This cartoon represents one of my ongoing efforts to draw connections between the home front and the battlefield. To me, our foreign and domestic policies mirror each other in ways we shouldn’t like.
Collateral Damage
Civilian casualties are so frequently a feature of war that the Pentagon long ago coined a term for it: “collateral damage.” I have always hated that euphemism, so much so I named my first In Contempt collection after it.
The incident in question here occurred in the hills of Afghanistan in early 2002.
Three men — Mir Ahmad, Daraz and Jahan Gir — were gathering scrap metal when a Predator drone fired a Hellfire missile at them, killing them instantly. The pilot, operating the drone from thousands of miles away, saw a tall Afghan man and assumed he was Osama bin Laden.
The Pentagon has said the missile was fired on the strength of intelligence suggesting the men were al Qaeda leaders, feeding speculation that a tall man among them might have been bin Laden, the elusive al Qaeda founder who was the main target of the war launched by the Bush administration in Afghanistan on Oct. 7. Since then, however, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials have said they are unsure who was hit.
A Washington Post reporter who reached the remote scene of the attack was held at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers and prevented from entering the site. The soldiers also barred access to the nearby village where Ahmad and the two other men had lived.
“This is an ongoing military operation,” said the soldiers’ commander, who would not identify himself, after consulting by radio with his superiors. “If you go further, you would be shot.”
“We’re trying to find out what happened here, too,” he added.
— Washington Post, 2/11/2002
From the beginning, the CIA-operated Predator drone program has been “beset by intelligence failures”, a frequent turn of phrase in espionage studies. As The Atlantic reported a few years ago, the first use of the Predator drone against suspected terrorists, in this case Mullah Omar, was a failure and led to decades of bureaucratic infighting between the CIA and the Pentagon.
But the people who really suffer are civilians. They comprise the majority of casualties by drone strikes. In 2012 a study by Standford University (see full PDF here) found the US had severely under-counted civilian casualties while the percentage of “high-level targets” relative to all reported casualties was 2%. A NY Times investigation published December 2021 uncovered Pentagon reports intelligence failures and “faulty targeting” still plague the program, civilians suffering the most.
Not a resounding success, intelligence-wise. Never mind that the use of “extrajudicial execution” (aka, assassination) is a bit of a war crime.
Death Penalty Follies
The Columbia study mentioned in the cartoon indicates another kind of intelligence failure. Actually, there are two studies, both from the same researcher, James Liebman, one from 2000 and another from 2002.
In 2000 Liebman (download the full study here) found that the overall rate of prejudicial error — aka, judicial system screw-ups harmful to appellants — in capital cases was 68%. Errors included: incompetent defense lawyers; prosecutorial misconduct, including suppression of exonerating evidence; and faulty instructions to jurors. When this cartoon appeared, Liebman’s follow up found high rates of death sentencing correlated with high rates of reversals on appeal. “Of the 10 states with the highest death sentencing rates, nine exceeded the national average reversal rate of 68%, with Mississippi leading at 92%.” (LA Times)
Liebman’s work among other studies informed a growing movement against the death penalty and for judicial reform around this time. Since then not much has improved. As Black Lives Matter has been saying for years now, the judicial system favors prosecutors. They have little interest in reining in or punishing police misconduct, because both parties have a vested interest in achieving high rates of conviction, regardless of the merit of their cases. (The story about fake drugs seized in Dallas mentioned in the fourth panel is a good example of how the war on drugs has fueled this behavior.)
When Joe Biden became president, civil rights groups reminded Joe Biden he has pledged to abolish the death penalty. We’ll see.
What about this cartoon?
The connection to me was obvious: the US is executing innocent people (or attempting to, anyway) — in court and on the battlefield — at higher rates than reality would justify. But it’s not just a “wetware” problem. We can’t just fault “bad intel.” Ambition and hubris, combined with a callous disregard for human life and policies that serve violent ideologies are at the root of these failures. And they cause a lot of needless suffering.
