by Eyal Press
Dirty workers operating under this pressure did sometimes have room to make moral choices. When Harriet Krzykowski learned what happened to Darren Rainey, she could have quit her job. She could also have reported the incident and demanded that the perpetrators be held accountable, as George Mallinckrodt had after hearing that one of his patients had been stomped on. Refusing to collaborate with the authorities might have been risky, but it would not have cost the mental health staffers at Dade their lives, as was the case in the “infernal environment” that Levi described. On the other hand, the fact that some room for choice existed could paradoxically heighten the sense of complicity and self-reproach that dirty workers felt. What prompted Harriet Krzykowski to fall silent was, ultimately, that she didn’t want to antagonize security or lose her job. These were good reasons, but were they good enough? She wasn’t sure, which was why she kept wondering whether she was a victim of the system or a perpetrator. Her confusion was shared by other staff members I met who refrained from reporting abuse for no better reason than that they wanted to continue receiving their paychecks. In the view of George Mallinckrodt, who lost his job after speaking out about the stomping incident, the duty to protect patients from harm should have superseded this consideration. It was an admirably principled position, one shared by medical ethicists and organizations like Human Rights Watch. Notably, though, Mallinckrodt had less to risk from adhering to such a view. He was a bachelor from a wealthy family, not a parent with young children to support and no safety net, like Harriet Krzykowski. The pressure of economic necessity led Harriet and several of her peers to act more cautiously as they navigated the gray zone at Dade, pulled by conflicting impulses that reflected their precarious circumstances.
Similar tensions prevailed among at least some Border Patrol agents, not all of whom were strangers to the dreams and longings that led migrants to cross the border in search of a better life. In his memoir, Cantú wrote that he mentioned to his mother that nearly half of the recruits at the Border Patrol training academy he attended were, like him, Latino. “Some of them grew up speaking Spanish, some grew up right on the border,” he told her. “These people aren’t joining the Border Patrol to oppress others. They’re joining because it represents an opportunity for service, stability, financial security.” In this respect, his classmates were not unique: in 2016, Latinos made up the majority of the U.S. Border Patrol. After Trump was elected and promised to hire more agents, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times visited a Border Patrol academy in California’s Imperial Valley to talk to trainees. Most of them were Latino. They included people like Michael Araujo, whose own uncles had crossed the border illegally. Why was he joining the Border Patrol? Because of the pressure of economic necessity. “It’s a job in a county with the second-highest unemployment rate statewide at 17%,” noted the Los Angeles Times. “Everyone’s kind of interested if you’re from around here,” Araujo explained. “They know it’s one of the few places you can get a good job.”
In a study of immigration officers of Mexican ancestry who worked for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the anthropologist Josiah Heyman discovered something similar. The officers in question had grown up in an impoverished area of the Southwest with a highly segmented labor market, watching their Mexican American parents work various marginal jobs—in discount stores, at packing sheds. In this context, landing a position at the INS was highly desirable; it was a “good job,” notwithstanding the social discomfort it could generate. Being Latino could compound the moral hazards of working for an agency like the INS, provoking charges of betrayal and disloyalty. One person Heyman interviewed mentioned that a close friend had told her, “You’re arresting my compadres.” After Francisco Cantú’s book appeared, some critics accused him of being a “traitor.” The accusation echoed the charge that some Black prison guards heard from prisoners who ridiculed them for working in a criminal justice system that systematically oppressed people of color.
To be sure, not everyone who took a job policing the border did so because they lacked alternatives. Some joined out of conviction and showed no mercy for migrants. In 2019, The New York Times published a story about the decline of morale in the Border Patrol, owing to the backlash triggered by Trump’s policies. One agent complained that people called him a “kid killer”; another said that he and his colleagues avoided restaurants where people might spit on their food. This was the price of working in an agency responsible for herding sobbing children into overcrowded camps where detainees were denied access to food, water, and medical care. But while a few agents betrayed misgivings about the role they’d been forced to play, far more seemed unconflicted, expressing support for the Trump administration’s draconian policies. The Times described the Border Patrol as a “willing enforcer” of the crackdown on migrants, an attitude apparent on a private Border Patrol Facebook page where agents used callous, racist language to mock both migrants and their congressional sympathizers. “Oh well,” read a post about a sixteen-year-old who died in Border Patrol custody.
The agents who posted such messages deserved no pity. Even Border Patrol agents who did feel conflicted were “the rightful owners of a quota of guilt,” not least because, unlike the subjects of Levi’s essay, they stood no risk of getting killed for refusing to carry out orders. Guilt was especially appropriate for agents like Cantú, one might argue, a college graduate who could have pursued plenty of other careers. As he acknowledged in his memoir, he chose to join the Border Patrol, just as he chose, at least initially, to go along with his share of gratuitous cruelty. Among the people who held this view was Cantú’s mother. “You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it,” she tells him at one point in The Line Becomes a River. “You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison.” The fact that Cantú felt remorse afterward likely came as little comfort to the victims, just as it failed to appease Primo Levi. “It remains true that the majority of the oppressors, during or (more often) after their deeds, realized that what they were doing or had done was iniquitous, or perhaps experienced doubts or discomfort,” Levi wrote of the collaborators in the camps. “This suffering is not enough to enroll them among the victims.”
But as Cantú’s memoir makes clear, the cruelty of the system was more than just the sum of individual agents’ actions. It was a product of policies formulated by politicians and embraced by many citizens. While activists dismissed ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection as “rogue agencies,” the agenda they enforced was popular with Trump’s base. These agencies did not lack for admirers at the MAGA rallies that helped get Trump elected in 2016 and continued throughout his presidency. Although liberals found the nativism on display at these rallies appalling, many were quick to forget that Trump was hardly the first president to oversee a ruthless crackdown on migrants. Amid the uproar set off by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, Cantú published an op-ed in The New York Times in which he noted that tearing parents away from their children was only the latest, most visible chapter in a much longer story of cruelty and callousness. Its roots could be traced back to the 1990s, when the Clinton administration dispatched Border Patrol agents to cities like El Paso to apprehend illegal migrants. Instead of deterring border crossings, the crackdown made them more dangerous, leading desperate migrants to embark on treks through the desert, which many did not survive. According to the reporter Manny Fernandez, between 2000 and 2016 the Border Patrol recorded more than six thousand migrant deaths.
All of this happened before Trump entered office, as did holding migrant children in unlicensed detention centers, a policy that began under Barack Obama, who deported more people through immigration orders than George W. Bush—indeed, more than all his predecessors combined. These inhumane policies provoked little outrage from a public that, perhaps not coincidentally, was conveniently shielded from seeing or hearing about the less palatable consequences.
“For most Americans,
what happens on the border remains out of sight and out of mind,” Cantú observed in his op-ed, with “the hostile desert” left to “do the dirty work of deterring crossers, away from the public eye.”
* * *
No one called Heather Linebaugh a Nazi for serving in the drone program. But plenty of people subjected her to belittlement, she told me when we met one day, a few years after she’d been discharged from the military. Heather was tall and thin, with thick black hair that spilled over her shoulders and an intense, slightly mournful gaze. She was wearing cutoff jeans and an olive-green tank top that revealed a maze of tattoos on her arms, including one she’d gotten on the day she’d processed out from Beale. À rebours—French for “against the grain”—it read, a slogan that evoked a side of her personality she’d had to suppress in the military, the rebellious streak that had drawn her to grunge bands as a teenager and that later, at Beale, led her to identify with whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, the former intelligence officer who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks after growing disillusioned with the Iraq War. In the eyes of Heather’s military superiors, Manning was a traitor. In her own eyes, she was a courageous figure, not least for taking a risk that many soldiers who privately harbored doubts about the morality of what they were doing avoided. This was true of Heather herself, who told me that she briefly looked into filing as a conscientious objector while at Beale. The prospect of ending up like Manning, who was court-martialed and accused of “aiding the enemy,” a crime punishable by death, gave her pause. When Manning’s hearings began, Heather decided to break her silence by going to Fort Meade to express solidarity for her. The venue she chose was a demonstration outside the courthouse in Fort Meade. On hand were activists from various peace groups, among them Code Pink. Heather approached the area where the speakers were lining up. “Hi, I’m Heather Linebaugh—I was in the drone program,” she announced when her turn came, only to be interrupted by a chorus of boos.
Like the activists who showed up at Francisco Cantú’s readings to call for boycotting his book, the protesters were less interested in what Heather had to say than in condemning her. The reaction infuriated her. “I wanted to say, ‘Fuck all of you!’” she said. The guilt she felt, the nightmares she was having: none of this won her any sympathy. Afterward, Heather wondered what the point of airing her beliefs was. Her doubts resurfaced a few months later, after she decided to air them publicly again, this time in an editorial that she submitted to The Guardian. “Whenever I read comments by politicians defending … drones,” began the op-ed, which Heather composed after a string of fitful nights interrupted by disturbing dreams, “I wish I could ask them a few questions. I’d start with: How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?” It continued:
What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.
“It’s also important for the public to grasp that there are human beings operating and analyzing intelligence from these unmanned aerial vehicles,” Heather went on. “I may not have been on the ground in Afghanistan, but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end. I know the feeling you experience when you see someone die. Horrifying barely covers it.”
Sharing her perspective could help educate the public about the hidden costs of the drone wars, Heather figured. It would also enable her to vent her grief. About a year after leaving the military, she learned that a member of her former unit had died by suicide in his off-base apartment. The soldier was a former “Airman of the Year” who had been hailed as a model service member. A short while later, another drone analyst Heather knew took his own life. Heather mentioned the suicides in her editorial, along with the “depression, sleep disorders and anxiety” that afflicted her and many of her peers.
The venue in which Heather chose to express these thoughts had not been selected randomly. The Guardian was the newspaper through which another whistleblower, Edward Snowden, had revealed that the National Security Agency was secretly monitoring the private email and telephone communications of U.S. citizens. Snowden’s revelations sparked a nationwide debate about mass surveillance that spread from the halls of Congress to the boardrooms of telecommunications companies like AT&T and Google. Heather was not so grandiose as to imagine that her article would have a similar effect. Still, she told me, she hoped it could at least spark some reflection and dialogue and help raise awareness about the travails of veterans afflicted with wounds that were less visible but no less debilitating than those of conventional soldiers.
On the day her article appeared online, Heather turned on her laptop, clicked on a link to The Guardian’s website, and began scrolling through readers’ comments. Within hours, hundreds had appeared. The more of them she read, the more shaken she felt. “Appreciate the honesty, Heather, but you should be in custody awaiting trial,” one reader wrote. This was the reaction on the left, among people who needed no convincing that drone strikes were wrong and saw people like her as war criminals. On the right, Heather found herself denounced as a traitor and a crybaby, an “armchair warrior” who had no grounds to complain. Instead of sparking dialogue, her article unleashed blame, a flood of hostile messages that spanned the ideological spectrum. After a while, she shut off her laptop, rattled and distraught. In the days that followed, she avoided going online, after friends warned her about the vicious things being said about her. Eventually, the negative attention died down, giving way to something equally jarring: silence.
* * *
The best way to help veterans heal from moral injury was by communalizing it, Jonathan Shay argued in Achilles in Vietnam, giving soldiers opportunities to tell their story “to someone who is listening and who can be trusted to retell it truthfully to others in the community.” This was the principle behind the ceremony I’d attended at the VA in Philadelphia, where veterans were invited to deliver the truth about war to an audience of civilians who were summoned to listen and to acknowledge their shared responsibility.
But what if society didn’t want to listen? What if delivering the truth about war was met with a roll of the eyes or a quick change of subject from people who, when it came to hearing about the wars fought in their name, lacked what Everett Hughes called “the will to know”? In the media and the human rights community, the most frequently voiced criticism of the drone program was that it lacked transparency, preventing citizens from knowing the truth. “The public simply did not have the information it needed to evaluate the government’s decisions,” argued Jameel Jaffer, then the deputy legal director of the ACLU’s national-security program. “Overbroad secrecy impoverished public debate and corrupted the democratic process.”
Critics like Jaffer weren’t wrong that transparency was lacking. As the report published in 2017 by the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic and the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies noted, the U.S. government had been “consistently and excessively secret” about targeted killing operations. In response to these critics, the Obama administration eventually agreed to adopt some limited transparency measures, including a rule requiring intelligence officials to disclose the number of civilians killed by drones in places like Yemen and North Africa. In 2019, the Trump administration eliminated these “superfluous reporting requirements,” with barely a murmur of protest from Congress or the public. Trump also eliminated a rule restricting drone strikes to high-level militants. This, too, was met with silence.
The muted reaction underscored how “civilized” drone warfare was—civilized as defined by Norbert Elias, with routine violence tolerated as long as it was discreet and disguised. Compared with ground invasions and conventional bombing campaigns, the kill capacity of drones was
trifling, some pointed out. Measured by body counts and collateral damage, this was undeniable. Yet the comparative “humaneness” of drone warfare created a hazard of its own. It enabled U.S. officials “to present warfare as a form of virtue,” argued Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and law at Yale, waged by military generals who sought to keep the body count low even as they engaged in surveillance and killing operations “across an astonishing span of the earth” in order to sustain America’s global hegemony, a hegemony that few opposed. “The containment and minimization of violence in America’s wars, particularly when it comes to civilian deaths, have only made it harder to criticize America’s use of force in other countries,” Moyn maintained. Precisely because drones and special operations forces carried a lighter footprint and caused fewer civilian casualties than conventional forms of warfare, in other words, questioning whether they should be used at all became, paradoxically, more difficult. It gave America’s wars a “moral sheen”—a cleanness—that made the prospect of endless war more palatable.