War is still hell, even with really cool technology

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“The Simpson incident had shown me that a dog was kept in the stables, and yet, though someone had been in and had fetched out a horse, he had not barked enough to arouse the two lads in the loft. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”
From “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” by Arthur Conan Doyle

Like this curious incident of the dog that did nothing,  the absence of outrage at governement-sponsored assassinations when those assassinations are done remotely with high-tech unmanned drone aircraft speaks volumes about our confused relationship with technology.

On August 5th, officials at the C.I.A., in Langley, VA, watched a live video feed relaying closeup footage of one of the most wanted terrorists in Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud, on the rooftop of his father-in-law’s house. The video was captured by the infrared camera of a Predator drone—a remotely controlled, unmanned plane that had been hovering, undetected, two miles or so above the house. The C.I.A. remotely launched two Hellfire missiles from the Predator, and Mehsud and eleven others died. There was no controversy when, a few days after the missile strike, CNN reported that President Barack Obama had authorized it. However, there was widespread anger after the Wall Street Journal revealed, at about the same time, that during the Bush Administration the C.I.A. had considered setting up hit squads to capture or kill Al Qaeda operatives around the world. Hina Shamsi, a human-rights lawyer at the New York University School of Law, was struck by the inconsistency of the public’s responses. She said of the Predator program, “These are targeted international killings by the state.”

via The risks of the C.I.A.’s Predator drones : The New Yorker.

Jane Mayer, whose terrific article in October 26th issue of The New Yorker is a must read, has been on Fresh Air with Terry Gross and The Rachel Maddow show discussing the politics, ethics, and controversies of relying on drone aircraft for fighting the bad guys, and bad guys they are, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In an appearance Thursday on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Mayer explained that as amazing as the remote control technology behind the drones may be, “It is based always on human intelligence telling you which target to go after.”

“They’ve gotten some tremendous success in killing al Qaeda leaders,” Mayer noted, “but at the same time, since 2006, they’ve killed between 750 and 1000 people. The number of al Qaeda is a small fraction of all the people that they’ve killed. There’s a lot of so-called collateral damage.”

Because of this, Mayer suggests, “It’s a program that people fear is going to have unintended consequences. … It’s going to become a propaganda tool for the Taliban and it’s going to create retaliation against the United States and maybe against Pakistan’s government, which we’re trying to prop up.”

via CIA Predator drones could aid Taliban, reporter says | Raw Story.

I’ll leave the politics and policy to those expert in those areas. What I want to take up is the psychology of our response. Consider the following scenario: A US soldier, maybe a neighbor, your freshman roommate or your kid’s college roommate, walks into a frontier town in Pakistan and calmly slits the throats of a Taliban leader and his entire family, including children, sometimes as young as 15 months. How would you feel?  Pretty horrified I would imagine.

But yet, when the same killing is done by drone aircraft controlled remotely from CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia, there is barely a ping on our ethical radar. Why?

I’m sure part of it is the memory of 9/11 and the fact that these really are bad guys. But I also think we remain enthralled by technology and willingly give over large chunks of our humanity in exchange for really cool technology. It’s OK that we lose the moral high-ground around the world–becoming no better than terrorists ourselves in the eyes of those collaterally-damaged while we fight our enemies–if we can also be the techno-kings of the world.

Others are so perplexed by how these amazing machines work that they feel anyone smart enough to put those drones in the air must know what they are doing. But technological prowess does not translate into either political or ethical wisdom.

As Mayer points out in her article, this policy is not the only option and may be doing more harm than good. As a result, we now have the blood of children on our hands. The fact that the blood was spilled by really cool 21st-century technology should not make us think the blood is any less warm, red, and human.