Members of the
upstate Drone Action Coalition outside the Hancock Air Force base, New York. Ed
Kinane is on the far left. Credit: http://www.upstatedroneaction.org/.
All rights reserved.
In
one way or another I’ve been involved in anti-militarism for most of my adult
life. Raised Catholic but with my born-into faith rapidly eroding, I chose to
attend Fordham University in the early
1960s, a Jesuit college in the Bronx. If anyone could justify the only moral
compass that I knew, it would be the Jesuits, or so my thinking went.
Although
I was oblivious, in those days war clouds were gathering over Vietnam. I’m not
sure why, but I signed up for the Air Force Reserve
Officer Training Corps (ROTC) for college students, a program operating on
many U.S. campuses. Around six weeks into my freshman year, we cadets gathered
on the football field for bayonet training. There, for 40 or 50 minutes, we
lunged at the air with imaginary weapons. With each lunge, we screamed, ‘Kill!
Kill!’
At
some moment in time I was gobsmacked by the absurdity of it all—struck by the
contradiction between this exercise in the de-sensitization and normalization
of murder, and the so-called Christian schooling I thought I had chosen. The
next morning I told the ROTC commander that I was resigning. “You can’t resign,
Kinane, he sputtered. “You’re fired!”
Throughout
the rest of my college years I was definitely ‘against’ the war in Vietnam, but
despite the unrest that was heating up across U.S. campuses I did nothing to
oppose it. Caught up in my own private concerns
and keeping my nose in my books, my inaction lasted for several years. But after
I got a master’s degree in anthropology in my mid-twenties I finally broke out
of this bubble. I was gradually drawn into human rights activism and anti-militarism
through a series of jobs in non-profit organizations like Peace Brigades International and Witness for Peace.
Fast
forward to early 2003 when U.S. forces were massing along the Kuwaiti border,
threatening to pour into Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein, and capture the country’s
oil fields. In February I joined the Iraq Peace Team,
a project of Voices
in the Wilderness—a feisty human rights group based in Chicago before fines
from the U.S. Treasury Department forced
it to close its doors.
After
flying out of New York to Amman in Jordan, getting an Iraqi visa, and being
driven hour upon hour across the desert, I arrived in Baghdad. Like other Peace
Team members I had brought medical supplies with me that at the time were
banned by the draconian
U.S./U.N. Sanctions imposed on Iraq. According to U.N. statistics those
sanctions led to the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, especially
children and other vulnerable people. The Team, about 30 of us, knew that we
were entering Iraq illegally according to U.S. law. But we each chose to engage
in protracted civil disobedience.
We
saw ourselves as being in solidarity with the Iraqi people and sharing their
risk of attack. In the hope of somehow waking people up back home and ‘de-villainizing’
Iraq—and maybe helping to turn the tide against the war—we did our amateur media
work with both mainstream and movement publications and websites, describing
what we saw and experienced.
We
knew it was a phony war. Saddam Hussein had
no part in 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction, and no links to Al Qaeda. Soon
after I arrived our team hit the streets of Baghdad with thousands of
Iraqis—along with millions of
others world-wide who protested against the impending invasion. Some say that
those marches that took place on February 15 collectively constituted
the largest demonstration in human history.
In
the small hours of March 20 the U.S. air attack
on Baghdad finally began. Cocksure, the Pentagon called its murderous three-week-long
spasm, “Shock and Awe.” Not since Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the
world witnessed such massive and concentrated terrorism, airborne or otherwise—“terrorism”
defined as violence or the threat of violence directed
toward civilians for political and military purposes.
From
my balcony at the Al
Fanar Hotel in downtown Baghdad I watched the bombs that were aimed at
Saddam’s palace just across the Tigris River explode in pyrotechnic fury. ‘Smart’
bombs and missiles targeted vital infrastructure—destroying electricity grids,
the telephone exchange, just about every government building (except the oil
ministry), and many homes.
Before
the sanctions, Iraq was known as a kind of ‘medical
Mecca’ of the Middle East, but Baghdad’s many hospitals—by then nearly
devoid of equipment or medicine—soon brimmed with maimed civilians. Our team
tried to document the destruction, visit the wounded, and get the word out
about what was happening.
All
of us kept a small bag at hand in case we were suddenly evacuated. We taped the
windows of our hotel rooms in case the glass got shattered. We hung whistles around
our necks to alert rescuers if we got trapped under rubble. At the Al Fanar, when
the bombing got thunderously close, we dove to the floor, bruising our knees,
while the always-dignified Iraqis calmly filed down into the basement. They were
used to air attacks.
On
April 8, the day the Marines surged into Baghdad, U.S forces bombed the
offices of Abu Dhabi TV and Al-Jazeera, killing Tareq Ayoub, a journalist
who was transmitting live from the building’s roof. Right across the street
from the Al Fanar was the Palestine Hotel. It
housed more than a hundred un-embedded international media who flocked to the scene—‘first
responders’ of a sort.
The
‘journos’ knew that the bombs were ‘smart’, so they would never hit their hotel.
But U.S. forces shelled the Palestine anyway, killing
two Reuters journalists before surrounding our two hotels with tanks and
machine gun nests. There was no mistaking the message: ‘get out!’ Mostly, the
media obeyed, paying drivers vast sums of money for the risky run back to Amman.
Altogether
in 2003 I spent five months in Iraq. Our team had no vehicle, armored or
otherwise. We walked Baghdad’s streets—virtually the only Westerners to do so. Friends
back home later asked, “Weren’t you afraid of the bombs or of the Iraqis?” I felt
almost duty-bound to answer yes. But the fuller truth, which I hesitated to share,
was that I experienced less fear than one might expect. I’ve come to realize
that I lack the imagination of those who picture their own deaths more vividly
and who therefore feel fear more intensely—and quite reasonably so.
Six
years after returning to the U.S I learned that Hancock
Field Air National Guard Base near my home town of Syracuse, New York
was becoming a hub for the MQ9 Reaper
Drone—a “hunter/killer” airborne robot that is remotely-controlled via
satellite over Afghanistan and elsewhere. The base is the home of the 174th
Attack Wing of the New York National
Guard. Like “Shock and Awe,” “hunter/killer” is Pentagon jargon for its proud
terrorizing of Afghans and others on or close to the oil lands of the Islamic
world.
Since
2009 I’ve been working with other
grassroots activists from upstate New York and beyond to expose what’s
happening at the base and to rally opposition to U.S. drone warfare. Besides
occasional larger protests, we demonstrate with our signs every first and third
Tuesday of the month outside Hancock’s main gate: “Drones Fly, Children Die,”
“Weaponized Drones are Weapons of Terror,” and “To End Terror, Stop
Terrorizing.” Our goal is to stir the conscience, not only of the public that
drives by but also of the drone operators as they pass us on their way home
after their shifts.
Weaponized
drones like the Reaper have become the Pentagon’s darling—instruments
of supposedly ‘frictionless’ war par excellence. Sadly, this image seems to
work, so long as it’s Afghans, Pakistanis, Somalis, Yeminis and not U.S.
military personnel who are maimed or killed during bombing missions. So long as
that’s the case, then U.S. taxpayers don’t need to think much about them, even
though ‘frictionless war’ is an oxymoron.
The
propaganda that surrounds drone warfare helps to explain why people are
generally so blithe about the deep-rooted militarism that’s paid for by their
taxes and targeted against remote peoples in Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, North
West Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Gaza and elsewhere. Why don’t more of us
resist this criminality?
Such
seeming indifference may be because so many of us, like so many ordinary
Germans in the 1930s, are unable to imagine what millions of people on the
receiving end of violence must experience, so their sense of empathy is never
sharpened. After all it’s an experience that few people in the U.S. have
endured. Since 9/11 those deeply deceitful words—the “war on terror”—have been
drummed and re-drummed into their all-too-receptive minds.
That’s a key lesson that I’ve learned through
years of civil resistance: the need for persistent, public truth-telling as we
work to put an end to war.