Drone Warfare

by Medea Benjamin

  Within an hour, some sixty protesters had gathered. They carried signs, peace flags and model drone planes to make sure their presence was understood by General Atomics employees and any passersby. “Our intent was simply to ask the employees to think about the company they work for and hold the management accountable for the killing machines they manufacture,” Nancy Mancias explained.

  The protesters laid down for a die-in, and chalked the outlines of their bodies to leave behind a representation of the civilians killed indiscriminately by drone attacks. Three protesters then sat down in the driveway, preventing any access to the property and creating a backup of cars along the road. The police attempted to negotiate with them. “What do we want? We want General Atomics to agree to stop making drones,” the protesters insisted. Since the police couldn’t deliver that, the group then asked to meet with CEO James Neal Blue, a meeting they had already requested weeks in advance. The police couldn’t arrange that either. So the sit-in continued.

  After over an hour of preventing access to the company’s headquarters and more than four hours of disrupting business as usual, CODEPINK, San Diego Peace Resource Center, and the coalition of activists packed up.

  “This is one morning when we made it difficult to get to work,” Mancias commented, “but there are mornings in Pakistan and Afghanistan when people never make it to work at all, or arrive to find buildings and roads destroyed by US attacks.”

  A few months later, on October 7, 2011, hundreds of protesters marched to the General Atomics headquarters in Washington, DC, to mark a decade of fighting in Afghanistan. Representatives of many of the nation’s anti-war groups were there, armed with banners, signs, songs, and chants. Nick Mottern brought three of his drone models, which hovered ominously above the protesters’ heads.

  After stopping for several minutes in front of the White House to send a message to President Obama that it was time to ground the drones, the group trekked on towards the General Atomics office to deliver a letter to the CEO. But as soon as the activists entered the lobby, the police and building security panicked. They shoved everyone outside—even pushing elderly veterans to the ground—and slammed the doors shut.

  The group staged a teach-in on the steps, with speakers highlighting General Atomics’ role in escalating drone warfare. The event got good media coverage, and the activists left inspired.

  Sometimes activists have targeted “secondary companies,” i.e., those that have relationships with firms involved in the drone-making business. These can be easier targets because they may have more of a public face than weapons companies, and because it might be easier for them to sever their partnerships. In early 2011, CODEPINK contacted the car company Nissan to protest the relationship between Nissan and AeroVironment. AeroVironment makes the charging system for Nissan’s electric car, the Leaf, but it also makes a variety of small drones. Nissan portrays itself as part of the green movement, as exemplified by their electric car, but here they were partnering with a company involved in drone warfare. CODEPINK asked Nissan to cut its ties with AeroVironment, but got no response.

  So a group of Los Angeles activists decided to crash the Nissan exhibit at the prestigious LA auto show. They jumped onto the Leaf’s platform, chanting, unfurling banners and calling upon Nissan to stop supporting drone warfare. They were eventually escorted off the premises, but not before getting out their message and embarrassing the company.

  One of the best ways to build an activist base is to focus on local connections to drone warfare. Fran Quigley, a professor, lawyer, and journalist, had been researching the disturbing trend of robotic warfare and decided to see if his home state of Indiana was involved.

  After submitting several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applications, he was surprised at the number of connections he uncovered. In West Lafayette, a company called Lite Machines had a multimillion-dollar contract with the Navy to manufacture a mini-drone. Rolls Royce in Indianapolis was making the engines for the Global Hawk. In Indianapolis, battery maker EnerDel had a $4-million-dollar contract to make batteries for drones. The engineering faculty at Purdue was doing research on drones, as was the Naval Surface Warfare Center in south central Indiana. And in Terre Haute, the Air National Guard was helping to pinpoint targets for drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “There’s nothing special about Indiana in this field,” said Quigley, “so I presume that if you did the research, you’d find significant drone activities going on in universities, small factories and research parks all across the country.”

  “Our state needs jobs, but I hate the fact that people of good conscience may be sucked into the military-industrial complex process of creating machines that contribute to the death of innocent civilians,” said Lori Perdue, an Air Force veteran and Indiana member of CODEPINK. “If we could create green jobs instead of war jobs, I bet the guy working the line making jet turbines would rather be building a wind turbine.”

  Quigley and the local activists have been educating students and plan to organize demonstrations outside the drone warfare support sites.

  A group in Iowa didn’t even wait until the local factory started working on drones to protest. As soon as they got wind that a company called AirCover Integrated Solutions was going to partner with the University of Iowa to build small surveillance drones in Cedar Rapids, they began protesting.273 Company President James Hill said the protesters were misdirected, that the drones would be used for good purposes like searching for people lost after earthquakes, finding wandering patients with dementia and looking for suspicious packages in stadiums.274

  But protesters think the drones will really be used to spy on the public, including folks like themselves. “The prospect of having drones flying around, spying on people, is kind of horrific,” said Nate Adeyemi, one of the local organizers. “It’s such an infringement upon the human right to privacy.” The group is also protesting the university for its involvement and the local officials who gave the company a loan.

  Another target for activists has been the organization that lobbies on behalf of the industry, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). The group created in 1978 “to promote and support the unmanned systems and robotics industry.” The organization has ballooned to include 1,400 members—all anxious to feed at the government trough. Activists have crashed their press conferences, conventions and fairs.

  Given their close connections in Congress—the companies give millions in campaign contributions and get, in return, billions of tax dollars—AUVSI can even show off its wares right inside the Capitol. At an exhibit hosted by the Congressional Drone Caucus in September 2011, activists broke up the lovefest, unfurling white sheets covered in fake blood and falling to the floor, moaning and writhing in pain. “Stop the killer drones,” they wailed, while another protester carrying a large cardboard drone made a loud buzzing noise as he zoomed around the room. Startled, the Congresspeople, staffers and corporate employees were forced to stop their conversations—until the police arrived and escorted the group out of the building.

  While protesters are busy naming and shaming companies, some of the nation’s best legal and human rights groups have been taking the issue of drone warfare and extrajudicial assassinations to court. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner over the government’s decision to put US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki on a hit list and freeze his US assets. They brought the case to a US federal court on behalf of Anwar al-Awlaki’s father, hoping to prevent the targeted killing of his son.275

  They lost the case on procedural grounds, but the judge was disturbed by the “serious questions” raised by the practice. “Can the executive order the assassination of a US citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization?” the judge inquired.276

  The UK-based human rights law group Reprieve is cons
idering bringing litigation against some European governments that have been complicit in the drone attacks on their nationals, including the governments of the UK, Germany, Belgium, France, and Spain. The laws in Europe make it easier than in the United States to sue in the courts. “We’re going to sue the government in Britain because the British have admitted that they provide intelligence for the drone attacks,” said Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith. “I think we have every chance to find violations of Geneva Conventions and humanitarian law. Whether we win in court or not, though, it’s the kind of thing where the British government cannot prevail in the court of public opinion, as what they are doing is just wrong.”

  Reprieve assisted its Pakistani partner organization, Foundation for Fundamental Rights, to lodge a legal case in Pakistan against John Rizzo, the former acting CIA general counsel who gave the final okay for adding names to the CIA’s hit list, and against the CIA station chief in Pakistan, Jonathan Banks, who fled the country after he was named in the case. The group is also investigating UK corporations involved in the production of drones for possible lawsuits.

  Another US group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed lawsuits about drones, but their focus is the secrecy surrounding the domestic use of drones. EFF filed suit demanding that the Federal Aviation Association release data on certifications and authorizations the agency has issued for the operation of unmanned aircraft. Certification by the FAA is required to operate a drone over 400 feet. And though the FAA said there were 285 certifications covering eighty-five different users as of mid-September 2011, the details on those users were unclear.

  Jennifer Lynch, the staff attorney for EFF, said that the use of drones domestically was raising significant privacy concerns. “Drones give the government and other unmanned aircraft operators a powerful new surveillance tool to gather extensive and intrusive data on Americans’ movements and activities,” she said. “As the government begins to make policy decisions about the use of these aircraft, the public needs to know more about how and why these drones are being used to surveil United States citizens.”277 Other groups are insisting that if the FAA does not protect people’s privacy, then Congress should enact additional protections.

  Human Rights Watch has taken on an even more difficult task: trying to get more transparency and accountability for the CIA’s secret drone program. It has called on the Justice Department to release information such as legal memos on targeted killings, drone videotapes from specific attacks, and after-action reports. Where there is a finding of wrongdoing, the group says, individuals responsible for conducting or ordering unlawful attacks should be promptly investigated and disciplined or prosecuted.

  Human Rights Watch also thinks the drone program should be taken out of the hands of the CIA. Since the US government is unwilling to demonstrate that the agency is abiding by international legal requirements for accountability and redress, the group feels the use of lethal drones should be exclusively within the command responsibility of the US military.278

  This was echoed by professor Mary Ellen O’Connell in her testimony to Congress in April 2010. “Restricting drones to the battlefield is the most important single rule governing their use,” she said, adding that at the very time the United Sates was trying to win hearts and minds to respect the rule of law, “we are ourselves failing to respect a very basic rule: remote weapons belong on the battlefield.”279

  The American Civil Liberties Union wants the government to account for casualties. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the ACLU received an official statement from the Department of Defense confirming it does not compile statistics about the total number of civilians killed or injured by drones. “Given widespread concerns about drone warfare and varying estimates of civilians killed, the Defense Department should compile data about the number of civilian casualties caused by drones and disseminate that information to the public,” said Jonathan Manes, an attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.280

  The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) agrees. It asserts that good military practice to minimize civilian harm dictates data collection before, during and after a combat operation, analysis of any harm that occurs and a review of lessons learned. But CIVIC goes farther, calling on the government to not only keep a record of civilians harmed by US drones, but also to compensate them. In 2010 CIVIC released a report called Civilian Harm and Conflict in Northwest Pakistan, showing that there is no comprehensive or systematic accounting of drone strike casualties nor any measure of amends, including compensation, for civilian victims.281

  “There are US systems in place, imperfect as they are, to compensate an Afghan harmed by a US convoy or small arms fire. But not a Pakistani harmed by a drone. Why are their losses treated differently?” asked CIVIC Executive Director Sarah Holewinski. “This makes no sense, and worse, it disrespects civilians, leaving them to suffer with no recognition or help.”282

  Holewinski told me that her group has tried repeatedly to meet with the CIA, but has had no success. “There’s a Catch 22, which is that the program is secret, it ‘doesn’t exist.’ So how can they meet to talk about a program that doesn’t exist?”

  It is precisely where this “non-existent” CIA program operates, Pakistan, where the largest outpouring of anti-drone protests have occurred. These include tens of thousands rallying in Peshawar and Karachi, hundreds sitting down on the main highway between Pakistan and Afghanistan to physically block the NATO supply route, general strikes in North Waziristan and protests outside Parliament in Islamabad.

  The immensely popular Pakistani opposition leader and former cricket champion Imran Khan has led the nation’s largest rallies against drone strikes. He insists that there is no military solution and calls for dialogue with the Taliban. He also laments the lack of response from civil society in the West, particularly the United States, where, he says, people don’t even know what their government is doing.

  Khan is right. Drones strikes are wreaking havoc from Pakistan to Gaza with little outcry from the citizens living in the “democracies” that are dropping the missiles. But while protests in the West are still in their embryonic stage, a growing group of activists are at least starting to educate the public, ask questions of their governments and companies, and demand answers.

  Opposition to Drones Goes Global

  In the United States, the activist movement against drone warfare grew up organically, in different parts of the country, without much national coordination. A loose umbrella coalition called United Against Drones, formed in August of 2010, connects groups through a listserv, a website and monthly conference calls to coordinate actions.

  Another network called the Alliance to Resist Robotic Warfare & Society (ARROWS) was formed in July 2009 to expand awareness and resistance to what it calls the emerging robotic/biotech/nanotech control matrix.

  In April 2010 the Alliance organized a civil society conference called Challenging Robotic Warfare and Social Control. Held in Columbia River Gorge, Oregon, near Boeing Corporation’s military drone complex, it brought together over 125 people from veterans’ groups, churches and peace organizations throughout the US Northwest. The conference ended with an urgent call for further activism and a protest at Boeing’s ScanEagle drone headquarters. The Alliance has continued to organize speaking tours and to promote resolutions in churches rejecting robotic weaponry and other artificial life forms. But like United Against Drones, this is a loosely coordinated network.

  Across the Atlantic, in England, a more developed coalition of organizations, academics and individuals emerged in 2010 called the Drone Campaign Network. Many UK groups had drones on their radar ever since the Royal Air Force started using them in 2007, but until the creation of the network, there wasn’t one particular group that focused exclusively on drones.

  The network is led by author and activist Chris Cole, formerly director of Fellowship of Reconciliation, Oxford. Cole helps groups connect to drone-related act
ivities in their local area, particularly if there are manufacturers based in their communities, and organizes a yearly gathering to share information and coordinate activities. Through the blog Drone Wars UK, he keeps track of drone news, information sources, and upcoming actions.

  One thing in the activists’ favor is the UK public’s general antipathy towards drones. After some snooping, Cole discovered on the Ministry of Defence’s website that one of their top concerns was the increasingly negative public perception of drones. Suspiciously, the Ministry of Defence took down the page as soon as he publicized it on the Drone Wars UK website. “People aren’t buying the whole ‘they’re keeping our boys safe’ story,” Cole said. “With the Iraq war debacle, people are skeptical about what the military says, especially claims that the drones are so accurate that they don’t kill civilians. There is also much more skepticism about the use of drones for surveillance in the UK than the US.”

  The coalition includes peace groups such as War Resisters International and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; faith-based organizations such as Fellowship of Reconciliation, England and Pax Christi; and professionals such as Scientists for Global Responsibility. They have organized actions that range from a Stop the Arms Fair at the Houses of Parliament to demonstrations at General Atomics’ new London office. Member group Child Victims of War sets up meetings with members of Parliament to complain about the number of children killed in drone attacks. Scientists for Global Responsibility disseminates information about drones on their website.283

  The Fellowship of Reconciliation, England, which has done its own excellent reports on drone warfare, has been calling on the government to make public the number of casualties resulting from British drone attacks and calls for a more open, serious, and informed discussion about the UK’s use of drones.284 “Drones are the latest in a long line of new weapons used in the mistaken belief that they will provide a clean and tidy solution to a conflict. Time and again history has proved that this is a myth,” their website states.285