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There’s No Such Thing as Civilians in the Drone War

Via Glenn Greenwald, this New York Times report on the Obama administration’s drone wars:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

…The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

Even when it is admitted that civilians are killed in drone strikes, it is inevitably described as legitimate “collateral damage.” There is a systematic refusal to call it what it really is, although former general counsel at the CIA John A. Rizzo, now under investigation in Obama’s war on whistleblowers, has referred to these killings as “murder.”

The BBC’s Photo Fib of a Syrian Massacre

A few days have passed since the BBC irresponsibly passed off this 2003 picture of dead Iraqis as depicting dead Syrians in last week’s Houla massacre. The original photographer, who works for Getty Images, said “Someone is using someone else’s picture for propaganda on purpose.” The Telegraph:

Photographer Marco di Lauro said he nearly “fell off his chair” when he saw the image being used, and said he was “astonished” at the failure of the corporation to check their sources.

The picture, which was actually taken on March 27, 2003, shows a young Iraqi child jumping over dozens of white body bags containing skeletons found in a desert south of Baghdad.

It was posted on the BBC news website today under the heading “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows”.

The caption states the photograph was provided by an activist and cannot be independently verified, but says it is “believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial”.

Max Fisher at the Atlantic thinks “the BBC’s error seems like an innocent one.” He thinks it was a hasty mistake arising after the photo made its rounds anonymously throughout the Internet: “We might never know who first entered this photo into the social media currents, which sent it flying through Arabic- and English-language social networks (including my own Twitter account) until it landed on the BBC website’s front page.”

We can’t know for sure, but I don’t think it’s fair to assume the BBC’s innocent naiveté as opposed to its knowing deception. I’m not suggesting a conspiracy theory, but I think there are two pressures on news organizations when it comes to hard-to-cover situations like the one in Syria. First, there is a pressure to get the most sensational story out before anyone else does. And what’s more sensational than a pile of dead bodies? There is also pressure to pose a call to action, which in other words is a pressure to validate what has been the dominant narrative of the Syria conflict. I think it’s entirely possible that the editors at the BBC did not do their due diligence and some even knowingly let the false photo go up, hoping they wouldn’t get caught.

In any case, this is a reminder that much of the journalism on Syria has to be taken with a grain of salt. We know much of the establishment’s information has been attained through opposition activists or expat groups and we also know of a number of instances where they have fibbed the reality on the ground. We also know the opposition has committed serious atrocities, and so have an interest in glossing over those facts in favor of information emphasizing the atrocities of the Assad regime. This doesn’t mean the Assad regime hasn’t committed its own atrocities and peddled its own propaganda. It has.

Confirming events on the ground has become slightly easier since the UN observers arrived. And despite this photo fib, the Houla massacre does in fact appear to have taken place, probably committed by the regime, according to UN observers and witnesses. But this BBC controversy should make clear that the establishment media is not the vaunted authority they parade themselves to be and are just as much in the dark about things as the rest of us.

Cup of Coffee Should Cover It, Right?

Its Memorial Day and for many Americans this means vacation. Not for Antiwar.com of course, because the war doesn’t take a vacation and neither do we. But this sort of “take a trip up north” or “go to a barbecue” holiday comes with the built-in assumption that we reflect on glorious military campaigns of the past. During peacetime this is extremely easy to do, of course, there’s no reason to question this reflection too much, its just an excuse for an extra day off. In the midst of an unending, hugely unpopular war, things change, and couching the three-day weekend in jingoist terms is going to get people thinking about the war, and nobody in power wants that.

They can’t exactly cancel the holiday either, both because the calenders are already printed and because that’s going to get people thinking even more about the war. Instead, there seems to be a concerted effort to make very cynical displays of state “generosity” over the weekend, apparently thinking that this will salve over any doubts people have about the wartime regime. Since the state’s generosity is entirely a function of massive taxes and its also running a huge deficit fighting the war, so it better be real cynical and real cheap.

Here in Michigan, it takes the form of the Michigan Citizen Corps (MCC), whose rhetoric is couched entirely in “homeland security” and “anti-terrorism,” but whose real duties show up on these three-day weekends.

They go to rest stops along the Interstate highways, and give away government-subsidized cups of coffee to people to “honor” the troops. Fearing that this inherently ridiculous little program wasn’t sufficient any longer, the Federal Government even threw a $6,000+ grant at the group to buy some Snow Cone machines for the kids. Because we don’t want their little hearts and minds thinking too much either, especially since this war is going to last so long that they’ll eventually be voters.

On Saturday night, the US military launched an air strike in Paktia Province, killing a family of eight, including six children. One of the first responses I got about the story was from a self-righteous MCC person, who insisted that my reporting on the killings was not only disrespecting the holiday, but was disrespecting his “service” in handing out that subsidized coffee. He accused me of “missing the big picture” on the government by criticizing the deaths of those kids while ignoring the nice coffee-giving things they do.

Eight people are dead. Six children. How many cups of coffee do you need to look the other way? Inquiring minds want to know.

A Decade of War ‘Not Worth the Effort’

As jingoists condemn critiques that the veterans have not been fighting for our freedoms (much the opposite) on this here Memorial Day, consider this passage surprisingly printed on the front page of today’s New York Times:

Broadly, the question is what the United States gained after a decade in two wars.

“Not much,” Col. Gian P. Gentile, the director of West Point’s military history program and the commander of a combat battalion in Baghdad in 2006, said flatly in an interview last week. “Certainly not worth the effort. In my view.”

Questioning State Doctrine on Memorial Day

Apparently yesterday’s MSNBC show Up with Chris Hayes is getting a lot of attention. And by attention I mean vitriol. His crime? questioning the martial civic religion and the morality of mindless soldier worship on Memorial Day. I can’t decide whether or not I’m surprised. Here is the first segment of that “controversial” show.

Last Memorial Day, I wrote this, which covered similar notions. Also see my pieces on The Folly of Soldier Worship and The Ism That Won’t Go Away.

US Iran Policy Intended to Leave Open ‘Avenues for Regime Change’

Joshua Landis, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma, posted on his blog last week a letter from a friend who witnessed an encounter between an Iranian opposition activist and U.S. State Department officials at a recent conference on Iran:

A couple of friends were invited to a conference last week to present the perspective of the Iranian opposition about the current situation in Iran. They told me that during their talk at the conference they lambasted the sanctions policy and told the attendants that sanctions are counterproductive and detrimental to the middle class in Iran and the opposition’s social base. When a State Department representative asked them “What do you expect us to do for Iran?” they said “Lift the sanctions. That would be the best thing you can do for Iran!”

My Iranian friends at the conference explained that one of the US diplomats said that the US priority in Iran is not human rights violations and not public opinion in Iran. Rather, the diplomat insisted that Washington’s main concern was Iran’s nuclear program, its impact on the security of Israel, and avenues for regime-change. He mentioned Pakistan as an example where regime-change is no longer possible because of its nuclear capabilities. The US diplomat added that regime-change causes instability which is dangerous in the case of a country with nuclear capabilities. So time is running out for regime-change in Iran. This triggered a quarrel between some of the Iranians and the speaker to the effect that one of the prominent opposition leaders retorted that the US should have no role in changing the regime and that it should be the choice solely for the Iranian people. He went on to ask that if the US was not concerned with human rights in Iran “why did you invite us here in the first place”! He said that we have been insisting that the human rights should be the central issue, however your strategic concern is the nuclear program.

This account is revealing for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it recounts a State Department official admitting that part of the calculus in heaping harsh economic sanctions on Iran is to prevent the government from attaining a nuclear capability, not because of concerns about proliferation, but because it would hinder U.S. efforts at regime change. This clears up what seems to be a mystery of why the U.S. would impose supposedly punitive sanctions on Iran despite the intelligence consensus that they have no nuclear weapons program and have demonstrated no intention of getting one. If Iran can ever quickly develop a nuclear deterrent through know-how and technological capability, this constrains Washington’s power to overthrow the regime and replace it with an obedient client (not a first in the case of Iran, of course). That is an unacceptable amount of power to afford an adversary. The threat to Israeli security and the notion that Iran would use nuclear weapons for anything other than to deter aggressive adversaries is quite simply a manufactured concern.

Another reason this account is important is it illustrates how economic sanctions have consequences that are both morally reprehensible and that run counter to the neo-conservative approach which aims to sanction the regime and empower some supposedly democratic opposition that can overthrow the regime. As Landis writes, “Anti-Assad activists designed and lobbied for the sanctions imposed on Syria by the West. They wanted to undermine the regime and create an environment of crisis in the country with the aim of toppling the regime.” The problem is that waging economic warfare on a country is harmful to the people and any viable opposition. Sanctions “undercut the opposition almost as much as they do the regime,” Landis writes, and “they destroy the middle class and standard of living” for the bulk of the population. The same happened with Iraq in the genocidal sanctions regime of the 1990s and the same applies to Iran now.