Targeted Killing

By Roy D. Follendore III

November 5, 2002

There is an old science fiction concept that concludes if we could somehow go back in time and kill an infant we could change history. Think about it. If you could strangle an innocent child named Stalin or Hitler, you could save millions of people. If there were such a thing as time travel into the past our various Governments might be tempted to do that. If they were to have such a thing, they probably would call such a mission a targeted killing. We have such a thing today. It is a "surgically" oriented name for an activity that is in fact justified by the intention of changing the future. There is no need for a lengthy trial. We do not even need a human being to step on foreign soil. We have heard about it in the news and they have been recently discussing it on national public radio stations.

There can be no doubt that killing any human being or a group of human beings is a drastic activity. Within civil society we have chosen to execute those who kill others, kidnap, rape and torture. Governments of men hold themselves above their citizens. All civil nations have a rich history of killing pirates, often hanging them on the spot. But terrorism is at least one step past piracy. The concept of modern terrorism means total war against society without the motive of profit. Governments have long ago taken it on themselves to commit to total war, so it should not have been any surprise that once the technology existed for an average individual to do such a thing they would. So it no longer takes a large group to create a terrorist organization. There are many selfish individuals who believe that they are more important and powerful than they actually are. If everyone owned their own personal hydrogen bomb, just consider how long it would take before the cities on our planet has vanished and perhaps the world in which we live to vanish in radioactive flames.

Many critics of government say that the dangers of technology with respect to the average citizen has not been taken seriously but it is certainly becoming more obvious that Governments are becoming more and more terrified of what that means. They are saying "I told you so" when speaking out against "liberal thinkers." We would suppose that idealists are somehow to be entirely genetically replaced by conservatives. It is as though we have become characters of bad science fiction, and like some of those horror stories we are becoming fearful of new technology as well as our children who might use that technology. Some people are fearful of what irrational, ruthless religious groups might do something awful with the science that has become available to them. Some would abandon science and technology and take us back to our roots while conveniently ignoring the simple fact that it is too late for that.

We can not go back in time. The existence of our planet now depends on the technology we have, but also on the technology we are expected to have in the future. So even as we hear the technological doomsayers, we are being pounded by stories on the broadcast news of threats of radioactive bombs made of luminous signs that can pollute the heart of our cities. Everyone knows that human beings are naturally cunning killers and yet we keep telling ourselves. Obviously even the 'reporters' must have come to think that society needs them to publish evermore unconventional ways to generate terror. Recently in Washington D.C. we have witnessed through the media two snipers who shot 13 innocent people one at a time and in doing so held hostage the lives and events of the Capital and the surrounding area. The grossly disproportionate ratio of terror to capability that these individuals demonstrated should tell us something about weakness that we Americans feel since 911.

It should not therefore be a surprise that within such a war any Government whose duty is to protect society, might take the necessary and drastic action to destroy those who threaten the lives of it's citizens. That sounds like a pretty good idea to most of us. The problem is that terrorists choose to hide within civilian clothes and within crowds of honest citizens. It can often be impossible to destroy the enemies of society without also destroying the innocent within society. This forces our leaders to make certain choices that involve the life and death of the innocents. Obviously it would be wrong to use a nuclear bomb on a city just to kill one terrorist. At the same time, any science fiction writer could easily devise a scenario where such an action could be considered the right one. It was wrong for the Israelis to use a 2000 pound bomb within a highly populated city just to kill a single terrorist. But given the great act of secrecy of such actions how do we citizens know that? The answer is that we can not know absolutely, but what we are given to know. This why in the absence of knowing and in the name of human justice it is absolutely necessary to place the burden of proof in favor of the victims of a Government policy. This is why civil international recognition of human rights has not been supported by Governments who are in favor of their own absolute right to unilateral action. This is where things get scary.

It has long been the policy of the United States to attack our enemies when they attack us. There is nothing new about that. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was based on retaliation. What is different about the targeted killing of terrorists these days is the fact that the technology now exists to identify, wait and strike a target through the use of sensors and weapons on remote controlled and autonomous vehicles. These vehicles are capable of very long endurance and there is no risk to our military. The difference is therefore not only in the reduction of risk, and pinpoint accuracy, but the also the timing. Weapons can be unleashed when the target is most vulnerable but more importantly, when the destruction of the target does not risk the innocent. So now that there is this capability, what about unilateral action? Considering the fact that under most circumstances, the terrorists exist within communities that would rather not have them, this is a powerful capability. Should we use such systems for what we consider the greater good?

It feels a little odd to think that there is an impersonal quality to a manned weapons system dropping a bomb on a target, or a cruise missile launched on automatic toward it's target. But it is probably a little more comfortable for those who throw that dice to have a certain degree of distance and randomness in the result. These weapons systems are inevitable extensions of the Vietnam era Spectre AC-47 "Puff the Magic Dragon" manned gunship aircraft that have proven so deadly then and many times since. The optics involved then were enough to cause those who manned those aircraft to see close up the individual people they were killing. I would hate to think about the nightmares those images probably brought back to the crewmembers.

Digital optics with stereoscopic immersion technology is far more advanced today so that even commercial off the shelf digital optics are stabilized. The operators of the drones that carry missiles are probably able to clearly look into the eyes of the targets right up to detonation. If this is so, then we can easily surmise that facial recognition software currently being used within airports may also be used by Predator targeting systems. If you are a skeptic they you should at least concede that if this is not true today then it is not beyond the scope of rational imagination that it soon will be.

What is so different about targeted killing is that there are vehicles in waves of constant and perpetual flight that can identify individual human being designated be killed and then execute them on the spot. From the operational perspective there can be one convenient continuous step. OK, let's think about this. It we would want to discover the potential social difficulties of our future through the use of this concept, then we would only need to ask a few immediate questions. In general, what is publicly known about this new weapon? What are the technical and operational questions? Any civilian pilot probably knows enough to ask these questions and most can answer them.

How many individual targets are such weapon systems capable of identifying and killing? The official answer is unknown. The official answer is that the Predator system is a manual process but even at that the probability is that it obviously can identify many and possibly kill several targets. How many autonomous remote vehicles can be kept in the air. The official answer is unknown, but the probability is obviously many. How many missiles can each vehicle carry? The answer is two for the Predator but that answer depends on the size of the vehicle. The Predator carries two Hellfire missiles. The "hang time" of these platforms is dependent on the amount of fuel onboard and therefore the size of the vehicle. Unlike cruise missiles these systems are reusable and they are sustainable so they are cost effective. The actual information we can all find on the Internet.

The current platform of choice, the RQ-1 Predator, is described as being a medium-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle system. The flight of the Predator has a variable aperture TV camera, a variable aperture infrared camera used for low light and night operations as well as a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for looking through smoke, clouds, or haze. The cameras produce full motion video. It can be operated 24 hour continuous operations currently

It is inevitable that eventually accuracy and as well as the number of and types of weapons that can be fired from these unmanned aircraft will increase. One day the speed and hang time with be weeks and will require fewer airborne platforms to cover the same distances. It is even now possible to allow these types of autonomous systems the opportunity to intelligently roam and make independent decisions. Eventually these systems will be able to take on almost all of the necessary decisions and use the appropriate weapon for the task. They will become much smaller. DOD research is currently working on robots about the size of a large wasp. Will they eventually be given deadly weapons?

Hopefully some of these new weapons will be of the non-lethal variety. But if so, then the decision to allow such systems to operate in a truly autonomous and independent manner will be a much easier threshold to cross. On the other hand, even non-lethal weapons activated from such platforms will certainly and most fundamentally change the nature of how citizens think about the nature of their "police force." Some weapons of these so called non-lethal weapons that are currently being developed are capable of frying the skin with microwaves, causing great pain and forcing people to take certain actions or remain within a confined space. Other non-lethal weapons confuse and disrupt a person's ability to think clearly.

But through the use of this kind of system, and for whatever immediate good may come of it, there is a more immediate societal threshold that we Americans are now crossing by using it, or even considering using remote controlled or autonomous airborne targeting platform systems. With the use of non-lethal weapons, what exactly are the citizen's rights? Is the use of such overwhelming forms of combined technical surveillance and force without civil oversight an absolute right of Government or is it the first concrete step towards an Orwellian Police State? With the use of lethal weapons, what are the legal differences if any between assassination and targeted killing? Does the head of every sovereign country have a right to target and kill anyone on a foreign land? What of due process of law? Is targeted killing to stop terror and due process both possible? Should there be a published list of those who are targeted? Should these people to be targeted, be given a civilized public hearing? If put on the list of targeted killing should they be given the opportunity for a trial before being targeted? Is it proper to consider procedural error or even the possibility of a formal appeal? What of international treaties and laws? Given the scale, why isn't targeted killings considered a form of mass execution? How can a world wide war on terror not be by it's very definition a world war? The relationships between civil, criminal, moral and ethical laws are not keeping up with Moore's law.

Whether humanity chooses to call these technological form of killings executions, sanctioned assassinations, a targeted killings, an activities to create enemy causalities, liquidations, or murders, it is easy enough to recognize that these are not the rapidly changing rules that man has previously lived with. The concept of "targeted killings" has opened up all of these issues because it means the use of highly mobile intelligent robotics for what are effectively the delivery of individual death sentences imposed by a foreign government. World War I began by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand which in turn triggered what turned out to be a series of unexpected political events. Is the mindset of an assassination through a drone aircraft really so different? It would be easy to imagine any assassin to be a kind of autonomous intelligent drone targeting system who could survey, identify and act on behalf of his master.

In the final analysis, targeted killing represents a dangerous precedent which in many ways we really do not yet understand. Our military leaders often conveniently choose to see these kinds of solutions in terms of changing arrangements of power. They are trained and ingrained in their binary ethic where there are winners and losers, the victors and the defeated, the living and the dead. It is no wonder that military leaders prefer to ignore or whitewash ethical, moral and legal implications by cloaking death in terms of war and secrecy. Once funded, the chain of command deliberately chooses not to come to terms with or understand the fact that such options are also weak option because they only solve short term problems. Their sense of history is immediate and complete because it is tied to contracts that must be seen immediately as missions, in order for them to appear to succeed in their duties.

So in it's own way, perhaps targeted killing appears to those who would use it as being a little like time travel into the past to protect the future. One gives an order now to search. There is a delay as the search progresses, and sometime perhaps in the future we see the results of such a command that was given and began in the past. The justification for such systems is obvious. It would seem to those leaders that rose from the 1980's, that the issues that we faced then seemed to be far better defined than they are today, though that is not true.

Today we exist in a modern world awash with technological noise and perhaps that is the true nature of the terror in which we now exist. My generation seems to have been willing to both relinquish control of technology and abstain from responsibility for what we have become through technology because we use it to see more things. The news media which my generation has controlled has been just as irresponsible because it continuously attempts to compete within the entertainment industry and does not want to take on the tough issues of the emergence of new technologies. I wish that this world were simple enough to discuss things like this with a degree of simplicity but I am afraid that era is behind us. Our present and future is complex and we have chosen our path through this our present past into that future.

As I have written on previous occasions, there are bad people doing good things and good people doing bad things. It is often tough to define the enemy. For that matter it is tough to identify the enemy. It is tough to defeat a determined enemy. Some think that targeted killings through robotic machines are the solution. We would all like to grab for the technical solutions instead of human ones for the same reasons that our terrorist foes have done so. This is our common weakness and mistake that unites us. That is the weakness of any system used for "targeted killing."

Prolog

At this moment I admit that I am not completely satisfied with this essay though I felt it was worth publishing. There are a couple of ideas that I was either not able to squeeze into it or did not say quite as directly as they should have been. Maybe it was because the subject of targeted killing has such a combination of narrow and broad implications. The points that I would like you to contemplate after reading the essay above are these.

First, below the sophisticated modern man, all of mankind remain first and foremost nomadic hunter gatherers that now must now exist within increasingly limited and forbidden lands. When we are prevented from our search by boundaries we desperately turn to religion and ultimately to ideologies. When the vestiges of our search are lost, the only thing that holds civilization together are the institutions of faith. When that is gone we become like the African Ik tribe of Uganda. The Anthropologist Colin M. Turnbull wrote about the tragic existence of these Mountain People.

Second, the media on which we depend to reflect who and what we are is far better at representing the individual, rather than the whole. There is no camera that is capable of instantly presenting an accurate image of a society though they very easily appear to represent a person. Media is therefore by it's nature a divisive process, particularly within the hands of those editors who for commercial or political purposes deliberately choose to take shortcuts, or support a particular view in the name of economy. The media needs to do a better job at meaningfully presenting to society their technological options the implications of those option on a regular basis.

Third, the concept of targeted killing by any organization or individual is a horrific policy that is sure to eventually backfire with the general public. Regardless of our loyalty to this administration or to America, it will eventually be recognized as essentially a form of institutional murder predicated on the idea that the concept of war and therefore the battlefield are broadened. The fact that it may be considered as murder and murder is now being considered moral is a moot point because civilization long ago determined that the killing of human beings is sometimes necessary. Civilizations have attempted to specify when, where and how murder is allowable. But the larger and more dangerous spin is that through the use of targeted killing, war is no longer being considered as having a beginning and end and it has been declared allowable to exist everywhere at any moment chosen. Under these conditions the person that might share your next Taxi ride could be considered a legitimate target and therefore you a collateral casualty of war. The person in the next apartment may be an enemy. It should therefore always be openly questionable as to whether any targeted killing is necessary. In war and peace it is recognized that there can be times when it may be appropriate to kill an individual target. This can happen for instance when in doing so removes the known guilty while more importantly protecting the innocent from their immediate harm. The problem is that there are currently no real independent checks and balances to publicly express the necessity and evidence of such actions. Because of this, such actions as targeted terrorism may appear to others as institutional terrorism.

Fourth, the good people that are working within the institutions of the Federal Government take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, which of course is a good and just cause. The problem is that for some time the Government has been under reconstruction so that it is being consistently managed by those who choose not to do the right thing in the specific instance, in order that they may be able to do the right thing later. Sooner or later these "good minded" individuals may choose to fall on the sword, but mostly they never do. We must never forget that as human beings some are not that different from Kurt Gerstein in the sense that they get trapped by attempting to do the right thing. It would be naive for anyone to think that even the most reputable institutions can not do wrongful things. Good intentions by individuals are important but it is not everything, for once one is involved, organizations even poorly managed ones, can be personally difficult to walk away from. The trap is that walking way from participation can make things worse so if you believe in what you are doing you do not want to leave the game. But good people do need to leave or they become part of the problem. This is precisely why it is to important that the Congress and public court system should always exercise it's authority to check, balance and provide oversight of the power of the executive branch in such matters.

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