The Drone Program Whistleblower Problem

by Laurie Calhoun | Aug 2, 2021

“I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole…We had entire training courses…”- Former CIA Director and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

The concept of whistleblowing seems simple on its face: a government employee recognizes that crimes are being committed by the agency they work for and reports them so that the public is made aware that their tax dollars are being misused by those in charge. But what happens when large parts of the operations of an entire agency (such as the CIA), or even the entire executive branch of government, are grounded in immoral behavior? Is it possible to effectively “blow the whistle” on the entire sprawling apparatus? Or is that conceptually impossible, given that the government reserves for itself the prerogative to issue judgments on what it does?

A system of checks and balances in the United States is said by its defenders to be preserved through having three separate and independent branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. If a governor enacts a law which some citizens believe violates the Constitution, then they can sue the governor, and a judge will issue a verdict on the matter. If the citizens do not win the suit, they can still appeal the ruling by taking the case up again in a higher court. Eventually, the most contentious disputes end up at the Supreme Court, where debate comes to an end and a final judgment is made. This system allows some degree of checks and balances on lower court judges whose political biases may impede objective assessment of the matter in question. Of course, Supreme Court justices, too, are human beings who have been appointed by politicians, so bias cannot be altogether eliminated. But because the nine Supreme Court justices are never appointed by the same president, there is some hope that perspectives will be balanced, and at the very least, dissenting justices in the minority are able to articulate the grounds for their dissent, so that if ever the matter reaches the high court again, it can be informed by those concerns.

Legality and morality, however, are two different things, as much as we may wish for the former to reflect the latter. Expressing moral dissent from what is being done by the government becomes far more difficult when the perpetrators are granted by law the ability to commit moral atrocities, as in war. During wartime, the standards of civil society are completely flouted, permitting the premeditated, intentional killing of human beings, even of soldiers who have been coerced to fight, and even of completely innocent civilians, provided only that the perpetrators claim to have good intentions. Antiwar activists continue to question the “just war paradigm” presupposed by modern military practice, but the complete abolition of war remains a lofty ideal, given the less lofty financial dynamics propelling the war machine forward.

As difficult as it is to take issue with war itself, many veterans throughout history have done just that, having once witnessed firsthand the stark disparity between wartime rhetoric and reality. It is even more difficult to criticize government killers when they operate under a cloak of secrecy. If final judgments regarding alleged wrongdoers are exclusive to the very institution or branch being criticized, then the system becomes microcosmic of tyranny, for the head of the institution effectively writes the “laws” for his subordinates. One example of this was the military’s own assessment of events captured in the video footage Collateral Murder, which was shared by Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning through Wikileaks. In that harrowing film, Reuters journalists are killed by U.S. soldiers hovering above them in a helicopter. After assessing the episode in response to public outrage over what transpired in New Baghdad, Iraq, on that day, the Pentagon concluded that the soldiers had in fact acted in accordance with military protocol. Manning did the public a great service by revealing a shocking truth about what the U.S. military regards as acceptable behavior.

Notwithstanding the oft-recited claim that the United States is a pillar of democracy, there are sizable portions of the U.S. government which are beyond the reach of effective criticism for the simple reason that they are shrouded in secrecy on grounds of national defense. Notably, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the part of the Pentagon’s wide-ranging initiatives paid for using the ever-expanding Black Budget operate with effective impunity. The pretext of “national self defense” is used to prosecute and sometimes destroy the lives of those who dare to demur from the sorts of immoral activities undertaken by government entities allegedly for the good of the nation. In many cases, what are really being defended are the agencies themselves and the comportment of their compliant employees.

The reason given for the assiduous pursuit of whistleblowers in such cases is identical to the alleged reason for the secrecy: that to reveal anything about what is underway is to compromise national security. When whistleblowers expose what look to be war crimes, they are said by prosecutors specifically to endanger the lives of those implicated in the allegations—both regular government employees and cultivated sources. Indeed, the mere possibility of endangering the perpetrators—even when there is no evidence of any harm done by the leaks—usually suffices for the prosecutors of whistleblowers to win their cases. The irony, of course, is that the reason why the revelation of unsavory government activities to the public is dangerous to the perpetrators is manifestly that the acts in question are immoral and will be denounced by most any right-minded person who is made aware of them.

Before the twenty-first century, crimes such as the assassination of suspected enemy spies were committed both by the CIA and by the Pentagon. There was very little, if any, congressional oversight over secretive assassination programs throughout the Cold War, and the small number of congresspersons privy to the details evidently agreed with what was going on. Nonetheless, in the 1970s, the Church Committee and the Pike Committee did manage eventually to rein in the CIA and the Pentagon run amok during the Vietnam War, when hatred and fear of communism led government administrators to devise morally dubious programs such as Phoenix, which resulted in widespread civilian carnage. A moratorium was put on assassination by President Ford in 1976 through Executive Order 11905, and it seemed that the self-correcting system had worked to some degree—albeit not in time to save the lives of thousands of human beings.

During the Global War on Terror waged in response to the events of September 11, 2001, the moratorium on assassination came to an end. Far from being regarded as taboo, such killing was normalized and came eventually to be openly acknowledged and even vaunted to the public. In effect, the intentional, premeditated execution of specific individuals—formerly known as assassination and considered illegal under international law—was rebranded as targeted killing and embraced as a new standard operating procedure of what was enthusiastically billed as smart war. By using remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), or lethal drones, it would no longer be necessary to risk troops’ lives, which was naturally good news to politicians who promoted the drone program without thinking about the consequences for the people on the ground, nor the global effects later on down the line, when other governments began to deploy lethal drones in achieving their aims.

“Taking the battle to the enemy” was deemed necessary for national self-defense, and now, the marketing line went, it could be done without sacrificing any U.S. soldiers’ lives. There might be a bit of so-called collateral damage here and there, but as usual it would come to be ignored or brushed aside as one of the inevitable consequences of “the fog of war.” By portraying targeted killing as a rational way of minimizing combat losses, the whole notion of what counts as permissible warfare was transformed, seemingly irrevocably, given that the United States and Israel set the precedent. Over the course of the war on terror, thousands of people have been killed, and many times more maimed and terrorized, using missiles launched from drones hovering above Yemen, Syria, in Northern Africa, and beyond, in programs administered by the CIA rather than the military. The fact that drone strikes “outside areas of active hostility” (where no U.S. troops were on the ground to protect) were made the province of the CIA to initiate and supervise was diaphanously intended to evade meddling congressional attempts at oversight.

By now, lethal drones have been purchased by governments all over the world, who are free to use these weapons to dispatch anyone whom they designate as the enemy, no matter where they may be. First in line among non-U.S. heads of state to emulate President Obama in intentionally hunting down and assassinating citizens located abroad was U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. Cameron used lethal drones in 2015 to execute British citizens located in Syria, despite the fact that capital punishment is forbidden by U.K. law. Had Cameron indicted and tried his victims in Britain, then they would likely still be alive, even if found guilty in a court of law. Rather than prosecute his targets as citizens entitled to due process, Cameron waited until they traveled to Syria before extrajudicially assassinating them.

Where formerly it was considered illegal (under the Geneva Conventions) for a soldier to execute an unarmed enemy soldier point blank, in the Drone Age it is said to be perfectly permissible for an operator located thousands of miles away from a “battlefield” devoid of allied soldiers to push a button and eliminate a suspected enemy combatant, along with anyone who happens to be around him at the time. Still reeling from the shock of what transpired on September 11, 2001, politicians and the populace alike were essentially tricked into believing the manifest absurdity that a soldier located in a trailer in Nevada could be said to kill in self-defense a person who not only was not provided with the right to surrender nor prove that he was not a terrorist, but in fact was not even armed. Understandably, some of the enlisted soldiers lured into working in the U.S. government’s interagency drone program have deeply regretted their participation and abandoned the profession.

A few of the persons privy to the details of the drone program have spoken out, including Daniel Hale, a former signals intelligence analyst who was recently sentenced to nearly four years in prison for violating the Espionage Act. Hale, who worked in the drone assassination program in Afghanistan, stole and shared a trove of top-secret documents, which were published online by Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept as “The Drone Papers,” and in book form as The Assassination Complex. The documents confirmed what other apostate drone operators had already claimed: that the U. S. government, far from achieving “near certainty” about their targets before dispatching them with missiles launched from drones, in fact defined all victims of drone strikes as Enemy Killed in Action or EKIA, provided only that they were military-aged males. Instead of needing to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before executing these suspects, the entire program has been based on the preposterous premise that such persons are guilty until proven innocent. Under this assumption, lengthy hit lists have been drawn up for years by analysts using circumstantial evidence such as SIM card data from cellphones of suspected terrorists. No matter that some of the military-aged males incinerated by drones may have worked as taxi drivers, delivery persons, etc. If their number was derived during a data sweep from the phone of a person already suspected of having terrorist organization connections, then they became “guilty until proven innocent” by transitivity. In “crowd killing,” entire groups of men of unknown identity have been eliminated under the assumption of guilt by association.

The atrociousness of this inversion of justice, which took place during Barack Obama’s presidency and resulted in the deaths of thousands of unnamed persons of color, is difficult to exaggerate. The fact that Hale, in an eleven-page handwritten letter which he sent to the judge presiding over his trial, has explicitly taken issue with President Obama’s public statements on the drone program makes it seem very unlikely that President Biden will pardon the whistleblower—although I certainly hope that I am wrong about this. The problem in this case is that to pardon Daniel Hale would be to acknowledge that either President Obama lied to the public when he said that drone strikes were only carried out when there was “near certainty” that no civilians would be harmed, or else he was incompetent, having no idea what was being done by his drone program czar, John Brennan, and those whom he supervised. A classic Charybdis and Scylla.

Daniel Hale is obviously not a spy, for his avowed intention in disclosing top secret documents was only to reveal to the public what was going on in the drone program under a bogus pretext of national self defense. What he revealed is not that a few rogue operators have killed innocent people with impunity, but that the entire drone program is premised on the assumption that it is perfectly acceptable to execute anyone anywhere on the basis of purely circumstantial evidence. In addition to cellphone SIM card data, drone video footage and the testimony of bribed informants on the ground are also used to add names to hit lists. But in the third world countries where these drone strikes have been carried out, the destitute locals who provide HUMINT, or human intelligence, obviously have compelling financial incentives to locate targets for the people paying them.

To acknowledge that Daniel Hale was right to act on his conscience and reveal to the populace that they were being lied to is simultaneously to assert that the entire drone program is fundamentally misguided, indeed just as wrong as murder—because that is what it is. Hale correctly recognized the financial incentives driving the employees of the “killing machine,” with private military companies (PMCs) rewarded for identifying as many “terrorists” (in reality, suspects), as possible. All of the employees involved in the hunting down and killing of suspects using lethal drones outside areas of active hostilities have been embroiled in a taxpayer funded large-scale program of mass murder. Yet this killing has been rendered banal to most citizens, in large part because the mainstream media outlets decline to discuss the matter at all, deferring as they always do to the Pentagon under, again, a pretext of national self-defense.

The Con Job of the Century?

by Laurie Calhoun | Jun 22, 2021

Over the course of the past century, a number of truly awe-inspiring heists have been carried out by con artists, whose modus operandi is to exploit human frailties such as credulity, insecurity and greed. Con is short for confidence, for the con artist must first gain the trust of his targets, after which he persuades them to hand their money over to him. A con job differs from a moral transaction between two willing, fully informed trading partners because one of the partners is deceived, and deception constitutes a form of coercion. In other words, the person being swindled is not really free. If he knew what was really going on, he would never agree to invest in the scheme.

The “Ponzi scheme” was named after Charles Ponzi, who in the 1920s persuaded investors to believe that he was generating impressive profits by buying international reply coupons (IRCs) at low prices abroad and redeeming them in the United States at higher rates, the fluctuating currency market being the secret to his seemingly savvy success. In reality, Ponzi used his low-level investors’ money to pay off earlier investors, support himself, and expand his business by luring more and more investors in. More recently, Bernie Madoff managed to abscond with billions of dollars by posing as an investment genius who could deliver sizable, indeed exceptional, returns on his clients’ investments.

It is plausible that at least some of the early investors in such gambits, who are paid as promised, suppress whatever doubts may creep up in their minds as they bask in the splendor of their newfound wealth. But even those who begin consciously to grasp what is going on may turn a blind eye as the scheme grows to engulf investors who will be fleeced, having been persuaded to participate not only by the smooth-talking con artist, but also by the reported profits of previous investors. Eventually, however, the house of cards collapses, revealing the incredible but undeniable truth: there never were any investments at all. No trading ever took place, and all of the company’s transactions were either deposits or withdrawals of gullible investors’ cash.

Before a con artist is unmasked, nearly everyone involved plays along, either because they stand to gain, or because they truly believe. Sometimes the implications of having been wrong are simply too devastating to admit, and these same psychological dynamics operate in many other realms where most people would never suspect anything like a Ponzi scheme. It is arguable, for example, that the continuous siphoning of U.S. citizens’ income to pay for misguided military interventions abroad constitutes a form of Ponzi scheme. If President George H. W. Bush had never used taxpayers’ dollars to wage the First Gulf War on Iraq in 1991 and to install permanent military bases in the Middle East, then Osama bin Laden would likely never have called for jihad against the United States. If the U.S. military had not invaded Iraq in 2003, then ISIS would never have emerged and spread to Syria and beyond. Such implications are deeply unsettling, and even in the face of mounds of evidence, most people prefer to cling to the official story according to which the 1991 Gulf War was necessary and just, while the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were completely unprovoked, and all subsequent interventions a matter of national self-defense.

The series of bombing campaigns in the Middle East beginning in 1991 are plausibly regarded as a type of Ponzi scheme because the “investors” (taxpayers), have actually paid to make themselves worse, not better, off. Not only have the “blowback” attacks perpetrated in response to U.S. military intervention abroad killed many innocent persons, but the lives of thousands of soldiers have been and continue to be wrecked through dubious deployments abroad. Along with all of the blood spilled, much treasure has been lost. The more than $28 trillion national debt (as of June 2021) is due in part to the massive Pentagon budget, rubber-stamped annually by Congress, to say nothing of the many other “discretionary” initiatives claimed to be necessary in national defense. Afghanistan is a perfect example of how billions of taxpayer dollars continue to be tossed into the wind even as the formal U.S. military presence winds down. The reason why the War on Terror continues on is not because it is protecting the citizens who pay for it or helping the people of the Middle East but because it has proved to be profitable to persons in the position to influence U.S. foreign policy.

One might reasonably assume that anyone who stands to enrich himself from government policies should be excluded from consequential deliberations over what ought to be done, and in certain realms, the quite rational concern with conflict of interest still operates to some degree. With regard to the military, however, there has been a general acquiescence by the populace to the idea that because only experts inside the system are capable of giving competent advice, they must be consulted, even when they will profit from the policies they promote, such as bombing, which invariably increases the value of stock in companies such as Raytheon. Throughout history, there has always been a push by war profiteers to promote military interventions, but Dick Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush and vice president under his son, George W. Bush, took war profiteering to an entirely new level. By privatizing many military services through the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), Cheney effectively ushered in a period of war entrepreneurialism, beginning with Halliburton (of which he was CEO from 1995-2000), which continues on today, making it possible for a vast nexus of subcontractors to profit from the never-ending War on Terror, and to do so in good conscience. When more people have self-interested reasons for supporting military interventions, then they become more likely to take place.

With the quelling of concerns that conflict of interest should limit the persons who advise the president on matters of foreign policy, the formal requirement that the secretary of defense be not a military officer but a civilian has been effectively dropped, with both James Mattis and Lloyd Austin easily confirmed as “exceptions” to the rule, despite the fact that, not only did both have significant financial interests in promoting war, but each also had a full career in the military before retiring and being invited to lead the DoD. Military men are inclined to seek military solutions to conflict, which is undoubtedly why high-ranking officers are invited to join the boards of military companies, making Mattis and Austin textbook examples of “revolving door” appointments.

Arguably even more ruinous to the republic in the longterm than the rampant conflict of interest inherent to “revolving door” appointments between the for-profit military industry and the government has been the infiltration of the military into academia, with many universities receiving large grants from the Defense Department for research. Academia would be a natural place for intellectual objections to the progressive militarization of society, but when scholars and scientists themselves benefit directly from DoD funds, they have self-interested reasons to dismiss or discredit those types of critiques—whether consciously or not—in publishing, retention and promotion decisions. In addition to the institutional research support provided by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), successful academics may receive hefty fees as consultants for the Pentagon and its many affiliates, making them far more likely to defend the hegemon than to raise moral objections to its campaigns of mass homicide euphemistically termed “national defense”.

As a result of the tentacular spread of the military, Cui bono? as a cautionary maxim has been replaced by Who cares? People seem not at all bothered by these profound conflicts of interest, and the past year has illustrated how cooption and corruption may creep easily into other realms as well. Indeed, there is a sense in which today we have two MICs: the military-industrial-complex and, now, in the age of Covid-19, the medical-industrial-complex. This latter development can be viewed, in part, as a consequence of the former, for in recent decades the military industrial complex has sprouted tentacles to become the military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics banking complex. Long before Covid-19 appeared on the scene, the Veterans Administration (VA) adopted pro-Big Pharma policies, including the prescription of a vast array of psychotropic medications in lieu of “talk therapy” to treat PTSD among veterans and to preemptively medicate soldiers who expressed anxiety at what they were asked to do in Afghanistan and Iraq. The increase in the prescription of drugs to military personnel generated hefty profits for pharmaceutical firms, allowing them to expand marketing and lobbying efforts to target not only physicians but also politicians and the populace.

Since the initial launch of Prozac in 1986, the pharmaceutical industry has become an extremely powerful force in Western society, made all the more so in the United States when restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertising were lifted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1997. Already by 2020, about 23% of Americans (nearly 77 million out of a population of 331 million) were taking psychiatric medications, and those numbers appear to have increased significantly during the 2020 lockdowns, which took a toll on many people’s psychological well-being. As medications are prescribed more and more throughout every sector of society, drug makers exert a greater and greater influence on policy, even as the heroin/fentanyl overdose epidemic, caused directly by the aggressive marketing and rampant overprescription of opioid painkillers, continues on.

Just as the military industry is granted the benefit of the doubt on the assumption that they are helping to protect the nation, the pharmaceutical industry accrues respectability from its association with the medical profession. Who, after all, could oppose “defense” and “health”? In reality, however, for-profit weapons and drug companies are beholden not to their compatriots, nor to humanity, but to their stockholders. War and disease are profitable, while peace and health are not. The CEOs of military and pharmaceutical companies, like all businesspersons, seek to ensure that their profits increase by all means necessary, the prescription opioid epidemic being a horrific case in point. Just as academics may enjoy Defense Department funding, many doctors and administrators of medical institutions today derive essential funding from drug companies and the government, whether directly or indirectly. These connections are immensely important because many politicians receive generous campaign contributions from Big Pharma, which by now has more lobbyists in Washington, DC, than there are congresspersons, and not without reason. Formulary decisions at the VA regarding the appropriateness of prescribing, for example, dangerous antipsychotic medications such as Astrazeneca’s Seroquel to soldiers as sleep aids are made by administrators who are political appointees, as are public health officials more generally.

With a functional Fourth Estate, it would be possible to question if not condemn the conflicts of interest operating in the for-profit military and medical realms. Unfortunately, however, we no longer have a competent press. Throughout the Coronavirus crisis, this has become abundantly clear as alternative viewpoints on every matter of policy have been squelched, suppressed, and outright censored in the name of the truth, when there may have been ulterior motives at play. In fact, the complete quashing of any directives regarding non-vaccine therapies for mitigating the effects of Covid-19—including Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine—may be best explained by the simple fact that FDA emergency use authorization of vaccines in the United States is possible only when “there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives,” as is stated plainly on the specification sheets for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Regarding the origins of the virus, early claims by some researchers that Covid-19 may have been produced in the virology lab in Wuhan and released accidentally were swiftly dismissed as “conspiracy theories.” Anyone who suggested this eminently plausible origin of the virus was immediately denounced by the media and deplatformed or censored by the big tech giants. “Gain-of-function” research, often funded by the military, involves making existent viruses deadlier to human beings and is said by its proponents to be necessary in order to be prepared for future natural pandemics or in the event that some enemy might use such a virus as a bioweapon. The latter is a familiar line of reasoning among military researchers, invoked also (mutatis mutandis) in nuclear proliferation and the military colonization of space: we must develop the latest and greatest nuclear bombs and effect total spectrum domination of the galaxy before any other government has the chance to do so! Many of the scientists involved in these endeavors may have the best of intentions, but that does nothing to detract from the propensity of human beings to commit errors.

In the case of Covid-19, the origin of the virus was deemed settled because Dr. Anthony Fauci, an ardent apologist for gain-of-function research and the reigning public health guru in the United States, authoritatively insisted that the transition from bats to humans came about naturally. After Fauci’s pronouncement, it seemed a matter of common knowledge to “right-thinking” believers in The Science^TM everywhere that the virus probably came from the wet market in Wuhan, where live animals were sold as ingredients for use in culinary delicacies such as bat soup. When the World Health Organization (WHO) looked into the matter, they appointed Peter Daszak to lead the investigation. But Daszak had in fact funded gain-of-function research by repackaging and distributing U.S. government funds through his firm EcoHealth Alliance. Needless to say, Daszak had every reason in the world to squelch any suggestion to the effect that he himself may have had something to do with the millions of deaths caused by Covid-19.

We do not yet know whether the virus had a natural or manmade origin, but if in fact U.S. taxpayer-funded research caused the pandemic and millions of deaths, then this would constitute yet another example of a government-perpetrated Ponzi scheme, rivaling and perhaps even surpassing the War on Terror in its negative consequences. We pay for gain-of-function research (determined by bureaucrats such as Anthony Fauci to be a good idea), and then we suffer the consequences when things go awry. Note that, just as Ponzi scheme perpetrators may begin as regular businesspersons before committing fraud, there is no need in the case of Covid-19 to invoke conspiratorial hypotheses. Many politicians who promoted and thereby helped to realize the 2003 invasion of Iraq may have been convinced that Saddam Hussein posed a grave danger to the world. Similarly, there may not have been a conscious intention on the part of anyone to let loose the SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) virus on the world. After all, it’s not as though incompetence among government bureaucrats is a rarity.

Whether accidentally or intentionally caused, disasters invariably pave the way for massive power grabs on the part of select persons advantageously situated. Once Iraq had been invaded, this served as the pretext for sacrificing even more blood and treasure as the quagmire intensified and spread to other countries. When the Covid-19 virus arrived on the scene, it became the pretext for a massive and abrupt transfer of wealth. Not only did much of the commerce of small businesses crushed by lockdowns migrate to companies such as Amazon and Walmart, but billions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into pharmaceutical firms.

The multi-trillion dollar Covid-19 aid packages included provisions for research and development, testing, and hospitals. But the most lucrative venture in all of this frenzy has been a vaccine program with universal aspirations. The U.S. government funded the development of the Covid-19 vaccines, and now that they exist, President Biden has purchased 500 million more doses of the Pfizer product to donate to other countries. The global propaganda campaign to vaccinate everyone everywhere with elixirs touted initially by their developers as having up to 95% efficacy, too, has been paid for by governments. It was unclear from the initial press releases about the spectacular new vaccines what efficacy actually meant, as there was a fair amount of equivocation regarding whether the treatments would confer immunity and prevent transmission of the disease or simply lessen the severity of symptoms. After millions of persons had already been vaccinated, it emerged that the reports of 95% efficacy were at best misleading and at worst fraudulent, for the reported percentages were relative risk reduction (RRR) rates, which reflect outcomes only for the small proportion of the population vulnerable to the disease. When the rates are calculated for the general population, the vast majority of whom are not vulnerable to Covid-19, it turns out (as those who declined the vaccine had already surmised on the basis of the survival statistics), that the absolute risk reduction (ARR) rates of the Pfizer, Moderna, Astra Zeneca, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are quite low, to be precise: 0.84%, 1.2%, 1.3%, and 1.2%, respectively. Nonetheless, aggressive campaigns to require vaccine passports of citizens as a condition on their resumption of normal life are everywhere on display.

A clue that the well-being of patients is not at the forefront of the minds of those running the “vaccine everyone” campaign has been the encouragement of pregnant women and children to undergo vaccination, though neither group is at serious risk from the virus and neither group was included in the trials used to secure emergency authorization. Even more remarkably, against all established science on immunology, the idea that persons who have already recovered from the disease must also “get the jab” has been aggressively promoted all around the globe. Judging by the media coverage, the reason for insisting that persons who were already infected with and have recovered from Covid-19 must also be vaccinated is supposed to be that people can become reinfected with the virus. That line of reasoning, however, is refuted by the statistics for reinfection. As of June 2021, out of nearly 180 million cases of Covid-19 worldwide, there were 148 confirmed cases of reinfection. Studies recently published in Nature and by the Cleveland Clinic conclude that vaccination offers no benefit to previously infected persons.

In the build up to every new war, many people who do not stand to benefit from the intervention and may even be harmed by it often succumb to the propaganda and enthusiastically take up the cause. In the current crisis, the false dichotomization into two exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories, the enlightened science lovers and the anti-vaxxers, is also a part of a propaganda campaign. The persons who have declined vaccination, either because they already survived Covid-19, or because they prefer to wait for longterm safety data and do not believe that the possible benefits outweigh the unknown risks, are dismissed as crackpots, when in fact they are simply being prudent. Yet the media persists in propagating a misleading depiction of vaccine hesitancy in this specific case as proof of hostility toward science. This sort of polarization of the populace is, needless to say, on display during wartime as well, when anyone who dares to oppose a military intervention is depicted as a supporter of a tyrant abroad or an irrational pacifist or, when all else fails, a simple traitor.

It would be incredibly naïve to fall prey to the idea that pharmaceutical executives are somehow philanthropic, for they command enormous salaries for maximizing their stockholders’ profits. In 2020, Pfizer CEO Anthony Bourla enjoyed a 17% increase in compensation, to $21 million, while Moderna’s CEO, Stéphane Bancel, became a billionaire. The pharmaceutical industry and the military industry, despite comprising publicly traded companies, are prime examples of “crony capitalism”, benefiting as they do from large infusions of cash from the government, which is allocated by bureaucrats many of whom have career and other financial interests at stake. Moreover, the funding links between the military and the public health and pharmaceutical sectors form a tangled web. Not only did the Department of Defense receive a chunk of the Covid-19 rescue packages, but gain-of-function research has been paid for by military institutions. Indeed, much of the funding provided to Peter Daszak for redistribution by EcoHealth Alliance derived from the U.S. Department of Defense.

Both the for-profit military and for-profit pharmaceutical industry now use the mainstream media as a propaganda outlet to further the interests of their shareholders. Even the independent media have been infiltrated by pro-military and pro-pharma voices, which is why falsehoods such as “Saddam is in cahoots with Bin Laden and has WMDs!” and “Lockdowns save lives!” are able to gain such traction among the populace. That liberty-restricting policies should be lifted only on the condition of vaccination requires people to believe that the mediation policies were both necessary and effective. But in the United States, the differences in outcomes in various states do not appear to depend on the timing or extent of lockdowns. Nonetheless, just as the mass surveillance and collection of people’s private data was accepted by many as a necessary part of the War on Terror, many persons with no financial interests at stake now rally on behalf of Big Pharma for universal vaccination.

The global propaganda campaign to require people to show health papers or a “vaccine passport” in order to participate in human society—to travel, dine out, shop or even gather together in groups—reveals that the mistakes made by a few actors are being seized upon to exert more and more control over the population. The mass surveillance of Americans was accepted by many as necessary, given the potential dangers of factional terrorism, and now, having spent more than a year whipped up by the media into a paralyzing state of fear for a virus which kills less than 1% of the persons it infects, many citizens appear willing to accept what influential globalists have been insisting must be “the new normal”. This is a grave mistake.

It is too early to know how this unprecedented chapter in human history will end, but the trends are not encouraging. With countries continuing their serial lockdowns, travel restrictions, masking, testing, and quarantine requirements, they deepen the divisions already on display making it seem more likely that some form of apartheid state with totalitarian qualities will emerge. Does any government have the right to force its citizens to undergo a medical treatment for which, according to all available statistical data, they have no need? Why are universities requiring vaccination as a condition of enrollment and employment? Why are more doctors not rising up to challenge the aggressive push to vaccinate everyone everywhere with an experimental treatment? There is no medical basis whatsoever for requiring previously infected persons to undergo vaccination, which has never been demanded in the case of any other disease.

What is at stake is not merely inconvenience, and the solution is not, as some liberty lovers have suggested (if only facetiously), to acquire a forged vaccine passport. We should reject in the most categorical of terms the very idea that anyone anywhere should be required to prove his health status to anyone else and that anyone anywhere should be compelled to undergo a medical treatment against his own will—whatever his reasons may be. One’s medical choices affect one’s health, well-being and body, which no government can be said to own. To relinquish one’s right to one’s own body is to render oneself the property of a tyrannical state. If citizens permit the government to strip them of their right to make decisions about how to lead their very own lives, then they will have been fleeced far worse than the victims of the most mercenary Ponzi scheme, having paid with their freedom for their future enslavement.

The Pentagon Turns ‘Feminist’

by Laurie Calhoun | Mar 22, 2021

For many years, male U.S. citizens have been required to register with the Selective Service, an independent agency within the Executive Branch of the U.S. Federal Government, so that they can be located in the event that it becomes necessary to reinstate military conscription. The most recent military draft was ended after the Vietnam War, in 1973, and ever since then people have proudly pointed to the “voluntary” terms of U.S. military enlistment. That soldiers are voluntary is also frequently invoked in passing by cynical civilians who dismiss complaints about the plight of soldiers during wars and their aftermath. Those wont to insist, “They freely chose to enlist!” not-so-slyly suggest that perhaps we should not care so much about the thousands of homeless veterans and the epic levels of suicides among distraught soldiers, who by 2019 were ending their lives at rate of about twenty per day.

In recent years, the question whether women should be permitted to serve as combatant soldiers has arisen, as more and more other professions have opened up to what historically has been regarded as “the gentler sex.” Until quite recently, the fighting forces of the military were always viewed as the province of men, but times have changed, causing some people to reconsider the longstanding association of the military with masculinity. There are essentially two standard arguments regarding female combatants.

First, according to what might be called the “traditionalist” approach, women are generally smaller and physically weaker than men. Their admission into the ranks alongside the physically strong males who have fought enemy soldiers one-on-one on bloody battlefields throughout history would severely compromise the military’s capacity to win its battles and, ultimately, the government’s wars. A second strand of the traditionalist view focuses on the idea that women should not be sacrificed needlessly. Women have historically been viewed as nurturing and less aggressive than men. If women were deployed evenly among the men fighting on the ground, then they would be more likely to perish than their male counterparts, not only because they are, on average, physically smaller and weaker, but also because they are less violent than men. But if women were eliminated, this would hurt society more generally, as women give birth to and often raise children.

The second approach, which might be termed “feminist,” holds that combatant selection should in no way depend on one’s possession or lack of a Y-chromosome. It may be the case that women on average are weaker and smaller and less aggressive than men, but that does not mean that all of them are. Over millennia, women have far more often filled the role of mother than that of breadwinner, but, again, times have changed. Today a woman can choose whether or not to be a wife and mother. Some women today serve as the CEOs of military weapons companies or even heads of state. What it means to be a liberated woman is to be able to choose between the full range of opportunities available to men. Furthermore, there are certainly examples of extremely powerful women, such as Serena and Venus Williams, who might, if they chose to fight rather than play tennis, do quite well on the battlefield. Accordingly, on this view, women should be permitted to train and compete with men for spots in even the most physically demanding of military roles, up to and including the Marines or special operations teams such as the Delta Force. The way to find out whether a woman qualifies for such a force is precisely the way in which men find out whether they qualify: through basic and advanced training which leads some candidates or their commanders to conclude that they may be better suited for less arduous roles.

In 2015, the Pentagon appeared to adopt the second, more progressive or feminist, approach, announcing that all combatant positions would henceforth be open to women. The reality, I believe, is quite a bit more crass, as evidenced by the fact that not long after women were invited to serve as combat warriors, people began discussing whether women should, along with men, be required to register for the Selective Service, so that they, too, could be called up should another military draft be instituted. This move, from permissibility to obligation, from a triumph of feminism to the severe restriction on liberty and potential enslavement of women, the prospect of their being demanded to serve in the armed forces against their will, is a curious non sequitur which seems to have gone unnoticed by the soi-disant feminists who support Selective Service registration for all. The Pentagon public relations wing naturally claims “woke” creds, but what is really going on here?

I am afraid that the traditionalist approach (which still has its adherents, for example, Fox News host Tucker Carlson), altogether misses the point of the Pentagon’s invitation to women to join the ranks of military killers. For most “combatants” in future war will not be found on the ground battling enemy soldiers in one-on-one fights to the finish. Instead, unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV), or lethal drones, will continue to be used, as over the course of the twenty-first century so far, to inflict death upon enemy “soldiers” who pose no direct threat to their killers. The risks in having both men and women fight in theaters such as the twenty-year War on Terror throughout the Middle East (which has also seeped into Africa) will become progressively less physical. Because of new technology, the primary harms suffered by future soldiers will be psychological and moral. This follows from the very logic of the use of drones to kill people abroad who cannot be threatening anyone with death because they are unarmed. Least defensible of all is the incineration of persons located in countries where there are no soldiers on the ground said to require force protection. Yet this is what drone operators are trained and required to do.

One of the most significant military discoveries in the twenty-first century, all but ignored by the warmakers themselves, is that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), does not emerge exclusively or always as a result of traumatic experiences on the battlefield, when soldiers are forced daily to face the specter of their possibly imminent deaths as they witness people dying all around them and move through dangerous territories where IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and snipers may be hiding any- and everywhere. Protracted fear and stress can be powerful factors in the onset of PTSD, but what we have learned from its high incidence among drone and laser sensor operators is that moral trauma and conscience also play an important role. Indeed, regret for what one has done is sufficient alone to induce profound PTSD, as evidenced by those drone operators who, in states of psychological and moral despair, have opted to abandon the profession at the termination of their initial contract, even when they have been enticed to stay by the provision of generous bonus offers.

On its face, the job of a drone operator may look like a good deal, and it did to those who later regretted and renounced their vocation: garner creds as a courageous warrior by donning a uniform and showing up to work in a trailer where one “fights” the enemy on a screen from thousands of miles away. No trenches, no IEDs, and no snipers—the drone operator himself remains unscathed, indeed, untouchable by the enemy. The physical job of a drone operator involves manipulating buttons and levers, observing the enemy on the screen and remaining alert, not as a way of saving one’s own life, but to make sure that the enemy does not get away. The images of what these soldiers see on those screens and have done to those people, however, sometimes come to haunt drone operators. Watching targets for hours, days, weeks, even months, before “splashing” them with a missile and witnessing them bleed out before dying, knowing in some cases that they are leaving behind widows and orphans, if not also first-order (physical) collateral damage, exacts a steep psychological toll on some of the push-button killers.

The military will continue to become progressively more lethal to the enemy but less deadly to its own combatant or killing forces because of the manifest rationality of not needlessly risking soldiers’ lives, and the development of technology which makes that possible. If a war can be won without sacrificing a single soldier, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed President Barack Obama did when he ordered hundreds of missile strikes on Libya in 2011, then why would any commander choose to do otherwise? This risk-averse approach to war began in earnest with President Bill Clinton, whose combat pilots flew high above their targets in Kosovo in 1999 in order to protect themselves from harm, despite the fact that by doing so they increased the risk of killing civilians on the ground. Presidents, along with the populace, care more about their compatriots than “collateral damage” victims abroad, who, being out of sight, are also out of mind.

The Libya intervention was quite far from being a success story, much less an example of, as Clinton gushed, “smart power at its best,” but it is true that no combatants were killed during the 2011 ousting of then-President Muammar Gaddafi. Ironically, U.S. State Department employees were killed in the post-war mêlée, but that was after the bombing had stopped. The country of Libya is now in shambles, but the Benghazi debacle, along with everything else which ensued subsequent to the bombing campaign, is simply written off by its architects, including former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power (recently pegged to head up USAID), as unpredictable, unforeseeable consequences of a military intervention with purely humanitarian aims. In attempting to convince Obama to take action, Power compared the situation in Libya to that of Rwanda in 1994. Remarkably, having been initially disinclined to intervene, Obama was persuaded to believe Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the women who rallied for that war—a veritable case in point for those who claim that women can be just as aggressive as men. But was the post-war scene in Libya completely unforeseeable and unpredictable, as Power glibly maintains in her memoir? We may beg to differ with those armchair warriors who failed to draw appropriate inductive conclusions from the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan or the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, but, alas, they seem keen to ply their bellicose trade wherever and whenever it becomes possible again.

Thousands of people at the Department of Defense work full time in public relations, producing texts and media to persuade taxpayers that the government’s wars are just and right. One might reasonably wonder why, if all of the ongoing wars were in fact worthwhile and necessary undertakings, there should be any need for public relations campaigns to support them, or to lure young people to enlist. But because the necessity and justice of the nonstop bombing of people in the Middle East is far from self-evident, those paying for the carnage must continually be made to believe, against all evidence, that the soldiers killing people abroad today are just like the courageous men who defeated the Nazis in World War II. Snafus such as the photographs from Abu Graib prison must be explained away, and the military’s image re-burnished to ensure that young people will continue to enlist.

The “feminist” turn at the Pentagon, I submit, is just another ploy to address the recruitment crisis at a time in history when the skills required of the latest supply of cannon fodder have become significantly less physical. More drone operators are trained today than regular combatant pilots, and at some point the idea of risking one’s own life for one’s country will be deemed anachronistic and quaint. Robots with “boots on the ground” have been deployed for years, especially to assist troops in landmine-infested territories. “Ground force” robots have also been used to blow up targets, as was done, unbelievably enough, to U.S. military veteran Micah Xavier Johnson, in Dallas, Texas, on July 8, 2016, after he killed five members of the local police force. The replacement of mortal soldiers by robots will be further precipitated by the inexorable production of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), which will take human beings completely out of the killing loop once robotic killers have been programmed to gather, sort, and analyze data before selecting targets and launching missiles. Until the military has become entirely automated, however, it will continue to need human operators, and that is why women have been enthusiastically invited to join in on the killing spree.

The invitation to women to serve in combat forces has been billed as progress, evidence of how “woke” the Pentagon is, along the lines of President Biden’s appointment of the first African American Secretary of Defense, General Lloyd J. Austin. But, as in the case of Austin, the admission of women into combat forces has a subtext. The far more relevant factor in the case of Austin is his connection to military industry, the fact that he is a former board member of a company (Raytheon) which stands to profit every time Syria or anywhere else is bombed. The surface “wokeness” is just a patina, a veneer, a bit of public relations polish on what is ultimately an intrinsically pragmatic policy. The fact that Austin is black is an effective distraction from the reality of the ever-more tentacular MIC or, to be precise, the military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex. Military industry, which is funded by the Pentagon, has also gloated over its female CEOs. Meanwhile the crisis levels of sexual abuse by fellow soldiers and commanding officers of female enlistees has been largely ignored by the military-infiltrated mass media.

The admission of women troops as combatants is not so much an affirmation of the worth of female human beings as it is a recognition that they, too, can be trained to serve as push-button contract killers. There is an ongoing, chronic military recruitment crisis because service in the bungled missions in Afghanistan and Iraq has seemed progressively less honorable as the quagmires have dragged on. Many people were willing to enlist after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but by now nearly no one (aside from war profiteers) seems convinced of the righteousness of the forever wars in tThhe Middle East. In order for those wars to continue on, new, psychological, cannon fodder must be found. Step right up, ladies, we have a splendid job for you, complete with benefits, pension and paid maternity leave!

The issue of maintaining Selective Service registration for men alone is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, and it would seem that, in consistency, the entire program must either be abolished or expanded to include women. Under a faux-feminist guise, some “patriots” among the U.S. Congress (an extremely important limb of the octopoid MIC) will likely rally for the expansion, which would be a severe blow to liberty lovers of all stripes, men and women alike. If it is unconstitutional to require men but not women to register for the Selective Service, now that women are permitted to serve in the armed forces, then the proper remedy can only be to abolish the Selective Service registration requirement, for involuntary service violates every person’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, whether or not they possess a Y-chromosome.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has raised the issue before the Supreme Court on behalf of a group of men, and it may well be that they favor abolition of the requirement. Nonetheless, should the current law, under the present circumstances, be struck down as unconstitutional, then the fact that the Supreme Court did not previously find the Selective Service registration of males alone to be unconstitutional will be invoked by hawks in the U.S. Congress to push for new legislation mandating universal registration, regardless of biological sex. The question which needs desperately to be debated now, however, is whether the creation of an entire society of push-button contract killers is something which anyone should support.

The Real Problem with Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS)

by Laurie Calhoun | Feb 10, 2021

With the extremely rapid advances in technology made in the twenty-first century, many aspects of human life have transformed irrevocably. One of the most significant changes involves norms regarding the commission of intentional, premeditated homicide by governments. The practice is today termed “targeted killing,” but it differs only in the implement of death from what in centuries past was called “assassination” and deemed illegal. Black-ops involving shady assassins who stalk and eliminate perceived enemies under a cloak of secrecy are no doubt still carried out by governments. But the use of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV) or lethal drones to stalk and eliminate terrorist suspects in lands far away is openly acknowledged and has been largely accepted by politicians and the populace alike as one of the military’s standard operating procedures.

The use of lethal drones to kill rather than capture suspects began in Israel, but was taken up by the George W. Bush administration in the war on terror waged in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. President Barack Obama then expanded the practice, electing essentially to eliminate the problem of longterm detention of suspects in facilities such as the prison at Guantánamo Bay by defining them as guilty until proven innocent and then dispatching them using missiles launched from drones. The suspects killed were classified posthumously as Enemy Killed in Action (EKIA) unless specific information demonstrating their innocence was brought to light. But since many of the killings took place in remote parts of the world, such as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, where there were few if any troops or intelligence analysts on the ground to do the sort of due diligence needed to establish the innocence or even the identity of the persons killed, this nearly never happened.

With the ascendance and spread of lethal drones, government officials have effectively permitted the current state of technology to dictate morality, rather than subjecting proposed tools to scrutiny before using them. This is most plausibly a result of the fact that the experts to whom politicians defer on these matters are invariably either military officers or persons with ties to military industry. Indeed, many military officers end up serving on the boards of weapons manufacturing and military logistics firms. The revolving door between government service and industry is evident in cases such as those of Dick Cheney, James Mattis and Lloyd Austin, all of whom served as secretary of defense and also sat on the boards of private military companies with sizable government contracts. From the perspective of military experts, whose focus is upon winning wars through maximizing lethality, the development of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) has naturally been regarded as a boon, offering the possibility of combating the enemy without risking soldiers’ lives.

Yet in the development and spread of remote-control killing technology, important ethical considerations have been overlooked. First, during regular combat warfare, when troops are placed in dangerous situations, where “kill or be killed” becomes a prudential maxim for survival, many acts of killing can be construed as literal acts of self-defense. Whether or not the troops should be there in the first place, as in Iraq or Vietnam, is another matter altogether, but if a soldier is already in a perilous theater, with enemy combatants lurking around every corner, then the pretext of self-defense becomes reasonable. The same cannot be said for acts of killing perpetrated by soldiers sitting in trailers in Nevada, who are not being directly threatened by their targets.

U.S. combat soldiers on the ground in both Vietnam and Iraq killed many people who might have been insurgents but proved not to be. The veterans of those conflicts suffered enormously as a result, and many ended up permanently wrecked by the experience. Soldiers who use drones to target the enemy are far from the bloody fray and physically safe from the dangers of the “battlefield” on which they fire. Nonetheless, drone and laser sensor operators such as Brandon Bryant abandoned the profession after having become disillusioned with the disparity between what they had signed up to do (defend their country) and what they ended up doing, killing poor tribesmen living out in the middle of nowhere who were not threatening anyone with death at the time when their lives were abruptly ended.

Because drone operators follow and observe their victims for extended periods of time, and witness their anguish in the aftermath of strikes as they bleed out, they have been prone to suffer bouts of regret and develop post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) despite never having been directly endangered themselves. Such reflective servicepersons furthermore recognize that collateral damage, said to be unavoidable in the “fog of war,” is truly excusable only in a life or death, do or die, dilemma. Up to now, what the drone and laser operators had to fall back on was the fact that they were not in a position to be able to assess the value of the intelligence used to select targets. Their job was to locate and kill the person(s) said to warrant elimination by officers higher up in the chain of command. Accordingly, when mistakes were made, the blame ultimately rested with the analysts who had built the case for targeting on the basis of evidence gathered by drones, obtained through paid informants, and mined from cellphones. In other words, even if the drone operators themselves regretted having killed persons whom they themselves did not believe deserved to die, based on their own observation of the targets, some among them were still able to assuage their conscience by invoking the tried-and-true “invincible ignorance” line, according to which soldiers are not to blame when negative consequences arise from their having executed what to all appearances were legal orders.

But surely intelligence analysts, too, may suffer regret when obviously (or even possibly) innocent people are destroyed on the basis of the analysts’ marshaling and interpretation of the available data. Why not, then, take the fallible human being out of the loop altogether, thus minimizing the possibility of error and the human vulnerability to emotions which sometimes culminates in PTSD? If it was better for soldiers in trailers in Nevada to kill thousands of terrorist suspects throughout the Global War on Terror, rather than having them fly dangerous combat missions, would it not be even better to relieve all parties involved of the burden of having killed?

Despite the moral dubiousness of killing “enemy soldiers” who are not directly threatening anyone with harm, and a fortiori in countries where there are no allied combat soldiers on the ground said to require force protection from above, remote-control killing technology continues to be refined and extended with the aim of making drones both more efficient and more lethal. Consequently, a world in which robots “decide” whom to kill, as in dystopic films of the twentieth century such as Terminator, Robocop and their sequels, is no longer the mere fantasy of writers of speculative fiction. Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, with the proper-sounding “LAWS” as its acronym, are currently being pursued as the best way both to keep soldiers off the battlefield and also to minimize the errors invariably committed by all-too-human operators in drone warfare. From a purely tactical perspective, an obvious benefit of LAWS is that with this new technology, which takes human beings “out of the loop,” when mistakes are made, there will be no operator who must bear the burden of knowing that he killed people who did not deserve, much less need, to die. Indeed, arguably the most significant benefit to the military in rolling out LAWS will be the elimination of PTSD among drone operators who deeply regret their participation in the serial, mass killing of persons who posed no direct threat to their killers when they were incinerated by missiles launched from drones.

With LAWS, the responsibility for mistakes made can be almost completely diffused, for computers will not only gather and analyze the data, but also select the targets on the basis of that data, and then launch the missiles themselves. The magnitude of the mistakes made will vary from case to case, but so long as human beings are involved in the construction and programming of the machines used to kill, then the potential for error will obviously remain. There may still be a bit of room left for soul searching among those who programmed the computers, but they will always be able to absolve themselves by pointing to the inherent limitations of data collection. Without perfect information, mistakes will continue to be made, but the lengthier the causal chain, the fewer individuals there will be who feel the need to shoulder any blame.

From a tactical perspective, all of this may sound very logical and clearly better than having soldiers risk their lives, and analysts and operators suffer psychological distress upon learning that they contributed to the carnage when innocent persons are erroneously destroyed. The first premise in the inexorable march toward Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, however, that the killing will happen, with or without human operators and analysts, needs to be subjected to scrutiny. What has propelled the mad rush to develop and implement LAWS is the false assumption that the killing ever needed to happen in the first place. The governing idea has been that because the persons being targeted have been determined to be potentially dangerous, they might undertake to threaten people at some future time, if they are permitted to live. In other words, the victims are being preemptively eliminated, following the reasoning used to promote the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the warmakers claimed that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the world because of his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). That pretext was of course later found to have been false, along with others, including the claim (obtained through torture) that the Iraqi dictator was somehow in cahoots with al Qaeda. Yet the war went on all the same, with some pundits and war supporters filling the justificatory void with the tried-and-true need to spread democracy.

In the maelstrom of the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, assassination was simply rebranded as targeted killing, when in fact both practices involve the intentional, premeditated elimination of persons deemed potentially dangerous. This criterion is so vague as to permit the targeting of virtually any able-bodied person who happens to be located in a place where terrorists are suspected to be. The only differences between assassination and targeted killing are the nature of the weapon being used and the fact that soldiers wear uniforms, while undercover assassins and hitmen do not. But are these differences morally relevant?

Unfortunately, over the course of the more than twenty-year Global War on Terror, there has been no attempt to reckon with the facts. But if the war on Iraq was a violation of international law, then every person killed in the conflict was the victim of a crime. Because of the shock of the events of September 11, 2001, however, most of the people who pay for the military’s killing campaigns have gone about their business, allowing the government to use their tax dollars to kill people who had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, and in many cases were protecting their own land from illegal invaders. Twenty years on, the military continues to kill people when and where it pleases under the pretext of the need to fend off the next terrorist attack. That millions of persons have been killed, maimed, widowed, orphaned, reduced to poverty and/or rendered refugees as a result of the ever-expanding missions of the U.S military in the Middle East and North Africa—most of which were caused by overspill of previous missions, beginning in Afghanistan and Iraq—has been largely ignored.

The “killing machine” has been on autopilot for some time now, in the sense that lists of targets continue to be drawn up and dispatched with the killers themselves writing the history of what transpired. The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq gave rise to new terrorist groups such as ISIS, which then spread to countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Mali, and beyond. Subsequent interventions in those lands then led to the spread of factions throughout Africa, where drone bases have been erected in several countries to deal with the problem of radical Islamist terrorism. With LAWS, the perpetual motion targeting of unnamed persons can be expected to be revved up to run even faster, around the clock, for robotic killers suffer neither compunction nor fatigue, and the success of their missions will continue to be measured by the number of “dead terrorists”, who in fact are suspects. In other words, the ethical problem with LAWS will remain precisely the same as the ethical problem with the drone program through which human operators have pressed the buttons to launch the deadly missiles.

The debate over LAWS should not be over how to make robots act as human beings might. Rather, we must pause and back up to ask why anyone would ever have thought that this rebranding of assassination as the military practice of “targeted killing” should be permitted in the first place. The fallacy in thinking that lethal drones and LAWS “protect the troops” derives from the assumption that the people being killed would have been killed had this technology never been developed. The truth, however, is that the many drone bases now peppering the earth have served as a pretext for launching missile attacks which would otherwise never have occurred. With such tools at their disposal, military and political administrators are apt to use them without thinking through the moral implications of what they are doing, specifically ignoring the long-fought advances in criminal justice made over millennia, above all, the presumption of innocence upheld in free societies the world over.

Drones were originally deployed for surveillance purposes, but it did not take long before they were equipped with missiles to provide a dual-function machine capable of both collecting data and taking out enemy soldiers based on that data. Most of the individuals eliminated have not been identified by name, but in some cases specific persons have been hunted down and killed, as in President Barack Obama’s targeting of U.S. citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Kahn in Yemen in October 2011, and Prime Minister David Cameron’s killing of British nationals Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin in Syria in August 2015. More recently, on January 3, 2020, President Donald Trump targeted top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, who was located in Baghdad at the time. Trump openly avowed that the act of killing was intentional and premeditated. According to the president, the major general was responsible for past and future attacks against the United States. All of these eliminations of specific, named individuals would have been considered illegal acts of assassination in centuries past but are today accepted by many as “acts of war” for the simple reason that they are carried out by military drones rather than spies.

The ethical problems with lethal drones have been raised many times by activists, who have protested the killing of persons in countries such as Pakistan, with which the United States is not even at war, and also by successive U. N. Special Rapporteurs on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions (Philip Alston, Christof Heyns, et al.), who have repeatedly cautioned that the extension of the right to kill anyone anywhere at the caprice of the killers, which has been assumed by the U.S. government in its wide-ranging drone-killing program, can only sabotage the prospects for democracy in lands where leaders opt to eliminate their political rivals, facilely denouncing them as “terrorists” while pointing to the precedent set by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Needless to say, the literal self-defense pretext does not hold when leaders choose to use remote-control technology to hunt down and assassinate specific persons rather than charging them with crimes and allowing them to be judged by a jury of their peers. But, just as in the case of unnamed targets, when the victims of drone strikes are identified by name, they are invariably labeled terrorists, with no provision of evidence for that claim.

With LAWS comes the specter of fully normalized political assassination with no territorial boundaries whatsoever. The question, then, is not “how do we devise the best algorithms with which to program robotic killers?” Instead, we must ask why homicide should be used in cases where the decision to kill is clearly not a last resort, as it never is in drone killing outside areas of active hostilities, because no human being will perish if the missile is not launched. In expanding the drone program, the Obama administration carried out many “signature strikes,” where the precise identity of the targets was not known but their behavior was said to be typical of known terrorists. In addition, cellphone SIM card data was used to identify persons who had been in contact with other persons already believed to be terrorists or found to have connections to known terrorist groups. To execute persons on the basis of such circumstantial evidence of the possibility of complicity in future terrorist acts is a stunning denial of the human rights of the suspects, and flies in the face of the democratic procedures forged over millennia precisely in order to protect individual persons from being killed at the caprice of those in positions of power. This drone killing procedure in fact exemplifies the very sort of tyranny which finally led Western people to abolish monarchic rule and establish republican constitutions protective of all citizens’ rights. As the mass collection of citizens’ data continues on, such moral concerns are more pressing than ever before, for political leaders may decide to use their trove of intelligence to eliminate not only citizen suspects located abroad, but also in the homeland.

What needs to be done is manifestly not to make machines more efficient and lethal killers. Instead, we need to revisit the first premises which were brushed aside in all of the excitement over the latest and greatest homicide technologies deployed in the twenty-first century, when the U.S. government was given free rein to pursue the perpetrators of the crimes of September 11, 2001. That license to kill with impunity was never revoked, and to this day the drone killing machine continues to be used to destroy people who had nothing whatsoever to do with what happened on that day. With the diffusion of responsibility inherent to LAWS, a truly dystopic future awaits, as the criteria for killing become ever more vague and moral responsibility is fully diffused.