Pulling the trigger on the Anti-Democracy gun
“Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.”
They landed on a wild but narrow scene,
Where few but Nature's footsteps yet had been;
Prepared their arms, and with that gloomy eye,
Stern and sustained, of man's extremity,
When Hope is gone, nor Glory's self remains
To cheer resistance against death or chains,--
They stood, the three, as the three hundred stood
Who dyed Thermopylae with holy blood.
But, ah! how different! 'tis the cause makes all,
Degrades or hallows courage in its fall.
O'er them no fame, eternal and intense,
Blazed through the clouds of Death and beckoned hence;
No grateful country, smiling through her tears,
Begun the praises of a thousand years;
No nation's eyes would on their tomb be bent,
No heroes envy them their monument;
However boldly their warm blood was spilt,
Their Life was shame, their Epitaph was guilt.
And this they knew and felt, at least the one,
The leader of the band he had undone;
Who, born perchance for better things, had set
His life upon a cast which lingered yet:
But now the die was to be thrown, and all
The chances were in favour of his fall:
And such a fall! But still he faced the shock,
Obdurate as a portion of the rock
Whereon he stood, and fixed his levelled gun,
Dark as a sullen cloud before the sun.
Emphasis my own in the following...
Imagine a gun or bullets that could automatically decide who to kill. One could point it in the general vicinity of the person who one intended to kill, but the choice of who to kill would ultimately be left to the machine. Sometimes it would lock on and kill the one who it was supposed to, sometimes it would hit someone else, a random pedestrian, woman, child, elderly person, baby in a carriage, the ultimate decision would be not a person's but a machine's.
Now imagine the consequences. No police officer or person using such a device could be held liable for shooting an innocent bystander. Such distinctions between innocent and guilty, victim or criminal, they would be ultimately irrelevant. No one would or could be held liable if the machine hit the wrong target, and no crime or mistake would be made, so long as it fell within acceptable parameters of suggested probability error. And if it went beyond those parameters killing far more innocent bystanders than intended criminals or other targets, still, whose fault could it be? If such deaths, possibly huge numbers of people, were not crimes but merely 'errors', flaws in an otherwise laudable system of unaccountability, freeing those whose consciences would otherwise be burdened by guilt or feelings of remorse of killing an innocent person from losing any sleep over what they do, or who they killed or maimed unnecessarily, would this be not a good thing? They could increase exponentially their 'targets' without fear of ever being held accountable for 'mistakes' since they would not be 'their' mistakes at all, just another unaccountable untraceable part of 'the system'.
The blame, if any, for these 'errors' which are not crimes anymore, not even misjudgments, certainly nothing to lose any sleep over, would be with those who made the police or other military group to carry and use such weapons of unaccountability instead of regular, judgment-required ones in which someone would ultimately held responsible for their misuse or 'wrongful deaths'. But then such people would be doing so only because they were told to do so by the authorities, elected representatives of the legitimate government, if the government is elected or legitimate. Thus the blame would not be on them either, nor even the company which invented or manufactured them, nor even on the person who invented them. They were simply making a proposal, it was not their fault the government decided to purchase them. And if they did not invent or make them and the government would have found them useful, they might have bought them instead from a competitor.
In such a system of shared blame or fault, clearly no one would ever be held responsible for any 'accidental' deaths because, literally, there would not be any definition of such a thing. Such things will happen, it is to be expected, and the benefits of their use are thought to outweigh the costs, especially since now if all are responsible, or a large enough section of society are guilty, then no one is.
We actually have instituted nationally a system of such fallible systems which can 'accidentally' destroy, or create the exact opposite of what they are supposedly implemented to correct, fairness and the public good. Paper-trail-less voting machines. Machines that can be hacked, can be used to totally subvert democracy or any election, and it is all legal. Such untraceable and unaccountable errors which can put a wrongly decided 'victor' into office more often than the Supreme Court can, are simply not anyone's fault. Not those who designed the machines, not those who purchased them, not those who authorized the funds to purchase them.
The fallibility of such systems are well known by now. They are hackable as well as prone to error, and if they were hacked, there is no way to trace by whom because there is intentionally no evidence (except by statistical analysis, hardly a smoking gun) and no way to verify without a paper trail, that a wrong result had been given or that it would not have occurred that way anyway. But 'painful' recounts of close elections such as Florida in 2000 and an even closer Minnesota Senatorial election of 2008 can now be simply waved away where these machines dominate or have influence. Nothing to recount. Take the machines word for it because that is all you will ever get, and how it works is as classified as any Honduran death squad's relations to the US government could ever be.
But there is another aspect of this which is clearly criminal. Though I would state that anyone who is responsible for having built or ordered such machines which INTENTIONALLY produce results, election results for who controls the government no less, which cannot be independently verified have committed crimes against the state or treason, many would consider that an extreme position. Get over it. Mistakes happen all the time. There is no such thing as an error free election anyway so what is the big deal if these new machines are not perfect? That is the price of progress! Heck, it can even be funny too.
Literally we now have made stealing elections in plain sight no longer a crime. Though we have many many FBI and other officials who will state otherwise, that such actions are still in fact illegal, how can that stand when those running the elections are purposely making it possible for such things to be done, to hide the evidence that any election was indeed 'stolen' and such future investigations, if any, will be hampered by a preemptive 'shredding' of any evidence of such a crime?
And even if one were to state that such things are merely 'bad judgment' such as creating a system of confinement or 'interrogation' based upon torture, sexual assaults, raping of relatives or threats to do so to elicit cooperation, then how can they explain away a doubling or tripling of doubt in the public of the fairness in their elections, that the person 'elected' to represent them actually won the most votes honestly? The last poll I saw, more than 30% of Americans doubted the fairness of the electoral process, in a large part due to unchallengeable, unverifiable electronic voting machines. That politicians and electoral boards can flagrantly put in systems of voting counting that completely and provably severely diminish the public's faith in the honestly of their elections shows such laws against tampering clearly do not extend to giving people valid reasons to not wish to vote at all. Why vote if you don't think it will be counted fairly? And if that is the intent after all, you have a completely legal way to disenfranchise millions simply because of 'bureaucratic bad decisions' which can create the exact same conditions as riggable voting machines without actually having to rig them except when one thinks simply turning people off to the idea of voting has not worked well enough this particular time.
Once the evidence came out that such machines could be rigged, leaving them in place and not recalling them should have been prosecuted for the crime that it was, conspiracy to continue to make possible the rigging and theft of an election. And beyond that, even if such machines are not 'provable' to be 'hackable' simply putting in systems which do not have or severely diminish the public's confidence in the honesty of their elections, that alone should make it a crime. For that which undermines the public's desire to vote because such elections are purposely being held up as possibly being or having been tainted, with evidence quite enough to back that suspicion up, should itself be enough to make it a crime, as conspiring to suppress legitimate voters from having reason to vote.
One would think that the Democrats, more than the Republicans who would benefit from such machines, would act to correct this and put in place laws that would ban machines which produce vote counts not verifiable by manual recounts after the fact, but that does not seem to be the case. Corruption in both parties by corporate interests may indeed stall action on this long enough for those who make and profit from this ability to steal elections to remain in business to once again be in a position to keep or expand such electronic systems, which not only may be hackable, may be able to be illegally used to benefit one candidate over another, but also to corrode the public's faith, shaky as that is, that their government is not completely corrupt already.
When I voted in 2008, it was on a machine that counted the votes electronically, yet it was required to produce a printed ballot as well which could be used in the event of a recall to verify the computers tabulation. Such machines provide all the benefits of electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper trail except one, they cannot be used to steal an election. States that purchased, never mind those that continue to purchase, such machines that do not produce a paper trail can claim that they do not have funds to purchase new machines, and going back to older more verifiable systems is not practical. That is to admit that it is too expensive to have a system of voting that does not without due reason corrode the public's image of the honesty of their government and its elections, and that a system with a built-in potential to be made to give the completely wrong result than what it was intended to do, (if it indeed was ever intended to produce results accurate to how people voted,) is not valuable enough, or that completely verifiable honest machines are not where the most profits, kickbacks, contracts, or bribes, are to be found. Is that not after all, how government contracts for things like voting machines or anything else are awarded?
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When I first thought of writing this a year ago, I had elections primarily in mind. However the US governments use of drones in 'targeted killings' (read assassinations) in Afghanistan and Pakistan show that the idea of unaccountability in the use of 'smart' weapons that I wanted to start with, have a much more real life meaning than in how it relates to election theft, real, potential, or the threat of which.
Never mind the overwhelming disproportionate killing of innocent civilians (I know, there are no 'innocent' people over there, or the argument which carries the day stating that), more than 50 men, women, children (mostly women and children) killed for every 'terrorist' killed, it is wholly and completely being done in defiance of international law, treaties, and common sense.
Before Christianity meant those who go to church regularly in the United States are 50% more likely to approve of torturing people than those who do not, it meant a religion based upon the principle of reciprocity. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Beyond 'American Exceptionalism' or that we are killing people in forwarding 'God's plan', what we are doing by such assassinations is completely what we have determined only the United States is justified in doing.
We have been operating completely outside of international law so long now that many to most Americans cannot even recognize that there is or ever was such a thing, or that if there was, that it should not apply to us or our nations actions equally as to others.
The 'justification' for these killings, some in countries we are not even at war with, and doing it in an 'extrajudicial' (read 'completely illegal') way, is that if we asked the governments in which whose territory where they are located to hand them over to us for extradition, that they would be unable or unwilling to do so. This also is limited by the fact that we often do not have any or enough evidence to justify them complying, other than simply handing over anyone we ask them to to be held without trail on evidence we do not have or are not willing to divulge. In such instances as to demand complete trust that we are not acting in error, bad faith, or in haste, in complete contradiction by the way to how we have acted in the past in this manner and are continuing to do so, we do not think such governments would comply with such requests. So we simply kill them all. In their houses, in their churches or mosques, wherever we think they are regardless of who may be around them at the time so long as we say we did it at a time when we think we killed the fewest numbers of innocent people possible, or a least tried to that effect or made some effort in that direction.
The mirror that the American government cannot see in yet is visible to the entire world outside of the United States is 'What if other nations tried to do that as well? Are we the only nation that has people they want, but that they are in countries unwilling to turn them over to them?”
The United States has many people living in it that China wants. We even house the leader of the Falon Gong movement which China not only considers a subversive, but the head of a movement who considers himself Jesus Christ reincarnated, has tens of millions of followers, and is considered a threat to their governments existence. Far more so than some Afghan or Pakistani holed up in some remote village we may or may not have any clear evidence against, certainly not with means to destabilize or overthrow our government. What would we think if China were to wipe out his US residence, killing everyone in the building, could they be that precise, whether he were home at the time or not being unimportant, but its OK because they tried at the time of day to kill the least amount of 'innocent' people. They could even make the case as we have, that his servants, followers, lawyers, in his house at the time, not to mention his family could hardly be described as wholly 'innocent' anyway. Not when after torturing a chauffeur for years after holding him without charges, and again torturing him (Enhanced Interrogation ® TM, Newspeak aside) for years, convicted him of terrorism by virtue of being the driver of a terrorist. How innocent can a maid or housekeeper really be? Of course they have it coming to them.
The British have given asylum to at least one Russian billionaire who has called for the overthrow of the Russian government. Russia very much would like to extradite him so they can charge him for things they say he has done in the past, and I am sure they take him admitting in interviews that he would like to see the government of his country overthrown and is willing to pay to have it done, to be somewhat, at least to the Russians, a criminal with evidence or reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing which is documentable. In Afghanistan or Pakistan the US has supposedly wiped out at least one small village to kill one person, yet we tell the world to trust us, a bad person may have been there, or at least we have some evidence he may have been bad but its classified. Imagine Russia blowing up the billionaire's English estate because they thought that the billionaire was there, or might have been, or could have been, but its OK because they only took out that one home, and those working for him who were helping him, or could have been, and are equally guilty or are 'regrettable accidental deaths'.
As these two reverse mirror examples of how the US or British would react or think if anyone dared to do anything remotely similar to them to what the US is doing week after week in violation of international law: war crimes, and crimes of aggression, (but since Obama is better than Bush, the world is just supposed to give it a pass), both of those examples are of people from those countries who fled and are charged with real crimes.
Image if China or Cuba or North Korea was to say to the US government, "there are Americans living in your country (America) who may be terrorists based on secret evidence we have but we can't tell you about. Please hand them over to us so we can torture them or ship them off to a third country where we can have them tortured for us, yet escape accountability for the torturing of them. If the torture, I am sorry, the interrogation of these Americans, who we admit could quite very well be perfectly innocent, but that is hardly the point, is successful, then we will have confessions from them to justify our suspicions about them, even if completely unfounded. And if you do not comply, you really should not be surprised if we level their villages or their homes instead."
And that is how we treat Pakistan, a democracy,(as if can remain one long if we keep doing this to its people, showing them often that their own government cannot protect them from us.) and supposedly is our ally. The rest of the world can and does expect even harsher requests of them. And all of this is for what? Our own generals and security experts say such attacks make us far more enemies than they kill, not to mention hundreds and hundreds of women and children dead, and many more crippled, disfigured, and will suffer for the rest of their lives. And this is to give President Obama his street cred with the CIA? To prove that the US can be every bit as barbaric as any dictator, warlord, or religious maniac? If that is so, they bravo, mission accomplished. Now is a good time to stop then.
They landed on a wild but narrow scene,
Where few but Nature's footsteps yet had been;
Prepared their arms, and with that gloomy eye,
Stern and sustained, of man's extremity,
When Hope is gone, nor Glory's self remains
To cheer resistance against death or chains,--
They stood, the three, as the three hundred stood
Who dyed Thermopylae with holy blood.
But, ah! how different! 'tis the cause makes all,
Degrades or hallows courage in its fall.
O'er them no fame, eternal and intense,
Blazed through the clouds of Death and beckoned hence;
No grateful country, smiling through her tears,
Begun the praises of a thousand years;
No nation's eyes would on their tomb be bent,
No heroes envy them their monument;
However boldly their warm blood was spilt,
Their Life was shame, their Epitaph was guilt.
And this they knew and felt, at least the one,
The leader of the band he had undone;
Who, born perchance for better things, had set
His life upon a cast which lingered yet:
But now the die was to be thrown, and all
The chances were in favour of his fall:
And such a fall! But still he faced the shock,
Obdurate as a portion of the rock
Whereon he stood, and fixed his levelled gun,
Dark as a sullen cloud before the sun.
Passage from the poem, The Island, by Lord Byron, 1823
Emphasis my own in the following...
'Every government assumes deeds and misdeeds of the past," writes Hannah Arendt in Eichmann and the Holocaust. "It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors." ...
In short, by acknowledging the crimes while refusing to pursue the criminals he has promised to rectify America's grim recent history without ever reckoning with it.
Events over the past few weeks have shown just how ethically and politically untenable this situation really is. His first term looks as though it may be consumed by these issues anyway - and not on his terms. Having released the torture memos, Obama then reversed his position on releasing photographs that accompanied them on the grounds that to do so would endanger US troops. Having opposed trying Guantánamo prisoners under military commissions, he now supports it. ...
This should leave us in no doubt as to where the ultimate responsibility lies. "Where all are guilty, no one is," wrote Arendt. "Confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing." ...
But in the absence of moral leadership the national conversation has morphed seamlessly from human rights to national security, where the issue of torture and detention is debated not on the grounds of morality but efficacy.
With the former vice-president Dick Cheney leading the charge, the right has managed to mount a spirited defence of torture in which America's rights as the potential, abstract victim of terrorism supersede detainees' rights as actual victims of torture. ...
Conventions are devised precisely to set boundaries in moments of crisis - in periods of relative harmony there is not much need to refer to them. The Geneva convention, in particular, was devised to establish the rules of engagement during times of war. If the very fact of being at war is reason enough to discard it, then it has no meaning.
And finally, if showing the world what America has done would inflame anti-American sentiment then maybe America shouldn't do it in the first place.If Obama Cedes Ground on Torture to Cheney, We'll All Pay a Heavy PriceWhatever we were, we have degenerated into a nation that finds glory in deploying the most advanced high-tech, high-explosive weaponry against some of the world’s poorest people, that justifies killing women and children, even by the dozens, even if by doing so it manages to kill one alleged “enemy” fighter. A nation that exalts remote-controlled robot drone aircraft that can attack targets in order to avoid risking soldiers’ lives, even though by doing so, it is predictable that many, many innocent people will be killed. A nation that is proud to have developed weapons of mass slaughter, from shells laden with phosphorus that burns to death, indiscriminately, those who are contacted by the splattered chemical to elaborately baroque anti-personnel fragmentation bombs that spread cute little colored objects designed to look like everything from toys to food packages, but which upon contact explode, releasing whirling metal or plastic fleschettes which shred human flesh on contact. ...
By acknowledging recent crimes while refusing to pursue
the criminals, the president has made his position untenable,
by Gary Younge, May 24, 2009, The Gaurdian/UK,
But we Americans are irrational, panicky cowards. We worry that the terrorists will come and get us.
My guess is that a lot of this is mass guilt. Whether people admit it or not, I suspect most people know on some subconscious level that we Americans have been living off the rest of the world’s misery. We know we’re stealing oil from the people of nations like Iraq and Nigeria. We know that our toys, our electronics devices and our fancy name-brand running shoes are being made by people who cannot afford to buy them themselves. We know that for decades we have been overthrowing elected governments and propping up fascist dictatorships to keep the exploitation going so that we can buy cheap goods and extract cheap resources (As Marine Medal of Honor hero Smedley Butler long ago admitted, [Reference is to "War is a Racket", see Wikipedia.com, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler] that’s what our “heroes” in uniform are generally doing overseas). ...
After granting the ‘untouchable’ status to all involved in this shameful chapter in our nation’s dangerous downward slide, he now refuses to release the photos, the incriminating evidence, and is doing so by using the exact same justification used repeatedly by his predecessors: ‘Their release would endanger the troops,’ as in ‘the revelation on NSA would endanger our national security’ and ‘stronger whistleblower laws would endanger our intelligence agencies’ and so on and so forth.
Not only that, he goes even further to shove his secrecy promotion down other nations’ courts throat. In the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and a legal resident in Britain who was held and tortured in Guantanamo from 2004 to 2009, and filed lawsuits in the British courts to have the evidence of his torture released, Mr. Obama’s position has been to threaten the British Government in order to conceal all facts and related evidence. This case involves the brutal torture and so very ‘extraordinary’ rendition practices of the previous administration, the same practices that ‘in words’ were strongly condemned by the President during his candidacy.
Today he and his administration unapologetically maintain the same Bush Administration position on extraordinary rendition, torture, and related secrecy to cover up. Here is Ben Wizner’s, the attorney who argued the case for the ACLU, response “We are shocked and deeply disappointed that the Justice Department has chosen to continue the Bush administration’s practice of dodging judicial scrutiny of extraordinary rendition and torture. This was an opportunity for the new administration to act on its condemnation of torture and rendition, but instead it has chosen to stay the course.” Yes indeed, President Obama has chosen to protect and support the course involving torture, rendition and the abuse of secrecy to cover them all up. ...
The report also includes the disagreement over the exact number of ‘Civilian Casualties’ in Afghanistan by our military airstrike:
>>“Government officials have accepted handwritten lists compiled by the villagers of 147 dead civilians. An independent Afghan human rights group said it had accounts from interviews of 117 dead. American officials say that even 100 is an exaggeration but have yet to issue their own count.”<<
Does it really matter - the difference between 147 and 117 or just 100 when it comes to children, grandmothers…innocent lives lost in a war with no well-defined objectives or plans? If for some it indeed does matter, then here is a more specific and detailed report:
>>“A copy of the government's list of the names, ages and father's names of each of the 140 dead was obtained by Reuters earlier this week. It shows that 93 of those killed were children -- the youngest eight days old -- and only 22 were adult males."<<
Maybe releasing the photographs of the nameless unrepresented victims of these airstrikes should be as important as those of torture. Because, from what I see, they and their loss of lives have been reduced to some petty number to fight about.Two Sides of the Same Coin: From State Secrets to War to Wiretaps,
By Sibel Edmonds, May 25, 2009, Counterpunch.org
When doctors started reporting that some of the victims of the US bombing of several villages in Farah Province last week—an attack that left between 117 and 147 civilians dead, most of them women and children—were turning up with deep, sharp burns on their body that “looked like” they’d been caused by white phosphorus, the US military was quick to deny responsibility.
US officials—who initially denied that the US had even bombed any civilians in Farah despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including massive craters where houses had once stood—insisted that “no white phosphorus” was used in the attacks on several villages in Farah.
Official military policy on the use of white phosphorus is to only use the high-intensity, self-igniting material as a smoke screen during battles or to illuminate targets, not as a weapon against human beings—even enemy troops. ...
C.J. Chivers, writing in the May 14 edition of the NY Times, in an article headlined “Korangal Valley Memo: In Bleak Afghan Outpost, Troops Slog On,” wrote of how an embattled US Army unit in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan, had come under attack following a morning memorial service for one of their members, Pfc. Richard Dewater, who had been killed the day before by a mine.
Chivers wrote:
>>After the ceremony, the violence resumed. The soldiers detected a Taliban spotter on a ridge, which was pounded by mortars and then white phosphorus rounds from a 155 millimeter howitzer.
What did the insurgents do? When the smoldering subsided, they attacked from exactly the same spot, shelling the outpost with 30-millimeter grenades and putting the soldiers on notice that the last display of firepower had little effect. The Americans escalated. An A-10 aircraft made several gun runs, then dropped a 500-pound bomb.<<
It is clear from this passage that the military’s use of the phosphorus shells had not been for the officially sanctioned purpose of providing cover. The soldiers had no intention of climbing that hill to attack the spotter on the ridge themselves. They were trying to destroy him with shells and bombs. In fact, the last thing they would have wanted to do was provide the spotter with a smoke cover, which would have helped him escape, and which also would have hidden him from the planes which had been called in to make gun runs at his position. Nor was this a case of illuminating the target. The incident, as Chivers reports, took place in daylight.The U.S. is Using White Phosphorous in Afghanistan,
By Dave Lindorff, May 18, 2009, Counterpunch.org
At the week-end Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, a Fellow with the Center for a New American Security, published an op-ed in the The New York Times going one step further. Their basic argument: ‘End the drone attacks’. Why? One of their arguments is pretty compelling (irrespective of the validity of the data):
>>While violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened population they seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often kills more civilians than militants. Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent — hardly “precision.”<<
Kilcullen and Exum suggest:
>>Expanding or even just continuing the drone war is a mistake. In fact, it would be in our best interests, and those of the Pakistani people, to declare a moratorium on drone strikes into Pakistan.
A moratorium on drone strikes in Pakistan? Surely a step too far? The authors readily accept that:
The appeal of drone attacks for policy makers is clear. For one thing, their effects are measurable. Military commanders and intelligence officials point out that drone attacks have disrupted terrorist networks in Pakistan, killing key leaders and hampering operations. Drone attacks create a sense of insecurity among militants and constrain their interactions with suspected informers. And, because they kill remotely, drone strikes avoid American casualties.<<
But, they argue, on balance the costs outweigh these benefits for 3 reasons:
>>First, the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians. This is similar to what happened in Somalia in 2005 and 2006, when similar strikes were employed against the forces of the Union of Islamic Courts. While the strikes did kill individual militants who were the targets, public anger over the American show of force solidified the power of extremists.<<Kilcullen: Drone strikes make Af-Pak strategy harder, not easier,
by Charlie Edwards, May 18, 2009, Globaldashboard.org
"We need to call off the drones," testified David Kilcullen, who masterminded Iraq's surge for Gen. David Petraeus, to Congress last month. One problem is a dismal precision rate—Pakistani officials claim that as many as 50 civilians die in Predator attacks for every insurgent killed. "The moral requirement is a commitment ... not to strike unless you're sure who you're hitting," says Just and Unjust Wars author Michael Walzer. Peter Bergen, author of The Osama bin Laden I Know, also argues that drones "might fatally undermine U.S. efforts" as people on the ground feel besieged. A poll last year bore this out: 52 percent of Pakistanis blame the U.S. for rising violence; only 8 percent blame Al Qaeda. But the argument is falling on deaf ears: President Obama recently increased Predator flights, and the CIA says attacks are up 30 percent from last year.
Imagine a gun or bullets that could automatically decide who to kill. One could point it in the general vicinity of the person who one intended to kill, but the choice of who to kill would ultimately be left to the machine. Sometimes it would lock on and kill the one who it was supposed to, sometimes it would hit someone else, a random pedestrian, woman, child, elderly person, baby in a carriage, the ultimate decision would be not a person's but a machine's.
Now imagine the consequences. No police officer or person using such a device could be held liable for shooting an innocent bystander. Such distinctions between innocent and guilty, victim or criminal, they would be ultimately irrelevant. No one would or could be held liable if the machine hit the wrong target, and no crime or mistake would be made, so long as it fell within acceptable parameters of suggested probability error. And if it went beyond those parameters killing far more innocent bystanders than intended criminals or other targets, still, whose fault could it be? If such deaths, possibly huge numbers of people, were not crimes but merely 'errors', flaws in an otherwise laudable system of unaccountability, freeing those whose consciences would otherwise be burdened by guilt or feelings of remorse of killing an innocent person from losing any sleep over what they do, or who they killed or maimed unnecessarily, would this be not a good thing? They could increase exponentially their 'targets' without fear of ever being held accountable for 'mistakes' since they would not be 'their' mistakes at all, just another unaccountable untraceable part of 'the system'.
The blame, if any, for these 'errors' which are not crimes anymore, not even misjudgments, certainly nothing to lose any sleep over, would be with those who made the police or other military group to carry and use such weapons of unaccountability instead of regular, judgment-required ones in which someone would ultimately held responsible for their misuse or 'wrongful deaths'. But then such people would be doing so only because they were told to do so by the authorities, elected representatives of the legitimate government, if the government is elected or legitimate. Thus the blame would not be on them either, nor even the company which invented or manufactured them, nor even on the person who invented them. They were simply making a proposal, it was not their fault the government decided to purchase them. And if they did not invent or make them and the government would have found them useful, they might have bought them instead from a competitor.
In such a system of shared blame or fault, clearly no one would ever be held responsible for any 'accidental' deaths because, literally, there would not be any definition of such a thing. Such things will happen, it is to be expected, and the benefits of their use are thought to outweigh the costs, especially since now if all are responsible, or a large enough section of society are guilty, then no one is.
We actually have instituted nationally a system of such fallible systems which can 'accidentally' destroy, or create the exact opposite of what they are supposedly implemented to correct, fairness and the public good. Paper-trail-less voting machines. Machines that can be hacked, can be used to totally subvert democracy or any election, and it is all legal. Such untraceable and unaccountable errors which can put a wrongly decided 'victor' into office more often than the Supreme Court can, are simply not anyone's fault. Not those who designed the machines, not those who purchased them, not those who authorized the funds to purchase them.
The fallibility of such systems are well known by now. They are hackable as well as prone to error, and if they were hacked, there is no way to trace by whom because there is intentionally no evidence (except by statistical analysis, hardly a smoking gun) and no way to verify without a paper trail, that a wrong result had been given or that it would not have occurred that way anyway. But 'painful' recounts of close elections such as Florida in 2000 and an even closer Minnesota Senatorial election of 2008 can now be simply waved away where these machines dominate or have influence. Nothing to recount. Take the machines word for it because that is all you will ever get, and how it works is as classified as any Honduran death squad's relations to the US government could ever be.
But there is another aspect of this which is clearly criminal. Though I would state that anyone who is responsible for having built or ordered such machines which INTENTIONALLY produce results, election results for who controls the government no less, which cannot be independently verified have committed crimes against the state or treason, many would consider that an extreme position. Get over it. Mistakes happen all the time. There is no such thing as an error free election anyway so what is the big deal if these new machines are not perfect? That is the price of progress! Heck, it can even be funny too.
Literally we now have made stealing elections in plain sight no longer a crime. Though we have many many FBI and other officials who will state otherwise, that such actions are still in fact illegal, how can that stand when those running the elections are purposely making it possible for such things to be done, to hide the evidence that any election was indeed 'stolen' and such future investigations, if any, will be hampered by a preemptive 'shredding' of any evidence of such a crime?
And even if one were to state that such things are merely 'bad judgment' such as creating a system of confinement or 'interrogation' based upon torture, sexual assaults, raping of relatives or threats to do so to elicit cooperation, then how can they explain away a doubling or tripling of doubt in the public of the fairness in their elections, that the person 'elected' to represent them actually won the most votes honestly? The last poll I saw, more than 30% of Americans doubted the fairness of the electoral process, in a large part due to unchallengeable, unverifiable electronic voting machines. That politicians and electoral boards can flagrantly put in systems of voting counting that completely and provably severely diminish the public's faith in the honestly of their elections shows such laws against tampering clearly do not extend to giving people valid reasons to not wish to vote at all. Why vote if you don't think it will be counted fairly? And if that is the intent after all, you have a completely legal way to disenfranchise millions simply because of 'bureaucratic bad decisions' which can create the exact same conditions as riggable voting machines without actually having to rig them except when one thinks simply turning people off to the idea of voting has not worked well enough this particular time.
Once the evidence came out that such machines could be rigged, leaving them in place and not recalling them should have been prosecuted for the crime that it was, conspiracy to continue to make possible the rigging and theft of an election. And beyond that, even if such machines are not 'provable' to be 'hackable' simply putting in systems which do not have or severely diminish the public's confidence in the honesty of their elections, that alone should make it a crime. For that which undermines the public's desire to vote because such elections are purposely being held up as possibly being or having been tainted, with evidence quite enough to back that suspicion up, should itself be enough to make it a crime, as conspiring to suppress legitimate voters from having reason to vote.
One would think that the Democrats, more than the Republicans who would benefit from such machines, would act to correct this and put in place laws that would ban machines which produce vote counts not verifiable by manual recounts after the fact, but that does not seem to be the case. Corruption in both parties by corporate interests may indeed stall action on this long enough for those who make and profit from this ability to steal elections to remain in business to once again be in a position to keep or expand such electronic systems, which not only may be hackable, may be able to be illegally used to benefit one candidate over another, but also to corrode the public's faith, shaky as that is, that their government is not completely corrupt already.
When I voted in 2008, it was on a machine that counted the votes electronically, yet it was required to produce a printed ballot as well which could be used in the event of a recall to verify the computers tabulation. Such machines provide all the benefits of electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper trail except one, they cannot be used to steal an election. States that purchased, never mind those that continue to purchase, such machines that do not produce a paper trail can claim that they do not have funds to purchase new machines, and going back to older more verifiable systems is not practical. That is to admit that it is too expensive to have a system of voting that does not without due reason corrode the public's image of the honesty of their government and its elections, and that a system with a built-in potential to be made to give the completely wrong result than what it was intended to do, (if it indeed was ever intended to produce results accurate to how people voted,) is not valuable enough, or that completely verifiable honest machines are not where the most profits, kickbacks, contracts, or bribes, are to be found. Is that not after all, how government contracts for things like voting machines or anything else are awarded?
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When I first thought of writing this a year ago, I had elections primarily in mind. However the US governments use of drones in 'targeted killings' (read assassinations) in Afghanistan and Pakistan show that the idea of unaccountability in the use of 'smart' weapons that I wanted to start with, have a much more real life meaning than in how it relates to election theft, real, potential, or the threat of which.
Never mind the overwhelming disproportionate killing of innocent civilians (I know, there are no 'innocent' people over there, or the argument which carries the day stating that), more than 50 men, women, children (mostly women and children) killed for every 'terrorist' killed, it is wholly and completely being done in defiance of international law, treaties, and common sense.
Before Christianity meant those who go to church regularly in the United States are 50% more likely to approve of torturing people than those who do not, it meant a religion based upon the principle of reciprocity. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Beyond 'American Exceptionalism' or that we are killing people in forwarding 'God's plan', what we are doing by such assassinations is completely what we have determined only the United States is justified in doing.
We have been operating completely outside of international law so long now that many to most Americans cannot even recognize that there is or ever was such a thing, or that if there was, that it should not apply to us or our nations actions equally as to others.
The 'justification' for these killings, some in countries we are not even at war with, and doing it in an 'extrajudicial' (read 'completely illegal') way, is that if we asked the governments in which whose territory where they are located to hand them over to us for extradition, that they would be unable or unwilling to do so. This also is limited by the fact that we often do not have any or enough evidence to justify them complying, other than simply handing over anyone we ask them to to be held without trail on evidence we do not have or are not willing to divulge. In such instances as to demand complete trust that we are not acting in error, bad faith, or in haste, in complete contradiction by the way to how we have acted in the past in this manner and are continuing to do so, we do not think such governments would comply with such requests. So we simply kill them all. In their houses, in their churches or mosques, wherever we think they are regardless of who may be around them at the time so long as we say we did it at a time when we think we killed the fewest numbers of innocent people possible, or a least tried to that effect or made some effort in that direction.
The mirror that the American government cannot see in yet is visible to the entire world outside of the United States is 'What if other nations tried to do that as well? Are we the only nation that has people they want, but that they are in countries unwilling to turn them over to them?”
The United States has many people living in it that China wants. We even house the leader of the Falon Gong movement which China not only considers a subversive, but the head of a movement who considers himself Jesus Christ reincarnated, has tens of millions of followers, and is considered a threat to their governments existence. Far more so than some Afghan or Pakistani holed up in some remote village we may or may not have any clear evidence against, certainly not with means to destabilize or overthrow our government. What would we think if China were to wipe out his US residence, killing everyone in the building, could they be that precise, whether he were home at the time or not being unimportant, but its OK because they tried at the time of day to kill the least amount of 'innocent' people. They could even make the case as we have, that his servants, followers, lawyers, in his house at the time, not to mention his family could hardly be described as wholly 'innocent' anyway. Not when after torturing a chauffeur for years after holding him without charges, and again torturing him (Enhanced Interrogation ® TM, Newspeak aside) for years, convicted him of terrorism by virtue of being the driver of a terrorist. How innocent can a maid or housekeeper really be? Of course they have it coming to them.
The British have given asylum to at least one Russian billionaire who has called for the overthrow of the Russian government. Russia very much would like to extradite him so they can charge him for things they say he has done in the past, and I am sure they take him admitting in interviews that he would like to see the government of his country overthrown and is willing to pay to have it done, to be somewhat, at least to the Russians, a criminal with evidence or reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing which is documentable. In Afghanistan or Pakistan the US has supposedly wiped out at least one small village to kill one person, yet we tell the world to trust us, a bad person may have been there, or at least we have some evidence he may have been bad but its classified. Imagine Russia blowing up the billionaire's English estate because they thought that the billionaire was there, or might have been, or could have been, but its OK because they only took out that one home, and those working for him who were helping him, or could have been, and are equally guilty or are 'regrettable accidental deaths'.
As these two reverse mirror examples of how the US or British would react or think if anyone dared to do anything remotely similar to them to what the US is doing week after week in violation of international law: war crimes, and crimes of aggression, (but since Obama is better than Bush, the world is just supposed to give it a pass), both of those examples are of people from those countries who fled and are charged with real crimes.
Image if China or Cuba or North Korea was to say to the US government, "there are Americans living in your country (America) who may be terrorists based on secret evidence we have but we can't tell you about. Please hand them over to us so we can torture them or ship them off to a third country where we can have them tortured for us, yet escape accountability for the torturing of them. If the torture, I am sorry, the interrogation of these Americans, who we admit could quite very well be perfectly innocent, but that is hardly the point, is successful, then we will have confessions from them to justify our suspicions about them, even if completely unfounded. And if you do not comply, you really should not be surprised if we level their villages or their homes instead."
And that is how we treat Pakistan, a democracy,(as if can remain one long if we keep doing this to its people, showing them often that their own government cannot protect them from us.) and supposedly is our ally. The rest of the world can and does expect even harsher requests of them. And all of this is for what? Our own generals and security experts say such attacks make us far more enemies than they kill, not to mention hundreds and hundreds of women and children dead, and many more crippled, disfigured, and will suffer for the rest of their lives. And this is to give President Obama his street cred with the CIA? To prove that the US can be every bit as barbaric as any dictator, warlord, or religious maniac? If that is so, they bravo, mission accomplished. Now is a good time to stop then.
posted by Jared DuBois | 4:03 PM
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