All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show is Nick Mottern.
He's a reporter and director of consumersforpeace.org.
He's been active in anti-war organizing and worked for Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Bread for the World, the former US Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, and the Providence Rhode Island Journal Bulletin.
That's a pretty impressive resume.
There, welcome to the show.
Yes, thank you.
Very happy to have you here.
The article is at truthout.org.
It's called Lobbying Report.
Drones fly through Congress to enter US skies.
And this is quite an impressive piece here.
It's got all the scary stuff too, but it's very heavy on details about who gets what kind of lobbying money and who's working hard on this project.
And perhaps a little bit even about what objections are being raised.
So go ahead and hit them hard with this thing here.
Well, I think that this is a case of weapons being brought home to the United States for greater profit in the commercial market.
And of course, jet engines were developed in World War II, and now they power our commercial airliners.
But a drone is a very peculiar kind of weapon in that it really isn't a sightless or thinking aircraft.
And a lot is being done to try to make it be exactly the same as a human piloted aircraft.
But so far, that hasn't been done.
And flying a drone in the sky over Afghanistan is quite different than flying one in the United States, because there are so many fewer aircraft over Afghanistan.
There's much less electromagnetic radiation of all kinds from radio, cell phones, you name it.
And so the notion of bringing these things to fly in among commercial airliners, to have police use them to monitor people on the ground, is a very bizarre profit-making notion.
But the drone manufacturers, which include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, all the big companies and many smaller ones, very successful in getting votes in Congress to push the Federal Aviation Administration to get these drones in among general aviation.
The House bill would have it done for what they call commercial drones within the next three years.
And there's absolutely no indication that the technology would justify this.
And as a matter of fact, all the indications are that it would be disastrous.
So I think there's this cost-benefit analysis.
Well, this will mean 1,200 jobs near Syracuse in a company that does guidance systems for these drones.
So you take that five years of 1,200 jobs versus a commuter airliner crashing with 40 people on board.
Maybe some people would argue that it's worth killing those 40 people so the other people can work for three or four years.
And this kind of thinking, of course, goes through every part of industry.
But it's very dramatic that this whole notion with drones could get this far without getting any significant public attention to it.
Well, now, when you said commercial drones there, are you talking about like package delivery courier drones, that kind of thing?
We're mostly still talking about city police departments, that kind of thing.
Well, they have smaller drones that they have used to some degree to survey fishing grounds to find schools of fish, to do agricultural surveys for mining.
But there's absolutely nothing in this legislation that would limit what commercial means.
And there's really other parts of the legislation that would also permit armed military drones to fly in general air traffic.
So there's no prohibition on weaponized drones flying across the United States.
And there's no sanctions or ban in the legislation against using these for surveillance of anyone, any time, any place.
So the kind of controls that you have over wiretapping, other kinds of surveillance, there's no indication that anybody has that intention for these drones.
And as the article says, one of the huge problems with drones is misidentification.
And so you can have in Afghanistan or Pakistan a group of people in an automobile.
Drone operator may identify them as the enemy.
There's no eyes on the ground to verify that.
And an airstrike can be called in, or drone weapons can be launched, and people can be killed that have nothing to do with the war at all.
And that's assuming that we have any legitimate right to be there anyhow.
But I'm just saying, once you get into this and into this technology, it becomes very persuasive and easy to make identifications and carry out attacks, or even carry out subpoenas, I guess, based on totally false information.
Well, now, when you say that there's no prohibition in here on the military using weaponized drones, does that extend to federal, state, local civilian police as well, or to anyone?
There's no prohibition in the legislation on the police using weaponized drones, or drones loaded with tear gas, or anything else, no.
Wow, cool.
And now, tell me, there's got to be a part right where the feds are going to give these away, like little pieces of Werther's original, or whatever, to every police department in the country.
Well, it's completely possible that federal tax money will pay for these drones to assist local police departments, yes, just like other federal law enforcement grants.
And so you have a huge amount of spending going on in the Pentagon right now, up to a $5 billion initiative to expand the drone, the whole panoply of drones, from tiny little ones the size of hummingbirds all the way up to ones that might have a wingspan of over 100 feet.
So it's very normal for those applications to be applied to civilian use of any number of kinds.
And so you have the Reaper drone that was developed to be an attack drone in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq, now being used as a surveillance drone along the borders for Canada and for Mexico.
But there's nothing that would prevent those things from being weaponized, as far as I can see.
Well, it reminds me of the book Technopoly by Neil Postman, where he says that in American society, any gadget that can be invented will be invented.
And as soon as it's cheap enough, it will be implemented.
And there's no part of our culture anymore that's organized to stop this onslaught, especially when we're talking about government subsidized technology like this.
It's all made for control.
And then you look at deploying it in war all the time.
It just accelerates the process.
That's right.
And it accelerates the technology.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry.
I always do that.
Talk us right up into the break there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Nick Modern.
He's got this great article at Truthout.
Lobbying report, drones fly through Congress to enter US skies.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I love MSNBC.
All day today, one missing blonde girl.
Is there or is there not such a real place as hell?
Another really great one I forgot.
Now they're talking about a new Disney movie about cheetahs in Africa.
These are your top stories on MSNBC today.
Well, anyway, here on Anti-War Radio, we're talking with Nick Modern from truthout.org about this new piece, Drones Fly Through Congress to Enter US Skies.
And I guess at the break there, Nick, we're talking about how war is the health of the state and how all this technology that our government uses to bomb and occupy people in Iraq and Afghanistan and, for that matter, Somalia and Yemen and Libya.
This technology is coming home.
It's the very same drones probably, in many cases, will be in the hands of our local sheriff's deputies.
Well, you see, I think that you're just talking about what the mass media, if you want to call it that, focuses on.
And I think that up until this point, the whole notion of drones has been covered in a very positive way, that these are airplanes that are much less expensive than a regular airplane.
A Reaper drone can drop two 500-pound bombs.
It can fire four Hellfire missiles against people on the ground.
It costs about $14 million, whereas a 16 would cost maybe $35 million.
And it would have a pilot and everything.
So this is something that is sold as an expensive way to conduct a war.
But the focus has been on how many drone missions have been flown over Pakistan.
And they would say, well, there's a dramatic increase up this year, or in 2010, like up to 118 from half that number the previous year.
But it doesn't really, and the press hasn't really examined.
And I haven't.
I mean, it's a very complicated thing to get information out of the Pentagon.
But the amount of drone action in Afghanistan is much higher than it has been in Pakistan.
And they're talking, I'd say, probably on an order of four or five times as much.
There hasn't been any examination of what the impact is to people on the ground in terms of civilian casualties, the kickback against the Americans because of these drone attacks.
And this has been one of Petraeus' general, David Petraeus.
He's in charge of Afghanistan at the moment.
This drone activity has been a very big part of his campaign over there, much the same way that helicopter gunships were a very big part of his campaign and the surge in Iraq.
And these are extremely deadly aerial weapons against people on the ground.
So I think that you could say that the drones are involved in a very significant level of mayhem in Afghanistan, outside of public view.
And I think that it's arguably being used to try to terrorize the Afghan people.
You can't see these things.
They fly very high, sometimes up to 20,000 feet in the air.
And they're very small, relatively, of an airliner.
So this death comes raining down from the sky.
And the notion may be that this will somehow deter people from having anything to do with the Taliban.
But the history of psychology of bombing is that it really strengthens the resolve of people on the ground.
Another thing about drones that has been pretty well hidden is that there are a lot of technical problems with these things.
There have been a significant number of crashes of drones, of loss of control of one kind or another.
There was a GAO report that came out in 2008 that looked over some of the Pentagon's reports about drones.
And they found out that there were, I guess in a four and a half year period, 200 drone accidents.
And that 65 of these resulted from failures in the technology of the drones themselves.
So you can assume that in the last three years, probably some of those things have been corrected.
But it's hardly a pristine record.
And you have these flying then in US airspace with a pretty substantial failure record compared to regular aircraft.
And one of the things they point out in the GAO report is that because the pilots of the drones are on the ground many miles away, they don't experience air turbulence the same way that a pilot would in an airplane.
And so they have kept drones aloft in circumstances where the drones were just ripped apart by the wind.
And you wouldn't have this happening in a regular airplane because, of course, the pilot's life would be threatened directly by what the plane was encountering.
So the safety hazards surrounding this thing have made the FAA extremely reluctant to put these up in the sky over the United States.
And then you have now a situation where FAA air controllers are being found to be so overworked that they're falling asleep at their consoles.
And you're putting into the skies with them non-piloted aircraft that they're supposed to observe and try to keep track of at the same time they're looking after planes they can actually talk to.
I mean, it's astounding, really.
Yeah, well, and as you pointed out before, too, all of North America, especially right here in between Canada and Mexico, is just saturated with radio waves of every description.
And it could be very easy to imagine one of these drones and many of these drones simply falling out of the sky from interference.
Yes, that's right.
In the article in Truthout, someone wrote me a comment, a very interesting comment, a man named John Davison.
And he pointed out that one of the first, I guess, casualties of drones was Joseph Kennedy, Jr., the brother of John F. Kennedy, who was flying a drone in World War II that was going to be...that he was supposed to bail out from with his co-pilot.
But for some reason, as they were getting ready to leave the plane and they armed the explosives in the plane, they don't know whether it was an electrical spark or what it was that set off the explosives and just, of course, killed him, and the plane was just turned into powder.
But that was a situation.
It could have been, from what I've read, exactly what you're talking about, where a radio transmission may have set off one of the relays and that were controlling the explosives.
So the idea of technology being always perfect that allows this stuff to go forward, and then, of course, we're all humans, and you've got huge potential for tragedy with this kind of thing.
Well, and you know, you talk about the incentive of a pilot to keep his plane upright and somehow flying, whereas a drone pilot might not even realize that his drone is stalling or that the winds are too much and that kind of thing.
But, you know, think about the killing power, too.
Pupnik in the chat room is pointing out, and he had a conversation with a veteran the other day with nearly 200 kills, who's a broken man.
You know, what's bothering him is the dying people screaming for their mothers as they died and that kind of thing.
But if you're hiding out in a bunker in Nevada with the entire diameter of the earth as your shield, killing people in Pakistan, you can kill people in Pakistan all day.
They're nothing but, you know, they're green images in the little night vision and whatever.
It's playing a video game.
You never have to smell burning bodies.
You never have to hear people screaming as they're dying.
You never have to hear the wailing mother's grief right afterwards or whatever like that.
It becomes very easy to kill people from a trailer in Nevada.
And it seems like it's gonna be the very same thing when we're talking about our local sheriff's deputies, who, after all, are perfectly happy to crack all our skulls wide open with their baton or the butt of their gun.
Imagine when they have these drones to use against us, like en masse around here.
It's gonna be a nightmare.
Well, that's true.
And there's a company now that's manufacturing hand grenade size guided, little guided missiles that are very easy, you know, are really intended for some of these small drones.
Yeah, next on Dallas SWAT.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry, we're all out of time.
I really appreciate your time.
Everybody, that's Nick Modern from Truthout.
It's called Drones Fly Through Congress to Enter U.S. Sky.
It's a very important article.
Truthout, thanks again.
Thank you, Scott.
