While Newsweek touted New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney, the erstwhile beneficiary of the hype all but killed her chances of getting the job by opening her mouth.
“I absolutely advocate for comprehensive immigration reform,” Martinez told reporter Andrew Romano. “Republicans want to be tough and say, ‘Illegals, you’re gone.’ But the answer is a lot more complex than that.”
With those words, Martinez inflicted multiple wounds on whatever slender chance she had to join the national ticket. First, she indicated support for the immigration agenda that President Obama promises to pursue if he defeats Romney in November. Second, the reforms the 43-year-old first-term Republican favors are opposed by every Republican member of the Senate (even those like John McCain, who used to support it) and a solid majority in the House. (In case there was any doubt, the same day Martinez’s interview appeared, Politico reported that the Romney campaign was seeking a “boring white guy” as a running mate.)
Martinez had previously said she wasn’t interested in a place on the Republican ticket. Her comments certainly indicate she isn’t interested in the public posturing necessary to achieve it.
On immigration reform, Martinez said she favors:
an approach “with multiple levels”: increased border security; deportation for criminals; a guest-worker program for people who want “to go freely back and forth across the border to work”; a DREAM Act-style pathway to citizenship, through the military or college, for children brought here illegally by their parents; and a visa (coupled with a “penalty” or a “tagback”) that allows rest of the illegal population to remain in the U.S. while they follow standard naturalization procedures.
In conversation, Martinez slagged Romney’s advocacy of “self-deportation” for the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the United States.
“‘Self-deport?’ What the heck does that mean?” she snapped.
Martinez is not the only person asking. As articulated by Romney during the primary season,”self-deportation” means making life so miserable for the undocumented that they will “voluntarily” leave the country. Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and Romney advisor, told me he thought the United States could remove 5.5 million “illegal aliens” by the end of the first Romney administration.
As John McCain and others have pointed out, a GOP campaign promise to forcibly evict millions of Americans from their homes is neither attractive nor practical as an appeal to Latino voters, the fastest-growing group in the American electorate.
Martinez suggested Romney needed a more attractive message.
“I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign,” she said. “But now there’s an opportunity for Governor Romney to have a sincere conversation about what we can do and why.”
Impolitic to the end, Martinez expressed skepticism about Sen. Marco Rubio’s much-hyped but still vague idea of GOP variation on the DREAM Act. Rubio, with Romney’s tacit blessing, is seeking to moderate the Republicans’ reputation on immigration by developing a DREAM Act-style measure that would protect undocumented young people from deportation without giving them citizenship.
Politicians, Martinez said, cannot “fix [immigration] by saying, ‘Here’s the DREAM Act and we’re done.’ It has to be part of a larger plan.”
In other words, the New Mexico governor is that now-rare national Republican figure who favors comprehensive immigration reform, otherwise known as amnesty. Martinez would open the illegal immigrant’s path to citizenship that Marco Rubio avoids and that most Republicans seek to block. She probably won’t be Mitt Romney’s running mate. But Susana Martinez will be heard.
Public safety agencies can now get expedited permission to fly drones weighing up to 25 pounds in U.S. airspace, according to new rules approved Monday by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The size of the craft was the most significant change made by the FAA in responding to a congressional mandate to integrate unmanned aviation vehicles into domestic airspace. In February, Congress passed legislation calling on the FAA to expedite approval for law enforcement and first responder agencies that want to use drones smaller than 4.4 pounds.
FAA officials decided to boost the size of the largest permissible public safety drone after meeting with federal, state and local law enforcement representatives, a spokesman said. The officials “determined that small unmanned aircraft systems under 25 pounds would be the most cost-effective, easiest to manage and overall most appropriate to carry out the various first responder missions.”
The decision opens up the market to American drone manufacturers seeking customers in the public safety sector, according to Ben Gielow, general counsel for Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a trade group. An industry survey of drones under 4.4 pounds found 79 different models for sale by 54 companies, Gielow said. Now public safety agencies shopping for North American-made drones to fit the FAA regulations will be able to choose from 146 models manufactured by 69 different companies. The larger drones will be able to carry more sensors to improve “situational awareness,” he said.
Missy Cummings, professor of aeronautics at MIT, says the larger vehicles “will be more maneuverable and stable in high winds. They’ll be able to get a clearer and steadier picture of whatever they’re looking at.”
But don’t expect to see a law enforcement drone overhead right away. Public safety organizations must first apply to the FAA for approval to establish a drone training and performance evaluation program. Only when the agency has shown proficiency in training and evaluation of unmanned airborne vehicles will it receive a certificate of approval to fly drones.
Other congressionally mandated conditions will remain in effect. The drones must stay under 400 feet while flying and must remain in sight of the operator at all times.
In February, Congress ordered the FAA to develop plans to open up U.S. airspace to “small” drones for commercial purposes by mid-2014. The legislation defines a “small drone” as one that weighs less than 55 pounds.
So as drones grow more common in U.S. airspace, they are likely to grow larger.
Stark Aerospace of Mississippi is perhaps the only foreign-owned company with FAA permission to fly a drone in U.S. airspace. Based in the town of Columbus, not far from Mississippi State University, Stark is a subsidiary of the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries — not that you could tell from looking at the company’s website, executive leadership or affiliations. You have to go to the Mississippi secretary of state website to learn that two of Stark’s three directors are Israelis.
So too with the America’s drone industry. The Israeli influence is not visible but it is real, documented and extremely relevant to the future of drones in America. If you want to know how drones may change American airspace in coming years, just look to Israel, where the unmanned aerial vehicle market is thriving and drones are considered a reliable instrument of “homeland security.”
“There are three explanations for Israel’s success in becoming a world leader in development and production of UAVs,” a top Israeli official explained to the Jerusalem Post last year. “We have unbelievable people and innovation, combat experience that helps us understand what we need and immediate operational use since we are always in a conflict which allows us to perfect our systems.”
Israel’s drone expertise goes back to at least 1970, according to the UAV page of the Israeli Air Force. Mark Daly, an expert on unmanned aircraft at Jane’s Defense in London, notes the Israelis were the first to make widespread use of drones in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when the aircraft were used to monitor troop movements.
Now, as the Arab media and Western reporters such as Scott Wilson of the Washington Post have reported, the Israeli Defense Force uses fleets of constantly hovering drones to intimidate and control the Arab population in the Gaza Strip. (The residents call these drones “zenana,” which both sounds like the aircraft’s distinctive buzz and is Arabic slang for a nagging wife.) The IDF regularly uses drones for targeted assassinations of suspected militants, saying the drones enable them to use “precision strikes” to avoid hurting civilians. Yet as Human Rights Watch has documented, the drone strikes during the Gaza War killed scores of children who were nowhere near armed combatants.
Israel markets its expertise in defense to the rest of the world. Israeli academic Neve Gordon cites a glossy government brochure on drones titled “Israel Homeland Security: Opportunities for Industrial Cooperation,” which boasts, “no other advanced technology country has such a large proportion of citizens with real time experience in the army, security and police forces.” The chapter called “Learning from Israel’s Experience” notes that “many of these professionals continue to work as international consultants and experts after leaving the Israel Defense Forces, police or other defense and security organizations.”
The work has paid off when it comes to drones: The Jewish state is the single largest exporter of drones in the world, responsible for 41 percent of all UAVs exported between 2001 and 2011, according to a database compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Israeli companies export drone technology to at least 24 countries, including the United States.
In addition to exports, Israeli companies also create subsidiaries in consumer countries. “To increase sales outside Israel, Israel’s defense companies have to set up subsidiaries in target markets, rather than expand local manufacturing,” Haaretz reported in 2009. The Israelis “set up Stark in 2006 to drum up business in America,” according to Haaretz, because the U.S. prefers “to buy armaments and other defense gear from local companies.” In 2007, Stark “inaugurated its first production outfit, which makes Hunter unmanned vehicles that it sells through Northrop Grumman. In fact, the U.S. armed forces have been using [Israeli-made] Hunter drones since the early 1990s.”
As for domestic drone uses, the Israeli example is perhaps most instructive at the U.S. border. The 5 million Palestinian Arabs living in and around Israel, like the 11 undocumented resident aliens in the United States, are ineligible for citizenship in the land they call home. Both groups are subject to monitoring, barriers to entry and rapid expulsion. Not surprisingly one of the first uses of drones by the Department of Homeland Security was to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border, where it now flies Israeli-made Hermes 450 drones.
And the Israeli example is instructive not just at the border, but also south of it, where the Mexican government has allowed the U.S. to fly drone missions as part of the drug war. Mexico has, apparently, learned a thing or two from its northern neighbor about the best country for buying drones. In March, when it allegedly purchased two new drones of its own, it knew where to go: Israel.
Kate Doyle’s job isn’t exactly journalism, though she’s nailed more big stories than many Pulitzer Prize winners. Her work does not quite qualify as law enforcement either, though a few bad guys living in confined quarters rue the day she came into their lives. “Human rights detective” sounds flippant, so she prefers “forensic archivist.”
Whatever you call it, war criminals have to pay attention. Last month Doyle, a senior analyst at the non-profit National Security Archive, testified as an expert witness in the Peruvian government’s prosecution of Vladimir Montesinos, the country’s former intelligence chief, who is on trial for ordering the execution of 14 captured leftist guerrillas in 1997. Doyle authenticated a declassified CIA cable she had obtained that included a first person account of Montesinos’s actions.
In the near future, she hopes to take the stand as an expert witness against former de facto Guatemalan president Efrain Rios Montt, who presided over a genocidal “scorched earth” war that killed an estimated 200,000 people in the early 1980s, the worst genocide in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th century. An investigation documented 626 different massacres committed by the U.S.-backed military forces between 1979 and 1984; most of the victims were unarmed Mayan Indians.
Doyle’s forensic investigations over the last 20 years have made her an irritant to governments everywhere — including Washington — as well a friend to the families of the victims of human rights abuses throughout Latin America. She has won a host of awards, including this year’s Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive and Puffin Foundation award for human rights activism, one of the world’s largest prizes in the field. She will share the award with fellow investigator Fredy Peccerelli, who is the executive director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation.
“She speaks with such strength because she speaks as an American,” Peccerelli said in an interview. “Very few times do you have someone investigating their own government and pointing to their own officials about their involvement. Kate speaks about the responsibility that Americans bear because of what they did. It’s very powerful.”
(Full disclosure: Doyle is a friend. I relied on CIA documents she obtained from the National Security Archive to write my book Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. Like many journalists in Washington and Latin America, I have found her work to be built on a solid foundation of official documentation from the U.S. and other governments. )
She’s also a passionate advocate of freedom of information laws. Thanks in part to her work, seven Latin American countries have adopted freedom of information laws since 2000. The most distinctive feature of these laws is that, unlike the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, they explicitly forbid the withholding of information about human rights abuses on grounds of “national security.” A provision she calls “very important but untested.”
“Having a legal mechanism to obligate the state to provide information is just the beginning,” says Doyle. She shares the information with prosecutors to develop cases based on “criminal patterns of action” that yield specific details of a disappearance or a massacre. Peccerelli’s forensic anthropologists exhume bodies and do DNA analysis.
Doyle has been largely frustrated in Mexico and El Salvador, where legal authorities are reluctant to confront the abuses of the past. But in Guatemala, she and her colleagues have uncovered some remarkable stories that have led to the prosecution of military officers involved in war crimes.
In the late 1990s, a source gave Guatemalan human rights activists a 54-page army log that revealed the fate of scores of people who were “disappeared” by security forces during the mid-1980s. The log included photos of 183 of the victims, along with coded references to their executions.
For the families of the victims, the results of the discovery of the so-called “death squad dossier” were close to miraculous. Not only are the officers named in the documents now under investigation, but thanks to Peccerelli’s DNA work, the bodies of five of the victims were identified and returned to their families, who had never known what had happened to their loved ones 30 years ago.
In 2009, another source gave Doyle a set of internal military documents about the scorched earth campaign of the early 1980s that were so damning in their details that the source recommended she immediately leave the country. “This person was worried that anybody who had possession of such incendiary documents would be targeted,” Doyle said.
The documents will be used by prosecutors in the trial of Rios Montt. “We have a very strong case,” Doyle says. But the continuing power of the Guatemalan military means the 86-year-old retired general may be able to avoid justice.
I asked her if she ever get discouraged by the enormity of the crimes she investigates.
“I don’t,” she replied. “I”ve met so many beautiful, dedicated people in Guatemala who have been working on this for 30 years that I feel privileged. What Fredy’s group has done with DNA findings is amazing. I’m inspired, not discouraged.”
Working with the families of people who have lost loved ones, she says, “is always painful. But I can bring them information that they’ve never been able to get. That’s mitigates the pain.”
I asked her if she ever gets scared.
“I have received threats,” she says with a rueful laugh. “But I’ve never felt one iota as frightened as my colleagues who have to stay in Guatemala all the time. Pressure and hostility and threats come with the territory” — the territory of the forensic archivist.
The Obama administration is escalating its public relations offensive for global drone war, even as popular opposition in nuclear-armed Pakistan imperils the U.S. government’s long-standing alliance there. As the abrupt resignation of U.S. ambassador Cameron Munter calls into question the sustainability of U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, the White House is doubling down on its policy of aerial war in Muslim countries.
After years of secrecy, denials and no comments, the Obama administration is now hastening to defend the drone war publicly. This media offensive, launched on May 1 by White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, was bolstered by the release of “Letters From Abbotabad,” a selection of 17 documents out of the reported 6,000 seized from the house where bin Laden was killed.
Obama’s public diplomacy on drones has its uses on the 2012 campaign trail, but for U.S national security policymakers it is needed to counter the daily reports out of Pakistan that virtually everybody from the pro-American foreign minister to the Islamist right opposes the drone war. In the country’s upcoming presidential election, perennial populist candidate Imran Khan is surging on the strength of his pledge to shoot down U.S. drones.
At stake are NATO supply lines into Afghanistan. Five months ago, Pakistani authorities protested a U.S. drone strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers by barring U.S. resupply trucks from Pakistani roads. The U.S. is now flying supplies into Afghanistan, an expensive proposition for a cash-strapped country. The Nation, a leading newspaper in Pakistan, says the resignation of Munter, who was sympathetic to Pakistani arguments against the drone strikes, “could complicate efforts to repair alliance with the U.S. and reopen NATO supply into Afghanistan.”
The Obama administration reinforced its narrative of effective drone war this week by confirming the story of a Saudi double agent who reportedly foiled a plot to bomb a U.S. civilian airliner with explosive undergarments. First reported Monday by the Associated Press, and amplified by the New York Times, the story reflected well on the Saudi intelligence service, which recruited the double agent who obtained the explosive device and turned it over to the U.S. for inspection. The White House initially asked AP to delay publication of the story but once it was published, administration officials were quick to link the return of the underwear bomber to the drone war.
The Saudi double agent, U.S. officials told Rep. Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, had tipped off the U.S. intelligence to the whereabouts of the man who built the explosive undergarments, an al-Qaida militant named Fahd al-Quso, who was also allegedly involved in the USS Cole bombing in 2000. Al-Quso was killed by a drone-launched Hellfire missile on Sunday.
Rep. King denounced the leaking of the story as an extraordinary violation of secrecy laws, which it certainly was. The Christian Science Monitor pointed out the disclosure will hinder the efforts of U.S. intelligence organizations to track and detect Islamic militants. Whatever the costs of the leak of the story, the benefits will redound to the Obama White House.
The administration can also cite the presumably authentic “Letters From Abbotabad,” which lend credence to the argument that the drone war has disrupted Islamic jihadists planning to attack American civilians.
As the Guardian reported last week,
Crippling US drone attacks forced Osama bin Laden to consider withdrawing his fighters from what had previously been safe havens in Pakistan, according to newly released documents seized at the compound where the al-Qaida leader was killed a year ago.
CNN cited the “the dire impact” of the drone strikes. The Detroit Free Press said the documents showed “al-Qaida was on the run from drone attacks” while adding that the refusal of the Obama administration to release a fuller record of its bin Laden collection, makes it “difficult to glean any larger truths about the state of his organization.
The documents show that bin Laden, holed up in a safe house in the city of Abbotabad, heard from allies along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that the U.S. aerial war was making their lives miserable.
Our Waziristani brothers, for example, said that they were frankly exhausted from the enemy’s air bombardments. The enemy has been given almost a worldwide approval to violate the air space of other countries and to attack anyone whom it views as its enemy.
At one point bin Laden recommended that the group’s leaders be moved out of North Waziristan where the vast majority of U.S. drone attacks have occurred to “a faraway location.” If the experienced leaders in the region were killed, Bin Laden said
this would lead to the rise of lower leaders who are not as experienced as the former leaders and this would lead to the repeat of mistakes. I am leaning toward getting most of the brothers out of the area.
But if you’re going to accept the letters at face value, what about bin Laden’s assertion that the drone war had done nothing to forestall the failing U.S. effort in Afghanistan? Shortly before his death he wrote
Anyone who looks at the enemies in NATO, especially America, will know that they are in big trouble. This year has been the worst year for them in Afghanistan since they invaded it. The number of their dead has never been this high according to their own reports. Their financial crisis continues. Britain has lowered is defense budget and America is reducing the budget of the Pentagon. Anyone who knows the world and knows politics, knows that it is impossible for them to continue with the war.
His observations are hard to dispute. Some things are true even if Osama bin Laden says them.
And that’s the paradox of the U.S. drone war in Pakistan: since 2009 military success has reliably correlated with political failure. As drone attacks have made Americans safer, they have also generated more enemies. This approach is flailing but the Obama administration is determined to defend it.
For a sickening moment, disaster loomed over Kabul in August 2004. A surveillance drone operated by the German armed forces was taking pictures over the Afghan capital when a civilian airliner filled the viewfinder of the drone’s camera. The Air Force later concluded the airliner, carrying more than a hundred passengers, missed the German drone by just 170 feet. (The photo could fool you into thinking it missed by about 17 feet.)
That near-miss is a cautionary tale for the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. military and civilian aviation as they seek to open up domestic airspace to unmanned aviation systems. While most of the critical attention on domestic drones has focused on privacy issues, safety is an equally pressing concern: How do we launch thousands of new aircraft into already crowded airways?
Last Friday, Michael Toscano, president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, called on the FAA to expedite its rule-making for unmanned aviations systems in the U.S. airspace. “UAS will be the next big revolution in aviation,” Toscano wrote in a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “However, before this industry can really take off, we need rules from the FAA on how to safely operate alongside manned aircraft.”
So while civil liberties groups fear drone surveillance, universities teach the new technology, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs dream of start-ups like the TacoCopter, the FAA has the more mundane task of ensuring the safety of domestic airspace, something Congress has ordered it to do for drones under 4.4 pounds by mid-May. The FAA has yet to publish draft drone regulations and solicit public comment on small drones, much less on the larger unmanned systems, which can have wingspans up to 20 feet and weigh hundreds of pounds.
In a timely post last month, Public Intelligence pointed out some of the perils involved. “Is it even logistically possible to operate thousands of pilot-less aircraft in the domestic airspace?” PI editor Michael Haynes asked in his article, ”The Problems With Domestic Drones.” Haynes reviewed several recent Pentagon studies about drone safety in war zones, which highlight some of the daunting issues facing the FAA.
One problem is the potential for so-called zombie drones. In an April 2011 report, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board identified “limited communications” systems as a problem for drone operators, especially “lost-link events,” in which the operator loses contact with the vehicle.
As PI notes:
Sometimes the link is reestablished and the pilot is able to maintain control of the drone. Sometimes the link cannot be reestablished and the drone is effectively turned into a zombie that can drift far from its intended target, as may have occurred recently with the RQ-170 captured by Iran in December 2011.
“Lost-link events are operationally uncommon,” the Air Force science panel concluded, but are obviously “of primary concern” for drone operations in U.S. airspace, where there’s reason to fear they might be more likely.
That’s because there’s a lot more potential for electronic magnetic interference in crowded domestic spaces than there is in remote war zones. When the Pentagon’s Joint Spectrum Center analyzed the deployment of Predator drones over the Mexico-Arizona border, it had to examine potential conflicts between the drones and fixed microwave links in Mexico, nearby radio astronomy observatories and various other potential sources of interference.
Another example from PI:
When several Predator drones were needed for tests at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the Joint Spectrum Center had to study the potential for interaction with residential indoor and industrial outdoor radio local area networks, outdoor video surveillance networks and other potential signals arising from a nearby residential community.
A 2010 Air Force report on lessons learned from the use of small unmanned aircraft systems (known as SUAS) in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded “many of the current SUAS use datalink equipment that is not interoperable with other datalinks or tunable to other frequencies.” The limitations of this technology will “hinder” the integration of drones into U.S. airspace.
Another problem is the risk of midair collisions. These risks can be reduced with ground- and air-based “sense and avoid” radar systems, according to the Air Force study group. But installation of such systems may take two to three years and cost up to $3 million per aviation site, the study group said. No such systems for drones have been installed anywhere in the United States.
And then there’s the question of the electronic spectrum on which the whole drone business depends. “This might be the biggest issue of all because none of these aircraft can fly without a communications channel,” said Ben Gielow, manager of government relations for the Association of Unmanned Vehicles Systems International. Parts of the spectrum are allocated for specific uses such as civil aviation, law enforcement and the military. But there is no part of the spectrum that is reserved for command and control of unmanned aviation. In February, the United Nations’ World Radiocommunication Conference called for studying “additional allocations, to accommodate spectrum requirements of UAS consistent with the protection of incumbent services.” Which doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen quickly.
Gielow says the AUVSI is calling on the FAA to first issue proposed regulations on small drones operated by public safety agencies so it can meet the congressional deadline of opening U.S. airspace to drones of all sizes by the end of 2015. “A lot needs to be done,” he said.
In response to Toscano’s letter, an FAA spokesman issued a statement saying the agency would act “later this year.”
Significant work is underway to ensure the safe integration of unmanned aircraft systems into the national air space. Specifically, the FAA is committed to safely integrating small UAS, and we expect to publish a proposed rule later this year.
So drones are coming to U.S. airspace, and these rules will be the best hope against Kabul’s near-disaster happening over an American city.
Susana Martinez (Credit: AP/Susan Montoya Bryan) 
Public safety agencies are cleared to fly small drones under 25 pounds. (Credit: Aeryon Labs, Inc.) 
(Credit: Benjamin Wheelock) 
Kate Doyle, human rights investigator, combines legal activism with forensic science. (Credit: Reuters/Jorge Lopez) 
Ambassador Cameron Munter, victim of the U.S. drone war. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) 
Photo still from a drone camera that nearly collided with a passenger jet over Kabul. 