by
Michael S. Rozeff

Recently
by Michael S. Rozeff: What’s
Bad About a House-to-House Search?

As far
back as May 8, 2009, Tom Englehardt (in an LRC
article) mentioned reports that drones in Pakistan had killed
“hundreds of bystanders”. (I haven’t searched for the earliest such
reports.) By October, 2012, a 36-page
study appeared out of Columbia Law School, and I believe it
was not the first. Analysts for quite some time had begun saying
that drone
strikes created more terrorists than they killed, and that the
people being targeted were not “high” terrorist figures. There was
also a great deal of criticism of second strikes on funerals for
the people killed. But drone policy was Obama’s baby, and he favored
it. Despite the counter-productiveness of drone strikes to achieve
the empire’s aims, now channeled through Obama, he continued these
strikes. If he felt he could not back down, retreat, or show softness
in his goal of dominating the politics of the regions being droned,
and if he had nothing to put in its place to achieve this aim, then
he decided to accept the accompanying costs of creating terrorists.
The Boston Marathon bombing is one of those acceptable costs, although
I am certain he wishes the FBI had not messed this one up royally.

The adminstration
of Obama wants the maximum capacity to use drones without accountability.
It doesn’t want anyone second-guessing its policies, and that includes
Congress. Congress is a flabby and slow contender in the making
and control over policy anyway.

The Columbia
report complains about the “limited public debate on drones”. That’s
because academics ignore most everything except what other academics
say. They’re not reading press accounts, or LRC, or Englehardt,
or they’re not giving much weight, say, even to a former CIA employee
who criticizes the drone policy. Most academics don’t get ahead
except by massaging lots of data, and so we find them complaining
that “hard facts” and “information that ought to be provided by
the U.S. government” are not being provided. This is called “stonewalling”
or “secrecy”. It’s any government’s method of doing what it wishes
to do without being constrained by widespread public knowledge of
its base activities.

The U.S. government
can stand LRC critics and quite a few others because so few Americans
are paying attention, and when they do pay attention, they literally
do not know whether they should believe what they are reading because
their firmly-anchored belief is that the government is not only
the authority but also “good” authority. This belief is part of
a belief and value system that has been inculcated in them for years.
Adults have to go through a period of years to root out such a system,
and most people don’t do this.

The U.S. government
even welcomes a certain amount of criticism as evidence that the
government is open, that there is public debate, that this is a
viable free-speech democracy, and that the government’s policies
have been legitimized via this “open” debate. But since the government
controls the flow of information to most of a big corporate media
that cannot and does not put up any serious criticism, the government
need not worry about critics. In addition, it can find and pay off,
albeit indirectly, countless academics, columnists and commentators,
who have no personal interest in being radical and a great interest
in being loyal Americans who spout the ever-shifting party lines.
More accurately, the standard analyses that never doubt the goodness
of the State and Empire are like a river of Empire flowing between
two banks, which are Left and Right. Almost everything that the
public hears from first grade onwards is channeled between these
two banks. This provides an illusion of a free country, just as
the banks provide an illusion of a freely-flowing river.

Now, at least
5 years after drone criticism has begun, the Senate Judiciary Committee
has a hearing in which a man
from Yemen tells them face to face what the effects of the drone
policy are on making Yemenis anti-American. This slowness in responding
to events on the ground is intentional on the part of Congressional
leaders. They only address an issue when, for whatever reasons that
are in their interest, they calculate the time is right. Then they
schedule hearings and then they invite hand-picked witnesses. Any
concern about the loss of innocent lives of foreigners or the retaliation
on American soil only enters their calculations indirectly. Power
and position are #1, and lives factor in secondarily only insofar
as they affect power and position. An extreme cynicism, if you will,
is called for in assessing these matters, if only to counteract
the programming that most Americans have undergone. However, one
need only ask why it has taken so long to address this drone issue,
even to the limited extent of holding a hearing? And what does Senator
Dick Durbin, who chairs the committee, stand to gain from having
this hearing at this time?

It may be that
Durbin’s political antenna has picked up some possible gains to
his power and position by gingerly moving toward a position that,
while not anti-drone, advocates more, as he put it in May, “checks
and balances”. He also seems carefully to be stepping toward a more
anti-war position. He said in May

“From
a constitutional viewpoint, it goes to this authorization for
the use of military force. I don’t believe many, if any, of us
believed when we voted for that – and I did vote for it – that
we were voting for the longest war in the history of the United
States and putting a stamp of approval on a war policy against
terrorism that, 10 years plus later, we’re still using.”

I will venture
to say that Durbin will remain solidly within the river banks. He
may tack his boat a little more in an anti-war direction, but since
both the left and right banks have for decades now been heavily
mired in a pro-war fog, that direction may be beneath the river’s
surface. Perhaps he should capsize his boat. In the end, he will
if he succeeds gain some points for himself while not altering the
Empire by any significant amount.

The Empire
flows on.

April
26, 2013

Michael
S. Rozeff [send him mail]
is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York.
He is the author of the free e-book Essays
on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book
The U.S. Constitution
and Money: Corruption and Decline.