Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

I intended to write about the Swiss banker from Julius Baer Bank who turned over documents to WikiLeaks showing, according to him, how the rich and powerful hide money and avoid taxes with a little help from their offshore banking friends. But this is nothing we didn’t know before, although here’s the details and names of those rich politicians and business tycoons who do it. At least forty of them, anyway. But what is new and what I can’t get out of my mind is the photo on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times showing one of the “Death TV” teams at Langley Air Force base in Virginia. We’ve heard before that the drones flying over Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are controlled by operators here in the U.S., but words in articles don’t have the impact of photographs. In a previous letter (December 17) I called the use of drones a moral evil and your increase of their use repellent. But here, on the front page of the paper, in color, is one of those teams, young men and women dressed in camouflage uniforms (as though they were actually on the battlefield in Afghanistan!) sitting in their sterile control room filled with computers and telecommunications equipment, monitoring live feeds from Pakistan or Afghanistan or wherever that remote controlled plane is flying. Maybe they’re the drone operators or maybe the operators are at another Air Force Base in Nevada, it’s not clear from the article, and maybe it feels like another computer game to these young servicemen and women, the kind of thing they grew up with, but it isn’t. This is about human life, flesh and blood, who lives and who dies. The drones they monitor are armed with cameras and rockets, machines whose only purpose is to kill, and they are being controlled by people 7,000 miles away who have the power of gods to determine who lives and who dies. Each of them can push a button and send a missile hurtling into a car or truck loaded with insurgents – or civilians – or into a large group of Taliban fighters – or a wedding party - killing men, women and children. What moral evil is this? What is the impact on those young men and women who make a mistake and kill innocent civilians? Easy for the generals to dismiss it as “collateral damage” but what about the grunt who pushed the button, who made a decision based on incorrect information? Or maybe a mistake due to the chaos and confusion of being inundated by data? How can they live with themselves? How can you?