The Martin Luther King You Won't Hear About Tomorrow

There will be many tomorrow--politicians, academics, pundits, clergy--who will reference King's "Dream" speech. Far fewer will likely cite passages from his April 1967 address at Riverside Baptist Church, but it's the speech every person of conscience should reference, particularly in this age of a global, endless "war on terror". Then, King was speaking about Vietnam...but his words and his warning are just as prophetic today:

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Amen.

Biden: "We're leaving Afghanistan in 2014." State: "Not exactly."

From The Cable, today: 

"We are leaving in 2014, period, and in the process, we're going to be saving over the next 10 years another $800 billion," Biden said. "We've been in this war for over a decade. The primary objective is almost completed. Now all we're doing is putting the Kabul government in a position to be able to maintain their own security. It's their responsibility, not America's."

Marc Grossman, the State Department's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, explained today that's not the whole story.

Grossman said Tuesday that the point of the upcoming negotiations is to agree on an extension of the U.S. troop presence well past 2014, for the purposes of conducting counterterrorism operations and training and advising the Afghan security forces.

Imperial habits die hard.

The Drone Debate, Encapsulated

When I went to Georgetown University over 20 years ago, I felt the standards for hiring and retaining faculty were relatively high. If you need any evidence that they've slipped--badly--you need only read this piece by GU faculty member Christine Fair:

Finally, no forensic experts have been employed to verify claims about injuries to discern if they comport with ballistics and weapon effects associated with drone-delivered munitions. Given that trauma, injury and death can be attributed to terrorist attacks and Pakistani conventional military operations, this form of verification is critical. But we can conclude for several reasons that drones are the best alternative, once the United States (with the collusion of Pakistan agencies in many cases) decides that a person is to be killed.

Try as I might after a lengthy search, I just couldn't come up with any "ballistics and weapon effects" reports from WWII, Korea, Vietnam or Desert Storm to verify that casaulties caused by "alleged" US military action were, in fact, caused by US military action...so I guess we'll just have to list the hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries from those wars as being "Cause unknown".

I also love how she never talks about the Obama administration's employment of so-called "signature strikes", which are this war's equivalent of the Vietnam-era "free fire zone".

The level of intellectual and academic dishonesty in this and other such drivel written by Fair should cause her to lose her job...but I'm not holding my breath.

Conor Friedersdorf over at the Atlantic has a more clear-headed view of what's going on here:

The phrase "surgical drone strike" is handy for naming U.S. actions without calling up images of dead, limb-torn innocents with flesh scorched from the missile that destroyed the home where they slept or burned up the car in which they rode. The New America Foundation, which systematically under-counts these innocents, says there have been at least 152 and many as 192 killed since 2004. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts the civilian death figure at between 474 and 881 killed. Either way, would "surgical" strikes kill innocents on that scale in a region with just 2 percent of Pakistan's population? Using data that undercounts innocents killed, The New America Foundation reports that 85 percent of Pakistanis killed in drone strikes are "militants," while 15 percent are civilians or unknown. What do you think would happen to a surgeon that accidentally killed 15 in 100 patients? Would colleagues would call him "surgical" in his precision?

I was a CIA military analyst for many years, and I did bomb damage assessment during Desert Storm and military targeting support packages for other operations. So unlike Fair, I actually know something about this business. So here are some facts.

The journalists, human rights experts and others she and a small coterie of inside-the-Beltway "Drone War" proponents denigrate on a daily basis are in fact the only ones who've made a real, reasonably systematic effort to document the effects--human and political--of America's drone strikes in the region. They use the same techniques to interview witnesses that NGO's have used for decades--including the UN. The same techniques, by the way, that the CIA and other intelligence agencies routinely use to get information from defectors and emigres.

Fair also claims that drones are "the best alternative" in the region. Best alternative to what? The "best alternative to actually coming up with a CT strategy that actually works? Maybe one that would stop a future Nidal Hassan or Najibullah Zazi?

Our Moral Slide Continues

These are the kind of poll results that will make you want to start drinking early. From a poll commissioned by Amy Zegart:

A quarter of all Americans are willing to use nuclear weapons to kill terrorists. No joke. This was among many surprising findings in a new national poll that YouGov recently ran for me on hot-button intelligence issues.

And on torture? The moral backsliding has been dramatic:

Respondents in 2012 are more pro-waterboarding, pro-threatening prisoners with dogs, pro-religious humiliation, and pro-forcing-prisoners-to-remain-naked-and-chained-in-uncomfortable-positions-in-cold-rooms. In 2005, 18 percent said they believed the naked chaining approach was OK, while 79 percent thought it was wrong. In 2012, 30 percent of Americans thought this technique was right, an increase of 12 points, while just 51 percent thought it was wrong, a drop of 28 points. In 2005, only 16 percent approved of waterboarding suspected terrorists, while an overwhelming majority (82 percent) thought it was wrong to strap people on boards and force their heads underwater to simulate drowning. Now, 25 percent of Americans believe in waterboarding terrorists, and only 55 percent think it's wrong. The only specific interrogation technique that is less popular now than in 2005, strangely enough, is prolonged sleep deprivation.

A potential culprit? Hollywood:

Now, this new poll is the first hard data suggesting that spy fiction might be influencing public opinion about real intelligence issues. The YouGov poll results reveal that Americans who say they frequently watch spy-themed television shows or movies are significantly more likely than infrequent watchers to approve of assassinating terrorists, torturing terrorists, and using every torture technique pollsters asked about except threatening terrorist detainees with dogs. 

<snip>

Entertainment can and has shifted popular culture and attitudes on other subjects. When L.A. Law was a hit television show in the late 1980s, law school applications hit record levels. The Navy still talks about the movie Top Gun as one of its best recruiting tools. More recently, prosecutors have been bemoaning "the CSI effect" -- how the popular television show has led jurors to expect fancy forensic evidence in court and to assume the government's case is weak without it. Before the 9/11 attacks, torture was almost always depicted in television and movies as something that bad guys did. That's not true anymore. The Bush administration may be over, but Bush-era terrorist torture and assassination policies are growing more popular.

New Stanford/NYU Report: Living Under Drones