Deadly missions
A year ago, just before the Islamic State group took hold of Mosul, Iraq, a Jordanian fighter stated bluntly in a propaganda video: “[W]e are the descendants of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and we are coming to kill you.” Zarqawi, a fellow Jordanian, had been assassinated after landing on one of the United States’ many “kill lists.” With Zarqawi “neutralized,” the mysterious militant Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi rose to take his place. He was no improvement.
As Andrew Cockburn argues in his new book, “Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins,” the U.S. assassination program has done more harm than good. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have sought to kill their political opponents and
military targets. Assassination is not only an ugly legal precedent, but it just doesn’t appear to work. Yet when the program’s failures have been raised before foreign policy brass, the leadership has plugged its ears.
U.S. political assassination became formalized as policy (albeit covert) in the Eisenhower era. Stories abound of CIA scientists with briefcases traveling to places like Paris or the Congo during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. The CIA’s Desmond Fitzgerald even delivered a poison pen (target: Fidel Castro) in the days and weeks leading up to Kennedy’s own assassination. Documented in books like Evan Thomas’ “The Very Best Men,” these stories are standard CIA lore (Thomas’ was an official history, suggesting that the CIA didn’t mind such stories getting out).
A Washington editor for Harper’s magazine and author of a book on Donald Rumsfeld, Cockburn eschews the lore to focus on the marriage of technology, surveillance and assassination. The U.S. fascination with political assassination saw plans to kill Adolf Hitler during World War II. But experts at the time warned it could be counterproductive. He would be “canonized” rather than discredited, wrote one military official.
Next on the list was Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who led the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The U.S. wanted his head largely because code breakers had been reading encrypted Japanese messages before the attack, and if the intelligence had been put to better use, the attack might have been stopped. The U.S. continued listening long after the Japanese had been beaten back at Midway and Guadalcanal, yet orders came to “get Yamamoto,” and his plane was intercepted and shot down. It did nothing discernible to change the war, Cockburn argues.
In Vietnam, the plan to kill from the air was interwoven with a high-tech fence, crossing which, the Vietcong were expected to be surveilled and killed. (The sensors developed for this scheme may have been the seed for the projected allseeing eye from space in use today on American drones.) The fence, which used tiny seeing and even smelling sensors dropped onto the jungle floor, was easily eluded by Vietcong. Nor could they tell the difference between suspected enemies and ordinary villagers.
Ditto the modern drone. Not only is the sensor on a contemporary drone, whether a Preda- tor or another brand, legally blind, it would fail the driver’s test at a typical U.S. Department of Motor Vehicles office. But its blurs appear to operate like a Rorschach test, the proverbial inkblots, onto which pilots and video analysts might project their fears or their desire for kills, just as in the days of Yamamoto. The military even discusses the well-known limitations of the drone’s eye as like “looking through a soda straw” to see a scene of battle or attack. If it focuses in on individuals, it loses definition, and video analysts thousands of miles away are forced to guess at the blurs in the picture.
This is largely responsible, one gathers from Cockburn’s critical account, for the plethora of dead civilians in the wake of current U.S. policy. The latest high-profile (read: Western) instances of this include Warren Weinstein, an American aid worker, and the Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, in January. As President Obama announced April 23, both were captives of al Qaeda.
But even when assassinations do land on their intended targets, the result is often a smarter and more ruthless enemy. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which existed there negligibly if at all before the U.S. drew it there, morphed into the much more deadly Islamic State group as a direct result of the U.S. assassination program. And the U.S. claims that justify this policy are laughably unprovable: that the killings hurt enemy morale. The assassination program has also led to the wholesale dismissal by U.S. authorities of evidence of victims’ innocence, and only when indisputable proof has been furnished of drones killing civilians has the U.S. acknowledged errors.
One famous example from March 2011 was the killing of dozens of villagers who had gathered to discuss the rights to mine a valuable mineral discovered on the land between two properties. A U.S. official even told Cockburn that up to 30 civilian deaths were acceptable if a “high-value target” was in range for possible assassination. “If you’re gonna kill up to twenty-nine people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that’s not a problem,” the official said.
These are the arguments of bureaucrat-fiends, made to sound banal through euphe- mism, that Cockburn documents convincingly throughout the book. If the aim of a given policy is to win at war, and if war is sometimes necessary in the name of defense, Cockburn also shows again and again that these bureaucrats have handed out contracts for boondoggles that put American soldiers at risk of death, favoring unproven expenditures over proven technologies that are often less expensive. The assassination program, in a word, has palpably corrupted American policymaking, bearing out President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous warning as he left office that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the militaryindustrial complex.”
“Kill Chain” is a fascinating book, its arguments filed to slice the fingers and shred the arguments of many who appear within it. This is rhetoric effectively weaponized to do the most damage to a little-debated policy consensus forged with little input from voters.
If “Kill Chain” has a flaw, it’s twofold. The serpentine structure is at times slightly jarring (persistent readers will find it worth the trouble). The second flaw is no doubt inevitable: jargon. As George Orwell famously detailed, jargon is the military bureaucracy’s first line of evasion, and Cockburn makes lemonade of the lemons of endless acronyms. Even given these twin challenges, “Kill Chain” is a revelatory, must-read account of drones and killing from the air, but does anyone bother to listen to arguments critical of the military establishment and its untouchable bureaucracies? Sometimes they do. Especially as voters gear up to hear arguments from 2016’s presidential contenders, Cockburn’s readers will be better armed to deconstruct the arguments by which cant and cliche in defense of video-game-style killing are poured out through the media as safe, reliable wisdom.