Salon.com > counterterror

When drone strikes collide with stop-and-frisk

Sat, 11 May 2013 16:00:00 +0000

When NYPD officer Kha Dang took to the stand this week in the landmark federal trial challenging stop-and-frisk practices, he couldn't have known how revealing his testimony would be. Indeed, based on his comments, it's striking that that the police department would allow Dang -- a so-called stop-and-frisk "all star" for the large numbers of stops he carried out -- on the stand at all.

As Ryan Devereaux reported for the Guardian, in the third quarter of 2009 alone "Dang made a total of six arrests out of his 127 stops. He wrote one summons. He found contraband once. He never recovered any weapons and he only stopped people of color, primarily African Americans, 115 times to be exact. He never stopped a white person." Dang's record here is stunning enough alone. More telling still is the justifications he recounted to the court for making many of his stops, referring to repeated observation of individuals' general behavioral patterns, including "furtive movements" -- a vague policing phrase regularly stretched beyond the limits of all reasonableness. "We have a general idea of their behavior," Dang testified.

CIA may lose drone program

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:17:00 +0000

The CIA's controversial targeted killing program may be coming to an end, according to three senior U.S. officials who spoke to the Daily Beast. The spy agency may gradually stop overseeing the "disposition matrix" that determines who is targeted by armed drones, and the program would shift to the Pentagon's control. The same concerns about unfettered executive power to determine life or death with drones strikes would, however, remain. But according to the Daily Beast's Daniel Klaidman, transitioning the program "could potentially toughen the criteria for drone strikes, strengthen the program’s accountability, and increase transparency."

As part of a pattern traced for some months (particularly by the Washington Post's Greg Miller), in shifting the drone program from the CIA to the Pentagon, the Obama administration would codify shadow wars as fully integrated into modern U.S. warfare -- the stuff of Defense Department oversight. Klaidman reported:

How to think about drones

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

It's not unusual to hear the debate on targeted killings reduced to whether one is "for" or "against" drones. But such a reductive dichotomy over a technology makes little sense and conflates a vortex of issues from executive authority, secrecy, civil liberties, constitutionality and militarism to privacy and personhood. So, what are we really talking about when we talk about drones?

Clearly, we're not just talking about the technology of unmanned flying machines. The fundamental questions concerning the use of drones are about more than this. They are about who can be killed by the U.S. government, where, with what justification and with who else knowing. They are about what activities can be watched by whom and from which skies. They are stories about citizenship and foreignness, property and privacy; they tell of unidentified robots flying near JFK airport and human meat hanging from trees in Southern Yemen.

In short, when we talk about drones we are talking about complex configurations and arrangements of bodies, spaces, objects and subjects. Instead of embracing a knee-jerk polemic that either celebrates or condemns drones, it's important to parse out some of the issues that drone technology has brought to the fore. Then we can ask how it is that drone technology shapes and determines these narratives.

UK terror suspects stripped of citizenship, hit by drones

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:00:00 +0000

The legality of targeting U.S. citizens remains at the fore of debates over the Obama administration's drone program. In the U.K., the issue of citizenship and extrajudicial killing has taken a very different shape.

According to a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) for British newspaper The Independent, "the [British Government has secretly ramped up a controversial program that strips people of their British citizenship on national security grounds – with two of the men subsequently killed by American drone attacks."

The BIJ found that since 2010 the U.K.'s Home Secretary Theresa May has revoked the passports of 16 individuals, many of whom are alleged to have had links to militant groups. Of these sixteen, at least five were born in Britain -- one man had lived there for almost 50 years. "Critics of the program warn that it allows ministers to 'wash their hands' of British nationals suspected of terrorism who could be subject to torture and illegal detention abroad," The Independent noted.