Brian Williams - Predators

THE ARREST OF THE “CREECH 14” AND OTHER ANTIDRONE PROTESTS IN THE UNITED STATES AND UK

As the drone strike campaign picked up in the final years of the Bush administration and then skyrocketed under Obama, an antidrone movement appeared in the United States. One of the most active components of this antidrone/antiwar movement was a women’s group known as Code Pink. Code Pink recruited well-known activist Cindy Sheehan, who famously camped near President George W. Bush’s home in Crawford, Texas, to protest the Iraq War following the death of her son in that conflict. Sheehan was by 2008 nationally known and began a “No Drones” bus tour in which she and other activists dressed in pink protested outside Air Force bases that were home to drone squadrons. The women also protested at CIA Headquarters in Langley and marched from there to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s house, also in Langley, calling for his arrest. Code Pink protested at the San Diego home of the General Atomics chief executive officer, James Blue, where they built a shrine to the children killed by the drones his company produced. A statement on the Code Pink website concerning the protests read,

So many civilian casualties by US drone attacks are not just war crimes but crimes against humanity. We must restore America’s image by suspending these attacks immediately. This indiscriminate method of drone killing will not improve our relationship with Pakistan or the Muslim world. It will not bring us safety or peace throughout the world, in fact it begets more harm and destruction as extremists use the death of innocent civilians as a tool to recruit more people to join the Taliban to fight against us. 42

On her own website Cindy Sheehan wrote, “The primary and proven case against drone attacks is that they pose a public danger that can only be deemed as indiscriminate bombing.” 43

Thirty members of Code Pink, dressed in pink shirts that said “Stop Killer Drones,” partook in an antidrone march led by Pakistani politician Imran Khan, an ex-cricketeer who has been vocal in his calls for peace with the Taliban militants and an end to the drone campaign against them. The October 2012 march of several thousand Pakistanis and Code Pink members made its way from Islamabad to South Waziristan before it was halted by the Pakistani army at the border because of Taliban security threats. There protestors (presumably not the Americans) chanted “Down with America” and “A Friend of America Is a Traitor to the Nation.” 44While in Pakistan, the members of Code Pink also delivered a protest letter condemning the drone strikes to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan; the letter was signed by, among others, actor Danny Glover, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky, and movie director Oliver Stone. One of the American drone protestors described Obama’s role as “chief executioner” at a Pakistani seminar on the issue. 45

Another protest was held in October 2011 in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, which had an exhibit dedicated to drones. As many as two hundred protestors with signs that read “Drones Kill Kids” were met with pepper spray and arrests when they tried to close down the exhibit. 46A smaller protest was held outside a Raytheon Missiles System plant in Tucson, Arizona. There protesters held placards that read “We Have Guided Missiles and Misguided Men” and “Drone Attacks Inspire Hatred of the U.S.” 47

Perhaps the most famous antidrone protestors, however, were the “Creech 14,” members of the antiwar group Nevada Desert Experience whose motto was “Ground the Drones Lest We Reap the Whirlwind.” The Nevada Desert Experience was opposed to the “insidious creep of robotics into warfare.” Fourteen of its members were arrested for trespassing on Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2009. Creech was the most famous base associated with the U.S. Air Force’s separate drone campaign, which was largely carried out in the Afghan and Iraqi theaters of action. The group later summed up its actions at Creech as follows: “Nonviolent resisters want the U.S. government, the Pentagon, the drone controllers and the general populace to think about the horrific death and destruction the unmanned aerial attacks are raining down on people thousands of miles away and to contemplate that these attacks do not prevent or eliminate terrorism, but instead incite more hatred, revenge and retaliation, and make more recruits for the Taliban…. Warfare is not a video game.” 48The judge in the case against the Creech 14 found them guilty of trespassing but released them for time already served after telling them to “go in peace” and to use diplomacy instead of trespassing in the future to make their point.

In April 2011 thirty-eight protestors were similarly arrested at Hancock Field near Syracuse, New York, another base from which pilots of the 174th Fighter Wing remotely flew drones in Afghanistan and Iraq. Several of the protestors covered themselves in white sheets that had been painted red to resemble blood. 49In this area protests were led by Christians who were opposed to the remote killing. One antidrone blogger in the area wrote,

To sit at a console 7,000 miles away with life and death control over people whose land you’ve never walked on is too much power for any human being. It makes killing virtual and is a virtual license to kill. It can only corrupt.

I call on every pastor and minister in the Syracuse area to begin each service with an apology to the children of South Waziristan for the terror we have inflicted in their skies. 50

Another antidrone voice submitted an article to the Buffalo News that read, “Drone attacks are extrajudicial executions, with pilots acting as detective, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. There is no due process or rule of law, and the government claims the right to apply this policy to American citizens abroad.” 51

Among the antidrone voices has been U.S. congressman Dennis Kucinich, who wrote in the Huffington Post , “Think of the use of drone air strikes as summary executions, extra-judicial killings justified by faceless bureaucrats using who-knows-what ‘intelligence,’ with no oversight whatsoever and you get the idea that we have slipped into a spooky new world where joystick gods manipulating robots deal death from the skies and then go home and hug their children.” 52

Peter Singer, the author of a book on military robotics titled Wired for War , similarly reflected on drones in a New York Times article titled “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?”

Now we possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war. The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter—and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media—they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.

For the first 200 years of American democracy, engaging in combat and bearing risk—both personal and political—went hand in hand. In the age of drones, that is no longer the case. 53

An Economist article read, “Looking farther ahead, there are fears that UAS [unmanned aerial systems] and other robotised killing machines will so lower the political threshold for fighting that an essential element of restraint will be removed. Robert E. Lee said ‘it is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it.’ Drones might make leaders fonder of war.” 54Amnesty International similarly warned, “Anything that dehumanizes the process makes it easier to pull the trigger.” 55

The antidrone sentiment was not limited to the United States and Pakistan. In October 2011 a “week of action” was called for in Britain by a group named Ground the Drones. This group led small protests at various sites in the UK linked to drones. (The U.S. military has leased several Reaper drones to the British military for use in combat in Afghanistan.) These sites included the London office of the drone manufacturer General Atomics; the Royal Air Force base at Northwood, where the drone pilots were based; Boscombe Down, the testing ground for a domestic surveillance drone used by the police and known as the Watchkeeper; and other venues.