“You have 20 seconds to comply.” — ED-209
War is a great thing to watch from a safe distance.
During the Civil War, families would gather on a hillside to picnic with their children and watch cannonballs rip men’s limbs off. It was a nice way to spend the day, particularly if the weather was pleasant and your side was winning. CNN brought back the grassy hillside in 1991 with its Gulf War coverage: tracers and explosions lighting up the night sky on your TV screen. You didn’t exactly get the full effect—you couldn’t smell the blood in the air—but war hadn’t been this exhilarating for viewers for at least the last half dozen ones America had started.
I follow our nation’s drone strikes on Instagram these days. Every attack is updated so you never miss a one. I can get an alert for my phone so it will interrupt me during sex. I don’t activate it, but I like having the option.
Science fiction until recently, unmanned aerial vehicles—drones—are the new, neat way of killing. Touted as a safe way to cut down on unnecessary death, drone strikes are executed with “extraordinary care and thoughtfulness,” according to the Obama administration, to do away with the people in other countries whom he says are terrorists—including Americans. You can tell drones are only for killing bad guys and not the innocent guy who happens to live across the street from the bad guy because the two most popular drone models have namesakes famous for reducing civilian casualties: Predator and Reaper. A new, smaller model put into action in 2011 launches out of a little portable device soldiers carry. This lets soldiers dive-bomb it into nearby people by remote control. It’s called the Switchblade Drone, after the knife that is illegal because it’s only for stabbing people in their gut so they bleed to death.
Right now, surveillance drones the size of insects exist and I’m sure some bright entrepreneurial engineer is hard at work devising ways to turn them into lethal mosquito-bots.
The next step is truly self-aware drones that call all the shots and won’t give operators PTSD as they dwell on who they’ve killed. (Truly, a first world problem.) The machines will eventually turn on us, slaughtering humans in what the history books will cast in a very positive and forgiving light, because it will be robot history written by robots. Oh, we’ll get everything that’s coming to us. I’m more concerned about what it’s going to be like before Skynet eradicates us.
The rules governments devise for killing people are constantly evolving. Not that they have a very good track record at actually adhering to their own rules in the first place. Chemical warfare was once on the cutting-edge of science, but has since been deemed bananas. Unlike mustard gas, drones are okay to use because they are “conventional weapons,” which means they are the weapons we are currently using to kill people today. Assassination is also a thing of the past, not acceptable to engage in under international law. Thankfully, Obama is operating a program of “targeted killings” not at all like assassination, and with a set of rules and safeguards held in complete secrecy for your benefit.
One rule is that America won’t kill you unless you are “affiliated” with a terrorist organization. What’s affiliated mean? Well, if you’re dead, it means they decided you were affiliated. Not only that, but you were determined to be an “imminent” threat. This is where I’ll pause to make a George Orwell reference.
Can the U.S. attack you anywhere? Yes, according to the rules, the entire planet is fair game because we are engaged in the War on Terror. Currently, that we know of, the CIA is knocking people off via robot missiles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. What’s off limits? The moon. Go there.
Drones raise all sorts of interesting questions about the way to most ethically murder people. The White House insists our deployment of deadly robots is “legal, ethical, and wise.” Is it any of these? To get to the heart of this quandary, first I want you to kill someone with a sword. Not a loved one or anyone who is contributing to the world in a significant and worthwhile way, but some bad guy no one will call you out on. Make a determination and run them through with a sword. Go on. I’ll wait.
…
Okay, kind of messy, isn’t it? I’m imagining a struggle and a hot mess of blood everywhere. You got a work out (good) but your eyes met with your victim’s and you may have seen them as a human being (bad). You may have had a few doubts about killing someone because a cartoonist told you to do so on the internet.
Now try killing them from your home computer with a joystick that controls a drone. You can probably listen to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and keep a few browsers tabs open while you do this. Choose a place where CNN hasn’t set up shop and people are too poor to own camera phones. We can’t have people posting that depressing shit on Facebook all day.
The Bush and Obama administrations’ rules for the War on Terror do not prescribe any precise method of killing. We could “put dynamite in their behinds and drop them from 35,000 feet,” as talk show host Michael Savage once suggested. Hell, we could drop them from the edge of space and slap a Red Bull label on ’em if we wanted. But drones are what we mostly use.
Since Obama took office, he’s racked up a lot of skymiles with these global Robocops. He’s especially fond of using them in Yemen, where a few hundred people have been killed in strikes since he took office. Thing is, the people left alive are often unhappy about these attacks and motivated to join the fight against Great Satan. Al Qaeda membership in the Arabian Peninsula has more than doubled since 2009. Maybe they need…more drone strikes?
If Americans don’t care about Yemenis (and let’s admit it: they don’t) they should at least care about their own ass. On September 30, 2011, Obama authorized the execution of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki for being affiliated with Al Qaeda. In a strike a few weeks later, al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was also killed. He too was born in the U.S.A.
Asked how he defended the attack, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said al-Awlaki should have “had a better father.” And he should have. We all should have had better fathers. But Americans have the right to fair trial and to have charges brought against them. Instead, the president maintains he has the right to kill people he deems guilty. This right is not found in the constitution anywhere, but it does say so right in Judge Dredd, section 17:32. That’s good enough for most people.
Drones are proliferating faster than we can make up made up rules for them. I can buy one right now and fly it around my neighborhood filming people. Police departments are starting to use them for surveillance purposes and I’m sure they won’t use them excessively and disproportionately against the poor and minorities, the way they’ve used every tool ever plopped into their palm—batons, mace, guns, and tasers. Other countries are perking their ears to the thought of armed drones. Something tells me Americans would object to Cuba coming after sworn enemies of their regime by firing hellfire missises into a Miami neighborhood.
Our robot death planes aren’t ensuring that we only kill the Bad Guys. They allow us to not have as much skin in the fight, so less is revealed to us about the nature of killing. Improved technology does not equal acting more moral. The wheel was pretty great, unless you were being tied to one and tortured to death on orders from men with righteous and good intention.
But it’s not the robots I’m worried about. It’s us.
This is a chapter from Life Begins At Incorporation, available directly through me, as well as Amazon, Powell’s, and Comixology.
