War Dept.
Drones on With Summer Splurge
By Matthew
Behrens
With
student activists away for summer vacation, it was the perfect occasion in late
July for Carleton University to celebrate a new $40 million war training
contract. In partnership with war manufacturer CAE, Carleton’s Visualization
and Simulation Centre will enable Canadian Forces to better practice, in the
coarse but memorable phrase of former Canadian warlord Rick Hillier, the fine
art of killing people.
In
a moment that would have done Orwell proud, Carleton President Roseann O’Reilly
Runte gushed: “This is about saving lives. This is about saving money.” On hand
for the announcement was foreign affairs minister John Baird, who boasted this
war training partnership will advance
“Canada’s security interests and…Canadian values around the world.”
If
such values are so great, one wonders why they need to come out of the barrel
of a gun. But that’s a non-issue in a national security state: when everything
comes down to the rhetoric of “saving our way of life” from some unknown
threat, and protecting “our soldiers” from the threats we often arm to begin
with, everything becomes justified, from transfers to torture to starving the
poor of billions to pay for the War Dept.’s high-tech toys.
Such
announcements regularly occur on Canadian university campuses, but hopefully it
will spur at Carleton the kind of protest that shut down similar attempts to
exploit bright young minds for nefarious purposes (such victories occurred at
OISE and the University of Toronto
(http://www.homesnotbombs.ca/battellebooted.htm.)
The
Carleton University contract was one of numerous boondoggles announced during summer break by a Canadian War
Department that’s busily seeking our new enemies and new rationales to shield the
lion’s share of a $23 billion budget that is unquestioned by all major
political parties. The military is so awash in funds that last March, their
expenditures jumped 14% and no one could explain why.
In
May, Canada’s Parliamentary budget watchdog remarked that the Harper government
had deliberately misled the public on the costs of the F-35 stealth bombers (a
deception built upon bureaucrats within the War Dept. also ignoring their own
internal warnings that the bomber project was plagued by serious troubles).
Shortly
after, we also learned that War Minister Peter MacKay had also low-balled
government figures by almost seven times when he discussed how much it cost to
drop bombs on the people of Libya (over $350 million at last count). Needless
to say, the Libyan “mission,” as it was delicately called, was an important
benchmark for MacKay and the generals, who got to play with new equipment and
push for new weapons programs as a result.
Meanwhile,
the drawdown in Afghanistan – where Canadians fired off almost 5 million
bullets in one 20-month period – is making some Canadian soldiers itchy. In one
Ottawa Citizen
interview, a Kingston sergeant explained that garrison life on the home base
“really discourages a lot of guys. The question becomes, ‘When do we go next?’
Adrenalin is a drug and they need the heart-pumping excitement and that level
of unknown to keep them happy now.”
(http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Just+what+next+Canada+warrior+spirit/6681564/story.html).
Thus, war is an experience we must incessantly provide to those trained to be
warriors, finding new enemies and places to bomb so we can keep our soldiers
happy.
Some
of the boys apparently got what they wanted when millions were wasted last
month as a Canadian contingent of 1400 soldiers were shipped off to Hawaii to
take part in the U.S.-led Rim of Pacific war exercises, an attempt to remind
China of who’s boss on the world stage (and perhaps to reassure Canadian mining
firms that help is not far away when Asian locals agitate over poor working
conditions, toxic spills, or the murder of their union leaders).
The
irony here is that at the same time we are preparing for war – if necessary –
with China – the busy Mr. Baird
signed a deal to export increasing amounts of Canadian uranium to the nuclear
weapons-holding government of Beijing, a slap in the face to nuclear
non-proliferation.
And
while the Pacific was being pounded with ordnance, we also learned the Canadian
Forces are working to establish bases in the Caribbean, East Africa, Europe and
Southeast Asia. This allows Canada’s military to “project combat power/security
assistance and Canadian influence rapidly and flexibly anywhere in the world,”
according to a memo signed by Canada’s top soldier, Walter Natynczyk. (July 20,
Ottawa Citizen)
Part
of that power projection will be done not so much with human beings who – despite thorough
indoctrination in home-grown training camps to eliminate their sense of empathy
with those they are commanded to kill or transfer to torture – remain
vulnerable to the twinges of humanity that lead to afflictions like post
traumatic stress, depression, and suicide. Rather, the path forward is the
remote control warfare that has become de rigeur over the past decade.
Indeed,
the eagerness of War Minister Peter MacKay and his cronies to grab their
joysticks and bomb from the safety of five thousand miles away in Playstation
fashion is clearly palpable. The U.S. and Israel have long dominated in the
global use of drones (unmanned aerial vehicles), but now most countries are
getting in on the act because of cost savings (especially relative to
multi-billion contracts like the F-35 stealth bomber) and the relatively lower
political costs (no troop deployments, no body bags from “our side,” no
embedded media who might step outside the boundaries and inspect the
“collateral damage” on the ground).
And
so we have also learned that Canada’s poor will have to sacrifice an additional
$1 billion so that armed Predator drones and their Hellfire missiles will be
part of Canada’s growing arsenal.
The
drones are also touted as vehicles by which Canada somehow “saves lives,” but
this equation always leaves out the lives at risk on the ground. Over 3,000
souls have been slaughtered from the skies in the not-so-secret and clearly
illegal drone war waged by Obama and his minions in Pakistan and Afghanistan,
and the rapidly evolving technology is also being used to prevent refugees from
finding asylum and to target political demonstrations. Drones represent the
ultimate tool in a 24/7 surveillance and punishment society: the forces of
control can always monitor us and, when convenient, vaporize us, without any
sense of transparency or accountability.
They’ve
been used extensively by Obama in his targeted assassination program, and are
increasingly privatized to take them out of the already limited loop that would
provide any measure of accountability. Indeed, private mercenary firms like
Blackwater are deeply involved in arming and conducting drone strikes, thus
privatizing larger portions of what’s known as the “kill chain.” Ironically, by
the rules the Pentagon plays, such use of private mercenaries creates a whole
new army of “unlawful combatants” who, if captured by the Taliban, would have
no rights under the Geneva Convention. But such a scenario is unlikely, since
the Taliban cannot invade the safe sanctuaries in New York and Nevada in which
drone “pilots” sit in air conditioned comfort and fire the missiles.
The
usual rationale for anything military these days is being touted in the drone
PR: it is to protect “our Arctic” (and the precious resources that we stole
from First Nations) from anyone who’d steal them from us. But even the War
Dept. knows this is a red herring, as an internal assessment revealed in late
June concluded Russia poses no threat to the region
(http://www.canada.com/news/Russia+move+protect+Arctic+interests+threat+Canada/6831454/story.html)
But
corporations like Northrup Grumman are not letting logic or the facts get in
the way of a good profit, and so in June pitched the Canadian government at the
annual Ottawa weapons bazaar, CANSEC. War merchants have until September 28 to
submit their tenders to provide the Canadian War Dept. with a fleet of
Hellfire-armed Predators.
In
addition to the direct damage caused by drone strikes, they play a huge role in
projecting psychological torture on those who live beneath them.
Last year, Pakistan’s Foundation for
Fundamental Rights, in conjunction with UK human rights group Reprieve, brought
together 350 people to discuss the traumas of life under the drones, which many
reported seeing ten to 15 times a day. The anxiety of never knowing when the
hovering drones will strike is unimaginable: war by drone is a form of torture,
an indefinite death sentence hanging over the heads of villagers that can be
executed at any time of the day and night. And the victims never know what hit
them, as Hellfire missiles travel faster than the speed of sound. In addition,
after a drone strike, villagers often face death squads who believe someone in
the village provided targetting data. Kidnappings and torture ensue, a
convenient extension of the “kill chain” that begins back in a Nevada bunker.
The social justice
group Homes not Bombs has long protested at the site of Canada’s largest drone
profiteer, L-3 Wescam, located right next door to a private elementary school
in Burlington, Ontario. The group conducted their first attempted weapons
inspection of the plant in late 2002 and numerous direct actions have followed,
but such challenges have, unfortunately not slowed the relentless search for
newer targetting systems (though one employee informed the group of a
resignation, spurred to leave when s/he discovered the true nature of their
work).L-3 Wescam announced last month at the UK’s annual Farnborough weapons show the launch of its MX™-10D electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) imaging and designating turret, with their equipment showing, in the lifeless language of murder, “exceptional performance in all modes of flight throughout the HELLFIRE operational envelope.”
Canadians concerned about remote control murder, the rights of refugees, and freedom to associate would do well to resist Canada’s new generation of drone warfare: with this technology, the wars have truly come home.
