https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/drone-swarms-and-the-homicidal-impunity-of-governments/

by Laurie Calhoun

The only difference between the rogue operator in “Hated in the Nation” and the rogue governments killing citizens with impunity is that there is no way to call a halt to the latter when it is the prerogative of the government itself to decree who constitutes the evil enemy.

Image Source: https://online.clickview.com.au/exchange/videos/42246491/hated-in-the-nation

Drone swarms have been under development for years now, with the usual suspects touting the virtues of the latest and greatest automated technology to be purchased through lucrative government contracts for what are claimed to be purposes of national defense. As the name implies, drone swarms are modeled after the behavior of large groups of birds or insects which move in concert to produce what looks like purposeful action, despite the lack of a conscious intention on the part of any of the individual members of the group. Drones can be programmed to act in tandem to accomplish tasks such as locating specified persons and, in some cases, killing them.

Many of the drone swarms used in cutting-edge public events, concerts, air shows and the like, have not been “licensed to kill.” Neither were the first large surveillance drones. Instead, the capacity to kill was later appended to them. Small, insect-sized surveillance drones were featured in the film Eye in the Sky, which proved to be a fairly successful feat of propaganda in that it appeared to reconfirm the uncritical assumption on the part of much of the public that the use of drones by the military corps of governments the world over is not only inevitable but in fact good. But just as the most famous of the large reconnaissance drones, the RQ-1 Predators, were transformed into remotely controlled combat aerial vehicles, the primary mission of which became to kill designated targets, drone swarms, too, will likely be used for the same deadly purpose. This prediction flows from the fact that both efficiency and increased lethality have become the ultimate aims of military innovation.

As has been true of other means to mass homicide, including the machine gun, the underlying assumption behind the use of remote-control technology to kill has always been that taking soldiers off the battlefield and simultaneously increasing the lethality of means used against the enemy is not even worthy of debate—it’s obviously the right thing to do. This despite the fact that the use of drones in the twenty-first century has dramatically lowered the threshold for governments to engage in a wide-range of homicidal missions, both within and outside areas of active hostilities (i.e., declared war zones), including outright assassination, once regarded as officially taboo—even if it has been carried out covertly by paid operatives on behalf of governments since time immemorial.

Today’s leaders vaunt their use of cutting-edge technology to eliminate specific, named individuals, as though killing the victims were obviously permissible, given that targeted killing is now a standard-operating procedure of war, having been fully normalized. Rebranding political assassination as an act of war, provided only that the implement of homicide is a missile, was thus a slick and largely successful way of persuading people to believe that killing is an acceptable means to conflict resolution, even when it bypasses all of the standard procedures, including judicial means, for reconciling the rival claims of adversaries.

Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom, to name only the most obvious cases, have all premeditatedly and intentionally executed their own citizens without indictment or trial. Relatively little attention has been paid by the media to such flagrant violations of the citizen targets’ rights, because the narrative in every such case has been carefully controlled by the killers themselves. Samir Khan, Anwar al-Awlaki, and his son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, were killed under the authorization of President Barack Obama in 2011, setting a new precedent followed in 2015 by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who ordered the RAF (Royal Air Force) to target and destroy British nationals Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin, located in Syria at the time of their deaths. The list of Palestinian terrorist suspects killed by the Israeli government is far too long even to attempt to list here, but the point is the same: these people have all been denied their fundamental rights by the executive authority of their own government.

Equally and in some ways even more deplorable is that the much-lauded reduction of combatant troop casualties achieved through removing soldiers from the battlefield—sequestering them instead behind impenetrable bunkers in the Nevada desert and other far-flung safe spaces—has been paid for by a marked weakening of norms regarding what once upon a time was known as “noncombatant immunity.” At this point in history, the expression “collateral damage” rolls easily off the tongues of military officers, drone operators, politicians and pundits alike. Witness Gaza, where many thousands of entirely innocent persons have been systematically terrorized before being executed without indictment or trial, and without being guilty, or even suspected, of anything—beyond their spatial proximity and racial similarity to the members of Hamas responsible for the murder of Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. So little attention is now paid to the value of the lives of innocent human beings that even hostages taken by Hamas have been dispatched by their would-have-been rescuers, as a result of the Israeli government’s monomaniacal quest to “get Hamas,” no holds barred, even if that means finishing everyone else off as well.

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