And the War Goes On...

Besides being Ada Lovelace Day, yesterday was also the tenth anniversary of the US's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. This is a war that has done terrible damage to Afghanistan, has cost unimaginable sums of US taxpayer dollars to undertake, and which most people in the US do not approve of. Afghan human rights activist, author, and former Member of Parliament Malalai Joya, who has been on the side of democracy and therefore against the US, the Taliban, and the warlords (whose allegiances are always short-term and corrupt), released this video for the occasion:

Drone technology and "the social norm"

Whenever the US deploys new technology abroad, against foreign populations, you can be sure it will eventually (sometimes very soon) be adopted for domestic uses. The latest such technology is the drone. The CIA has been using drone technology in Pakistan to do the work of a death squad by remote control. (Death squads, of course, are evil entities, and so it's probably controversial to note that extrajudicial assassinations of persons are what death squads do.) Constantly and scandalously the CIA's drones have killed bystanders there, thus inciting public outrage and the outing and recall of the CIA's chief of station in Pakistan (to prevent his being hauled into a court of law on charges of murder, since he was present in Pakistan on a business rather than a diplomatic visa). We can easily imagine the scenario: the operative seated comfortably in an ergonomic chair at a console in the embassy, perhaps munching a snack or sipping a cup of coffee, killing real people with the ease of someone playing a video game, all the muss and fuss safely distanced and the resulting adrenalin surge utterly guilt-free, even when small children are their victims.

That is in Pakistan. (And Iraq and Afghanistan. And maybe even other places, for all we know, since the US is conducting military operations in dozens of countries abroad.) But now, if you live in the US, the drone will likely be coming in all sizes and shapes and purposes, to a city near you. So far the uses being proposed are that of surveillance, but we all know where taking that road typically ends. If US law enforcement can do something with the equipment they're given, they will.

Here's the Washington Post's Peter Finn:

For now, the use of drones for high-risk operations is exceedingly rare. The Federal Aviation Administration - which controls the national airspace - requires the few police departments with drones to seek emergency authorization if they want to deploy one in an actual operation. Because of concerns about safety, it only occasionally grants permission.

But by 2013, the FAA expects to have formulated new rules that would allow police across the country to routinely fly lightweight, unarmed drones up to 400 feet above the ground - high enough for them to be largely invisible eyes in the sky.

Such technology could allow police to record the activities of the public below with high-resolution, infrared and thermal-imaging cameras.

One manufacturer already advertises one of its small systems as ideal for "urban monitoring." The military, often a first user of technologies that migrate to civilian life, is about to deploy a system in Afghanistan that will be able to scan an area the size of a small town. And the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence to seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity.

But when drones come to perch in numbers over American communities, they will drive fresh debates about the boundaries of privacy. The sheer power of some of the cameras that can be mounted on them is likely to bring fresh search-and-seizure cases before the courts, and concern about the technology's potential misuse could unsettle the public.

And the best thing about this, for police departments? It's relatively cheap. As Finn notes, the real question is whether citizens will stand for it:

Still, Joseph J. Vacek, a professor in the Aviation Department at the University of North Dakota who has studied the potential use of drones in law enforcement, said the main objections to the use of domestic drones will probably have little to do with the Constitution.

"Where I see the challenge is the social norm," Vacek said. "Most people are not okay with constant watching. That hover-and-stare capability used to its maximum potential will probably ruffle a lot of civic feathers."

The article notes that there was apparently a revolt in Houston in 2007 against a pilot program for using drones. (Finn couldn't discover the reason for the program's being "aborted," but suspects it had to do with traffic tickets.) My guess is that most people will stand for it. The post 9/11 routine is well established. Some prominent politician receiving campaign funds from a company that makes drone technology will loudly and repreatedly claim that domestic use of the technology will make everyone safer, and then no elected official anywhere will be willing to oppose it. (That's how the boondoggle of the body scanner became standard TSA technology.) After all, for ten years we've been putting up with the security theater we all sacrifice our dignity to at airports, though it's degrading and is purely cosmetic. The politicians know it-- and also know they can't advocate dispensing with any particular component of it, no matter how absurd and ineffective it can be shown to be. As for the "social norm": no one seems to mind that citizens who videotape the police making arrests in public places (particularly when police misconduct is involved) are likely to go to jail for doing so. (Naturally the police can videotape anything they like.)

So tell me. Are we living in a police state yet?

In other words

Quite apart from the mystery of why Senator Lindsey Graham, like so many US politicians and pundits, is so intent on starting yet a third major war of conquest when they are still fighting the two that George Bush started, is the matter of his language. Yesterday, at an international "security" conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Graham declared:

"So my view of military force would be not to just neutralize their nuclear program, which are probably dispersed and hardened, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard," Graham told a panel.

"In other words, neuter that regime."

In other words? Really? So this is all about sexual potency and fertility? I can't help but recall Carol Cohn's classic article in Signs, published back in 1987, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals." Cohn spent two years talking to "defense intellectuals" talking about nuclear war and nuclear weapons.

Feminists have often suggested that an important aspect of the arms race is phallic worship, that "missile envy" is a significant motivating force in the nuclear build-up. I have always found this an uncomfortably reductionist explanation and hoped that my research at the Center would yield a more complex analysis. But still, I was curious about the extent to which I might find a sexual subtext in the defense professionals' discourse. I was not prepared for what I found.

What she found was that it was so much more pervasive and explicit than seemed seriously possible. Cohn ended up studying the language and trying to understand how it functions. As she notes,

"Listening to the discourse of nuclear experts reveals a series of culturally grounded and culturally acceptable mechanisms that serve this purpose and that make it possible to think about the unthinkable," to work in institutions that foster the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to plan mass incinerations of millions of human beings. Language that is abstract, sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use; paradigms whose referent is weapons; imagery that domesticates and deflates the force of mass destruction; imagery that reverses sentient and nonsentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and creation---all of these are part of what makes it possible to be radically removed from the reality of what one is talking about and from the realities one is creating through the discourse.

You can read the entire piece here.

That was 1987. This is 2010, and the arms race is long in the past. The US's "Defense" budget exceeds the combined military budgets of every other state in the world. And here in 2010 Graham is equating the possession (or in the case of Iran, the remote potential for achieving possession) of nuclear capacity with sexual potency and fertility. Does that mean that the states that possesses nuclear weapons are sexually potent and fertile (possesses the phallus?) and that those that don't are sexually impotent and unable to procreate? That's what Graham's langauge is suggesting. (Not to mention that he believes it ought to be the United States Government and the United States Government alone that decides who deserves to be potent. Israel, yes. Iran, no.)

Also in Graham's statement was the assertion that "his party would support military action against Iran that would destroy its ability to fight back while allowing its people to rise up." Yeah, right. Just as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we've seen how well those "military actions" have worked out.

Links for a Monday

**Dan Hartland writes about Vandana Singh's and Ian McDonald's work for Strange Horizons.

**On the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, the Fort Worth Texas police raided a gay bar, resulting in the arrests of seven people (for "public intoxication") and the hospitalization of one man with a brain injury inflicted by the police. 200 people turned out to demonstrate against this egregious police violence within 18 hours of the attack. Joel Burns, the city's first and only openly gay City Council member, noting the attack's occurrence on the anniversary of Stonewall, declared that “Unlike 40 years ago, though, the people of this community have elective representation that will make sure our government is accountable and that the rights of all its citizens are protected.” Read about it here.

**In Honduras, the police and military cut off electricity and the Internet (no Twitter there!) and imposed a curfew in the capital city, as citizens took to the streets to protest the overthrow of their constitutionally elected government by a military coup d'etat:

There is virtually no power or Internet in the Honduran capital in the wake of the coup d’etat. Electricity was gradually cut throughout the city, which is being overflown by war planes and helicopters. The few media outlets that continue to broadcast are only airing music.

The police have reportedly fired tear gas to disperse the growing crowds that have taken to the streets to protest.

There is also a blackout in some neighbourhoods in San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in this Central American nation.

Reuters reports that

On Sunday shots were fired, apparently into the air, near barricades of chain link fences and downed billboards erected by the protesters to block off the presidential palace. Some demonstrators were masked and wielding sticks.

Troops in full fatigues with automatic weapons lined the inside of the fenced-off presidential palace. Some covered their faces with riot gear shields as protesters taunted them, and a tank sat nearby, its cannon facing the crowd.

Honduras, an impoverished coffee, textile and banana exporter with a population of 7 million, had been politically stable since the end of military rule in the early 1980s.

Apparently the overthrown president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had attempted to fire the chief of the armed forces, and the Supreme Court had as a result authorized(???) the overthrow of the president. More details here and here.

Jeremy Scahill reflects on the coup, taking note of US associations and connections of its conspirators, particularly with the infamous School of the Americas and the certainty that the US Government knew it was coming. At the Nation, John Nichols notes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's "reasonably muscular condemnation" of the coup and the Wall Street Journal's suggestion that the Obama Administration worked (unsuccessfully) behind the scenes to avert it. But Nichols then quotes Roberto Lovato, an expert on US relations with Latin America, who considers "expressions of concern" insufficient:

President Obama and the U.S. can actually do something about a military crackdown that our tax dollars are helping pay for. That Vasquez and other coup leaders were trained at the WHINSEC, which also trained Augusto Pinochet and other military dictators responsible for the deaths, disappearances, tortures of hundreds of thousands in Latin America, sends profound chills throughout a region still trying to overcome decades U.S.-backed militarism.

Hemispheric concerns about the coup were expressed in the rapid, historic and almost universal condemnation of the plot by almost all Latin American governments. Such concerns in the region represent an opportunity for the United States. But, while the Honduran coup represents a major opportunity for Obama to make real his recent and repeated calls for a "new" relationship to the Americas, failure to take actions that send a rapid and unequivocal denunciation of the coup will be devastating to the Honduran people -- and to the still-fragile U.S. image in the region.