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
TBTCS: Why should you wait for Spielberg to make a movie YOU want to make? Step up to the plate, man! Make it yourself!
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/06/are-drones-defensible.html Sullivan and Greenwald are engaged in an ongoing battle. Sulllivan has confronted Greenwald on his “detached purity”. After Greenwald professed his support for Ron Paul, I lost some respect for him.
What might cause another 9/11?
It is supporters of Obama’s aggression, not its opponents, who are likely to provoke another Terrorist attack
By Glenn Greenwald
June 12, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/12/what_might_cause_another_911/singleton/
Excerpt:
Today’s defense of President Obama from Andrew Sullivan is devoted to refuting Conor Friedersdorf’s criticism of Obama’s drone program. Says Sullivan:
What frustrates me about Conor’s position – and Greenwald’s as well – is that it kind of assumes 9/11 didn’t happen or couldn’t happen again, and dismisses far too glibly the president’s actual responsibility as commander-in-chief to counter these acts of mass terror.
This is exactly backward. I absolutely believe that another 9/11 is possible. And the reason I believe it’s so possible is that people like Andrew Sullivan — and George Packer — have spent the last decade publicly cheering for virtually every act of American violence brought to the Muslim world, and they continue to do so (now more than ever under Obama). Far from believing that another 9/11 can’t happen, I’m amazed that it hasn’t already, and am quite confident that at some point it will. How could any rational person expect their government to spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the violence?
Just consider what one single, isolated attack on American soil more than a decade ago did to Sullivan, Packer and company: the desire for violence which that one attack 11 years ago unleashed is seemingly boundless by time or intensity. Given the ongoing American quest for violence from that one-day attack, just imagine the impact which continuous attacks over the course of a full decade must have on those whom we’ve been invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting.
One of the many reasons I oppose Obama’s ongoing aggression is precisely because I think that the policies Sullivan and Packer cheer will cause another 9/11 (the other reasons include the lawlessness of it, the imperial mindset driving it, the large-scale civilian deaths it causes, the extreme and unaccountable secrecy with which it’s done, the erosion of civil liberties that inevitably accompanies it, the patently criminal applications of these weapons, the precedent it sets, etc.). I realize that screaming “9/11″ has been the trite tactic of choice for those seeking to justify the U.S. Government’s militarism over the last decade, but invoking that event strongly militates against the policies it’s invoked to justify, precisely because those policies are the principal cause of such attacks, for obvious reasons.
*****
Obama Supporters Know His Drone War Is Indefensible
But the seductiveness of a leader using violence to slay the nation’s enemies causes them to celebrate it anyway.
By Conor Friedersdorf
June 7, 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/obama-supporters-know-his-drone-war-is-indefensible/258218/
And thanks for noticing.
OS,
Actually it is a carefully selected play on words.
That was a Freudian slip if I ever saw one: “…people who illicit from me…”
mespo,
I try not to talk to let alone debate people who illicit from me the urge to kick them in the balls repeatedly before turning the wolverines loose upon them.
mespo,
You’re right. A “trick” implies knowledge of your motivation, which, of course, I don’t have. My apologies.
When can we expect to see a Stephen Spielberg made-for-tee vee movie about Mendelsohn’s role in the incineration of 600,000 German civilians?
Will Spielberg include generous footage of Mendelsohn’s ten major projects in Israel — including a residence for Chaim Weizmann as well as Weizmann Institute, in addition to construction of Hebrew University in Israel, all between 1936 and 1938? What is striking about these dates is this: According to Edwin Black in “The Transfer Agreement,” in 1933, zionist Palestine was near bankruptcy. Without German Jewish wealth, the project would fail, Black fretted; all that work growing and selling oranges would be for naught.
Miraculously, within three years the zionist project was sufficiently flush to finance a university, a college, a craft school, a major hospital, two research centers, an elegant bank building and several high-style residences and a library.
Mendelsohn completed his Palestine gig just in time to fly to Utah and help the U S Air Force devise methods to destroy Berlin and 130 other German towns and villages; destroy German history and cultural memory; and incinerate 600 000 innocent German civilians.
Nal:
“I didn’t ignore it. The Harvard source was on point, the other source was not.”
***************************
Nice escape, but when you suggest a comment is a “trick,” you don’t get to cherry pick the parts that suit you.
mespo:
I didn’t ignore it. The Harvard source was on point, the other source was not.
But, now that you mention it,
would indicate that an investigation of the estimates is called for, to determine biases and reasonability. But, that would have been too much trouble, so they decided:
which sounds a little too Cheneyesque for my tastes.
Elaine: “Have you read Pierce’s book “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free”?”
Elaine,
No, but I am taking medication for my heart. Might it shock and enrage me like “Game Change?”
Malisha, spin this:
http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/utah_today/chemicalweaponscreatedcontroversyatdugway.html
“The construction of Dugway Proving Ground began in the spring of 1942. Because of sand dunes and frequent high winds, workers spread two inches of gravel over 130,000 square yards of ground in an attempt to control blowing sand at the construction site. By August wooden barracks and laboratories for chemical and physical experiments had been built. In February 1943 an airport with a 5,200-foot runway was completed. During that same year medical facilities, including a 75 – bed ward, nurses’ quarters, and a medical research building were provided for workers in case of accidents.
Almost immediately workers at the Dugway Proving Ground began testing chemical weapons to be used against wartime enemies. Tests with toxic agents, flame throwers, and chemical spray systems were performed at Dugway. One of the most popular World War II weapons, the 4.2-inch chemical mortar, was developed at the base. Animals were the victims of biological warfare research.
In order to test the effectiveness of new chemical warfare agents, whole villages were built in German and Japanese architectural styles. Prisoners from Utah jails were transported to Dugway to build the structures. Six German and 24 Japanese full-scale buildings were created. Refugee architect Eric Mendelsohn designed the huge German apartment building, and the Japanese worker housing was designed by Antonin Raymond, a Frank Lloyd Wright student who had worked in Tokyo for 20 years. These authentic buildings, the most expensive constructed at Dugway during World War II, were constantly repaired as testing took its toll on them. The Army tested incendiary bombs and other weapons on these structures. These experiments increased the effectiveness of bombing attacks on enemy production centers.
and this:
<a href = "http://www.galomagazine.com/artculture/talking-with-the-past-architect-erich-mendelsohn-on-screen/" 'Jewish architect' Erich Mendelsohn volunteers to work at Dugway to destroy Berlin.
One of the most compelling sidebars in Mendelsohn’s life (and in the film) involves a village he helped construct in the Nevada desert. The U.S. had entered World War II, but there were troubles. Allied bombs, dropped onto the rooftops of enemy cities, were failing to have the intended devastating effect; since Germany’s top-level topography was different than what America had reckoned. The government enlisted Mendelsohn’s aid (or rather, Mendelsohn volunteered) in designing a mock German village for purposes of target practice. Mendelsohn, the architect who in many ways built modern Berlin, was now helping to destroy it; there are unpursued parallels here between Einstein and the Manhattan Project. The German Village period might be the pinnacle of the Mendelsohnian tragedy, but Dror leaves it up to us to decide. With minimal editorial framing, we are stuck weighing the horrors of Allied firebombing against the evils of Axis aggression. We yearn for a third choice, and wonder if such a thing is possible.
TBCS: According to the myth (of Egyptian slavery to begin with), God sent those ten plagues, not zionists.
By the way Sebold is very clear about who bombed the cities: England. Not “JEWSTATE.”
But of course, it is possible (and you have proven) to change the spin on any story, factual OR mythological, to show that all the ills in the world are the fault of the Jews, so logic is not terribly offended.
How ’bout Hiroshima? Oh I remember — Jews caused Pearl Harbor by deliberately driving up the price of jewelry.
(By the way, by this same token, Jesus caused the crucifixion and anyway, he was a Jew so we knew that all along.)
Gene, I don’t watch much television. How ’bout you?
I’ve just been reading W G Sebald’s “On the Natural History of Destruction.” It got me to wondering if Egyptians wrote of their reactions to having their first born sons slaughtered by Hebrews, as the latter fled from Egypt after having plundered Egyptian treasure (enough to build a golden calf) and called down plagues upon the people who had extended hospitality, security, and prosperity to Jews for ~480 years.
I wondered if Persians had written books on their reaction to Esther having 75,000 innocent Persians slaughtered, and displacing the prime minister that the Persian king trusted with an alien who concealed his true identity and spied on the king’s court in order to gain political advantage.
Germans extended hospitality and support of their treasure and educational/political/infrastructure/ even military protection over at least 1200 years, but when on about the 14th of Feb 1933, Stephen Wise told Louis Brandeis that zionist Palestine was running out of money and would go bankrupt unless German Jews AND their wealth migrated to Palestine, Brandeis told Wise: “I would have Jews leave Germany.” (Don’t take my word for it; check it out yourself — p. 78, “The Transfer Agreement” by Edwin Black). Within a few more weeks, “Judea Declare[d] War on Germany,” and Rabbi Wise & sundry zionist & Jewish groups organized anti-German protests, rallies, kangaroo court/mock trials, and a relentless barrage of “atrocity propaganda” as had been perfected by Ed. Bernays & the Creel Commission to engender hatred of “the Hun” to embroil U.S. in the First world war — the war that Jews won.
Now if Hebrews did this to Germany — twice; to Persia once and orgasmic to do it again; and to Egypt — home to Jews for nearly 500 years, how much imagination does it take to be fearful that Israelis will pull the same stunt on the U.S.A.?
Perhaps you are too committed to hating them evul Nazis to see a pattern that threatens the U.S. Perhaps you don’t care if the U.S. is threatened. I do care about threats to the United States, and I think the pattern of history as well as present behavior sends out a crystal clear signal: the threats are coming from Israel.
Maybe when the topics make it to the tee vee-as-propaganda market more people will start to see the same dangers I see.
Gene H:
I see you are heeding Edward Gibbons’ sage advice: “I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.”
I make that mistake too often with folks like talking….
I’m trying to do better.
Nal:
“Nice trick conflating nuclear weapons with all weapons of mass destruction.”
***********************
Apparently you take it as some magnificent counterpoint to my arguments that it’s an even bet that thousands of Americans will more likely die in the next few years from a terrorist-borne bio-weapon than a nuclear one? A curious defense of your contention that we’re targeting those trying to save terrorists lives from our weaponry. We haven’t even talked about bio-weapons, but that threat is there too.(Maybe you missed the terrorist quotes I related to Bob. Nice people those militants.)
By the way, I appreciate your totally ignoring the other source from Harvard that went into great detail about the odds of the nuclear threat. Not much of a trick on my part since I provided the specific information you’ve implied I didn’t, but maybe you’re easily tricked. I don’t know.
The more likely answer is that it didn’t suit your criticism of my comment so it was expendable. I thought you were more thick-skinned and intellectually honest than that. My mistake.
I used to worry about the US over-reacting to a threat to its survival a’ la the War in Iraq, now I have the opposite worry. Apparently, all the new information from all over the globe we have gleaned in the past 11 years confirming the very real threat to our civilian population from terrorists using WMDs falls on deaf ears because we feel obliged to conjure up every excuse to dismiss them based on our disappointment with George Bush and the information we had back then. Even the President most of us voted for is called a “war criminal” by some, because he acts differently from our notions of what is right and wrong here despite the fact that, unlike the highest democratically elected office holder in the land, we have no access to the most relevant and current intelligence information.
We know better, of course. We are a curious people, indeed — and a bit ungrateful for the years of security we have enjoyed since 9/11 even as Europe, India, and the Mid East feel the brunt of these savage attacks.
If anyone wants to read about the 2012 terrorist threat assessment to the West from an expert, here it is:
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/new-terror-threats-2012-6391
Professor Rohan Gunaratna is head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore, author of Inside Al-Qaeda (Columbia University, New York, 2002) and lead author of Pakistan: Ground Zero Terrorism (Reaktion, London, 2011).
You’ve mistaken me for someone interested in talking to a Nazi sympathizer. You’d be better off talking to your television. In fact, we’d all be better if you’d confine your talking to your television.
mespo, are you suggesting that the the Harvardie link you posted represents “the real experts?”
Here are the first sentences in the “real expert” testimony you linked:
“Yes. Unfortunately, terrorist use of a nuclear bomb is a very real danger. During the 2004 presidential campaign, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) agreed that nuclear terrorism was the single greatest threat to U.S. national security.”
Got it. George Bush & John Kerry, two politicians running for office, neither one known for his “expertise” on anything except dissembling, warn us that “terrurists r gonna get chu!”
Vote for me, I’ll keep you safe!!! You can trust me!!
jeebus.
see Elaine, above: http://jonathanturley.org/2012/06/10/of-drones-double-taps-and-dresden/#comment-382532 “Have you read Pierce’s book “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.”
Gene, when is ‘horse laugh’ an appropriate response/refutation to a ludicrous argument?
Bob,Esq.,
You’re welcome. I love Charlie Pierce. He cuts through the crap–often with his sharp wit. Here’s how he refers to Gov. Scott Walker:
“Scott Walker, the twice-elected goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to run their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin…”
*****
Have you read Pierce’s book “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free”?