Drone warfare: Does the U.S. really know who it’s killing?

You would think it would “rank among the
most serious (and legitimate) scandals of his
presidency,” said Jim Newell in Salon.com.
President Obama admitted last week that a
CIA drone strike in Pakistan accidentally killed
two kidnapped aid workers, proving the supposed
safeguards against killing civilians are a
sham. But the reaction to the two men’s deaths
in Washington, even from Obama’s Republican
foes, was a collective “Oh, well.” Warren Weinstein,
an American, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian,
died when a missile fired from a U.S. drone
struck the al Qaida compound where they were
being held hostage. Under CIA rules, drone
operators supposedly fire only when there is
“near certainty” of the identities of the targets, and “near certainty”
that noncombatants will not be injured or killed. In reality,
U.S. officials simply fired a missile at a compound in Pakistan’s
tribal regions that they believed terrorists were using, discovering
only later they’d killed two al Qaida militants as well as Weinstein
and Lo Porto. The president offered his “deepest apologies” to
the families of Weinstein and Lo Porto, said Trevor Timm in
TheGuardian.com. But what about the hundreds of Pakistani,
Afghan, and Yemeni civilians killed by U.S. drones? We need a
“full-scale independent investigation” of the “human rights catastrophe”
caused by this secretive, lawless program.
“Sorry folks,” said Ralph Peters in the New York Post, but “that’s
war.” The deaths of Weinstein and Lo Porto are obviously regrettable,
but we cannot halt all counterterrorism efforts because al Qaida
takes hostages. U.S. intelligence officials report that drone strikes
have taken out 40 al Qaida leaders in Pakistan in just the past six
months, and have left the decimated core of that group incapable
of meeting to plot terrorist attacks. Let’s not forget that these jihadists
“would gladly nuke our cities” if they had the chance. “Drones
are not a perfect tool,” said Tom Rogan in NationalReview.com,
but without them we would have no “adequate means of defense”
against terrorists using remote areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
Yemen to “plot murder against the world.”
But for every terrorist we eliminate, how many do
we create? asked Doyle McManus in the Los
Angeles Times. Yes, drone strikes have devastated
“al Qaida Central,” but since those
attacks began in 2008, al Qaida’s Yemeni
branch has grown to some 1,000 members,
and Yemen’s government was toppled by
Houthi tribesmen angry that the U.S. had been given free rein to
attack their country. The perception that the U.S. callously kills
Muslim civilians has also helped the Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria recruit thousands of young men. In the big picture, the evidence
that drone strikes diminish terrorism “is less than clear.”
It is clear, however, that for civilians, drone attacks are “the
safest form of war in modern history,” said William Saletan in
Slate.com. In World War II, up to 67 percent of the dead were
noncombatants. In Vietnam, the figure was around 50 percent,
and in Iraq, 80 percent of those killed since 2003 have been civilians.
By contrast, the civilian casualty rate from U.S. drones in
Pakistan has been only 24 percent by the harshest estimate, and
possibly as low as 5 percent, and in Yemen, civilian drone deaths
have numbered between 8 percent and 15 percent. If the goal is to
avoid killing civilians, replacing drones with conventional warfare
would be “the worst thing you could do.”

Around The World News

Baltimore on edge after riots

What happened
A force of 3,000 National Guard troops and
state and local police imposed a tense peace
on Baltimore this week, after riots erupted
over the death of Freddie Gray—a 25-yearold
black man who suffered a severed spine
while in police custody. Just hours after
Gray’s funeral, rioters in West Baltimore set
ablaze a CVS store, looted businesses, and
hurled bricks at police, prompting Maryland
Gov. Larry Hogan to declare a state of emergency.
At least 235 people were arrested, including
dozens of high school students. The
violence waned as gang members joined hands with community
leaders to form a barrier between protesters and police, but fear
of renewed violence led the Baltimore Orioles to take the unprecedented
step of closing a major league baseball game to the public.
President Obama condemned the rioters as “criminals and thugs”
but—in some of his most candid remarks on police brutality—he
also said Gray’s death was part of a “slow-rolling crisis that has
been going on for a long time.”
Baltimore’s police department suspended six officers pending an investigation
into Gray’s death, and the Justice Department opened
its own civil rights inquiry. The original police report claimed Gray
was “arrested without force or incident” on April 12 after running
away from police in an area known for drug activity. He was put
into a police van, unbelted, and fell into a coma an hour later. This
has prompted speculation that Gray was injured during a “rough
ride,” in which officers throw handcuffed suspects into police wagons
and subject them to high-speed stops and starts.
What the editorials said
At this stage, it’s impossible to know how or why Gray died,
said The New York Times. The same can’t be said of Baltimore’s
eruption—the roots of which were laid out in a damning 2014
Baltimore Sun investigation that found the city had paid out
$5.7 million to settle police abuse claims since 2011. Victims included
a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, and an 87-year-old
grandmother. That culture of police brutality “set the stage for
just this kind of unrest.”
“None of that excuses the knuckleheaded rioters
who laid waste to neighborhoods where
they live,” said The Washington Post. Perhaps
real progress would be made in Baltimore if
more residents were like the angry mother
who was caught on camera giving her son a
beating for joining the mayhem. Instead, teens
were allowed to run wild, said The Baltimore
Sun. The community may have real grievances
against the police, but all these rioters
did is confirm “the ugly stereotypes that underlie
the very injustices the demonstrators are
trying to protest.”
What the columnists said
Baltimore is very different from Ferguson—the last scene of antipolice
riots, said Matthew Loftus in TheAmericanConservative
.com. Its mayor is black, its city council has a black majority, and
many of its police officers are black. Yet just as in the Missouri
suburb, stories abound of residents being “pulled over, roughed
up,” and arrested for no reason. When one Baltimore officer tried
to report the abuse, “he found a dead rat on his car.”
It’s far too late for politicians and officials to call for calm, said
Ta-Nehisi Coates in TheAtlantic.com. “There was no official appeal
for calm” when Gray was arrested and had his spine severed,
or when scores of other black victims of Baltimore’s police
had their bodies beaten and bones broken. Why should Baltimore
residents agree to be nonviolent “halfway through the war”—
when the state has spent years doling out “heaps of violence to
its citizens”?
But “this rioting will do nothing but harm the very people rioting,”
said Jack Millman in TheFederalist.com. It’s not just city officials
who have condemned the violence, but community leaders
who have spent years trying to revive Baltimore—a city where a
quarter of the residents live below the poverty line. Wealthy owners
of burned businesses will be fine; “they have insurance, and
those who live in the city can leave.” The people who’ll suffer the
most from the riots will be Baltimore’s poor and minority citizens,
who will remain trapped in ravaged, jobless neighborhoods.

All eyes on Kennedy in gay marriage case

What happened
Oral arguments took place this week in the landmark
Supreme Court case on whether same-sex couples
have a constitutional right to marry, leaving both
sides anxiously scrutinizing the ambivalent
comments of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the
likely swing voter. During two and a half
hours of tense debate over the legality
of the gay marriage bans in Michigan,
Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee, Kennedy
began by asking why nine unelected
justices should redefi ne a concept that has
existed for “millennia.” Later, however, he
made an explicit comparison between laws banning gay marriage
and laws banning interracial marriage, and expressed doubts
about denying homosexual couples the “dignity” of marriage—a
central theme in his previous opinions in favor of gay rights. Why,
he asked, don’t same-sex couples deserve the “same ennoblement”
as their heterosexual counterparts?
The rest of the court was divided along clearer ideological lines.
Conservative justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr. pointedly
noted that prior to 2000, no society in history had allowed
same-sex couples to marry, while liberal justices Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor all questioned the
idea that same-sex marriages would harm heterosexual unions.
Chief Justice John Roberts gave some mixed signals. He noted that
public opinion was rapidly changing in favor of gay marriage, and
warned that a Supreme Court ruling forcing it on unwilling states
“will have a consequence on how this new institution is accepted.”
But Roberts also suggested that gay marriage bans could be struck
down on simple grounds of gender discrimination. “If Sue loves
Joe, and Tom loves Joe,” he said, “Sue can marry him, and Tom
can’t.” The court’s decision is expected in June.
What the editorials said
The shift in consensus in favor of gay marriage is “perhaps the
fastest political transformation in U.S. history,” said The Wall
Street Journal. Many Republican politicians are probably praying
the justices take this controversial issue off the table once and
for all. But “the Constitution never mentions marriage,” and the
Supreme Court should think twice about short-circuiting public
debate. “When in doubt, better to let judicial modesty and the
wisdom of the people prevail.”
Opponents of gay marriage have no valid legal argument,
said The Washington Post. Their principal objection voiced
in court—that same-sex couples can’t procreate—is
immaterial, now that gay couples have proven
“quite capable of producing and raising welladjusted
children.” As for the theory that this
decision should be left to individual states, so as
to avoid another polarizing Roe v. Wade ruling,
that would place thousands of existing samesex
unions “into limbo.” Besides, fundamental
rights “are not subject to the vagaries of majoritarian politics.”
What the columnists said
Kennedy’s “chin-stroking” aside, a ruling that redefi nes marriage
looks like a foregone conclusion, said Ross Douthat in NYTimes
.com. But we religious conservatives have valid reasons to worry
what that will mean. “What society teaches about the link between
sex, marriage, and procreation has major implications for how,
when, and whether people couple, marry, and raise children.”
There’s nothing more important to society’s health. And we were
right when we warned that no-fault divorce, sexual permissiveness,
and Roe v. Wade would lead to a serious erosion of the family, an
explosion of single-parent families, and social decay.
Ultimately, this train cannot be stopped, said Jennifer Rubin in
WashingtonPost.com. By a 58-34 margin, American voters now
support same-sex marriage, while a similar proportion reject the
notion that businesses should be allowed to refuse service to gays
and lesbians on religious grounds. Today, gay-marriage opponents
resemble the Japanese soldiers in 1946 “who fought on from
bunkers on a remote island because they had not found out the
war was over.”
Predicting Supreme Court rulings “is tricky business,” said Noah
Feldman in BloombergView.com. But in three major cases over the
past two decades, Kennedy has written opinions that have carefully
built “the scaffolding” to expand full equality to gay citizens.
He may agonize a bit over completing that momentous project,
but in the end, “Kennedy is going to do the right thing.”