Drones and Dehumanization: on America's Self-Written Rules

posted on: Feb 13, 2015

“In their eyes, we don’t deserve to live like people in the rest of the world and we don’t have feelings or emotions or cry or feel pain like all the other humans around the world.” These were the words from 13-year-old Mohammed Saleh Tauiman when he was interviewed by the Guardian last September about the deaths of his father and older brother by a US drone. He described the drones as “death machines” that gave children in Yemen nightmares, “They turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep.”

ON JANUARY 26, 2015 Mohammed became the third member of his family killed by drones. His killing was justified by the CIA (and the New York Times) because he was a suspected al-Qaeda militant. But as one of his brothers said, “He wasn’t a member of al-Qaida. He was a kid.” According to the rules of the war on terror, however, this doesn’t really matter. The Obama administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.” 

These self-written rules, the secrecy by which they are applied, and the distortion of language to disguise the resulting violence are indicative of drone warfare. Describing Mohammed as a “terrorist” shuts down debate about whether he was an insurgent or an innocent teenager living in an impoverished area of Yemen where only al-Qaeda forces had offered his family any support after his family’s breadwinners were killed by drones. Even the barest suspicion that he may have been affiliated with terrorism is enough to ensure that his death does not matter. How we choose to name things gives us the illusion of ethics, and as a consequence those like Mohammed and the hundreds of other civilians killed by US drones are covertly deprived of their humanity, their deaths another contested statistic.

Source: www.yourmiddleeast.com