Killing Machine (36 page)

In February 2013 Stanley McChrystal, who had been cashiered for intemperate remarks by his staff but whose usefulness had come to an end anyway when Obama shifted to drones, gave an interview that added a very much needed historical perspective to the American struggles in the Afghan-Pakistan region. “If you go back to the British tactics on the North-West Frontier,” he said in an interview, “the ‘butcher and bolt’ tactics, where they would burn an area and punish the people and say, ‘Don’t do that anymore,’ and simultaneously offer a stipend to the leader [to remain friendly]—that approach worked for a fair amount of time. . . . But it certainly didn’t solve the problems.” Drone strikes were the American counterpart to the old British tactics. “Although to the United States, a drone strike seems to have very little risk and very little pain, at the receiving end, it feels like war. Americans have got to understand that. . . . If you go back in history, I can’t find a
covert fix that solved a problem long term. There were some necessary covert actions, but there’s no ‘easy button’ for some of these problems.”
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In a sense McChrystal agreed with Steve Coil’s argument from four years earlier: covert actions were largely stopgap measures, not long-term strategies. But they have long-term aftereffects. In midsummer 2012 Coll had warned that Obama had used the death of bin Laden not to close the door on Bush-era tactics (as Coll had hoped would happen) but to throw it wide open.

Awlaki was certainly a murderous character; his YouTube videos alone would likely convict him at a jury trial. Yet the case of Awlaki’s killing by drone strike is to the due-process clause what the proposed march of neo-Nazis through a community that included many Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, was to the First Amendment when that case arose, in 1977. It is an instance where the most onerous facts imaginable should lead to the durable affirmation of constitutional principle, as Skokie did. Instead, President Obama and his advisers have opened the door to violent action against American citizens by future Presidents when the facts may be much less compelling.
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The problem with fastening one’s arguments to the Awlaki case, however, was that it left unquestioned much larger issues.

The nomination of John Brennan, some argued, would actually curb the CIA’s role in authorizing widespread drone strikes, given Brennan’s repeated claims that during the Bush administration he opposed waterboarding, and his strong assurances during congressional hearings on his nomination that he would not have anything to do with it.

       
SENATOR CARL LEVIN:
Well, you’ve read opinions as to whether or not waterboarding is torture. And I’m just asking, do you accept those opinions of the attorney general? That’s my question.

       
BRENNAN:
Senator, I’ve read a lot of legal opinions. I read an Office of Legal Counsel opinion from the previous administration
that said waterboarding could be used. So from the standpoint of that, I can’t point to a single legal document on the issue. But as far as I’m concerned, waterboarding is something that never should have been employed, and as far as I’m concerned, never will be if I have anything to do with it.

       
LEVIN: IS
waterboarding banned by the Geneva Conventions?

       
BRENNAN:
I believe the attorney general also has said it’s contrary and in contravention of the Geneva Convention. Again, I’m not a lawyer or a legal scholar to make the determination as to what’s in violation of an international convention.

Brennan’s touchiness about previous OLC opinions suggests, however, that he was engaged in a defensive maneuver to protect the CIA mandate—in its broadest sense, which included signature strikes—as the key to maintaining its post–9/11 prominence as the president’s private army. Even after his appearance before the Senate committee, the White House engaged in an effort to ensure that his nomination succeeded (without revealing the contents of the secret OLC memos) by buying Republican votes with promises that the legislators would receive the e-mails that provided the controversial talking points used by the intelligence agencies after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the death of the American ambassador there, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans—an issue that Republicans had tried to use against Obama in the failed effort to elect Mitt Romney. “Such a concession would probably win at least some Republican votes for Mr. Brennan,” wrote two reporters who learned of the maneuver from congressional staff members.
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That President Obama would continue to hold out on the OLC memos, and even release data that seemed on the surface to be confirming that a less than fully honest response had been given to charges about how the Benghazi event was manipulated to keep the real story quiet during the election campaign, does not encourage confidence in the president’s 2013 pledge in the State of the Union speech that “in the months ahead, I will continue to engage with Congress to ensure not only that our targeting,
detention and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world.”
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Thirty days after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, former president Harry S. Truman wrote an op-ed piece for the
Washington Post
that began, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA.” Truman had set up the agency as an arm of the president, he said, because the chief executive needed to have at hand the most accurate and up-to-date information possible from all corners of the world; too many times intelligence reports from various places had resulted in conflicting conclusions and were of little use in enabling the president to reach right decisions. But “for some time,” Truman wrote, “I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.”

There were searching questions that needed to be answered.

I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as an intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere. We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
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The issue Truman raised had to do with the growth of an agency that had begun to act as a “policy-making” organization. In 2013, that issue remained unaddressed.

The sudden advent of full-scale drone warfare has been a shocking development. In speaking of the need for a “rule book,” Obama’s
aides commented that the United States is in a position not unlike that it encountered at the dawn of the atomic age, when there was a pressing need for new rules of warfare. Connected to the drone phenomenon has been the spread of transnational movements that interact with one another constantly, pushing hard against traditional ideas of national sovereignty until those concepts are near collapse. On one side, of course, there are what we call (with some lack of precision) “terrorist” organizations, some acting out belief systems as murderous commands, others simply frustrated with the way the world doesn’t work for them. At the same time, from another direction arises a growing transnational force that conservatives (and others) have called “lawfare,” which seeks to establish global standards for human rights, building upon such things as the Geneva Conventions but going well beyond them, as in nascent United Nations efforts to play a leading part in setting rules for drone warfare.

American policy makers feel challenged by both sets of pressures, and so far they have been unable to reconcile national interests with a strategy that will satisfy demands for changes in the world order. Drones are an exciting prospect for holding down American casualties and killing fewer civilians than in old-style wars. But the “lesser evil” argument really doesn’t work when in the long run the strikes create new enemies and force the construction of new kill lists. Another argument, that there isn’t anything one can do about the march of technology, is at base a teleological assertion, for there is no inevitability that drone warfare must increase. Truman dropped the first atomic bombs in Japan, and then considered but rejected the use of atomic bombs in Korea; Eisenhower considered and rejected their use in Indochina. Those appear to be the last times really serious consideration was given to the use of nuclear weapons—except as intimidating tests on remote Pacific islands, tests that eventually had to be stopped because they were polluting the earth’s atmosphere. What seems clear from the atomic experience is that military actions have both material and moral repercussions—and that they engender reactions from other actors on the world stage.

Not only do drones threaten the nation’s future by creating and sustaining an endless, seemingly mystical war against terrorism, but defending drones requires the abandonment of the Constitution. And that will mean the perpetrators of 9/11 have won.
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AFTERWORD

THE NEW NORMAL?

When technology at the service of expediency dictates our policies, we are no longer the nation we were created to be and that we continue to tell ourselves we are, a constitutional democracy
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Gary Hart, “A Plague of Drones,” March 9, 2013

It was an astounding moment. For thirteen hours Kentucky senator Rand Paul and one or two others filibustered the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director, demanding the White House provide a definitive statement ruling out drone strikes against American citizens on American soil. “I will speak until I can no longer speak,” he said. “I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”
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Rand is a Tea Party favorite and the son of Ron Paul, the former House member who made a run for the 2012 Republican Party nomination espousing “unorthodox” foreign policy views. Unlike his father, Rand Paul does not want to be seen as a Libertarian absolutist or isolationist. But his demand for absolute clarity on the administration’s drone policy drew attention to the whole question of the “rules”—or lack thereof—about drone warfare. Indeed, it is not too much to say that this speech and his follow-ups have suddenly made him a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Clearly he has struck a chord that continues to vibrate, pushing him higher in the Republican pecking order.

“In March, his 13-hour filibuster to protest the Obama administration’s drone warfare tactics electrified the blogosphere on both the left and right,” Karen Tumulty reported in the
Washington Post
,
“with Twitter registering 450,000 tweets using the hashtag #standwithrand.”
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Then, in the wake of the filibuster came a bigger news story that was directly related to the drone questions raised by Rand Paul. A former contract worker for the National Security Administration (NSA), Edward Snowden, made headlines by revealing the existence of a top secret government program, PRISM, that scooped up information about telephone calls, e-mails, Internet usage, etc., of American citizens in an effort to thwart new terrorist attacks. The ensuing debate saw the so-called government-surveillance scandals taking a real toll on Obama’s popularity, according to public opinion polls. Support for the president among younger voters, for example, plummeted by 17 percent. An article in the
Daily Beast
noted, “These results might give Chris Christie and Rand Paul hope about their 2016 prospects presenting themselves as the balance to eight years of Obama.”
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Before the surveillance question seized hold of the nation’s imagination, Obama believed he had regained the initiative in the debate over drones. In his 2013 State of the Union message, he had promised to be more transparent about his counterterrorism policy, saying, “I recognize that in our democracy, no one should just take my word for it that we’re doing things the right way.” A sharp-eyed reader of the State of the Union speech would note that the president never actually used the word
drones
in the text. So what did engaging Congress actually mean? Democratic regulars, of course, wanted nothing to do with the views of the Pauls, father or son. A few Republicans joined in to relieve Paul, including Tea Party types. Their opposition was put down to simple politics—anything to embarrass President Obama on any issue.

There was a lone Democrat, Ron Wyden, who got up to speak—but only after making it clear that he was not opposed to all drone warfare, just that there had not been a proper public debate about it. The Oregon senator was careful not to make too many ripples and said he would vote for John Brennan’s nomination, but also said he believed his colleague from Kentucky had raised some important points. “The executive branch should not be allowed to
conduct such a serious and far-reaching program by themselves without any scrutiny,” said Wyden, “because that’s not how American democracy works. That’s not what our system is about.”
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