What’s Secrete “Here” Is Not Secret “There” — How America’s Due Process-Lacking Anti-Terrorist Drone War Is Probably Going to Result in the Reverse of What Was Intended

© 2011 Peter Free

 

20 December 2011

 

 

Evil has many disguises — and we’re living two of them

 

Paranoia is one.  Violations of one’s own “due process” principle is another.

 

Combine these uncivilized traits, and we can see the United States has toppled from the Righteousness Pedestal that it once could claim to stand upon.

 

We have become merely another, viciously self-centered Great Power.  We can no longer claim to be the world’s moral leader.

 

Thanks to the actions of President Obama’s ethically indefensible secret drone program, the United States is almost certainly in for a heavy dose of real and karmic pay-back from the descendants of those it kills with and without just cause.

 

 

Facts — attacking unnamed “enemies” without verifiable justification

 

Journalist Karen DeYoung, writing in the Washington Post, reported that:

 

The administration has said that its covert, targeted killings with remote-controlled aircraft in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and potentially beyond are proper under both domestic and international law. It has said that the targets are chosen under strict criteria, with rigorous internal oversight.

 

It has parried reports of collateral damage and the alleged killing of innocents by saying that drones, with their surveillance capabilities and precision missiles, result in far fewer mistakes than less sophisticated weapons.

 

Yet in carrying out hundreds of strikes over three years — resulting in an estimated 1,350 to 2,250 deaths in Pakistan — it has provided virtually no details to support those assertions.

 

© 2011 Karen DeYoung, Secrecy defines Obama’s drone war, Washington Post (19 December 2011)

 

 

“Far fewer mistakes”? — a blatant admission of moral guilt

 

Without more transparent due process, how do we know what a murder-mistake is?

 

And even if we gullibly credit the Administration with correctly targeting all of its drone “hits,” its admission of mistakes means that the President recognizes that innocents are being killed at a cognizable rate.

 

How is that not blatant murder?  This is not a hot war by any humanely sensible or legally acceptable definition of war.

 

 

Stupidly overlooking the fact that, although Americans may not know whom our Government kills, the nations where the killed (and maimed) lived do

 

What is secret here is not secret there.

 

When drones are flying over your head, killing your family, in your country — these deadly assaults, and the names of those killed or maimed, are not secret.

 

 

It may be easy for Americans not to care, until the results of our arguably evil actions come back home to roost

 

Were it not for human beings’ tendency not to forget wrongs, no one would care about America’s self-violating excesses.

 

But the families, tribes, clans, and nationalities of the murdered and maimed do remember.

 

Pay-back is running hot in their blood now and will be for generations to come.

 

 

Without self-risk, violence spirals into the immoral — always

 

Just as the United States has become an incorrigibly militaristic state by burdening only one percent of its population with military duty — leaving the other ninety-nine percent to shop mindlessly, callously, and safely at “the mall” — the video-game-like drone program removes its operators from the risk of injury that injects the little bit of morality that keeps war-making under a semblance of ethical control.

 

The absence of risk for physical injury equals the absence of ethics in armed conflict.  If one is not physically on the battlefield, de-humanizing one’s enemy and arrogantly elevating one’s sense of rectitude are certainties.

 

De-humanizing other people, in peace or war, is the road to ethical and spiritual ruin.  Unchecked hubris is a spiritual evil recognized by each of the world’s major religious traditions.

 

 

The moral? — Secrecy and riskless war-making defeats national morality

 

It is difficult, in all contexts, to justify the execution of innocents.  The United States’ drone-murder program is a moral abomination by any reasonable standard, save those that guide the cowardly paranoid.

 

Who and what have we become?