height="397"
width="436">
<p class="wp-caption-text">Brian at Creech AFB: Photo credit:
John Amidon</p>
</div>
<p style="color: #222222;">I write this on my way to Kansas City,
where, this weekend, good and faithful friends will go to nearby
Whiteman Air Force Base to confront the predator drones based
there. A few days later, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and
friends will start walking from Boeing corporate headquarters in
Chicago (a major drone contractor) 160 miles to Battle Creek,
Michigan, where a National Guard unit is poised to begin
operating predator drones over far away skies. “Force Protection
Alpha” is truly “in Effect” and people in Yemen, Pakistan, and
Afghanistan as well as communities in the U.S. and Europe are
responding to the emergency.</p>
<p style="color: #222222;">Brian Terrell is a Co-coordinator of
Voices for Creative Nonviolence and lives on a Catholic Worker
farm in Maloy, Iowa_</p>
</div>
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