By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the commonlaw of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power.
~John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Ch. III, (kudos to Bron)
On the night of February 13th, 773 RAF Avro Lancaster bombers swept in low and fast on the Saxony railway town of Dresden. It was early 1945, The Third Reich was collapsing and some 600,000 people had taken refuge in the city to avoid the Allied onslaught. The presumed target was the military complex on the outskirts of town known as the Albertstadt. Dresden, itself, was riddled with military garrisons intermingled among the civilian population. In two waves, the RAF dropped 650,000 incendiaries and 8,000 lbs of high explosives and hundreds of 4,000 pounds bombs on the city center, all with little to no resistance. The entire city was ablaze. RAF crews reported smoke rising to a height of 15,000 ft. Fires were seen 500 miles away from the target.
The next day, February 14, 1945, as Dresden was trying to cope with the crisis, 450 U.S. B-17 Flying Fortress long-range bombers assigned to the 1st Bombardment Division of the United States VIII Bomber Command arrived at 1230 local time. Guided by the fires, they discharged 771 tons of bombs.
The results on the ground were horrific with an estimated 25,000 killed. Survivor Lothar Metzger recalled:
We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.
Some estimates bring the number of those killed to 100,000. Nazi propagandists took the figure to 200,000. RAF recon noted that ” 23 percent of the industrial buildings, and 56 percent of the non-industrial buildings, not counting residential buildings, had been seriously damaged. Around 78,000 dwellings had been completely destroyed; 27,700 were uninhabitable, and 64,500 damaged, but readily repairable.”
The raid, ordered by Churchill, rendered such a blow to Western psyche that he distanced himself from the raid saying, “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so-called ‘area-bombing’ of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests. If we come into control of an entirely ruined land, there will be a great shortage of accommodation for ourselves and our allies… We must see to it that our attacks do no more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the enemy’s war effort.” Of mention, is no sense of the human cost to the enemy of the raid. Th emphasis seems to be purely egocentric: What kind of country will we have when this is all over?
However British Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris was not so circumspect:
“Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.”
“War is hell” seems to claim the Air Marshall, and strategic concerns take precedence over humanitarian ones in a war zone. Is he right, or are both he and Churchill “war criminals” to quote some of the more animated commentary on the blog? Neither were prosecuted or charged with war crimes for the Dresden raid.
Which brings us to David Drumm’s fine posting yesterday about a claim of double-tapping Drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere in support of the war against the terrorists. The evidence published by the 18-month-old Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) claims that 6 instances of double-tapping have occurred with rescuers being targeted with second strikes. A review of 5 of those sources (ABC’s article was not easily retrievable) reveals that one arguably involved an attack on civilians, one was unclear on the status of the rescuers, and three reported second attacks on militants and extremists.
In response to my query on this point, David correctly pointed out that the Obama Administration does consider fighting age men in the strike zone “militants.” That fact was disclosed in a long New York Times article:
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
But does six instances of secondary attacks obscured by the fog of war prove that the US has a policy of targeting innocent rescuers? Can it even be said that we are indifferent to the humanitarian concerns of rescuers even as we attack our enemies on their home turf?
From a legal perspective, targeting killing of persons who present an imminent threat to a country is permissible. Obama himself has insisted on such evidence before authorizing the strikes though there are trade-offs, according to the New York Times. The CIA’s man in the White House, John Brennan, a crusty Irishman who has spoken in defense of civil liberties and to close Guantanamo but who has faced withering criticism for his role in post 9/11 interrogations, explains Obama’s analysis:
The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats to U.S. persons’ lives. It is the option of last recourse. So the president, and I think all of us here, don’t like the fact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things.
Assassination of persons is generally regarded as murder although, by executive order, the US President may order the killing of foreign leaders who represent an imminent threat to the US.
Former U.S. District Judge (S.D. NY) Abraham Sofaer explains the difference:
When people call a targeted killing an “assassination,” they are attempting to preclude debate on the merits of the action. Assassination is widely defined as murder, and is for that reason prohibited in the United States…. U.S. officials may not kill people merely because their policies are seen as detrimental to our interests…. But killings in self-defense are no more “assassinations” in international affairs than they are murders when undertaken by our police forces against domestic killers. Targeted killings in self-defense have been authoritatively determined by the federal government to fall outside the assassination prohibition.
Likewise, Harold Hongju Koh, Legal Adviser US Department of State, defends the use of drones as ” part of “responsibility of US to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks.”
But what then about rescuers killed trying to aid militants?
Georgetown Law Professor Gary Solis, author The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War, and no friend of the US drone policy concedes that “Legal guilt does not always accompany innocent death.” In an example, published by Harper’s Magazine, Solis comments on a US helicopter attack on civilians rendering aid to combatants. “Can a van picking up wounded victims be fired upon? If the helicopter personnel reasonably associated the unmarked van with the presumed enemy personnel, yes. An “enemy” vehicle without red cross, red crescent, or white flag receives no special protection, even if wounded personnel are on board.”
Thus, even critics of the drone program conclude that trying to render humanitarian aid to injured militants affords no protection unless they are clearly visible as such. There is nothing in any of the articles cited by the BIJ indicating that rescuers were so denominated.
What then to make of the double-tap policy and the humanitarian toll. I see no proof that US drone masters are “targeting civilians.” Targeting implies intention and given the Administration’s definition of militants in a strike area it is unlikely that there is the intention to harm civilians rescuers where proof of such status exists. The Administration argues that its definition is based on its decade long experience with al-Qaeda. One certainly can argue with the definition of “militant” given its breadth, but does this definition make us any more culpable that acknowledged WWII heroes Winston Churchill or Air Chief Marshall Harris in arguing that our prime responsibility in war is to deny the enemy the ability to wage war against us even as civilians are maimed or killed?
What do you think?
Sources: linked throughout
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Mesposer: “See, Bob, if your neighbor doesn’t want to promise your security, you may regard him as your enemy. Now let me take you by the hand and show you some of the promises our “neighbor” Al-Qaeda”
Mark,
In Perpetual Peace Kant is discussing the relationships between neighbor STATES; not mere groups of people. Al-Qaeda is a group of people; not a nation state.
Accordingly, should we follow your line of reasoning, we can then declare war on other non-nation state groups of people, our closest “neighbors” that threaten our security right here within our borders. We can declare war on kidnappers, pedophiles, child rapists and murderers. 14,000 murders per year, 84,000 rapes per year; 4,200 non-family member child abductions; 80,000 children sexually abused each year; 100 child murder abductions per year;
Compared to Al-Qaeda, these “neighbors” of ours are far greater threats to our security and our humanity and thus FAR more deserving of the title “enemy.”
Having declared war on these savage neighbors of ours, according to your loose definitions of war and enemy, we can use the same tactics currently in use against Al-Qaeda. Why you could even quote Lincoln to your heart’s content telling us all why the constitution must remain in abeyance during this war. Being the savages that they are, i.e. not deserving of any due process or recognition as citizens, you can round them up and summarily execute them as enemies of the state or you can simply send out assassination squads.
After all….as you say…
Mesposer: “I also know that amoral killers is precisely what we must become in a war with madmen.”
Is that what Kant would argue? Oh, wait, there’s that little thing called the categorical imperative; right? So, that maxim of yours above kind of puts you in direct contradiction with EVERYTHING Kant stands for.
So when you say “Here’s primer for Bob,Esq on Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” you’re being sarcastic; right? Or are you just that clueless?
Mespo,
Do not get me wrong. You provide a valuable service by letting us “seemingly intelligent people” know what really crazy people claim that they think — and I appreciate it. As Charles Sanders Peirce wrote of metaphysics: “[it] is a subject more curious than useful, the knowledge of which, like that of a sunken reef, serves chiefly to enable us to keep clear of it.” I take you and your nationalist cant as a serious warning, and accordingly steer as far clear of it as I can manage. Always good for a mariner to know the location of the rocks.
this is a writer from The Guardian: “…This claim is only possible because the administration has engaged in an Orwellian contortion of language, which assumes that anyone in the area of a drone strike must be “up to no good” and therefore a militant. This assumption of guilt by association, and
the grotesque misuse of definitions to cover up the deaths of innocents, including children, has allowed the administration to inflate the number of successful “hits” it has, while playing down the number of civilian casualties.
Now emboldened by this apparent success and the lack of an outcry over deaths caused by drone strikes, the administration is proposing to loosen the standards for targeting in Yemen even further by approving so-called “signature strikes”, in which attacks are launched on patterns of behavior rather than the known presence of a terrorist operative. These signature strikes are almost guaranteed to increase the number of civilian casualties…”
He is correct and so is the administration correct. They know the vast majority of our citizens will remain silent or cheer the effort, such as Mark does.
As citizens we should put the brake on this illegal and immoral as well as dangerous behaviour. We really do have that duty. While peaceful resistance is called traitorous by those who advocate genocide and murder on the suspicion of patterns, it is in actuality, what anyone who cares about our nation, other nations and the rule of law should be engage in.
talkingbacktocspan,
In your response to Mespo, I think you missed a real possibility. Take this for example:
“We do not commit honor killings.”
No, we break into an Afghan home in the middle of the night, kill all the inhabitants conducting a baby-naming ceremony, including three pregnant women, and then to cover up the crime we dig our bullets out of the women’s bodies and blame the women’s husbands and male relatives for an “honor killing.”
Mespo claims to know stuff. He doesn’t.
Gene,
A good rejoinder to the usual fear-mongering over “terrorists” acquiring nuclear weapons. Not at all likely. But if unexamined and hyped long enough, it makes a dependable bogeyman — its only real purpose.
Some religious sects in America have starved sick children to death, refused to give them medical care resulting in death, have bombed clinics and murdered doctors.
We do not think they represent the whole of Western civilization. Though sometimes a few of them get elected to public office in the USA.
mespo, specifically precisely exactly WHO are these people that you are talking about here, and what is the source of your information about them? When the prescription is kill ’em, the case against ” ’em” demands excruciating clarity —
“a gang of 7th Century theocratic misogynists who would have no problem eviscerating you or your children in some homage to their fanciful warrior deity.
The flabbergasting false equivalency I see bandied about by seemingly intelligent people is equating our form of democratically elected government (replete with the problems we all moan about) with their religious tyranny. We do not throw battery acid into the eyes of school girls; we do not conscript young me to be suicide bombers; we do not call for the death of innocents to assuage our religious insecurities about death; and we do not commit honor killings.”
We are not the same as our enemies as one day living under their theocratic thumb would surely prove to you.
mespo, this one is for you:
Gene,
He was one of my favorites second only to Bing Crosby. Man, those guys could sing.
Time to watch the season finale of Game of Thrones … if Dany Targaryen doesn’t get her dragons back, I’m going to be seriously pissed and probably take it out on mespo.
I do not think the Native Americans would approve of depleted Uranium dust being spread all over any land as the US has done in the Middle East. Or spreading Monsanto by law in a nation that is the cradle of agriculture.
They would take care of it with a view towards the 7th generation.
Every element on Earth deserved respect; stones, trees, grasses, sand.
That seems to be a civilized notion.
Elaine,
I enjoyed your principled rejoinder to [Mr Exceptionalism] above. If a foreign power invaded and occupied my country in service to “Oil, Israel, and Domestic Political Advantage” (h/t Daniel Ellsberg), I’d hate them and wish to expel them from my country, too. That the American government and military have taken another decade to painfully learn this about their invasions and occupations of middle-eastern countries testifies to an obdurate institutional learning impairment almost beyond comprehension. I mean, one would almost think that these people had never read a single book about the disastrous and failed Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in that part of the world No learning from the more recent British and Soviet disasters there, either.
Yet most rational persons — even some of those engaged in foreign policy — recognize that “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” emanates not from some religious, “moral” principle, but from common-sense, enlightened self interest. But we don’t have in our inflamed interlocutor a humble “patriot” cognizant of the “live and let live” principle of civilized societies but, rather, a seething “nationalist,” and we need to make this understanding clear from the start. George Orwell has a great treatment of the type in his classic essay “Notes on Nationalism”:
In dealing with the nationalist, therefore, one must first recognize the “sunken personality” superficially fronting for the mentality of the mob. From the mob it draws its sense of power, not from any philosophical or (a)moral concerns typically entertained or developed by individuals. And you cannot reason with a mob — or Lunatic Leviathan — mentality. The current strain of virulent American nationalism that has made so much of the world America’s enemy can only produce more enemies, never peace or “safety.” Common sense and enlightened self interest acknowledges this. The nationalist, however, not only cannotgrasp this truth, but adamantly refuses to do so. Again, from Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism”:
Our nationalist interlocutor classifies millions of persons — all unknown to him personally — as “beasts of prey,” while simultaneously refusing to see that quality manifest in himself and the economic looting of whole nations that he champions as “our rights.” Others hate us for our looting of them. The American nationalist hates others for hating our looting of them because, as the American nationalist sees things, we have a “right” to loot whomever we want. A typical nationalist, he considers the possessions and lives of foreigners only one of his own privileged “rights,” to dispose of as he or his leader wish A convenient and self-serving conceit, yes, but the truth — and we have to call it out under its rightful and proper name — nationalism — if we hope to deal with it effectively.
Finally, good point about the “like minded Western nations.” They went along with us for a short while, but then pulled their troops and money out of Iraq and Afghanistan long before our American corporate military types started figuring out the extent of the trap they had blundered into.
What Blouise said is true, mespo. If Frank takes offense? There is no one I’m more certain has the power to break legs from beyond the veil than Frank.
As to any terrorist group’s intention to acquire nuclear weapons or material suitable for dirty weapons? Any nation-state with half a brain knows that radioactive isotopes are like fingerprints. Should some terrorist succeed, we’ll know where the materials came from. Would you rather secure your own nuclear stockpile and contain terrorist from within or face the almost certain U.S. nuclear retribution such a discovery would entail? Or perhaps end your nuclear programs altogether? The only way to be safe from nuclear weapons in the end – be it from terrorists or from rogue states – is to stop building them as a species. Do you really think that genie is going back in the bottle? No. You’ve simply bought in to the scare tactic. A terrorist group has more power with that as a threat than they do in application. It would result in the annihilation of their host country and a systematic witch hunt for the rest of their members on a global scale that almost every government would participate in having seen such a threat made real. There would be literally no place to hide.
mespo,
😉
Watch what you say about Sinatra!!
Blouise:
Oops.
Gene H:
“That was also a totally different situation than dealing with criminal organizations and non-state actors.
Apples and oranges ethically speaking.”
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I think the difference is only in degree and this time it’s our enemies seeking to use the “bomb.”
But we’ve exhausted this topic unless you have more to say. What say we move on to the more important work of Lee Greenwood and anesthetizing school kids with his crooning. Wonder if Frank Sinatra could pass muster in that school He was awfully egocentric with “My Way”:
ani defranco “Hurricane” link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6On-ywDr-GU
this is like a game of telephone
mespo, I do not doubt that you are “firm classical philosophical ground”, with regard to Hobbes, but I do question it’s relevance.
What are we to do about Saudi Arabia; just throw it down the historical memory hole? I know that’s not the main subject here, but it does encompass the timeframe.
Anyway like Bob Dylan says, gotta blame somebody. Might as well be Iraq, Al-Quaeda, the Taliban, Iran, just anyone. The neocons, the neolib, PNAC, the whole bunch of macho jingoists must be very happy.
“Four months later the ghettos are in flame
Rubin’s in South America fighting for his name
While Arthur Dexter Bradley’s still in the robbery game
And the cops are putting the screws to him looking for somebody to blame
“Remember that murder that happened in a bar ?”
“Remember you said you saw the getaway car?”
“You think you’d like to play ball with the law ?”
“Think it might-a been that fighter you saw running that night ?”
“Don’t forget that you are white”.
[ offbeat ani defranco cover of “Hurricane” ]
mespo,
I think you might have too many balls in the air.
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“mespo727272
1, June 11, 2012 at 7:39 pm
Blouise:
‘ I don’t assume that all those who live in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Yemen and Somalia are jihadists/religious warriors/beasts of prey.'”
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I didn’t write that so you probably want to address your reply to Elaine.
Blouise:
“You didn’t write anything about militant theocrats in the comment that you addressed to me. BTW, we’ve killed innocent people while going after the militant theocrats.”
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My mistake on that, but I’m not sure the people killed are so “innocent” based on the reports I read and mentioned in the post.