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'Bugsplat': The Ugly US Drone War in Pakistan
It's time for the US to re-examine the consequences of its dehumanizing, deadly attacks in Pakistan.
This weekend, Pakistan ordered the closure of the US drone base after a US attack killed 26 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border. This news will be welcomed by the people of Waziristan, where communities have borne the brunt of the "collateral damage" of the US covert drone war. But for many, this decision comes too little too late. For too long, authorities ignored the deaths of innocent civilians being "bugsplat" by drones. After a recent trip to Pakistan to investigate the human consequences of the US drone attacks, I had no idea how close I was to come to understanding the horror of it.
In Islamabad I took part in a jirga - the traditional Pashtun forum for public discussion and dispute settlement - where tribal elders and villagers from the Pakistan tribal areas (FATA) came to meet with us to explain their personal experiences of US drone attacks. Sitting just two rows behind me was a 16-year-old boy named Tariq Aziz. Listening to story upon story of the extrajudicial murder of innocent civilians and children, the heartache for loved ones lost and the constant terror instilled by the now familiar roar of drones overhead, I could not have imagined that Tariq and his family would soon suffer the same fate.
Tariq Aziz (circled) attended a conference on drones in Islamabad (photo: Pratap Chatterjee)Three days later Tariq was killed along with his 12-year-old cousin Waheed when their car was targeted by a Hellfire missile as they headed home to Norak, a village in Waziristan near the Afghan border.
Drones are described not only as the future of warfare, but as risk-free war. But Tariq's death - and the hundreds of other civilian deaths recorded in a recent Bureau of Investigative Journalism study - demonstrate that this PlayStation warfare is only risk-free for operators of these remote-controlled killers. From the safety of an office building in Langley, Virginia, CIA operatives play games with Pakistanis' lives.
As I landed at Heathrow, thousands of miles away from the dirt road where Tariq and Waheed now lay dead, a CIA operative in northern Virginia will have reported "bugsplat". Bugsplat is the official term used by US authorities when humans are killed by drone missiles. The existence of children's computer games of the same name may lead one to think that the PlayStation analogy with drone warfare is taken too far. But it is deliberately employed as a psychological tactic to dehumanize targets so operatives overcome their inhibition to kill; and so the public remains apathetic and unmoved to act. Indeed, the phrase has far more sinister origins and historical use: In dehumanizing their Pakistani targets, the US resorts to Nazi semantics. Their targets are not just computer game-like targets, but pesky or harmful bugs that must be killed.
It was Hitler who coined this phraseology in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. In Mein Kampf, Hitler refers to Jews as vermin (volksungeziefer) or parasites (volksschädling). In the infamous Nazi film, Der ewige Jude, Jews were portrayed as harmful pests that deserve to die. Similarly, in the Rwandan genocide, the Tutsis were described as "cockroaches". This is not to infer genocidal intent in US drone warfare, but rather to emphasize the dehumanizing effect of this terminology in Nazi Germany and that the very same terms are used by the US in respect of their Pakistani targets. The US asserts that targeted killings are justified as a necessary counter-terrorism measure: Terrorists and militants are the pesky bugs that must be swatted.
The term "bugsplat" dehumanizes their targets - often innocent civilians - with families, friends, hopes and aspirations. I will never forget the pensive, yet curious look Tariq gave us as we joined the jirga, a look so reminiscent of my brothers at that same age. He had his whole life ahead of him. But two days later, "bugsplat", and Tariq and Waheed brought the known total of children killed by drones in Pakistan to 175.
Obama has launched more drone attacks in Pakistan than Bush - one every four days - but allegedly insists that strikes "do not put … innocent men, women and children in danger". John O Brennan, Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser, said in June that "there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision or the capabilities we've been able to develop". Yet, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, at least 225 of those killed in drone attacks during the Obama administration "may have been civilians". Add Tariq to the fast-growing list.
How do we know how many civilians are being killed? From what I heard from village elders at the jirga, the majority were civilians, not militants. Was Tariq a militant? By all accounts, no. Yet "official" reports of the attack told us that four militants had been killed. In truth, the only victims were Tariq and his young cousin.
Access to information and reliable statistics is vital. Neither the US nor Pakistan provide accurate reports of civilians killed, in breach of the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings. Reprieve, a British charity, is working together with lawyers and villages to better document the attacks. Tariq had volunteered for this task. He did so in the hope that his efforts would assist us - foreign lawyers - to raise awareness and to take legal action to stop the collateral murder he witnessed in his homeland and to compensate its victims.
Clive Stafford-Smith of Reprieve alleges that Tariq was targeted for his efforts: Informants must have attached a tracker to their car after our meeting; otherwise, he argues, it would be unlikely for the CIA to have picked two innocent children from a population of 800,000. Whether his allegation is proven or not, the legal point is simple: Tariq's murder by drone was an extrajudicial execution in breach of international law and Pakistani law.
What evidence did they have to suspect Tariq of being a militant? We will never know, because he was never questioned and he was never tried. Tariq deserved better. The people of the Pakistan deserve better.
Attacks like these on innocent children fuel anger and resentment. Imran Khan, leader of Pakistani political party PTI, argues that the US counter-terrorism strategy in Pakistan is counter-productive: Rather than targeting militants, drone attacks merely create them. For every innocent civilian like Tariq that is killed, many more militants are created. Having witnessed the fervent emotion expressed during the jirga in Islamabad and the sorrow and anger I felt upon hearing of Tariq's death, I cannot but agree.
Tariq was an innocent 16-year-old boy whose life and death should never have been reduced to the term "bugsplat". As Pakistan retaliates against the US for the loss of its soldiers, it is time to re-humanize the drone debate and consider more carefully its military - and civilian - consequences.
27 Comments so far
Show AllGo on. Tell me you're surprised by the dehumanization of those targeted by American Imperialism.
Then tell me that we can change the attitudes of a psychopathic Elite by asking them to play nice with others.
my dear writer - the world is bugsplat for goldman sachs and their lackeys - the imperial amerikan stormtroopers
let's get real
We as a nation are morally bankrupt.
I think it's interesting that in the warped minds of our leaders, there is a distinction between "militants" in Pakistan and "civilians". Non-uniformed citizens, even those bearing arms (as millions of U.S. citizens do), and going about their daily lives within the borders of their own country, are ALL civilians. The fact that most of them hate us and occassionally take potshots at our drones and helicopters does not make them non-civilians. It's their country, f'crissakes. How many tea partiers here wouldn't blast away at foreign helicopters buzzing around and strafing our towns within our borders?
War crimes carried out by war criminals. All war is a crime. "War crime" is redundant.
nag: its simpler than that - if we kill em they are terrorists
same goes for palestine - if the zionist kill em - they are terrorists
simple
Right you are, Med. The distinction our leaders put out there is for public consumption. In the public mind, upon reading in the MSM that a drone strike killed six people and our military leadership declares that they all were "militants" or "terrorists" or "al Qaeda", a collective "whew" is issued: "At least we got only bad guys - no (innocent) civilians killed." The public is thus conditioned to believe that killing six people, defined as bad by our military leaders, is justified as long as civilians aren't killed.
I can hardly wait for the next generation of drones. They are smaller and will only cost $40,000. Our police will be able to use them for crowd control and will be a nice addition to the pepper spray. Their speed and altitude might make them interesting to skeet shooters. I'm not sure, but I think they will be called "killer bees". Ha!
No on the skeet shooting. Most shotguns only go a few tens of yards. If the drones were above 300 feet, you'd never be able to hit them.
The world's greatest assassin, targeted killer, premeditated murderer, is President Obama of the USA and his war profiteers who make these murderous weapons.
Mass murderer obomber and his war mongering lackeys in congress and the killing machine military will go down with the fascist amerikan empire ! Part of the deadly insanity is that the silver tongued terrorist in the white house keeps spewing his deadly lies; and obomberbots still cling to hope !
And how about the blatant lie.. that there are NO civilian casualites, as if to lend his word to the false idea that the drones' aim is always accurate. This reminds me of the way the Obama campaign is going to work reversing all that he's done to invert sane (even established!) environmental law and dressing these insidious acts up as their opposite! That here's the "leader" who cares and IS doing something about it. If lies were official currency, these guys would be even richer than they already are... having rendered theft legal, and absconded away the public's "war" chest.
Television, computer games and the MSM are all desensitising tools used inexorably against you in varying degrees of subtlety.
Unplug the TV, stop wasting your time with killer computer games and refresh your critical thinking frequently.
I think this is the best antidote to the Mindless Violence and Villification Virus. Any other suggestions?
Sanctuary: If a conscious person decides to live off the grid in an area where tornadoes become active, their caring lifestyle is not immune to the larger forces (I'll put this one under "Climate Change") set into motion. It works the same way, by analogy, to people who turn off the T.V. Do you think that will stop a nation of angry citizens, some inured to violence, from perhaps deciding that your little sanctuary makes for the perfect target? The libertarian view that it's all about what THE individual does is perhaps part of the solution, but it doesn't really speak about the systemic dangers, waste, and inanity of societal components long deranged by unbalanced values (Mars rules well funded and on steroids).
Out of the ashes comes the Phoenix. That's the key to the "solution" you seek.
One has to breathe out before one can breathe in. But how bad do things have to get before the Phoenix can rise from the ashes? Perhaps we will know when we get there.
*Comment deleted by site administrators as spam: identical, repetitive comments posted on multiple articles*
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This is a good article - for the most part. 'Playstation warfare' makes me sick. A couple of years ago, my wife, and I, went to an outdoor mass and a middle age women was in attendance wearing a t-shirt displaying a predator drone. Perhaps her son, or daughter, was in the military and 'piloted' them. Perhaps while she was there celebrating Christ's mass and message of peace junior was busy blowing up a car full of poor dark skinned people in some far off country. The juxtaposition floored me!
The only part of this article I take issue with is trotting out the old nazi comparisons to shame Amerikans. As if Amerikans were somehow regressing to nazi barbarity, or as if our ruling elite was guilty of stealing strategies from the nazi playbook. This is giving the Amerikans too much credit and the nazis too little. Old Adolf, after all, was a keen student of history. He was well aware of the successful Amerikan genocide against the indigenous peoples, of US army generals advocating murdering Indian women and children as "Nits make lice" as well as the wonderful euphemism of 'manifest destiny' which excused both genocide and aggressive war waged against other nations not as crimes but of the destiny of a great people to dominate primitives and degenerates. And lets not forget the jolly old Brits. The greed and savagery displayed by the English in the Boer war was quite shocking at the time. That a great power, upon discovering gold, could just move rite in and steal it from the locals, and throw them into concentration camps when they resisted! But who remembers the Boer war anymore?
I am sure that the main lesson Adolf learned from anglo-american history (along with our own elite!) is that it is only a crime if you lose the war, and that in a generation , or two, everyone will forget about it anyways. So lets build some more drones and attain 'full spectrum dominance' of the planet. USA! USA! And if some hippies want to protest and stage sit ins, well, no need to look to the nazis for guidance on how to deal with the rabble, just remember the 'Bonus Army' and how Gen MacArthur dealt with that den of commies at the point of a bayonet!
Perhaps it is coincidence that Tariq Aziz is also the name of Iraq's former foreign minister, under Saddam Hussein.
A Christian, Aziz traveled to the Vatican one month before the US invasion to visit with Pope John Paul and assure the pope that there were no WMDs in Iraq and no justification for the pending US war on Iraq.
While the pope appealed to Bush to stay his forces and continue diplomacy, the US Catholic hierarchy blessed this immoral endeavor, and Bush attacked Iraq.
Bill in Dubuque
Americans were white supremacists throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th -- why else were "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone with the Wind" such tremendous box office successes? The "city on a hill" rhetoric that O'Bomber uses as freely as his peers is a way of stating superiority to the rest of humanity -- if others don't accept the 'gifts' -- i.e., the dictators and corporate rapists that are imposed upon them -- then clearly they are 'anti-democratic'. What a morally ugly human being he is -- but the whole system is, and always was, cruel. In the '60s, people saw how cruel it was, but of course many of those who saw it dropped out, became hedonists first and eventually conservatives who wanted to protect their privileges.
Your point is well taken. The NAZIs earned the popularized modern face of 'Evil' w their blitzkriegs & holocaust against European Jews & Roma people in WWII - inspired by bigotry, hatred & Eugenics. But the Americans, Brits & other Europeans, were well documented for their racist & imperialist policies, actions & ideologies [IE: Eugenics / Social-Darwinism / Malthusianism] decades- if not more than a century before the advent of Hitler & NAZIs!
Plus many well known & influential Americans & Brits [corps & people] supported &/or did Biz w Hitler & the NAZIs in the run-up to WWII - IE: the Rockefellers, Dulles Boys, Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush, IBM, GM Corp, the DeBeers Diamond Cartel [owned by the Oppenheimers], etc...
Most of the news reports only what the various governments state on what happened. There is not the slightest doubt that the people of Pakistan are aware of what is going on. They and not their slavish government will decide the future of "relationships". Huge demonstrations are reportedly brewing in Pakistan's major cities. In a normal world our country would be at war with Pakistan and unconstitutionally at that.
Good article!
I think Pakistan is probably getting ready to stand their ground. For the author, good thing you bring this to our attention. But, again, I don't think most remember that we gave Pakistan n. weapons, only to turn around and give them to India - knowing full well, both countries have been having disputes over Kashmir region (now, hopefully, the two countries are trying to work together).
Something else, I saw on the telly about a year ago, we angered one of the higher ups in Pakistan when we accused them of their madrassas turning their citizens into the t word. This guy was so angered, he said on the telly that we, here in the U.S. provided all of the books to madrassas. I looked it up, and saw things, including a link to the Univery of Nebraska, and I remember seeing that the University indeed at least printed the books/Quran, and I think they said, if I remember correctly, it was done with grants from usaid - which to me, I concluded this was with taxpayer money.
The war by remote is one example of the kind of behaviour we can call rogue or a crime against humanity that members of a society or a country indulge in. All societies display this element periodically.
A society or country, a group, that contains rogue members will also contain many good people. It is the duty of these good people to stop the rogues from defining their group.
So long as the behaviour continues to be the face of the society or nation the entire group can be called rogue or failed or to be lost and unbalanced; failed in a word.
All groups fail from time to time. Usually this failure is an acute phenomenon.
Should this behaviour be chronic or long term as in a chronic disease then the group has to isolate and expel the rogue element if it wishes to keep face.
On the evidence it is brutally clear that the USA has long lost face. To regain face the US people must either eradicate the rogue element or abandon the USA and join us all on earth in taking it down.
In other words, given the severity and the long term duration of the behaviour of the USA over the last century the cultural premises of the USA need to be examined and either altered or the entity must be trashed.
As it is now, the US is bound to die in failure anyway but we no longer have the luxury of a Mother Earth that gives us time for this to happen. Science and technology has made us Mother Nature and we have to nurture Earth not dominate and exploit it as the USA believes we must. Never has the legend of Icarus been more pertinent.
Dick Cheney, a famous US'n half-wit or child-adult, said 'Things happen'. Well now, things must be made to happen. In this case we all on this earth have fix the USA or take it down. This will deal with its shadows or curs too.
The world cannot move successfully into the future with the USA as it is.
Drone War is not only ugly, but it is the most cowardly form of warfare in human history. Instead of going to the battlefield, looking the enemy in the eye and either to kill him or to be killed by him, we sit in an air-conditioned room, somewhere in Colorado or New Mexico, in front of a computer, push a key on the keyboard and destroy a whole village half way around the world. Worst of all, we have the audacity to stand in front of a television camera and accuse the other side of engaging in “asymmetrical warfare”. WHAT A SHAME!!! What can be more “asymmetrical” than this, I wonder!!?
So true... yet as this technology gets cheaper, what's to say that some Drone doesn't show up here having crossed the Mexican border or Gulf of Mexico? The problem with the Pandora's Box of weapons is that once they're let loose, any sociopath is bound to use them. Amerika hardly has a monopoly on violent force, and this legacy I fear will one day hit home. Karma, after all, likely invented the boomerang.
One did, one 'crashed' in a US town near the border. It was not long after US border guards/troops gunned down that Mexican teen (after he went back to the Mexican side) who had been playing chicken (with the guards) upon the border.
Interesting, AmeriKKKa murdered some 1.4m human beings in Iraq in 'revenge' for the 2,900 dead at WTC on 9-11. I wonder how American's would feel if they had a WTC attack on them on a daily basis as missiles came out of the blue to murder you and your family members because you were thought ro be a terrorist 'suspect' of sorts to some paranoid schizophrenic with a 'joy stick' in his hand some 10,000 km way at Nellis AFB in in Las Vegas Nevada or maybe at Davis-Monthan AFB here in Tucson, Arizona
BugSplat huh?
How come when that Jordanian doctor in a bomb-vest who took out 7 of them CIA 'King Cobra' baby killers a few months near Bagram the CIA did not use the word 'BugSplat?"