Olivier Lallemant - Entry No. 7 (Khalili)

In her text, Dr. Laleh Khalili, specialist researcher in the fields of policing and incarceration, describes how incarceration is going in counterinsurgencies. This specific kind of warfare is very interesting to study, since it is not clearly controlled by international Law. It often leads to serious abuse to human rights and to the dignity of fighters. The author raises several questions that are, as for me, absolutely determining for the study of counterinsurgencies.

First of all, what all counterinsurgencies have in common in the second part of the 20^th century is that they constantly lead to human rights abuses. The main problem for the “government” side, which has to fight rebels whether they are from its own country or not, is the need for information. Actually, in all kind of warfare, one army needs to gather intelligence to plan efficient attacks against its enemy’s forces. But in the case of counterinsurgencies, the enemy is not a country, it is usually a heterogeneous group of people, which it is difficult to know whether the population is involved with or not, and even sometimes without a known head with a name on it. To lead a war efficiently, you have to know who you are fighting. And that is the point where confinement is involved. This specific kind of confinement has as a main target to get information from the “detainee”. In this objective, torture is a “common” way to get this information. The second way human rights are abused in those prisons is the second main characteristic of counterinsurgencies. This kind of warfare is above all based on bombings and terrorist attacks to more or less strategic points of the involved country. Laleh Khalili takes a lot of very good examples of contemporary counterinsurgencies, whose methods are mainly based on decolonization civil wars, which created this way of war making. Thus, as those rebels are involved in a terrorist organization that does not hesitate to kill innocent people as well as military to achieve its goals, the other part does not take care of prisoners as they were common human detainees. That is a very important issue because human rights are the fundamental basis under which we should never but the condition of a human being. But the main question that remains is: Should we prevent the rights of a person who knows where and when dozen of innocent people will be killed? This is a very political, ideological, and difficult question to answer, especially after events like September 11.

At the end of the chapter, the author raises the question of the “Regime of invisibility in wartime”. This “regime” leads to the invisibility everything that is related to confinement in counterinsurgencies. Detainees cannot be heard or seen during wartime, as well as facilities where they are imprisoned. This simply leads to the complete negation of the inmate’s existence. Legally, he is no one. In that case, whether the inmate lives or dies does not matter, since one both cases he remains invisible. The author takes the example of Israel’s “Facility 1391” prison camp, to show that it has been established much earlier than in April 2002, when it took its name. Its location remained an absolute secret for a very long time. Eventually, inmates could not even be found, since nobody knew where they were confined. The second main function of those facilities after intelligence gathering: “bargaining chips” hold center. This was a very important side of their using in Israel. In 2002, the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, voted the Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law. Suspending the article 4 of the Geneva Convention, this law meant in practice that they can imprison anyone who is suspected to be an unlawful combatant, who may harm Israel’s State Security; this has been a very efficient way to gather a lot of “bargaining chips”. As a conclusion, the author describes how important Law was in those invisibility confinement techniques; it has been compiled with treaties and control to keep absolute secrecy. Invisibility was the fundamental basis on without which the absolute control on counterinsurgency detainees would not have been possible at all.

VINCENT LÊ - ENTRY NO. 7 (KHALILI)

THE COVERT INCARCERATIONAL PROXY REGIME OF INVISIBILITY AND UNACCOUNTABILITY: In Chapter 3 of TIME IN THE SHADOWS, Khalili exposes the way in which covert prisons operated by proxy state militias and private mercenaries on behalf of the great empires constitute a regime of rendering invisible and unaccountable the spaces and actors of war respectively. The very difficulty that Khalili has in finding evidence for such proxy prisons in leaked and unclassified FBI and CIA files, which have censored or simply omitted any and all references to incarcerational spaces and agents, is in itself evidence for this. In any case, Khalili’s thesis of the covert incarcerational proxy regime of invisibility and unaccountability is, nonetheless, confirmed by the few known incarcerational black sites, which are not directly maintained and operated by the great empires themselves, but by an alliance of subordinate ‘sovereign’ State-apparatuses and private mercenaries doing so either with an eye cast to their own reward and gain, and/or from fear of non-compliance. Khalili identifies three advantages for the outsourcing of the spaces and agents of war by the great empires that outweigh its singular disadvantage: 1. MILKING THE (SCAPE)GOAT Niccolò Machiavelli taught us long before Claude Levi-Strauss or Khalili that such trickster figures as the proxy prison permit the great empires to distanciate themselves from the distasteful tasks of torture and interrogation conducted in said proxy prisons. Only Machiavelli went much further in situating the trickster at the very telltale heart of our societies by identifying it with the parliament. That is to say, the king/ruling classes, knowing how unpopular oppressive mechanisms like exorbitant taxations are, relieved themselves of the blame by establishing the third judicial body of the parliamentary state in order to impose them. In Machiavelli’s own words, ‘There could be no better or more prudent an institution than this [trickster one], nor could there be a better explanation for the security of the king and the kingdom […] princes must delegate distasteful tasks to others, while pleasant ones they should keep for themselves’. To provide a topical incarcerational example, my wager is that such Machiavellian trickery is behind the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott’s efforts to widely publicize the Australian military’s direct participation in locating the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, while simultaneously outsourcing the dirty work of brutally incarcerating refugees to Australia’s ‘ex-colony’, Papua New Guinea. As such, even if these covert proxy prisons are ever unveiled, the great empires can always endow themselves positively to the outraged public by betraying the proxy agents and holding them criminally liable for the empires’ own proxy acts of violence. As Machiavelli also portended so long ago that one would think we would have learnt our lesson by now, this FINAL SOLUTION is crucial for the empires because the singular weakness of the incarcerational proxy regimes is that the hired mercenaries and state militias who run them are neither reliable nor loyal to them. 2. LINGUIStricks It is precisely such judicial linguistricks that permits the proxy regimes to justify and cloak their violence in the language of legality and confidentiality. Consider Khalili’s anecdote in a footnote about how some French lawyers, who asked the Israeli military to visit a detainee whom they were representing in Khiyam prison, were informed that the South Lebanese Army controls the prison. When pressed by the lawyers to order the SLA to permit them visiting rights to the prison, Israel added that they do not operate the prison or perform any other joint operations with the SLA, but merely finance, train, arm and provide intelligence to them, such that Israel cannot hold itself or the SLA legally accountable. To add insult to injury, when the French lawyers then asked the SLA directly for visitors’ permits, they were told that the SLA is unaccountable for prisons operated by Israel! Given how such linguistricks function to cloak and sustain regimes of torture and violence, the French madman, Jacques Lacan, was all too farsighted indeed to have said that ‘LANGUAGE IS THE TORTURE HOUSE OF MAN’. 3. IMPERIALISM: THE HIGHEST STAGE OF RACIALIZATION AND GENDERIZATION The proxy states, Khalili continues, are not only used to wage wars on behalf of the empires, but also to divide those proxy states themselves into an antagonistic contradiction between those who work for the state and manage the prisons, and those who are their victims in a process that Khalili calls ‘racialization’. In this way, the target of the empires’ offensives are not simply those who their proxy states target, but the proxy states themselves. Again, this is nothing new under the sun insofar as it recalls Marx’s writings on the British colony in India, which are much hated by anthropologists (‘The British Rule in India’: http://www.marxists.org/archive/mark/works/1853/06/25.htm and ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm). But I do not mention these texts only so as to be frivolously provocative in an anthropology class. For in these texts, Marx demonstrates that the British colonizers did NOT unite a disconnected, roadless, tribalized India by laying the material foundations for a Western nation-state to emerge. It would be absurd, after all, for the colonizers to mobilize a brutally oppressed colony against themselves. It is true enough that the British did indeed break up local native ties and village community structures that served as impediments to mass industrialization, and hence surplus appropriation by the British, but only so as to also revive and nationalize the native Indian caste system and hereditary division of labour that impeded national consciousness and revolution. Moreover, according to Khalili, this colonial process of racialization is intimately connected to another process of ‘genderization’; viz., feminization of the colony/proxy as timid, receptive, cowardly, penetrable, dominated and slavish, and contradistinctive masculinization of the empire as brave, active, dominant, moral, masterful, and impenetrable. Simply put, genderization is the process of emphasizing that the imperialists’ tanks are bigger and their steeled foreskin harder than those of the proxy tricksters (120). WHEREFORE ART THOU POLITICS? Another way of formulating the function of the covert incarcerational proxy regimes is to say that these proxy tricksters constitute a REGIME OF DE-POLITICIZATION. That is to say, if Clausewitz is right and war is simply politics by other means, then the erasure of the agents and spaces of war functions to negate political participants and spaces as such so as to perpetuate the status quo. Consequently, by censoring political spaces from maps and signs and situating political participants in international wars where cameras and courts cannot reach, the regime of depoliticizaiton perpetuates the illusion the given visible set of apolitical behaviours and actions, such as voting and signing petitions, constitute the totality of possible modalities of political expression. But what Jacques Rancière, whom Khalili cites, would call ‘le partage du sensible’, and Derek Gregory might call ‘the scopic regime’, is as much a mode of exclusion and censorship from the sensible framework as it is a mode of making perceptible, visible, audible and thinkable. Such texts as Khalili’s and such actions as Assange, Manning and Snowden’s, which unveil the political spaces and agents of war, thereby constitute a REdistribution of the sensible, a kind of counter-regime of making visible, perceptible, thinkable and conceivable again politics as such. This is what Rancière and Khalili alike name ‘democracy’. There is, however, a crucial difference between Khalili and Rancière’s prescriptions. For Khalili, democracy is the monitoring of the covert incarcerational proxy regimes by the very superegoic Law that precisely concealed such regimes in the first place. To lend support to his prescription, Khalili, thus, misquotes Rancière, who, on the contrary, asserts that every redistribution of the sensible, or what Khalili calls by the neoliberal moniker of ‘transparency’, is by necessity an illegal act of war that violently transgresses the present distribution of the sensible such as it is always upheld before the Law.

Session 9 Expose, Part, Manar Daoud Barghouti

About the article:

In the article “Writing crisis, watching rebels: The technopolitics of the International Crisis Group in Lebanon (and beyond)” Nikolas Kosmatopolous makes an assessment of the role of the International Crisis Group (ICG) which is a non-profit NGO who focuses on research on conflict issues, but with research recommendations for diplomats, the world bank and other agencies. The paper tries to explain the contradictions between explaining a crisis situation within an already existing power structure – both societal and within the framework of the already-existing sentinel (the think tank that constitutes ICG). 

The whole article starts with the bomb as a concrete object to describe the situation of Lebanon on the brink of crisis – also in order to describe ICG’s practice in their monthly reports when they try to explain each crisis zone’s situation with an upward arrow, sidelined arrow and a downward arrow. The background of the bomb illustrating the threat of crisis in Lebanon never erupted (figuratively and literally), but still Kosmatopolous describes how they never removed it from the report – thus the bomb became a metaphor for the normalization of the conflict level in Lebanon. It is from this point he elaborates his analysis on how to understand think tanks of a specific (hybrid kind) in general and ICG in particular. The way to do so, according to Kosmatopolous, is to understand how 

innovations and technologies that come with the think tank reconstitute power in general.

The main goal of the ICG’s reports is to simplify crises to make them understandable for those who read them (world bank, diplomats, politicans etc.), however, this would necessarily be done within the model format and the framework of conception of the crisis expert who does the assessment and analysis. This is an effective model to construct an understandable method and theory of the bigger – and thus far more complex – crises. As Kosmatopolous describes, the report has to be easy to read, and not too complicated to understand. 

The goal of the ICG’s reports are of course not just to spread awareness to policy makers and agents (here of course not meant as spies but as merely actors in the field of crisis management), but to create a field of crisis prevention. However, necessarily the subject – through its process – creates an uncontrollable chimera where the constructed meanings, through the framework of the analyst, where the dialectics between stimulation of action and incomplete knowledge could create another reaction than expected (cf. “if you predict a crisis you will always be right”) with references to Keck and Lakoff (the sentinel device).  Thus Kosmatopolous – grounded with the previous sentence as the premise of his study – seeks to explore how the entities that are defined as threats “are intrinsically linked to the qualities of the sentinel device and vice versa”. 

Cons in the articles to be mentioned:

The article is without doubt an interesting piece which does raise some important questions. Especially on the issue of Foucault’s processes of subjectivication where the issues raised through ICG and the information it seeks to provide necessarily has to be developed and produced through a certain specter or framework. This specter or/and framework is of course deployed through the mechanism of power/knowledge of the sentinel where the different actors in the different conflict zones are declared and identified. The best example provided by Kosmatopolous is how it divides the world into hot and cold zones. This is – by my opinion – far more important to understand the field which ICG operates within and how they perceives the world.

Kosmatopolous writes that “I choose to look at how the function of the sentinel (the ICG/The think tank) in a particular context produces and constructs at the same time two dialectical types of subjects: on one side the subject to be placed under surveillance (the area of crisis) and on the other side the subject to be responsible for that surveillance (the ICG)”. The think tank (The ICG) creates the one it is surveying and researching. This is of course true, where ICG necessarily has the right of definition by default. Gareth Evans said that the real strength of the ICG is the detailed local knowledge of particular situations. Kosmatopolous then writes: “If the CEO of the ICG understands the organization as a particular sentinel whose major role is to provide “gold standard reporting” to Western intelligence services, the researchers of the organization are then constituted and selected according to perceived or proved abilities to provide that reporting”.

However, Kosmatopolous is forgetting another factor in this calculation between the ICG and the research subjects, primarily the sentinel itself which is the main agent in this production of relations and the power-relation that it operates within (which in Antonio Gramsci’s words would be: not only the maintaining, but also the production of hegemony). It is thus disappointing that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is only rewarded with a footnote – and only as a reference to mimicry of her title “Can the subaltern talk?” – when she is one of the main critics of Foucault’s, if not totally flawed, but lacking analysis of processes of subjectivication (Foucault, who Kosmatopolous names as one of the most important theoreticians to reveal relations of dominations). 

It would for example be very interesting to have a more concrete elaboration by Kosmatopolous on this power-relation dialectic between the subject being assessed by the ICG and vice versa, the sentinel and those who it tries to influence (the world bank, diplomats etc.) and the framework which it does this within.  Western think tanks are not and have never been, the ones they try to introduce or (re-)represent in their research - neither class wise, historically or intellectually. This must necessarily affect the product (the report) in ideological ways.

On the contrary, according to Spivak criticism of Foucault: Westerners (or in this case, Western based think tanks) are historically specific products within a class context as a result of the communities in which they are produced into and from. Something else – as the post-structuralist Foucault claims – implies placing the think tanks in the void of history without colonial heritage or ethnocentric influence. . As Kosmatopolous writes: “I seek to explore how do the entities that are identified as threats are intrinsically linked to the qualities of the sentinel device and vice versa” Unfortunately, I think he should focus more on the already established power-relations that already exist before the research – globally and locally – which the field researcher and the ICG operates within, and how this power-relation necessarily must affect the world crisis reports – in highly ideological ways.

---

Matías Koch - Entry No 6.

Writing crisis, watching rebels: The tecno-politics of the International Crisis Group in Lebanon (and beyond) At first it all comes a little strong. A particular moment is described, the explosion of a car in Beirut that kills the Lebanese Army Captain Wisám ‘Eíd. Followed by this is the article written by the Crisis Watch that month. I founded myself completely lost in the beginning of the article. Lots of names, difficult definitions and words flooded the sentences. I even used Google a couple of times to be completely honest. There are also quotes that make no sense at first, and must be re-read several times to understand them, or at least that was my particular case. But after a few pages, it all starts to make sense. The article becomes more centered and you can understand that the foggy beginning was indeed focusing on one thing, understanding the function and procedures of the International Crisis Group. The author then starts talking about his fieldwork in Beirut (2008-2010) and how he managed to get in touch with true members of this group. Robert was the name of the first person he contacted, and a brief summary of his work is described. The aim of a crisis expert is to make use of the information and experiences he has, in order to fulfill the needs of the audience in a complete way. He must have a direct experience of the crisis, in order to create a bond with it. It must be able to explain to de audience how things truly are, in order to keep the world inform. They seek the authority and recognition, in order to be a reliable source of information. The text starts to succeed in it mission of explaining how a crisis expert thinks, and what his aims are. The new focus of the text is the influence of the think tanks, which try to influence public policy and state leaders. The author is against the generalization and negative prestige of the think tanks, and his mission thru out the text is to explain why this are a key factor to the global and local communities. He believes they are an adequate institutional response to a particular problem. He thus, uses the lens of the techno-politics, approaching it as a technology that seeks to transmit and disseminate knowledge about global politics while packed organizations in a very particular technical format i.e. Magazines. They present a great resume of what is going on in the world, and take it into a smaller scale or a micro-model. He starts describing how the Reading Crisis review is organized, which is really useful to understand its goals. The accuracy of this description helps us visualize in our heads how the front page is like. He nails it with this, making the reader feel comfortable and creating a vivid experience. With every description, he gives us the reasons the publishers had to organized in that particular way. We have all the information we need about the International Crisis Group, no extra information is needed. A real full description is made by the author, and a definition is added in order to keep it extra easy: “The Crisis Group is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization…” And it is grounded in field research. His mission: “Can the report speak? Size, scale and sentinel”. Using Mitchell, the author tries to focus not only in the human factors of history, but also on the non-human factors, such as mosquitoes in Egypt or reports in the modern world. The techno-politics aims to connect all the dots and not to exclude important things from the equation. His mission is to analyze the crisis reports as an assemblage of forces and actors that are deployed in time, space and in relation to one other. First, he wants to make the connection between the field researchers and the office workers. For him this is representative for the “scale”, and he uses a member of the ICG team, Sandrine. As he did with Robert, he also describes her work and life. This is like a modus operandi for the author, which I like. She was a field researcher for a while, and now she works at the office in New York, so she is the perfect girl for the author intentions. Sandrine explains that the most important part of the field work is to get the right information from the right person. And to do this, you must risk your life and make the right questions at the right time. By doing this, the organization is able to make excellent reviews and get the right information every time. This is a key element for the organization and it is called as the “researched product”. One of the ICG’s main purposes is to make recommendations to the high rank leaders of the international community and to generate lobby in the member-states of the United Nation Security Council. The great thing about this text is the direct answer and experience the author takes from real members of the organization. These are words coming from high ranked workers, which is priceless and gives us the certainty that this is in fact true. To create this lobby, they need the help of the advocacy manager that is like the extension of the report. His job is to defend the policies the ICG recommends to policy makers and politicians. As the author previously mentioned, this is one of the most important aims of the organization because it means that they are in fact helping. Going back to Robert, the author now wants to know about the “Size”. As we remember, Robert was one of the ‘analysts on the ground’. He was an academic researcher before becoming part of the organization and he likes that the report has more impact. And as Sandrine, is in a way obsess with the idea of recognition and acceptance that their reports have on people. He talks about the importance of the size of the report, and how this can help them be more attractive to massive audiences worldwide. These are very technical things, like the title and the number of pages. For them, the best thing is to make a brief and easy summary at the end of each report for the occupied, important people to have at least a general idea, and for the media to take information from it. For me, this is all like a documentary of a product. It all starts with the fresh ingredients (ground agents), then it passes to the making of the product (office workers), then to the packaging (advocacy manager) and then to the selling mechanism (size). And the author is doing a great job as a documentary maker. The last item is the “Sentinel” which is the crucial balance between emergency and intervention. Now a days it is possible and desirable to understand, predict and manage global affair and crises, or it is at least believed. This justifies the compulsion to intervene on crises, and the ICG is an example of this. In the report the crisis is always accompanied with a solution, or a way to invert it. The ICG comes as a savior of the failure of the international communities, it is an artificial mechanism created while the natural one is trying to grow. The organization aims to focus the attention in the hot zones, in order to place them under particular forms of surveillance. They work as sentinel subjects, and this is a good thing.

Danièle Saint-Ville-Leplé - entry No.4 (Gregory)

Having a global, yet detailed and accurate vision of the battlefield is undoubtedly empowering. This 'macro-field of micro-visions' allows to adjust efficiently the means to the situation. Based on this accurate information the army intents establishing a 'pattern of life', constructing 'activity-based information', in order to identify the militants and minimize collateral casualties. Though the technical progress is undeniable, the way to process information remains subject to flaws. Derek Gregory even insists on the fact that assuming mere Rules of Engagement will solve the problem is missing the core of the issue.
Multiple human factors are still present as a source of possible errors. The drone war is in no way 'perfect' or unmanned, for there is a whole complex network of on-ground or off-ground people interconnected in the killing chain. And this network shows a culturally-constructed bias in the way it processes the information. Gregory uses here the concept of visuality to make his point. The visibilities are constructed culturally: on the battlefield, the otherness is perceived through subjective filters. This is why it is relevant to point out a correlated techno-cultural construction: constructed spaces of invisibility as a result of a partial process of the information.

Derek Gregory contends nonetheless the idea of anti-drones partisans: remote control does not turn bombers into inhuman, disengaged and irresponsible people.They are instead intensely immersed and feel a huge sense of responsibility toward their comrades on ground. This is essentially what makes them susceptibly more radical in their actions. The lives bombers aim at saving above all are their comrades' ones. The structure of the network - ultra-connected by the means of military social media - per se encourages flaws in the identification of the non-militant population. Military calculations tend to prevail on reasonings strictly respectful of International Law. International Law is taken in account only through the restrictive principle of proportionality of decisions.

Flaws in the identification of the militants should nonetheless be avoided. Killing civilians is highly counterproductive in a warfare attempting to fight insurgency movements, which main characteristics is precisely to mix with the population and obtain popular support in order to become imperceptible.The omnipresent 'fear of a faceless enemy' can only result in popular resentment.

Some internal remarks about Gregory's work may come to mind. The historical affiliation attempt is really interesting and should be pursued. However, the parallel between bombers and video gamers should not, in my view, be dismissed so promptly. This idea deserves being thought about more thoroughly. There are indeed testimonies accrediting a certain form of troubling sensation of almightiness (Gregory himself quotes a pilot: "Sometimes I felt like a God hurling thunderbolts from afar" (Martin 2010)). An raw hypothesis can also be made. That of a possible imperialistic view of the battlefield emerging on the part of the actors involved - as they put in place an unofficial warfare, supported by an interventionist ideology, and disdainful of the consent of the population.

More generally, through the reading of this article, some problems popped up that are still to be addressed. Further academic investigation on the consequences of real-time social networking during war appears as genuinely promising. Particular attention to the respective roles of the individual actor and of the community of actors would be beneficial. Another serious problem is that of the idea of a 'virtuous war'. Given even technical progress is not enough to guarantee a flawless warfare, is there any way for a war to ever be virtuous?

Georgina Kilborn- Entry No. 5 (Gregory)

In the context of the ‘war on terror’, an era where the state’s primary focus is the implementation of effective security measures and counterterrorism initiatives, Gregory’s, From a View to Kill: Drones and Late Modern War questions the virtues of drones deployed as instruments in this ‘virtual’ war. At issue in the drone debate, is not the matter of remoteness but the feeling of proximity achieved through new ways of ‘seeing’. As such, transparency is another conceptual issue traversing Gregory’s work, as well as a significant concern raised in public debate.

The time-space compression of video feeds from UAVs creates a dangerous sense of intimacy which risks converting “civilians into combatants”, warns Gregory. Gregory suggests that new visibilities in the form of reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence are restrictive. He asserts that such “constructed visibility” achieves a unique closeness whose repercussions are more lethal than those of distance.  Such proximity, he claims, “consistently privileges the view of the hunter-killer”. ‘Seeing’ through high-resolution imagery is not exclusively technical in nature, but also has its place in a “techno-cultural” system. While the distinction between ‘our’ space and that of the ‘other’ continues to be reinforced, our increasing proximity to their space creates a dangerous sense of familiarity.  Thus, rather than detachment, Gregory point to visibility and proximity as the main point of departure in analysing the implications of drone technology.

So, in this techno-cultural arena, where seeing is inclined to become believing, transparency, or rather the lack of, becomes a pertinent issue. Transparency is at issue in the unclear legal delineation of the  ‘global’ airspace in which drones are being deployed. This lack of clarity in the global battle space resembles what Agamben terms the ‘state of exception’; where the law is suspended in order to protect itself, by creating a zone of exclusion. The lines of war continue to be elastersized and this zone of exemption thus permits unaccountability for civilian casualties incurred in UAV warfare.

Accordingly, the visibility within the ‘battlespace’ remains unclear despite advancements in technology, rendering distinctions between combatants and civilians problematic. Further, the American Air Force deploys this absence of transparency to their advantage. Collateral damage remains covert by identifying a ‘grey zone’- an area lacking in clarity between innocent and non-innocent civilians and thereby rendering this inaccuracy of extra-judicial killing, justifiable. The issue of ‘just war’ is here raised. No more is there a presumption of innocence but rather preventative killing takes its place. This draws parallels to Foucault’s construction of ‘biopower’, which functions by distinguishing those who must live from those who must die (Mbembe 2003).

Transparency is also at issue in what is exposed by the media. What is revealed has been carefully selected and is limited in the sense that the narrative of the target is always underexposed. The public is faced only with the dominant narrative in which clean and ‘surgically precise’ UAVs deliver effective counterterrorism results. Nothing is heard of the counter narrative; that of civilian’s experiences in which drones, instruments of surveillance, constitute a form of terror. Within the space of the target, those who live beneath the fear inducing instruments, terror is bread and fear engrained. Thus, forms of surveillance and security can function to promote anxiety. 

However, this dilemma of transparency is not unique to the covert drone program. The intelligence gathering and surveillance measures of the NSA, when exposed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden created a hostile rapport between the state and the civilian. If law is an instrument aiding state crime, what may be the role of law in redressing state crime? Currently, these legal and bureaucratic oversights in the form of drone surveillance risk a new manifestation of terror, a perpetuation of the cycle of violence. 

bruno cuconato claro - entry no. 6 (on Gregory / Grossman / Chamayou)

Derek Gregory introduces us to the contemporary debate about the drone wars. Sharing the belief in the preciseveness of drones, some argue over the legality of american action in Pakistan, Yemen, and even in Afghanistan. Others, mostly drawing in Grossman's landmark On Killing, say that drones take killing to a whole new level of unscrupulousness, further enhanced by the lack of accontability for civilian casualties and by the relatively low attention given by the media to the issue.

Gregory enters the debate to dispel innacuracies in the arguments of both sides, taking the discussion to a more nuanced perspective. Gregory repeatedly shows that even if drones may be technologicaly effective, being operated by humans makes them imprecise. The claim about the recklessness inculcated in operators by the distanced perspective offered by the drones is doubted with several personal testimonies, and also a case of PTSD.

Gregory's argument is that drones break the grossmanian logic of more development in weapon technology -> more distance -> less resistance to kill. While physical distance from operators to victims can be indeed enormous, Gregory cites Chamayou's concept of co-presence to show that operators, victims, and ground troops are not that far from each others. Video feeds are much more realistic than the visibility proportined by ground cameras in planes, and operators can, even if not perfectly, see the product of their deeds. Operators are bonded to ground troops through radio, military social networks, and constant accompaniment – drones can stay in the air for up to 18 hours. The former factor acts in the sense of reducing willingness to kill, while the latter creates a responsibility in the drone operators towards the safety of ground troops which lessens their resistance to kill.

Gregory is particularly interested in how these 'scopic' regimes techno-culturally mediate what drone operators see. The fact that operators are working in groups, in contact with superiors, peers, ground troops, and military lawyer, and the fact that all of those are immersed in a hunt for terrorists, makes their visualisation a collective visualisation, and one influenced by a narrative of terrorists hunting alike to the one explored by Taussig in the article we previously read. Thus, as Gregory shows, civilians are turned into combatants, and cilindrical objects into rifles. This kind of relation works on an individual level, but is reflected through all the military structure. Thus Gregory deems wrong to condemn exclusively the operators involved in a case of civilian casualty.

In his book, Grossman shows that to kill a person has to overcome a resistance that spawns from her empathy towards another human being. Gregory argues that the techno-cultural mediation of the 'scopic' regimes, joined to the military structure and narrative that bureaucratizes and that legitimates killings while dispersing responsibility, sided with the bond created by ground troops and drone operators, all contribute to an effective differentiation of the american forces “us” from their victims “them,” the “others,” thus reducing the resistance to kill of drone operators.

Sara Gormley - Entry No. 5 (Gregory)

The War on Terror that Bush introduced the United States to has seen an evolution in military tactics embracing a virtual dimension to war and to US hegemony. This raises the question of morality in war as well as this modern warfare’s efficiency. The argument is made that drone attacks are counterproductive by creating even more enemies. Civilians who may not support terrorist activities will see innocents being killed by drone attacks and unite against what they view as an evil power.  While the US is promoting freedom and peace, how can the civilians of the countries under attack see it as anything other than the antithesis of these qualities?

There are legal issues involved as well which question the legality of US strikes against Pakistan, when the US is not at war with that country. The argument can be made based on the strikes’ limited nature, determining that it is not to the scale at which the United States would need international consensus to declare war or that it is an act of self-defense against terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda or the Taliban. But when considering those arguments, any armed attack that puts civilians at risk can be looked upon by some as a credible attempt at war. Most arguments however assume that the use of UAVs is unproblematic, supporting the notion of a virtuous war.

The argument supporting drones expresses the importance in its ability to detail the precision of its targets, thus diminishing civilian casualties. These advanced technologies may be causing desensitization in capable militaries who have the impersonal perspective of creating a faraway impact without regard to the very intimate impact it will have on those on the ground. The US military carrying out drone strike have a warmed perspective on the countries they are attacking, shown in the article when it states “When Kaplan (2006: 81) visited the base, he was told: ‘Inside that trailer is Iraq, inside the other, Afghanistan.’ The effortless sense of time-space compression is exceeded only by its casual imperialism.” Even the control room itself looks like one big video game, adding even more space between the hunter and the hunted. Increased capabilities of technology in war can also raise the problem of “drowning in data,” requiring a huge amount of support to sift through this information in what used to be a one man job.

This “video game war” is a main source of tension throughout the article. The “kill-chain” has changed over the years as technology has improved, questioning the actors carrying out the strikes’ ability to see the events which has perhaps increased, versus their ability to feel the full effect of the repercussions which has arguably decreased with the advancement of technology.  

When it comes to the war on terror and counterinsurgencies, there is a thin line between innocent civilians and combatant civilians, which it is the Job of the United States’ military force to determine. This has proved tricky in the past and, through media, its accuracy and imprecision has been broadcasted into homes across the world. This could bring in a new factor by shaping public opinion possibly for or against military action. There has been a history of people understanding war to be virtuous, but as armed forces increasingly removed from the battle and the world’s population brought straight to it through technology this point of view may have altered. We see a blurred line between what is “mine” and what is “yours” in this modern battlefield, introducing a whole new debate to the way the world sees war.