Drones are here to stay. That’s a given. Whether they’re the miniature plane Predators roaming our skies now, or nanobot clouds designed to skim information from unwitting subjects in the future, there’s no putting Pandora back in the bottle. (Hell)Fire has been gifted to humans.
Unfortunately, drones aren’t used just for surveillance. Guided missiles, targeted toxins, bioengineered diseases—all can be delivered to a target with minimal risk to the forces controlling the drone.
The subjects on the other side of the equation? Well, they’re not so lucky (and frequently neither are their neighbors).
So the question becomes: How do we utilize these constructs? What message do we want to send with our agents of remote operation?
Right now, the message we (we being the United States of America) are sending is one of fear, terror, and death. If you’re suspected of any ills against the United States in its War on Terror (an amazingly nebulous description when you look closely), well, I wouldn’t recommend geotagging your tweets.
And soon it might not be something that just those lucky folks living on the other side of the world have to worry about!
That’s right, our government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the criteria under which a drone strike is approved is clearly too much for our peasant minds to handle, and thus that information is only available to certain members of the government who “need to know.” Even that minuscule measure of transparency was only reached after intense pressure from the public on what someone has to do to find himself on the business end of an explosion, and we still don’t know the legal opinions the government is relying on to justify these strikes.
In fact, when initially asked, the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder, said he couldn’t unequivocally confirm that a drone strike wouldn’t be used against an American citizen on U.S. soil. It was only after a thirteen-hour filibuster by Senator Rand Paul (who I don’t agree with on a lot of things, but who is absolutely right on this) that AG Holder penned a letter stating that the president does not have the authority to kill “an American not engaged in combat on American soil.”
Well, great! We’re safe!
Not so fast. “Engaged in combat” can be a very loose term, especially with prior precedents set by our government. Does writing propaganda make you “engaged in combat”? Does letting someone stay at your house make you “engaged in combat”? Does talking to a member of a terror group (again, as defined by the people in charge of pulling the trigger) for the purposes of research or journalism make you “engaged in combat”?
We don’t know. The reason we don’t know is that our government doesn’t want us to know. Why don’t they want us to know? (Insert known knowns and unknown unknowns speech here.)
I don’t know. But I can promise you that institutions that insist on obfuscation and denial of information are historically institutions that don’t fare well under future examination. Soviet Russia. North Korea. Egypt, Iran, Nixon, Mao. Religious institutions of all shapes and sizes. Financial gamblers and corporate boards—all concerned with hiding the truth of their actions.
And those are all within the last century!
Looking back further we have feudal Europe, Renaissance Italy, imperial Japan—hidden cults and secret handshakes taking place across the world, all to make sure the majority of people didn’t know what those in power were doing. Eventually, though, those people found out.
Reformations, revolutions, rebellions—the inevitable response to power and corruption lurking amid shadows (and, naturally, quickly co-opted by those very same shadows). Violent, bloody, disruptive change, ninety-nine times out of one hundred—anger finally boiling over at the lack of transparency.
Because that’s what this is all really about. As citizens, we grant our government the monopoly of legitimate violence, but in return that violence has to be legally employed. That’s the whole reason we have the Constitution, and why it spells out what the government can and cannot do. That’s why we have a legal system, with things like “due process,” “a speedy trial,” and “the right to face your accuser.” Above all, our government is supposed to be accountable to us, the people, not a shadowy cabal in a back room somewhere that no one ever sees.
That’s why transparency is so important. So we can hold the government accountable for things like budgets and drone strikes and wars. So we know that violence is being employed within the constraints of our legal system and not to capriciously further personal agendas or desires for power. And, most importantly, transparency is so vitally important because it makes us face the choices we allow our government to make, especially those choices pertaining to violence.
Violence that historically never works. Violence that we allow to persist with our unwillingness to force transparency from those in charge of making decisions.
All the bombs we drop, all the countries we invade, all the terrorists we assassinate with a joystick and television screen—those aren’t the problem. The problem is instability, caused primarily through lack of food, infrastructure, and education. That’s what we should be fighting against (and not just overseas), but we buy into constant fear and think blowing up the symptoms will cure the disease. Another missile on the way, another insurgent killed, another five rising to take his place, angered and willing to do whatever it takes to destroy the threat they know is there, a threat they cannot see because it’s hidden by shadows and secrecy, a threat that won’t go away until it’s exposed to the light.
So the next time you see a report on body counts via drone, take a minute to wonder what those people did to deserve it.
If you don’t know, you might be next.