THE ROVING
EYE Drone
me down on the killing floor By
Pepe Escobar
Lord knows, I should'a
been gone Lord knows, I should'a been
gone And I wouldn't've been here, down on
the killin' floor
- Howlin' Wolf,
Killing Floor
As convenient as it is for
someone in a cubicle in the Nevada desert to press
a button and incinerate a Pashtun wedding party in
North Waziristan, now, with only a click, anyone
can download a 359
KB file available on Amazon for only $8.99 -
including free
wireless delivery - and
learn everything there is to learn about All
Things Drone.
It's fitting that
Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone
Warfare, 2001-2050 has been put together by
Tom Engelhardt - editor, MC of the TomDispatch
website and "a national treasure", in the correct
appraisal of University of Michigan professor Juan
Cole - and TomDispatch's associate editor Nick
Turse, author of the seminal 2008 study The
Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday
Lives.
This is essentially Tom and
Nick's revised and updated body of work detailing
the uber-dystopian Dronescape over the past few
years - spanning everything from secret Drone
Empire bases to offshore droning; a Philip
Dick-style exercise on a more than plausible
drone-on-drone war off East Africa in 2050; and a
postscript inimitably titled, "America as a
Shining Drone Upon a Hill". It does beat fiction
because it's all fact-based.
An MQ-1
Predator or an MQ-9 Reaper to go? This
digital file becomes even more crucial now that US
and world public opinion knows US President Barack
Obama is the certified Droner-in-Chief; the final
judge, jury and digital Grand Inquisitor on which
suspicious Muslim (for the moment, at least, they
are all Muslims) will get his paradise virgins via
targeted assassination.
Obama owns his
newspeak-drenched "kill list". He decides on a
"personality strike" (a single suspect) or a
"signature strike" (a group). "Nominations" are
scrutinized by Obama and his associate producer,
counter-terrorism czar John Brennan. The logic is
straight from Kafka; anyone lurking around an
alleged "terrorist" is a terrorist. The only way
to know for sure is after he's dead.
And
the winner of the Humanitarian Oscar for Best
Targeted Assassination with No Collateral Damage
goes to… the Barack Obama White House death squad.
Targeted - and dissolved - throughout this
grim process are also a pile of outdated concepts
such as national sovereignty, set-in-stone
principles of US and international law, and any
category which until the collapse of the Soviet
Union used to define what is war and what is
peace. Anyway, those categories started to be
dissolved for good already during the Bush
administration - which "legalized" widespread CIA
and Special Ops torture sessions and death squads.
Any self-respecting jurist would have to
draw the inevitable conclusion; the United States
of America is now outside international law - as
rogue a state as they come, with The Drone Empire
enshrined as the ultimate expression of shadow
war.
Incinerate the faithful Reading Terminator Planet inevitably evokes
the incestuous interaction between Hollywood and
the Pentagon. Even discounting the trademark wacky
paranoia of Hollywood screenwriters and producers,
a simple re-run of both the Robocop and
Terminator series reveals this may end up
badly.
And we're not even talking about a
Revolt of the Drones - yet. In 2010 there was
already a hint of juicy possibilities to come,
when a RQ-170 Sentinel crash-landed in Western
Iran via sophisticated jamming, and was duly
reverse-engineered, to the delight of Iranians,
Russians and the Chinese. The Pentagon
hysterically denied it had been outmaneuvered.
The notion that a Drone Empire may win
definitive control over what the Pentagon used to
call the "arc of instability" between the Middle
East and Central Asia - at the behest of Big Oil -
is eminently laughable.
As laughable as
the notion that a Drone Empire active in AfPak,
Yemen, Somalia and soon in all points across the
"arc of instability" will save the homeland from
jihad, Sharia law, a new Caliphate set up by a
bunch of fanatics, and all of the above.
Especially now that the Pentagon itself
ditched the rhetoric - and is focused on a
"pivoting" to face the potential peer competitor
that really counts, China.
And US Army
brigades (and Special Ops commandos) from 2013
onwards will be rotated all around the world -
with an emphasis in Africa - according to a
Pentagonese "regionally aligned force concept."
And Southcom has announced that Predator,
Reaper and Global Hawk drones will be deployed in
Central and South America for "anti-drug
operations, counter-insurgency and naval
vigilance".
As much as The Drone Empire is
global, drones can only be effective if ground
intelligence is effective. A simple example is
enough. Ultimately, in AfPak, it's not Obama that
decides on his "kill list". It's the Pakistani ISI
- which relies the info that suits its
contingencies to the CIA. And this while the
Pentagon and the CIA keep working under the
galactic illusion of absolute supremacy of
American technology - when they cannot even
neutralize an inflation of cheap, ultra low-tech
IEDs.
Uncle Sam wants your
ass Americans must also worry about the
Inland Drone Empire - as the pitifully unpopular
US Congress and President Obama have now fully
authorized their "integration" into American
airspace by 2015; by 2020, they will number at
least 30,000. For the moment, the Pentagon has
"only" 7,000 drones (ten years ago there were less
than 50).
Predictably, massive corporate
lobbying by drone manufacturers such as General
Atomics was key for the approval of the new
legislation. There's even a drone caucus, with 55
Congressmen (and expanding), and a global lobby
with 507 corporate members in 55 countries, the
Association for Unmanned Vehicles International,
which essentially sets the rules.
The
Orwellian - and Philip Dick - overtones are
inescapable; this is all about 24/7 drone
surveillance of large swathes of the US population
via radar, infrared cameras, thermal imaging,
wireless "sniffers" and, crucially, crowd-control
weapons. You better monitor the skies very closely
before you even start thinking about protesting.
And wait for the imminent arrival of
nuclear-powered drones, which can go on non-stop
for months, and not only days.
Tom and
Nick's digital file is absolutely essential
reading for contextualizing the lineaments of an
already de facto surveillance state, where
everyone is a suspect by definition, and the only
"winner" is the military-industrial complex.
Welcome to Motown as Dronetown: "Nowhere to run
to, baby, nowhere to hide…" Obama and the
Dronellas, anyone?
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