Food Stamps, Meet the Minimum Wage

The Drone Controversy, Viewed From All Sides

As the confirmation hearings by the Senate of John Brennan to be named CIA director drew near, the heat intensified over the program of death by drone enough to cause the Obama White House to finally relent, pledging to release to lawmakers the document that it had even gone to court to keep secret.

An opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, the document gives the President legal cover for killing, without due process of trial, an American citizen in September of 2011 in Yemen and of his 17-year-old son two weeks later. The practice of conjuring after-the-fact legal justifications for deeds already done brings to mind the opinions issued by that same office during the Bush administration that blessed “enhanced interrogation techniques”, otherwise known as torture.

kill list criteria

Just days before the hearing, NBC News had obtained and released a copy of a white paper that supposedly summarized the contents of the longer opinion. That finally undercut the White House’s long campaign to keep secret its arguments why a program of targeted killing is constitutionally defensible, but, even with the white paper out in the open, the full opinion is still classified and may be read only by intelligence committee members. That should make clear that the rights claimed for the President are far more incendiary than in the summary.

The white paper sets three requirements for what it deems lawful “lethal force in a foreign country” against “a senior operational leader of al-Qa’ida [government spelling] or an associated force”. That license to kill specifically includes “an operation against a U.S. citizen”. The target must (1) “pose an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, (2) capture is infeasible…and (3) the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles”.

The program immediately runs aground with the word “imminent” — is the government hoping we will believe there were hundreds of plots afoot when it eliminated the hundreds so far killed? — so the memo is at pains to expand imminent’s meaning beyond recognition. In a speech last March, Attorney General Eric Holder said imminence does not require knowledge of a specific attack on U.S. persons or interests. If the U.S. believes that the target has in the past been involved in violent activities and has not renounced such activities, that has come to mean “imminent” and justifies an attack.

Similarly, as apparently capture is almost never attempted, the question of what are the criteria that determine infeasibility arises? This is a reversal of the Bush-era practice, where drones — not then so fully developed — were used less and capture used more. But now, avoiding risk to American personnel seems universally to decide the matter.

Those who press for capture — or who ask why don’t we first offer surrender — seem clueless about the harrowing prospect of dropping special operations troops into remote and forbidding patches of Pakistan or Yemen and then extracting them safely after a mission, and then there’s the time lapse between spotting a target by drone and getting troops to the scene, armed and fully equipped with a plan of action.

the decider
The third criterion, following the “law of war”, brings up a myriad of questions, the first being whether the U.S. has invented its own. In a June 2011 report to Congress, the Obama administration mined semantic loopholes to skirt the War Powers Resolution of 1973, saying that congressional approval is not required because drone attacks do not involve “sustained fighting”, “active exchanges of fire” or a “serious threat” of American casualties. The White House further argues that Congress’ 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) and a nation’s right to protect itself under international law is justification enough to target individuals for assassination who are affiliated with Al Qaeda or “associated forces”.

But are there no limits and no rules, others ask? Isn’t this an argument that self-defense permits the President to decide to overfly any country and put its people to death — and based on secret information that the military and the CIA do not allow even congressional oversight committees to see? What is the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc) allowed to do in the 70 countries in which it now operates.

What about in the U.S.? There are reports that drones from the local anti-terrorism center in California have been brought into the search for former police officer and Naval lieutenant Christopher Dorner. He certainly meets the test for “terrorist” but will we assassinate without attempt to capture for trial?

Is the drone war the proper business of the CIA? Shouldn’t they limit their activities to the collection of intelligence. When did they become permanently licensed to kill?

Brennan insistent

As for Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen and Yemen imam who urged jihad against the U.S., Brennan was insistent in his confirmation hearing that his killing was warranted. Brennan said al-Awlaki had been linked to three attacks intended or carried out in the U.S.: an attempt to bring down an airliner bound for Detroit, another targeting cargo planes in 2010, and notably the Ft. Hood shooting in which 13 died. “He was intimately involved in activities to kill innocent men, women and children, mostly Americans,” Brennan said.

Americans are generally untroubled by the elimination of al-Awlaki. The debate centers on whether the President or the government has the right to to take an American citizen’s life, in secret, with no oversight, without public presentation of evidence, without due process of trial.

collateral civilians

The rising public concern is how many civilians the drone war is killing. The law of war requires the assumption that one is a civilian unless proved otherwise, but the drone program has made that notion rather quaint.

In June 2011, Brennan made the bizarre claim that there had been zero civilian deaths the year before “because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop”. To the contrary, the U.K.-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been tallying drone strikes since 2004 — to the degree it is able, given secrecy — and reports 2,600 to 3,400 killed in Pakistan to date, 473 to 893 of them civilians and 176 children. The New America Foundation estimates between 261 and 305 civilians have been killed in Pakistan. Deaths in Yemen are less — 370 to 1,100 killed, 70 to 180 civilians — but the number of strikes is on the rise. The administration claims the numbers are much lower.

It became apparent that Brennan’s zero count owed to the administration considering all military age males in a strike zone as assumed combatants, not civilians. This is not as far-fetched as it seems. An administration official gave ProPublica this example: “If a group of fighting age males are in a home where we know they are constructing explosives or plotting an attack, it’s assumed that all of them are in on that effort.”

The ratio of civilian deaths has dropped, according to the public watchdog groups who try to keep score (the Long War Journal covers Pakistan and Yemen; the New America Foundation covers Pakistan; the London Bureau of Investigative Journalism covers Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan and Afghanistan).

justifiable homicide

The argument that drone warfare is justifiable is bolstered by having to deal with an enemy that is not state-sponsored, wears no uniform, lives among and blends into their populations, effectively using them as human shields. That makes civilian deaths unavoidable. If that is the form of warfare they choose, so is the United States free to choose its own asymmetric method against a foe that actively plots to kill Americans.

The American public agrees. Killing the enemy with unmanned aircraft saves the lives of American pilots and soldiers. Over eight in ten approve of drones in a February 2012 Washington Post-ABC poll. Two-thirds even approved of targeting Americans who are suspected of being terrorists. Merely “suspected”, note.

But if the U.S. claims to do the utmost to spare the innocent, how can a convincing argument be made that “signature strikes” aren’t killing civilians? This practice began under Bush and has been used more extensively under Obama. It targets for killing unidentified individuals or groups who simply show a “signature of behavior” that is congruent with terrorist or militant group behavior. Make the mistake of looking suspicious and with no further proof, a drone will incinerate you. The CIA is scornful of an administration that thinks “three guys doing jumping jacks” must be a terrorist training camp.

How is it known that militants targeted by the U.S. are actually hatching plots against this country? There is concern that we are making the same mistake as we did by sweeping up people for internment in Guantánamo, a large percentage of whom were innocents, or family vendetta foes, fingered by Afghans seeking bounty payments offered by the U.S. There are other accusations that the U.S. may to some degree be operating “a counterinsurgency air force”, eliminating militants as a favor to the governments of allied countries.

recruiting for the enemy

In Pakistan and Yemen, drones deeply anger those on the ground. Their constant presence above, the anxiety and paranoia induced by not knowing when they might be shredded by a strike, has inculcated a universal hatred of America. A report from Stanford and NYU documented “anxiety and psychological trauma” among Pakistani villagers.

Yet Brennan said last August that there is “little evidence that these actions are generating widespread anti-American sentiment or recruits”. But neither is there evidence that the U.S., circling endlessly in the sky in drones piloted from bunkers as far away as New Mexico, goes looking for such evidence. Brennan said in a speech last year, “Yemeni citizens who have been freed from the hellish grip of AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] are more eager, not less, to work with the Yemeni government”. But he is hearing this from his contacts in the Yemeni government, eager for U.S. help, not from villagers themselves.

General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of the military in Afghanistan, disagrees, saying, “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.” He and others, such as
Michael Hayden, the former C.I.A. director, are troubled that in Pakistan and Yemen we are expanding our attacks unnecessarily, killing junior-grade militants who are well removed from being a direct threat to the United States and thereby fueling hatred all the more. As the New York Times reminds us,

“even members of Al Qaeda invariably belong to a tribe, and when they are killed in drone strikes, their relatives — whatever their feelings about Al Qaeda — often swear to exact revenge on America”.

Medea Benjamin, a firebrand often dragged from hearings such as the Senate’s review of Brennan, puts it this way: “Three out of four Pakistanis now see the U.S. as their enemy — that’s about 133 million people, which certainly can’t be good for U.S. security”.

Al Qaeda has spread from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia, and now Libya and Mali. Does the drone program recruit more terrorists than it kills? Are we simply growing an endless war?

Obama’s Hidden War: Peeling Back the Layers of Secrecy

As the use of drones increased in the Waziristan tribal areas of Pakistan, inaccessible to U.S. ground forces, a New York Times exposé in May of 2011 revealed that the White House itself was calling the shots from a “kill list” maintained by Obama’s counter-terror advisor, John Brennan. He who has now been nominated to head the CIA.

The drone war, since ramped up in Yemen and elsewhere, has still not even been acknowledged to exist by the White House. The Obama administration has decided that it is none of the public’s business. The White House has steadily denied Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain copies of the 2010 opinion the Office of Legal Counsel’s served up to make the assassination by this administration of even Americans legal (see related story). What irony, considering that on taking office, this president, over the protests of the CIA, found it only proper and transparent to release the similar and linguistically tortured Justice Department legal opinions that absolved the Bush administration of its physical torture practices.

The American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times sued, which led to an unusual ruling from federal judge Colleen McMahon of the New York Southern District. She sided with the government but not without giving the Obama administration a tongue-lashing:

“I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret”.

It is not just this legal memo that the government keeps hidden. In 2011, Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) sought an amendment to the USA Patriot Act requiring the U.S. government “to end the practice of secretly
interpreting law” and warned, “I believe many members of Congress who have voted on this issue would be stunned to know how the Patriot Act is being interpreted and applied”, but Congress is filled with the unknowing who have robotically renewed the Orwellian-titled “Patriot Act” knowing nothing of its confiscation of civil liberties.

how the drones take flight

With the public not privy to the secret program, how it operates can only be pieced together.

The Washington Post tells us that candidates for elimination are regularly reviewed at interagency meetings held at the National Counterterrorism Center. Recommendations are passed to a panel of National Security Council officials. Their final selections are sent to John Brennan at the White House. The “kill list” has been replaced by a “disposition matrix”, which sorts out how a target can be disposed of depending on where and when the opportunity presents. The Atlantic even diagrammed the process — although it can only be conjecture. Their article and the Times story had found that there are two overlapping kill lists, one in the hands of the Pentagon, the other maintained by CIA. It is the military version that is subject to interagency review and White House sign off, said the Post. Military strikes are carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), which comprises all special black ops forces such as the Navy’s SEALs, and is active in 70 countries. But an investigative reporter cited by Wired magazine contradicts that, saying that JSoc is accountable to no one, collects its own intelligence, acts on it without hesitation and has a secret budget thought to be in the billions. According to CIA “whispers to reporters…the unit is out of control”.

All of which says that no one is sure how JSoc or CIA operates. Unaccountably, in Pakistan the CIA is free to act on its own, without White House approval of targets. In Yemen, too, says The New York Times.

And yet “both CIA and Pentagon counterterrorism officials have pressed for greater freedom to attack suspected militants, and colleagues say Mr. Brennan has often been a restraining voice”, says The Times. Brennan has also said he thinks CIA should get out of the killing business. But once he is installed at CIA, how will we know?

Naomi Wolf, an observer of America who is published in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, and who wrote a memorable and chilling article in 2007 titled, “Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps”, sees that forecast coming true. She recently had this to say about today’s U.S.:

“The US executive now has a network of secret laws, secret budgets, secret kill lists, and a well-funded, globally deployed army of secret teams of assassins. That is precisely the driving force working behind what we can see. Is fascism really too strong a word to describe it?”

Lust for Oil Sends Us to Reckless Extremes

An announcement by Royal Dutch Shell makes it likely that the company will not be able to begin its Arctic drilling program this summer. Its two drilling ships are to be towed from Houston to Japan for major repairs.

Shell expected to drill last summer, but persistent sea ice first delayed the company from drilling the five wells it had planned. Next, the containment dome it had constructed to cap a well in case of a blowout was damaged in a testing accident. The test had been conducted in calm waters, bolstering the arguments of environmental groups, who ask what would happen if the dome had to be deployed to contain a spill in treacherous rough seas and high winds? Plans to drill were put off until this year’s summer.

But concerns then heightened when on New Year’s Eve, despite the threat of winter storms, Shell decided a drilling platform needed to be moved across the Gulf of Alaska to Seattle for maintenance, but the massive rig, a football field in length with no propulsion system of its own, broke its tow lines in 40-foot seas and could not be controlled by several vessels called to the scene. It ran aground near Kodiak Island. This ill-considered move told us something about Shell’s “highest safety standards”.

        Jonathan Klingenberg, U.S. Coast Guard
If you are wondering where Shell — and soon others — want to drill, the leases are so far north that they are north of Alaska. They are in the Beaufort Sea, north of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska’s northwest coast (see map).

The Arctic region is thought to hold a quarter of the untapped oil and gas remaining on the planet, some 84% of it buried under ocean. The Beaufort and Chukchi are viewed as the last vast oil reserve, containing some 19 billion barrels of recoverable oil, nearly three times the amount thought to be in the Refuge. They could yield a million barrels of oil a day, more than 10% of domestic production , a tantalizing prospect that dangles before us the possibility of ridding the country of its need to import oil from the Middle East.

Half a dozen companies are vying for the prize. Royal Dutch Shell has spent $4.5 billion since 2005 building equipment and buying rights to prepare for sinking its first drill stem.

But they have been met with a succession of suits by environmental groups who use endangerment of species — the bowhead whale for one — and expected air pollution by Shell’s drilling rigs and support ships to block by any means what they fear will be high risk oil exploration in some of the most inhospitable regions on earth.

But our government seems to be paying no heed. The Minerals Management Service issued permits for drilling in 2010, prompting several concerned employees to quit, saying “they had been pressured to rewrite their work or have it rewritten for them and that they were perceived as obstacles in the way of drilling” while those who went along were promoted and given cash awards.

The worst offshore spill in history that began with explosions aboard BP’s Deepwater Horizon did not slow Shell’s efforts to move ahead in the Arctic. It lobbied in White House meetings even during the height of the BP crisis in mid-2010, undeterred by reservation’s about the company’s preparedness for dealing with a major spill. It took regulator’s promptings to get the company to strengthen spill prevention safeguards and build a containment cap along the lines of the bonnet that successfully throttled the BP Gulf outpouring.

The president’s own Deepwater Horizon commission gave Shell’s Arctic preparations a barely passing grade in 2011. No technique had been developed to removed oil from ice in the event of mishap, and the Coast Guard lacks an adequate presence in the region. The Congressional Research Service says at least $3 billion is needed for equipment and ships such as icebreakers, which would be critical for reaching a stricken drilling platform in a sea filled with ice floes, but the Obama administration has offered only $8 million “to study” building one. The Coast Guard has only one of medium size and two heavy-duty ships, both from the 1970s and both inoperative. Coast Guard Commandant Robert Papp wants six. He warned Congress in 2011 that we are dangerously unprepared to deal with a major spill in the Arctic.

But no brakes have been applied. Politicians have been in the forefront to urge that we “drill, baby, drill” — a phrase that caught hold at the 2008 Republican convention — urging that drilling permits be expedited in the Gulf and offshore drilling be approved along both ocean coasts. President Obama saw that the way the wind was blowing was not driven by wind power and ordered up an “all of the above” energy strategy from a menu of both fossil fuels and renewables. After an obligatory six-month (shortened to five) moratorium following the scary BP spill in the Gulf, his administration expedited issuance of permits to meet industry and local economic demands. True, he did delay approval of Keystone XL — the Canadian pipeline from the northern border to the bottom of Texas — but we have several times predicted that he will now, post-election, give the project the go-ahead. And, strange to say, he nixed drilling off the states along the Atlantic and Pacific, but gave the green light to drilling in, of all places, the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Yet this energy plan was viewed as “sensible” by
the oceanographic and meteorological experts who write The Times’ editorials from their desks in New York, praising the Obama administration‘s “carefully selected” lease locations in the Beaufort and Chukchi.

Drilling in ocean waters is never a placid undertaking, but saying no to drilling off the coasts of the “lower 48”, as Alaskans call the contiguous U.S., while approving drilling in such hostile and forbidding areas — how to explain that?

lessons learned?

The BP spill occurred in the relatively calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico under the sunny skies of spring and summer. It evidently taught Shell, our politicians and this president nothing. Contemplate the planetary damage if a hurricane-force winter storm were to drag a drill ship from its anchorage and snap its drill string, or a blowout preventer were to fail as in the Gulf (we still don’t and never will know the cause of the BP preventer’s failure). In huge seas and below-zero temperatures, with drill ships battered by sea ice, a “spill” would be impossible to contain. For as long as the pressure of the sea and Earth’s mantle are enough to make the oil come up the pipe, it would flow indefinitely. The Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon would be all but forgotten in comparison.

The grail of energy independence has triggered a giddy and headlong rush to drill for oil in places we should set aside as too forbidding, too hazardous for man’s folly. Instead, we are left to await what may be the penalty for such extreme recklessness.

DC Court Decides to End Recess Appointments