Glenn Greenwald describes the video below as “one of the most flagrant and repellent examples of rank government propaganda masquerading as objective journalism that I have ever seen”.

In his ongoing defense of drone warfare — in tandem with the promotion of his new book — Klaidman writes:

The fact that a CIA or military operator can take out a target from the comfortable confines of their cubicle, far removed from the battlefield, without subjecting themselves to any risk, troubles people. The suggestion is that the ability to kill remotely dulls one’s moral sensibilities. But is that true? It’s hard to know without talking to CIA drone operators themselves. Since the program is covert, that’s not possible. But in reporting my book, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, I was able to get a remarkable, if second hand, glimpse into the mind set of a CIA drone operator.

In the book, I report out a conversation between the State Department’s legal adviser, Harold Koh, and a drone operator at CIA headquarters. Koh, perhaps the most forceful advocate of human rights law in the Obama administration, was preparing a speech in defense of targeted killing, and wanted to do his homework; he wasn’t going to put his reputation in jeopardy without knowing the drone strike program and its protocols inside and out. He spent hours at Langley grilling agency lawyers and operators. The operators were naturally suspicious of Koh—a wariness only fueled by Koh’s blunt demeanor. “I hear you guys have a PlayStation mentality,” he said.

The operators of the unmanned drones were civilians, but most were ex-Air Force pilots who took umbrage at the idea that they were “cubicle warriors” morally detached from killing. The lead operator lit into Koh. “I used to fly my own air missions,” he began defensively. “I dropped bombs, hit my target load, but had no idea who I hit. Here I can look at their faces. I watch them for hours, see these guys playing with their kids and wives. When I get them alone, I have no compunction about blowing them to bits. But I wouldn’t touch them with civilians around. After the strike, I see the bodies being carried out of the house. I see the women weeping and in positions of mourning. That’s not PlayStation; that’s real. My job is to watch after the strike too. I count the bodies and watch the funerals. I don’t let others clean up the mess.”

The conversation must have proved persuasive; Koh gave his speech, defending the legal underpinning of the job the drone operator and his colleagues do.

The expression “take out” has become so widely adopted it might seem that it barely warrants attention these days, but still, I find it a revealing euphemism. Journalists like Klaidman clearly prefer “take out” rather than “kill” even though the expression conjures up images of a gangster ordering the elimination of a rival. To speak of taking out targets is to transparently align oneself with those who exercise the power to order executions.

Klaidman mounts a defense of drone operators and attempts to demonstrate that their remoteness from the battlefield does not shield them from the moral weight of warfare. Indeed, through the words of the operative that he cites, Klaidman implies that a drone operator who spends hours following the movements of his target, acquires through this intimate view a deeper and more moral understanding of what it means to kill. He ignores the possibility that the predator hunting his prey gains just as much insight into premeditated murder.

Both Klaidman and the unnamed drone operator invoke this perverse image of humanitarian concern: that if a child’s father is blown to shreds but the child survives because the assassin didn’t fire his missile until after the child had moved a safe distance from the blast zone, then the drone operator, the CIA or Pentagon, the U.S. government, and by extension the American people, can all regard themselves as merciful. Look, we don’t kill the little children. How tender and caring we all are.

In the comic book categories through which Americans are encouraged to view the world, label someone a “terrorist,” and all other labels, such as “father,” “husband,” “brother,” suddenly fade into irrelevance.

For those not fully convinced by Klaidman’s argument, the apparent clincher is that the only alternative to drone strikes is much more destructive air strikes. A Hellfire missile does less damage than a 500lb bomb and that’s why its use constitutes a “humanitarian advance.” Case closed, Klaidman would have it.

The lie embedded in this line of reasoning is that absent the bomb or the missile we are inviting another 9/11 attack on the United States and thus strikes of one kind or another are a necessity. Klaidman, like all true believers in the war on terrorism, refuses to acknowledge that just as was the case eleven years ago, the ability of terrorists to attack targets in the United States does not hinge on the freedom of movement of a handful of al Qaeda operatives in North Waziristan.

Klaidman’s how-I-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-drone mission seems like a kind of sexual infatuation. During a couple of years research he has concluded that drones are simply irresistible. And since he appears to have confined himself to interviewing advocates of remote warfare it’s not surprising he would reach that conclusion. Presumably the idea of going to Pakistan and talking to survivors of drone attacks is something Klaidman would have viewed as unthinkable — even though had he wanted to balance his research in this way, I have no doubt that The Bureau of Investigative Journalism or Clive Stafford Smith at Reprieve could have facilitated such interviews.

Klaidman makes a feeble appeal for greater transparency around Obama’s drone warfare policy, but secrecy applied to drone attacks is no different from secrecy applied anywhere else: it’s primary function is to impede the political, legal, and media scrutiny that might undermine the operation of the program. As always, secrecy serves as a license for criminality.

The drone operator is really the high tech equivalent of a sniper and as Randall Collins has noted, the sniper, even within the military, is regarded as a different kind of killer.

Snipers tend to be disliked even by their fellow soldiers, or at least regarded with uneasiness. A British sniper officer in World War I noted that infantrymen did not like to mingle with the snipers “for there was something about them that set them apart from ordinary men and made the soldiers uncomfortable”… World War II soldiers sometimes jeered at them. U.S. snipers in Vietnam were met with the comment: “Here comes Murder Incorporated.”

For Klaidman though, the unassailable virtue of drone warfare is precision. “It is precisely the pinpoint accuracy of drones that makes them such a significant humanitarian advance over other kinds of weaponry.”

But as a method of assassination, a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone is actually among the least precise weapons. That’s why Osama bin Laden was assassinated by a more traditional method — a bullet in the forehead — Obama couldn’t risk the uncertainty that would prevail from a drone attack.

And those of us who object to drone warfare are not as Klaidman would have it, afraid of the drones’ supernatural power — we are afraid of a very worldly presidential power which claims the right to execute anyone anywhere.

When a handful of officials can meet in secret, review secret evidence, and apply a secret legal rationale to issue a death sentence and when the revelation of a “kill list” created in this way prompts virtually no public outcry, then we should not only fear our government — we should fear the passivity of those around us who seem blithely indifferent about America’s slide towards totalitarian rule.

Daniel Klaidman, author of the soon-to-be-released Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, could be compared to a crow which feeds by ripping flesh off rotting carcases — but I think that would be unfair to crows. After all, they are just doing what they need to do to survive. Klaidman on the other hand is feeding off death for profit.

An excerpt from his book which appeared at the Daily Beast earlier this week is an example of servile propaganda at its worst.

At least in totalitarian states with their ministries of information and state-controlled newspapers, no one is under any illusion about the way in which governments shape public discourse. But in the United States with a nominally free press, accounts such as Klaidman’s purport to offer Americans outside government a rare glimpse into its innermost workings.

In this case we are being led to believe that we can now better understand what is actually happening when President Obama and a small circle of advisers make the weightiest decision anyone could ever make: when (if ever) it is justifiable to execute someone while suspending the legal constraints that otherwise control the use of capital punishment.

Klaidman’s approach to this story suggests that he investigated the issues in a similar way that an interior designer might discuss color choices with her client. His idea of depth is that he wants to find out how his subjects feel about killing people.

Klaidman tells us that Harold Hongju Koh and Jeh C. Johnson, the top lawyers at the State Department and the Pentagon, have found it stressful helping decide who gets to live or die. In other words, those observers who might imagine that a cold bureaucratic process is at work can be assured that Obama’s death panel operates with feeling and sensitivity and an acute sense of moral responsibility. These are not casual killers.

Like Koh, [Johnson] wondered whether he could withstand the heavy pressure exerted by the military to expand operations. After approving his first targeted killings one evening, he watched the digital images of the strike in real time — “Kill TV,” the military calls the live battlefield feed. Johnson could see the shadowy images of militants running drills in a training camp in Yemen. Then suddenly there was a bright flash. The figures that had been moving across the screen were gone. Johnson returned to his Georgetown home around midnight that evening, drained and exhausted. Later there were reports from human-rights groups that dozens of women and children had been killed in the attacks, reports that a military source involved in the operation termed “persuasive.” Johnson would confide to others, “If I were Catholic, I’d have to go to confession.”

If watching ones victims get executed on Kill TV evokes an image of cold brutality, we are assured that Washington’s practitioners of targeted killing, just like their Israeli counterparts, shoot and cry.

What Klaidman does through this style of narrative is set up a false intimacy — a sense that we really know what goes on in the so-called Terror Tuesday meetings because we now know that when Obama decides to kill someone who considers the matter very carefully.

The president is not a robotic killing machine. The choices he faces are brutally difficult, and he has struggled with them — sometimes turning them over in his mind again and again.

Is this what “due process” now means: that when executioner Obama issues a death sentence, it’s not an impulsive action; it’s something he actually spends some time thinking about? How reassuring!

If Klaidman was a serious journalist he would ask some serious questions. For instance, even though he might not be shown the intelligence information that forms the basis for Obama’s “kill list”, there are some relevant comparisons that he could attempt in order to expose the legal implications of what is now happening inside the White House.

For instance, is the process of deliberation inside Obama’s Star Chamber, more thorough than what happens inside a district attorney’s office in the process of considering a major criminal indictment? I suspect not, but if he had chosen to approach his subject with this amount of seriousness, Klaidman could easily have collected the kind of anecdotal evidence that would most likely make it clear that in the Obama administration, death sentences get handed out more casually than indictments. (In a summary of key moments from Klaidman’s book we learn that the State Department’s top legal adviser “would be presented with the classified PowerPoint slides, and would often have less than an hour to flick through them and determine whether or not the government had the legal authority to take out the target.”)

The picture Klaidman prefers to construct is one framed to a tee by the interests of President Obama. Whereas the CIA and the military are eager to kill as many suspected terrorists as possible, Obama is deeply concerned about the risk to innocent life.

Schooled as a constitutional lawyer, he had had to adjust quickly to the hardest part of the job: deciding whom to kill, when to kill them, and when it makes sense to put Americans in harm’s way. His instincts tilted toward justice and protecting the innocent, but he also knew that war is a messy business no matter how carefully it is conducted.

What Klaidman is doing here — and I suspect doing so in a completely mindless way — is sustaining a narrative that shapes the whole approach to drone warfare: that it goes without saying that the targets of drone strikes are guilty. In other words, no one even raises the possibility that the innocent might not only include bystanders but even the target himself.

The only time “mistakes” get reported they are of the form that a strike targeted such-and-such a suspect but ended up killing someone else. Whenever the intended target gets killed, it’s case closed. The dead are always guilty.

But how could this possibly be so? We know that it’s possible inside the elaborately constructed American capital punishment system, that after lengthy trials, appeals and sentence reviews, innocent people can still end up being executed. Why on earth would we assume that Obama’s execution process operates more efficiently?

When Klaidman presents the case of the first presidentially authorized assassination of a U.S. citizen, he doesn’t stray a fraction from the official narrative.

In Barack Obama’s mind, Anwar al-Awlaki was threat No. 1. The Yemen-based leader of AQAP had grown up in the United States, spoke fluent American-accented English, and had a charisma similar to that of Osama bin Laden: soft eyes, a mastery of language, and a sickening capacity for terror. Obama told his advisers that Awlaki was a higher priority than even Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had succeeded bin Laden as al Qaeda’s top commander. “Awlaki had things on the stove that were ready to boil over,” one of Obama’s national-security advisers observed. “Zawahiri was still looking for ingredients in the cupboard.”

What worried President Obama most was Awlaki’s ingenuity in developing murderous schemes that could evade America’s best defenses. Already he had launched the Christmas Day plot, in which a Nigerian operative had nearly brought down a packed airliner by trying to set off explosives hidden in his underwear. Then, in October 2010, AQAP had managed to put improvised bombs—ink toner cartridges filled with explosive material—on cargo planes headed to the United States. (They were intercepted as a result of a tip from Saudi intelligence.) During the summer of 2011 Obama was regularly updated on a particularly diabolical plan that AQAP’s master bomb builder, Ibrahim Hassan Tali al-Asiri, was devising. The intelligence indicated that he was close to being able to surgically implant bombs in people’s bodies. The wiring was cleverly designed to circumvent airport security, including full-body scanners. AQAP’s terror doctors had already successfully experimented with dogs and other animals.

The president made sure he got updates on Awlaki at every Terror Tuesday briefing. “I want Awlaki,” he said at one. “Don’t let up on him.” Hoss Cartwright even thought Obama’s rhetoric was starting to sound like that of George W. Bush, whom Cartwright had also briefed on many occasions. “Do you have everything you need to get this guy?” Obama would ask.

But that sense of fierce determination was a product of long experience and didn’t come easily. By the time United States intelligence agents got Awlaki in their sights, Obama had adjusted and readjusted his views on targeted killings several times. Usually he tried to measure the possible benefits of a specific killing or killings against the possible downsides, including the slaying of innocents and getting the United States more deeply embroiled in civil conflicts. The Awlaki case was in a special category, however: By almost anyone’s definition, he was a threat to the homeland, but he was also an American citizen, born in New Mexico.

The capture of a Somali operative who worked closely with Awlaki produced key intelligence, including how he traveled, the configuration of his convoys, his modes of communication, and the elaborate security measures he and his entourage took. Finally, in the spring and summer of last year, U.S. and Yemeni intelligence started to draw a bead on him. A tip from a Yemeni source and a fatal lapse in operational security by the cleric eventually did him in.

The claims that Awlaki masterminded and led terrorist operations have never been substantiated. If there really was significant evidence that he had such an operational role, it seems extremely unlikely that Obama would have any reason to need to press the case for the urgency of Awlaki’s elimination. The CIA and the Pentagon would be leading that charge without any need for Obama to crack the whip.

A much more plausible explanation for Obama’s obsession with Awlaki is one that could not be easily accommodated inside a legal framework. It wasn’t that the American cleric was in the process of devising a dastardly new way to insert explosives into underwear; it was the real threat he posed as a propagandist. That is, Awlaki represented one of the worst fears of anyone involved in counterterrorism: that as an American-born, charismatic and articulate preacher, he was capable of recruiting radicalized Caucasian converts to Islam.

Of course it this was Obama’s fear, killing Awlaki with a drone strike was no way to avert the danger since even now, as a propagandist he remains alive and well on YouTube. But these are issues that are of no apparent interest to Klaidman as he tells us how Obama learned to kill.

Perhaps the worst feature of Klaidman’s work is that he is collaborating in the definition of the new normal.

When Bush and Cheney instituted the use of torture, this provoked national debate. Even if they were able to exploit national fears that had produced a widely permissive attitude towards so-called “harsh interrogation” methods, Bush and Cheney were in some measure held accountable for choosing to adopt these practices.

When Obama entered office with the support of many Americans who imagined he was the antidote to the extremism of the previous administration, he swiftly reinforced that perception by banning the use of torture.

But when it transpired that he had banned torture only to replace it with murder, rather than this prompt loud expressions of outrage, we are being told to see this as the “evolution” of a president who is grappling with the harsh realities of the era.

This is a much more insidious message: that Obama is simply doing what anyone in his shoes would feel compelled to do; that targeted killing should now be seen as an enduring feature of U.S. foreign policy.

If the average American pauses to consider what it’s like living in the vicinity of missile attacks launched from Predator drones, I expect that the popular conception is of a sudden strike that seemingly comes out of nowhere. “You will never see it coming,” President Obama jokes.

Administration officials sell remote warfare as military precision at its most advanced, as though innocent victims are a rarity that barely merits attention. In a speech he delivered at the end of April, White House Counter Terrorism adviser John Brennan said:

With the unprecedented ability of remotely piloted aircraft to precisely target a military objective while minimizing collateral damage, one could argue that never before has there been a weapon that allows us to distinguish more effectively between an al-Qaida terrorist and innocent civilians.

Yet neither Brennan nor any other administration official talks about what it means to live with drones ever-present — what it means for the drone of death to become a background noise that haunts everyday life.

Clive Stafford Smith traveled to Peshawar in Pakistan to hear some of the victims of Obama’s war describe the waking nightmare in which a drone attack is never far away.

Rasul Mana comes from the village of Sirkut Burakhel Supulga in Waziristan. As we meet, he produces from his pocket a sheet of ES-PRAMCIT (Escitalopram), an anti-stress drug that is manufactured in Karachi. There is only one left in the packet of eight.

I come from the village of Sirkut Burakhel Supulga. There are around 40 houses in the village, with perhaps a total of population of 3000 people. I know that’s an average of 75 people crammed into each compound. That’s the way it is. We all live with extended families.

Drones have had a great effect on me. Eighteen people have been killed by them in my village alone. When the drone is 5 km away the sound is very different. It sounds like a missile. As they come closer, it turned into a repetitive humming. Bangana is the word we use for drones. It means bee in Pashtu. I first heard that term in 2005, and the killer bees have been all over us ever since.

The kids know what the voice of the drone now. Every day we hear the voice of the drones at least six or seven times. We listen for the voice 24 hours a day. We are afraid at night as we lie in our beds.

The drones are going around and around over our heads. There may be four or five at any given time. They are normally very high, but sometimes they come down if there is a dust storm or it is cloudy. They also tend to come down lower to attack, which is when you get very scared.

When the missile is launched it makes a loud noise – zzhhooo – as it drops onto its target.

Many of the strikes are in the black of night. We run to where the attack has happened, we see people dead and crying in pain. No matter what time of night, the children will all be awake and crying. When we look for the injured, or pick up the pieces of the dead bodies, we know that the Americans may do another attack. It’s called a Good Samaritan attack, aimed at anyone who tries to help the injured, as they’re assumed to be friends of the original victims, who are themselves assumed to be militants.

People curse the Americans, calling on God to destroy them with flood, lightening, pestilence or any natural disaster.

The Americans put GPS tags in places. Spies put them on their enemies, just people for whom they have animosities. The GPS is half the size of a finger. We call it a Sim card. Something like a UV light comes out of it. The spy sends a note via a satellite phone that the target is tagged.

And then death descends. [Continue reading…]