America: Addicted to Surveillance, Drones, and Death Squads

What rights do humans have?

 

On a global scale, zip, actually.

One of the by-products of an increasingly interconnected and interpenetrated world is that the difference between the way nations treat their citizens and the way they treat the rest of the world is becoming more apparent.

The issue has been brought into sharp relief by the NSA’s global data collection and surveillance campaign.

A cursory look at Article 12 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights…

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

…in the post-Snowden era might bring a non-US reader up short with the brainwave Hey! Intrusive NSA surveillance is violating my human rights!

Not so fast, buster.  The UN is only busybodying with the activities of your own government.  

Back in 1948, when the UNUDHR first appeared, nobody worried that the United States government might be robbing the mail bags on the stagecoach between London and Paris, or whatever the hell people used to communicate back in the pre-Internet era. 

From a 21^st-century perspective, things get darker when you look at 

Article 3

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 5

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 9

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

As pointed out above, these restraints are meant to apply to a government in the treatment of its own citizens and are “universal” in that every government is supposed to respect them…but only for their own citizens.

Somebody else’s citizens, well that’s a different ball game. 

The United States explicitly asserts and exercises the right to arbitrarily arrest and detain foreigners; and incarceration at Guantanamo looks a lot like exile.  The US does subscribe to the Convention Against Torture, which is supposed to protect everybody against torture; it does so by classifying the coercive measures it applies to foreign detainees as “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment”, something that CAT doesn’t ban and the UNUDHR only forbids when inflicted by a nation on its own citizens; and the “right to life, liberty and security of person” for foreign nationals is clearly not being honored in the case of a drone strike.

Long story short, the UNUDHR actually assists the U.S. by closing one of the few doors to prosecution for the various abuses it inflicts on foreign nationals.  

Conversely, the United States can affirm the legality of what it’s doing overseas by emphasizing its adherence to the UNUDHR for its own citizens.

The NSA appears reasonably sedulous, at least on the theoretical level, in observing the constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure for US citizens.  For everybody else, it’s fair game.

So the NSA can point to its respect for the constitutional rights of citizens of the United States in order to assert that its wholesale sweep of global data is a defendable exercise of its considerable capabilities, and not evidence of a secretive, unaccountable bureaucracy run hog wild.

The same is true of the U.S. targeted killing program (with the exception of the targeted killing of US citizen Anwar al Awlaki, which perhaps can be treated as an extra-legal one-off relating to his disquieting success as an al Qaeda recruiter and spokesperson in the U.S. and other Anglophone countries, his perceived role in inciting the Fort Hood mass shooting, and the government's desire to demonstrate that a) vengeance is mine and b) US citizenship will not protect high profile Islamist extremists).

Extralegal assassination is not just a matter of the well-publicized drone strikes carried out by the U.S. government.  To a certain extent, the United States is addicted to death squads as an instrument of security and counter-insurgency policy carried out by foreign proxies against their own citizens or, when circumstances permit or demand, by US special forces under JSOC—the Joint Special Operations Command.

In researching my article on Colombia and its AUC death squads, which is in the current edition of the subscription-only CounterPunch Monthly—subscribe!—I was struck by the fact that for the US and Colombian governments, it seemed the only way out of the insurgency dilemma was to kill people, lots and lots of people, extrajudicially.

In the 1990s, the Colombian government—including its police and judicial system-- was thoroughly corrupted and intimidated and completely overmatched in its losing fight against narcos and FARC leftist insurgents.  There was no security or institutional space available to practice the kid-glove “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency officially promoted by the United States as a demonstration of the irresistible superiority of US democracy, law, and free market concepts.

The United States was there to help—the last thing the US wanted was for Colombia to follow Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela in the Communist domino category—and, as far as I can tell, bought into the whole targeted killing/death squad formula as the only way to improve security and get rid of the bad guys.

Mark Bowden’s book about the U.S. role in the campaign to do away with Pablo Escobar in the early 1990s, Killing Pablo, shows the U.S. apparently more than just turning a blind eye to the wave of extrajudicial killings, both by Colombian security forces and a government-tolerated death squad, “Los Pepes”, carried out to isolate and ultimately trap Escobar.  U.S. signals intelligence was apparently key to development of the death lists, and it appears likely that, as the bodies of people on the lists piled up, the U.S. government at the operating level knew of, approved, and abetted the campaign of extrajudicial killings. 

When Escobar was finally caught, the Colombian security forces predictably did not give him a chance to surrender (in a previous surrender, Escobar had leveraged his vast wealth and intimidating power to arrange his “incarceration” in a luxury prison he designed himself and subsequently escaped).  What is a little less predictable is the allegation that a moonlighting Delta Force sniper (Delta Force was in Colombia but officially only allowed to conduct training) actually carried out the extrajudicial execution as Escobar frantically scrabbled over a rooftop away from his hideaway.

JSOC was in Colombia, according to Bowden.  Indeed, so was Jerry Boykin, the notorious “my God is bigger than your god” religious megalomaniac, as a leader of the first Delta Force team.

Death squads subsequently became the solution that the United States was unable to repudiate, and Los Pepes morphed into the notorious Colombian self-defense forces, the AUC, which engaged in a five year campaign of massacre of thousands of villagers and townsfolk in order to deny FARC havens in the villages of Colombia’s heartlands with little more than ostentatious handwringing from the United States.

JSOC went on to impose the death squad solution as it hunted down and killed al Qaeda operatives with the assistance of the local sheikhs in Iraq’s “Anbar Awakening”, inspiring George W. Bush’s thumbs-up “JSOC is awesome”.  And I have argued frequently and I think persuasively, the United States is looking for the right opportunity and suitable local partner in order to solve its increasingly intractable anti-American jihadi problem in Syria.  Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars reportedly (haven’t seen it yet) provides an unnerving picture of JSOC’s metastasizing global presence.

Going back in history, Douglas Valentine could tell the story of the Phoenix Program, America’s attempt to kill its way out of its Vietcong problem in Vietnam; and the question of the doctrinal efficacy of death squads could be explored through review of the curriculum of the School of the Americas and the wave of anti-Communist/anti-leftist extrajudicial murder that swept through U.S. allies Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Colombia in the post World War II era.

“Addicted to death squads” is not an unfair characterization of U.S. counterinsurgency in practice, if not in doctrine.

Nowadays, America’s unilateral reach in overseas extrajudicial killings has, if anything, increased, thanks to the layering of pervasive global data surveillance and drone assassination technologies over the traditional U.S. tendency to inflict mayhem with impunity in foreign jurisdictions.

And, as other countries become more independent and ornery and U.S. economic clout dwindles America’s traditional options—Send in the troops!  Here’s some aid! Let’s do some nation-building!—become less effective.

So, as the list of Things That Work becomes shorter, the alternatives to extrajudicial killings as a way to secure gains for America overseas become fewer.

There oughta be a law…or a bill of human rights.

I don’t think there will be.

Illustration from UNDUHR website

There Will Be Blood

Democracy and Its Death Squads

To civilian liberals of a hawkish bent, General Petraeus projects the reassuring image of the thinking person’s general. It’s kind of hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that operating death squads might be an integral—and perhaps the vital—component of the vaunted Petraeus doctrine of counterinsurgency. Or that death squads will probably continue to play a central role in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan under an Obama administration.

As his adoring Wikipedia biography relates, General Petraeus is quite the intellectual:

Petraeus was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College—class of 1983. He subsequently earned a M.P.A. degree (1985) and a Ph.D. degree (1987) in International Relations from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He later served as Assistant Professor of International Relations at the U.S. Military Academy and also completed a fellowship at Georgetown University. He has a BS from the U.S. Military Academy—class of 1974—from which he graduated as a distinguished cadet (top 5% of his class).

For twenty years, Petraeus climbed the ladder with a series of staff assignments. From 1991 to 1993, a lieutenant colonel, he got his command ticket punched by leading a regiment and later a battalion of the 101st Airborne, before returning to staff work.

In an indication of the indignities that prolonged peace can inflict on military biography, Wikipedia had to make do with this example of courage and tenacity under fire:

As battalion commander of the Iron Rakkasans [nickname for the 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st’s 3rd Battalion; comes from a mangling of the Japanese word for “paratrooper”—ed], he suffered one of the more dramatic incidents in his career when, in 1991, he was accidentally shot in the chest during a live-fire exercise when a soldier tripped and his rifle discharged. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, where he was operated on by future U.S. Senator Bill Frist. The hospital released him early after he did fifty push ups without resting, just a few days after the accident.

Combat experience finally came in 2003 when, as Major General, Petraeus commanded the 101st Airborne during the invasion of Iraq and settled in to occupy the Ninawa Governate and its chief city, Mosul, in northwest Iraq.

Petraeus treasured his credentials as the enlightened counterinsurgency expert—and the rational, astute military man culturally at ease with civilians and civilian leadership--and assiduously cultivated the mainstream media. His diligence was rewarded:

An often-repeated story of Petraeus's time with the 101st is his asking of embedded Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson to "Tell me how this ends," an anecdote he and other journalists have used to portray Petraeus as an early recognizer of the difficulties that would follow the fall of Baghdad…[Petraeus] was "prepared to act while the civilian authority in Baghdad was still getting organized," according to Michael Gordon of The New York Times. Some Iraqis gave Petraeus the nickname 'King David', which was later adopted by some of his colleagues. Newsweek has stated that "It's widely accepted that no force worked harder to win Iraqi hearts and minds than the 101st Air Assault Division led by Petraeus."

Before we bid adieu to General Petraeus’ Wikipedia entry, we should unpack the description of his signature success—the pacification of Mosul during the occupation:

In Mosul, a city of nearly two million people, Petraeus and the 101st employed classic counterinsurgency methods to build security and stability, including conducting targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously, jump-starting the economy, building local security forces, staging elections for the city council within weeks of their arrival, overseeing a program of public works, reinvigorating the political process, and launching 4,500 reconstruction projects.

The traditional preoccupation of the military—killing people and blowing stuff up—is recast as “targeted kinetic operations and using force judiciously”. It makes military operations sound more like policework than fighting, and only one of six equally important ingredients in the appetizing and nutritionally well-balanced COIN salad.

This sort of verbiage is important.

In the United States, there is a powerful compulsion to shoehorn warmaking into the ranks of admirable activities conducted by good people with fine minds. General Petraeus fulfills an important need, especially for the responsible-liberal quadrant of the commentariat and the incoming Obama administration which, I imagine, will be staffed by Ivy League intellectuals and not be chock-a-block with blood and thunder military types.

For the United States to put up with occupations and COIN/pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that may go on for more than a decade, the public needs to believe that the occupation is some kind of combination of FDR’s New Deal and the superhero Justice League, using American know-how and values to continually improve the economic and security well-being of the peoples in our care.

However, in real life, occupation and counter-insurgency are a nasty, degrading, and bloody business. Commanders in a hostile land far from home, intent on protecting their own forces, aren’t always using a surgical scalpel to extract the tumor of insurgency. Sometimes the meat axe is swung indiscriminately, slaughtering patient and bystanders alike.

And the proper description of “targeted kinetic activity” is, perhaps, “death squad”.

According to Bob Woodward’s most recent book, The War Within, the activities of death squads in Iraq was one of the key factors in the reduction of violence under General Petraeus’s watch as commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq:

Beginning in the late spring of 2007, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies launched a series of top-secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government.

Senior military officers and officials at the White House urged against publishing details or code names associated with the groundbreaking programs, arguing that publication of the names alone might harm the operations that have been so beneficial in Iraq. As a result, specific operational details have been omitted in this report and in "The War Within."

But a number of authoritative sources say the covert activities had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the biggest factor in reducing it. Several said that 85 to 90 percent of the successful operations and "actionable intelligence" had come from the new sources, methods and operations. Several others said that figure was exaggerated but acknowledged their significance.

Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al-Qaeda in Iraq, employed what he called "collaborative warfare," using every tool available simultaneously, from signal intercepts to human intelligence and other methods, that allowed lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent operations.

Asked in an interview about the intelligence breakthroughs in Iraq, President Bush offered a simple answer: "JSOC is awesome."

It would seem to me that “the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government” had been deployed in Iraq to battle the insurgency from the beginning, and the U.S. military have been eavesdropping, bribing, and strongarming the locals in order to improve its tactical position in raids from Day One.

What probably made special operations so “awesome” in 2007 was the employment, coordination, and organization of these “techniques and information” in the service of a unified, strategic, and pro-active policy of targeted killings to decapitate and disrupt the opposition to the occupation.

In other words, death squads. Calling them “targeted killings” looks like a distinction without much of a difference. And “special operations” is just a euphemism.

And I guess we’ll just have to take General Petraeus’s word for it that there was some kind of vetting and due process, that people were not improperly killed because of those death squad doppelgangers, greedy and grudge-holding informants, that non-violent opponents of the occupation weren’t targeted as a matter of COIN doctrine, and that “collateral damage” was accidental, avoided when at all possible, and not used as a tool to intimidate the local populace into turning against the insurgents.

We’ll have to take his word for it as far as Iraq goes, anyway.

In Afghanistan, things are a little different. We’re not doing too well there, and the Karzai government is often willing to present its own version of U.S. operations.

Yesterday President Karzai went on record deploring an incompetently targeted tactical kinetic operation that apparently killed 40 people--including two dozen children--when U.S. warplanes accidentally bombed a wedding party while trying to put paid to some fleeing Taliban militants nearby.

And in Pakistan, things are a lot different. Everybody there hates what we’re doing, the independent media aggressively reports U.S. operations, and the government leaks like a sieve. And in the middle of this we’re trying to mount a successful death squad campaign 1) across borders and 2) remotely, using drones and 3) trying not to kill so many civilians that the Pakistan government moves beyond toothless protests to actual opposition to the incursions.

Perhaps not a recipe for success. But we’re certainly trying. And General Petraeus is on board.

In recent weeks, Pakistan’s western tribal areas have been subjected to a flurry of U.S. Predator drone attacks targeting al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. According to the Washington Post, since August there have been 18 attacks, which have killed over 100 people.

The Washington Post article further reported on an interesting development, one that maybe puts some flesh on those “most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government,” in the context of the most recent strike, which killed up to 19 people in North Waziristan:

Brig. Gen. Mahmood Shah, former longtime head of government security in the tribal areas, said the missile attacks have become notably more precise, leading some to believe that local tribesman in the border areas are supplying the U.S. military with better information about potential targets.

Shah said rumors about so-called U.S. spies among the tribes have fed paranoia about potential small-scale spying devices being deployed in local villages. Called "patri" by the locals in the dominant language of Pashto, tribesmen have lately made a habit of constantly sweeping the areas around their homes for any signaling devices, he said.

"They're not sitting outside in their compounds anymore because they are afraid that they will be struck by these missiles," Shah said. "These people have their own enmity between each other so there is a fear that they could just throw one of these chips or devices into their enemy's house."

The take in yesterday’s attack, according to an unnamed Pakistan intelligence officer: four foreign fighters killed out of a total of up to 19 dead (the Washington Post headline led with the more comforting but unsourced statement that only 12 people had died in the attack, giving a more acceptable collateral damage to bad guy ratio of 3:1).

And Pakistan can expect more of the same, according to newly minted CENTCOM chief General Petraeus, who was just in Islamabad (also from the Washington Post article):

U.S. Gen. David H. Petraeus said during a visit to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad this week that he would heed the Pakistani government's concerns about the U.S.-led, cross-border strikes. But during a subsequent visit to Afghanistan this week, Petraeus touted the success of such attacks in eliminating top Taliban commanders. He has made no express promise to end the missile strikes.

During an interview with AP in Afghanistan reported by Pakistan’s Daily Times, General Petraeus’ irony detector was perhaps off-line when he talked about:

[C]onfronting the extremists who have turned what used to be fairly peaceful areas into strongholds for individuals who . . . believe that they have the right to blow up other people who do not see the world the way they do.”

Death squads are inseparable from counter-insurgency. If we’re going to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan (and take the battle to Pakistan) we should get used to them. And we shouldn’t let General Petraeus—or his willingness to pander to our desire to distract ourselves with hearts and minds fables of counterinsurgency --shield us from the truth.