Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
Topicality
Topicality- Its
Its is possessive and indicates an agent of an action
Merriam-Webster no date
[Merriam-Webster, Full Definition of ITS, http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/its, Date Accessed June 28 2015, MM]
of or relating to it or itself especially as possessor, agent, or object of an
action <going to its kennel> <a child proud of its first drawings> <its final
enactment into law>
Topicality- Curtail
Interpretation: Curtail means to eliminate some part
Merriam-Webster no date
[Merriam-Webster, Full Definition of CURTAIL, http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/curtail, Date Accessed June 28 2015, MM]
curtail: to make less by or as if by cutting off or away some part
Mexico Terror DA
Shell
1NC
Unfettered drone surveillance is helping stabilize the USMexican border
BBC, 14
[BBC, 13 November, BBC News, US-Mexico border 'patrolled by drones,
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30044702, accessed 6-27-15, DA]
The US government is using drones to patrol half of its border with Mexico, a report
by the Associated Press says. The strategy means that the US is increasingly able to move away from
using large numbers of border patrol agents along the entire frontier. The drones allow border control
agents to focus on areas of "greater threat", says the report . The US border
immigration system is under pressure in the face of a worsening border crisis.
According to an investigation by the news agency, there have been about 10,000
drone flights since the new border control strategy began in March 2013. are being
The unmanned drones deployed in an effort to control 900 miles (1,450 km) of
remote areas, allowing border patrol agents to focus their resources elsewhere, AP
says. Richard Gil Kerlikowske, the commissioner of the Border Patrol's parent agency, Customs and Border
Protection, said his agency only had "finite resources". "You want to deploy your resources to
where you have a greater risk, a greater threat.'' The drones focus on detecting
small changes in the landscape such as footprints, broken twigs and tyre tracks. A
border control agent is only sent to the area if the drone has picked up signs of human disturbance, said AP.
troops on the border will be cut from 1,200 with responsibilities mainly on the ground to 300 who will support the border mission in
the air. The Department of Homeland Security said the change is possible because of a jump in the number of Border Patrol officers
in the region, an increase in technology and a drop in apprehensions at the border. Of course, the rabid xenophobes in the
Republican caucus disagreed with the moves, claiming we dont have operational control of the border and that more troops are
actually needed for security. But border arrests have dropped sharply, down 53% from 2008 to today, and 80% from 2000 levels.
to DHS, adding a number of new multi-purpose aerial assets that carry the latest surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.
platform to keep a watchful eye on Americas rugged borders, but critics say the drones are expensive, invasive and finicky toys that
have done little compared with what Border Patrol agents do on the ground to stem the flow of illegal crossers, drug smugglers
Much like the rest of our military commitments, we are moving from a
manpower-intensive mission to a secret, off-books, robot war mission, with
unmanned aerial vehicles dominating. Weve already heard about the increasing use of drones on US soil to aid
or terrorists.
law enforcement, so drones on the border was a logical and expected step. That doesnt make it particularly appealing.
portions of the smuggling trade, anecdotal evidence indicates the prices are rising and operations are increasingly sophisticated.
develop enclaves of autonomy, as has been the case in Colombia and Lebanon. In recognizing the severity of the situation in
Mexico, President Calderon is taking unprecedented measures to combat organized crime. Mexico is in the throws of this struggle
as we speak, and in no place is it more evident than in Nuevo Laredo. The criminal organizations control the streets after midnight.
Judges, police chiefs and city councilmen have been assassinated. Executions and firefights occur on a regular basis and have
forced the American Consulate to close for as much as weeks at a time. Seventy percent of the businesses in Nuevo Laredo have
closed in the last few years, though some of the shop space has been reoccupied. Mexican businessmen are desperate to live on
the Texas side of the border, due to the multiple kidnappings a week. The local press has stopped reporting on crime after multiple
attacks on their personnel and offices, and the San Antonio Express News and the Dallas Morning Herald have pulled their Laredo
in Nuevo Laredo to take charge of security in the area, due to lost confidence in the public security officials in the area. On
Tuesday, the Texas Department of Public Safety issued a warning against crossing the Mexican border. The struggles Mexican
authorities are facing are not dissimilar to what our counties and state are confronting as the phenomenon spills across the border.
phenomenon along the border, but it is relatively new to Houston. One can easily envision the organizations moving beyond the
are fearful in their own homes and who do not leave their home unattended, because when they return, there are strangers in
their home. This is particularly difficult on couples living alone, because they no longer can leave their home together or at the
same time, even to go to the grocery store, for fear their home will be burglarized or occupied when they return. In one specific
case, an older rancher, who operated a ranch on the Rio Grande that had been in his family for generations, made the difficult
The effects
of this crime also are felt in Houston, where approximately 1,250 Ford F-250 and F350 trucks were stolen last year, many of which were later found to be involved in
smuggling operations along the border. Turning to the national security implications
of the border environment, extremists are wellaware of the United States inability
to control its borders, and use of the border is mentioned not infrequently in
extremist chat rooms in the context of discussing tactics and logistics. Extremists
have had their own smuggling operations in Mexico, and unaffiliated smuggling
organizations have expressed a willingness to assist extremists willing to pay the
price. A 2005 DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) report outlines an ongoing scheme in which multiple Middle Eastern drugdecision to sell the ranch, but he is having difficulty finding a buyer that is not associated with organized crime.
trafficking and terrorist cells operating in the United States fund terror networks overseas, aided by established Mexican cartels
Houston. From
an illegal activity perspective, the nature of the city provides a great operating
environment for criminals and terrorists anonymity, ease of entry and exit,
readily available resources, robust commercial trade. From a terrorist perspective,
Houston provides not only a good operating environment, but it is considered one
of the top five economic targets in the United States. Terrorist associates and
sympathizers are known to have been active in the Houston area and are believed
to have wellestablished networks. Their organizations have shown the means,
knowledge, capabilities and motivation to carry out terrorist operations.
with highly sophisticated trafficking routes. This is of particular concern to the metropolitan areas, such as
Lebanon, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 each resulted in a casualty count of roughly the same
magnitude (150300 deaths). Although these events caused anger and a desire for retaliation among the American public, they
prompted no serious call for massive or nuclear retaliation. The body count from a single biological attack could easily be one or two
result from a single CBW incident is not beyond the realm of possibility: According to the U.S. Congress Office of Technology
Assessment, 100 kg of anthrax spores delivered by an efficient aerosol generator on a large urban target would be between two and
significant number of military casualties are not likely to be as forceful as they would be if the attack were against civilians. World
War II provides perhaps the best examples for the kind of event or circumstance that would have to take place to trigger a nuclear
Hiroshima and Nagasaki- based upon a calculation that up to one million casualties might be incurred in an invasion of the Japanese
homeland47- is an example of the kind of thought process that would have to occur prior to a nuclear response to a CBW event.
Impacts
retaliation simply to be visited on the country that had been so malicious (or foolish or unlucky) to have hosted and/or supported the
group. Of course, the terrorist group's known leaders and operatives might well be dispersed, and it would seem especially
disproportionate to use multiple nuclear weapons on multiple individual human targets in multiple countries (if of course multiple
nuclear use was an option for the country making the response). But there might be situations in which rather than targeting the
terrorist group itself with nuclear retaliation, with potential collateral effects for a wider population involving the slaughter of
innocents, a deliberate decision might still be taken to launch an inter-state nuclear attack that might still bring with it very wide
If it was felt that the group was supportedand even directly assistedin its
attack by a state sponsor, the leadership, armed forces, and/or territory of that sponsor might be
regarded as open to nuclear bombardment. 39 (This is one reason why Iran's future leaders might
casualties and damage.
pause before passing any nuclear weapons they may acquire to Hezbollah.) The attacked state might decide it was more important
(or practicable) to act coercively against the state sponsor rather than the terrorist group, or that double coercion could apply here if
the terrorist group could be held responsible for the retaliation inflicted on its state sponsor. Most of the foregoing arguments for
carefully deciding on the extent of the military response to a terrorist nuclear attack assume a fairly cool process of rational
calculation where the long-term political consequences of any action are weighed up against the short-term need for something to
response if they sought to implement them. That pressure could result in moves to lash out against terrorist groups in particular or
in generalin particular against the group (or groups) thought to be responsible for the nuclear attack, or in general against any
group known to have threatened the attacked country in recent times or to have been at all sympathetic with the perpetrators.
because nuclear weapons can have wide-area effects, they might in fact be
employed against general areas in which the terrorists were thought to exist (such as
Ironically,
some PakistanAfghanistan border areas) but where their precise locations was uncertain. Some advantages might be seen in
launching a somewhat indiscriminate response to an initially indiscriminate attack (an eye for an eye). State supporters
of the terrorist groups might expect a similarly wrathful response to fall on them. Of course, if the sponsor was a known possessor of
nuclear weapons a difficult decision would be presented to the retaliating country, although such a situation might also encourage a
disarming nuclear attack to remove from the state sponsor the opportunity to use their own nuclear weapons (although the
precision required to accomplish such disarmament by force is a rare commodity). A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of
nuclear weapons in response by the country attacked in the first place, would not necessarily represent the worst of the nuclear
worlds imaginable. Indeed, there are reasons to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should ever be regarded as belonging in the
category of truly existential threats. A contrast can be drawn here with the global catastrophe that would come from a massive
nuclear exchange between two or more of the sovereign states that possess these weapons in significant numbers. Even the worst
terrorism that the twenty-first century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside considerations of what a general nuclear
war would have wrought in the Cold War period. And it must be admitted that as long as the major nuclear weapons states have
hundreds and even thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal, there is always the possibility of a truly awful nuclear exchange
taking place precipitated entirely by state possessors themselves. But these two nuclear worldsa non-state actor nuclear attack
and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchangeare not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack,
and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons
between two or more of the states that possess them. In this context, today's and tomorrow's terrorist groups might assume the
place allotted during the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising the risks
of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early
1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. It may require a considerable amount of imagination
because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem
far too responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well. Some
attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael
May et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its
radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the
efficiency of the explosion, the materials used and, most important some indication of where the nuclear material came from. 41
nuclear Cluedo? In particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washington's relations
with Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers, would officials and
political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring would only seem to increase if the
United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each
other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply
too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the
United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible
but perhaps not impossible scenario might stem from a judgment in Washington that some of the main aiders and abetters of the
terrorist action resided somewhere such as Chechnya, perhaps in connection with what Allison claims is the Chechen insurgents
long-standing interest in all things nuclear. 42 American pressure on that part of the world would almost certainly raise alarms in
Moscow that might require a degree of advanced consultation from Washington that the latter found itself unable or unwilling to
provide. There is also the question of how other nuclear-armed states respond to the act of nuclear terrorism on another member of
that special club. It could reasonably be expected that following a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States, both Russia and
China would extend immediate sympathy and support to Washington and would work alongside the United States in the Security
Council. But there is just a chance, albeit a slim one, where the support of Russia and/or China is less automatic in some cases than
in others. For example, what would happen if the United States wished to discuss its right to retaliate against groups based in their
territory? If, for some reason, Washington found the responses of Russia and China deeply underwhelming, (neither for us or
against us) might it also suspect that they secretly were in cahoots with the group, increasing (again perhaps ever so slightly) the
chances of a major exchange. If the terrorist group had some connections to groups in Russia and China, or existed in areas of the
world over which Russia and China held sway, and if Washington felt that Moscow or Beijing were placing a curiously modest level of
pressure on them, what conclusions might it then draw about their culpability? If Washington decided to use, or decided to threaten
the use of, nuclear weapons, the responses of Russia and China would be crucial to the chances of avoiding a more serious nuclear
exchange. They might surmise, for example, that while the act of nuclear terrorism was especially heinous and demanded a strong
response, the response simply had to remain below the nuclear threshold. It would be one thing for a non-state actor to have broken
the nuclear use taboo, but an entirely different thing for a state actor, and indeed the leading state in the international system, to do
so. If Russia and China felt sufficiently strongly about that prospect, there is then the question of what options would lie open to
them to dissuade the United States from such action: and as has been seen over the last several decades, the central dissuader of
the use of nuclear weapons by states has been the threat of nuclear retaliation. If some readers find this simply too fanciful, and
perhaps even offensive to contemplate, it may be informative to reverse the tables. Russia, which possesses an arsenal of
thousands of nuclear warheads and that has been one of the two most important trustees of the non-use taboo, is subjected to an
attack of nuclear terrorism. In response, Moscow places its nuclear forces very visibly on a higher state of alert and declares that it is
considering the use of nuclear retaliation against the group and any of its state supporters. How would Washington view such a
possibility? Would it really be keen to support Russia's use of nuclear weapons, including outside Russia's traditional sphere of
influence? And if not, which seems quite plausible, what options would Washington have to communicate that displeasure? If China
had been the victim of the nuclear terrorism and seemed likely to retaliate in kind, would the United States and Russia be happy to
sit back and let this occur? In the charged atmosphere immediately after a nuclear terrorist attack, how would the attacked country
Extinction
Barrett, Carnegie Mellon Engineering and Public Policy PhD, 2013
(Anthony, Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between
the United States and Russia, Science & Global Security: The Technical Basis for
Arms Control, Disarmament, and Nonproliferation Initiatives, Volume 21, Issue 2,
Taylor & Francis)
War involving significant fractions of the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, which
are by far the largest of any nations, could have globally catastrophic effects
such as severely reducing food production for years, 1 potentially leading to
collapse of modern civilization worldwide, and even the extinction of humanity. 2
Nuclear war between the United States and Russia could occur by various routes,
including accidental or unauthorized launch; deliberate first attack by one nation; and inadvertent attack. In
an accidental or unauthorized launch or detonation, system safeguards or
procedures to maintain control over nuclear weapons fail in such a way that a
nuclear weapon or missile launches or explodes without direction from leaders. In a
deliberate first attack, the attacking nation decides to attack based on accurate information about the state of
affairs. In an inadvertent attack, the attacking nation mistakenly concludes that it is under attack and launches
nuclear weapons in what it believes is a counterattack. 3 (Brinkmanship strategies incorporate elements of all of
the above, in that they involve intentional manipulation of risks from otherwise accidental or inadvertent launches.
4 ) Over the years, nuclear strategy was aimed primarily at minimizing risks of intentional attack through
development of deterrence capabilities, and numerous measures also were taken to reduce probabilities of
be caused in several ways. First, a wide range of events have already been mistakenly interpreted as indicators of
attack, including weather phenomena, a faulty computer chip, wild animal activity, and control-room training tapes
Crisis being a prime historical example. It is possible that U.S.Russian relations will significantly deteriorate in the
terms of
worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and
important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and
Mexico," says the study - called Joint Operating Environment 2008 - in a chapter on "weak and failing states."
Such states, it says, usually pose chronic, long-term problems that can be managed over time. But the littlestudied phenomenon of "rapid collapse," according to the study, "usually comes as
a surprise, has a rapid onset, and poses acute problems ." Think Yugoslavia and its
disintegration in 1990 into a chaotic tangle of warring nationalities and bloodshed on a horrific scale. Nuclear-armed
Pakistan, where Al Qaeda has established safe havens in the rugged regions bordering Afghanistan, is a regular
feature in dire warnings. Thomas Fingar, who retired as the chief U.S. intelligence analyst in December, termed
Pakistan "one of the single most challenging places on the planet." This is fairly routine language for Pakistan, but
Mexico's
mention beside Pakistan in a study by an organization as weighty as the Joint Forces Command, which controls
almost all conventional forces based in the continental United States, speaks volumes about growing
concern over what is happening south of the U.S. border . Vicious and widening
violence pitting drug cartels against each other and against the Mexican state have
left more than 8,000 Mexicans dead over the past two years. Kidnappings have
become a routine part of Mexican daily life. Common crime is widespread. Pervasive
not for Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile, or 3,200-kilometer, border with the United States.
corruption has hollowed out the state. In November, in a case that shocked even
those (on both sides of the border) who consider corruption endemic in Mexico, the
former drug czar No Ramrez was charged with accepting at least $450,000 a
month in bribes from a drug cartel in exchange for information about police and
anti-narcotics operations. A month later, a Mexican army major, Arturo Gonzlez,
was arrested on suspicion that he sold information about President Felipe Caldern's
movements for $100,000 a month. Gonzlez belonged to a special unit responsible
for protecting the president. Depending on one's view, the arrests are successes in a publicly declared
anticorruption drive or evidence of how deeply criminal mafias have penetrated the organs of the state .
According to the Joint Forces study , a sudden collapse in Mexico is less likely than in Pakistan, "but
the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under
sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that
internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on
the stability of the Mexican state." It added: "Any descent by Mexico into chaos would
demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security
alone." What form such a response might take is anyone's guess, and the study does not spell it out, nor does
it address the economic implications of its worst-case scenario. Mexico is the third
biggest trade partner of the United States (after Canada and China) and its third-biggest
supplier of oil (after Canada and Saudi Arabia). No such ties bind the United States and Pakistan. But the
study sees a collapse there not only as more likely but as more catastrophic. It would bring "the
likelihood of a sustained violent and bloody civil and sectarian war, an even bigger
haven for violent extremists and the question of what would happen to its nuclear
weapons. That 'perfect storm' of uncertainty alone might require the engagement of
U.S. and coalition forces into a situation of immense complexity and danger." The
study then warns of "the real possibility that nuclear weapons might be
used."
used in the act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any
responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not be
a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear
explosion would be spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and
collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the
materials used and, most important some indication of where the nuclear material came from.41 Alternatively,
and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list consisting of
nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washingtons relations with Russia and/or
China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers,
political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring
would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with
Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these
developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack
occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the United States, could
Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible
meet with a devastating response. As part of its initial response to the act of nuclear terrorism (as discussed earlier)
Washington might decide to order a significant conventional (or nuclear) retaliatory or disarming
attack against the leadership of the terrorist group and/or states seen to support that group. Depending
on the identity and especially the location of these targets, Russia and/or China might interpret such
action as being far too close for their comfort, and potentially as an infringement on their spheres
of influence and even on their sovereignty. One far-fetched but perhaps not impossible scenario
might stem from a judgment in Washington that some of the main aiders and abetters of the terrorist action resided
somewhere such as Chechnya, perhaps in connection with what Allison claims is the Chechen insurgents longstanding interest in all things nuclear.42 American pressure on that part of the world would almost certainly raise
alarms in Moscow that might require a degree of advanced consultation from Washington that the latter found itself
unable or unwilling to provide. There is also the question of how other nuclear-armed states respond to the act of
nuclear terrorism on another member of that special club. It could reasonably be expected that following a nuclear
terrorist attack on the United States, both Russia and China would extend immediate sympathy and support to
Washington and would work alongside the United States in the Security Council. But there is just a chance, albeit a
slim one, where the support of Russia and/or China is less automatic in some cases than in others. For example,
what would happen if the United States wished to discuss its right to retaliate against groups based in their
If, for some reason, Washington found the responses of Russia and China deeply
underwhelming, (neither for us or against us) might it also suspect that they secretly were
in cahoots with the group, increasing (again perhaps ever so slightly) the chances of a major
exchange. If the terrorist group had some connections to groups in Russia and
China, or existed in areas of the world over which Russia and China held sway, and
if Washington felt that Moscow or Beijing were placing a curiously modest level of
pressure on them, what conclusions might it then draw about their culpability ? If
territory?
Washington decided to use, or decided to threaten the use of, nuclear weapons, the responses of Russia and China
would be crucial to the chances of avoiding a more serious nuclear exchange. They might surmise, for example,
that while the act of nuclear terrorism was especially heinous and demanded a strong response, the response
it may be informative to reverse the tables. Russia, which possesses an arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads
and that has been one of the two most important trustees of the non-use taboo, is subjected to an attack of nuclear
terrorism. In response, Moscow places its nuclear forces very visibly on a higher state of alert and declares that it is
considering the use of nuclear retaliation against the group and any of its state supporters. How would Washington
view such a possibility? Would it really be keen to support Russias use of nuclear weapons, including outside
Russias traditional sphere of influence? And if not, which seems quite plausible, what options would Washington
demonstrate the great potential of this vibrant region to play a positive role in both the U.S. and Mexican
economies and intertwined transnational Developing the U.S.Mexico Border Region for a Prosperous and Secure
where one can best see the benefits for the two countries of collaborating and cooperating on issues of major
Latin American Initiative, and David Mares, Baker Institute Scholar for Energy Studies, includes findings from nine
papers (see page 16). Commissioned by the Baker Institute, the papers analyze a number of topics relevant to the
President Obama has assumed office at a time of uncertainty in U.S.Mexico relations. Despite the foreign and
domestic challenges that his administration confrontsincluding ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a global
financial crisis, and a severe economic recessionU.S.Mexico relations
must be a top
priority. His visit to Mexico in April 2009 and high-level dialogue with President Caldern, as well as his recent
commitment of US$700 ISSN 1941-6466 2 million to fund border law enforcement activities, is a good starting
point. Funding that will help professionalize law enforcement capabilities in border cities and towns is extremely
important. It has been shown that raising the standards for evidentiarybased procedures and citizens rights has
enhanced the effectiveness of border law enforcement rather than hinder its efforts.
The use of
anonymous tip lines and surveillance has also played a constructive role
in arming local law enforcement with improved information about illegal
activities and drug smugglers. U.S. policy in recent years has failed to
recognize the critical importance of the benefit of positive relations with Mexico. A
continuation of this neglect by Washington, D.C., risks further deterioration in a
bilateral relationship already under severe strain. Mexico faces serious challenges
in the years to come that will be of grave importance to the United States as well.
Mexico is under severe pressure as violence related to drug trafficking increases,
and Calderns policy of giving the military a leading role in combating organized
crime is increasingly coming into question. At the same time, Mexico faces another possible crisis
as its oil production continues to sink, throwing into possible jeopardy a major source of income for government
border. Yet, Mexico is frequently negatively caricaturized, primarily with images of migrants illegally crossing the
border into the U.S. and stealing U.S. jobs. Instead of viewing Mexico as a valuable partner that
can benefit the U.S. in many facets, it is perceived as a liability, a region that
cultivates corruption and violence and is the root of the current U.S. immigration
problem that has spurred controversial rogue measures like Arizonas SB 1070. In matters of foreign policy,
Mexico is an afterthoughtour attention and resources are diverted to the Middle East or to grand
strategies based on pivoting our geopolitical and economical capacity towards Asia. With the U.S.
economy performing at a snail-like pace, an emphasis on exports has re-emerged,
but the bulk of the exporting narrative revolves around Asia. This is unfortunate,
because our neighbor to the south has quietly positioned itself to be the next jewel
in the emerging markets portfolio. For example, Market Watch (a Wall Street Journal subsidiary)
recently published a bullish article on Mexico with the following headline: Mexico: Investors New China. The
Economist published an opinion piece titled The Global Mexican: Mexico is open for business, highlighting Mexican
companies that are investing locally and in the U.S. and arguing that Mexico is fertile ground for more investment,
to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner. 1999).
Separately, Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact
the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and
connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic
level, Copeland's (1996, 2000) theory of trade expectations suggests that 'future expectation of trade' is a
significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security behaviour of states. He argues that
interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future
by interdependent states.4 Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed
internal
conflict
They write: The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing.
Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a
recession tends to amplify the extent to which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other.
and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government.
Diversionary theory" suggests that,
periods of weak economic performance in the United States, and thus weak
Presidential popularity, are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In
summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates economic integration
with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science
scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and
national levels.5 This implied connection between integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured
showing that
prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention. This observation is not contradictory to
other perspectives that link economic interdependence with a decrease in the likelihood of external conflict, such as
those mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter. Those studies tend to focus on dyadic interdependence
instead of global interdependence and do not specifically consider the occurrence of and conditions created by
economic crises. As such, the view presented here should be considered ancillary to those views.
an intelligence unit has picked up increased chatter in recent days. While Mexican authorities have denied ISIS presence in Mexico and its ability to illegally enter the U.S., Maloof
pointed out that three hardened Ukrainian criminals walked into the U.S. from Mexico undetected and have yet to be apprehended. Similarly, there has been evidence uncovered that
various nationalities from Pakistan and various Arab countries have entered the U.S. undetected, taking advantage of the porous southern border. Put it all together, panel members
unknown has been exploring what it takes to bring down a major component of the nations grid. Former Rep. Allen West bluntly called the situation a dry run for something bigger.
WND reported the utility company, whose operation was disabled in the attack, has offered a $250,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators. West explained, On
Marathon bombing that killed three people and wounded 264 others. The Boston Marathon suspects are from the Russian North Caucasus, which prompted the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to get involved in the investigation of the sniper attack on the transformers. There is a large community of Chechen and North Caucasus immigrants in the San Jose area.
Chechen jihadists also have been very prominent in Syria where it is battling to overthrow the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. There also were reports only days after
the California sniper attack of a shoot-out when a security guard at the TVA Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Spring City, Tennessee, was confronted by a suspect at 2 a.m. TVA spokesperson
Jim Hopson said the subject traveled up to the plant on a boat and walked onto the property. When the officer questioned the suspect, the individual fired multiple shots at the officer.
ISIS, and the belligerent threats made against the U.S. by that group. And he noted that the U.S. grid remains vulnerable and taking it down in any significant way could cause
the U.S., since the nations food, fuel, energy, banking and communications
industries all are dependent on electricity. Whenever you start tampering with the grid, youre affecting the
life-sustaining critical infrastructures, Maloof said. Our entire survival is based on
technology and electronics that, in turn, are based on the electrical flow. If thats
interrupted for any period of time, there are catastrophes over a wide geographic
area. Reports just this week revealed social media chatter shows Islamic State militants are keenly aware of the porous U.S.-Mexico border, and are expressing an increased
interest in crossing over to carry out a terrorist attack. A law enforcement advisory said, A review of ISIS social media messaging
during the week ending August 26 shows that militants are expressing an increased
interest in the notion that they could clandestinely infiltrate the southwest border of
U.S., for [a] terror attack. Maloof explained at the news conference that Americas enemies know the vulnerabilities of our grid they will at some
point try to attack. The threat is there, he said. ISIS operatives can easily come through the [southern] border. And because they [ISIS] have
proxies in the U.S., the potential for a catastrophe exists. The president could take his pen and make [the
calamities for
problem] a priority, he said. At the federal level they dont have a plan, so the state and local level wont have a plan.
The prospect of a wholesale collapse that sent millions upon millions of Mexican refugees fleeing across the
northern border so far seems remote. But
Walls
and decisions regarding relationships with foreign powers. Rostow writes, Congress
should be able to act effectively both before and after moments of crisis or potential
crisis. It may join the President in seeking to deter crisis by publicly defining national policy in advance, through
the sanctioning of treaties or other legislative declarations. Equally, Congress may participate
formally in policymaking after the event through legislative authorization of
sustained combat, either by means of a declaration of war, or through legislative
action having more limited legal and political consequences. Either of these devices, or both
in combination, should be available in situations where cooperation between the two branches is indicated at many
In other
words, for Congress to understand itself as having any justifiable role in
challenging executive security determinations, especially at moments of
crisis, would be to undermine the strength that the executive requires in
order to protect the nation. Conflict in this domain represents political degradation.
points along an arc ranging from pure diplomacy at one end to a declaration of war at the other.
first time that the Federal Bureau of Investigation uses very few drones in a limited capacity for surveillance.
Its very seldom used and generally used in a particular incident when you need
the capability, Mueller said when asked about the bureaus use of pilotless aircraft with surveillance
capabilities. It is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized
needs. Muellers remarks about the FBIs use of drones -- and the regular use of the vehicles by other law
enforcement agencies -- come as lawmakers and civil liberties groups are raising concerns about the reach of the
government in the wake of the disclosure of two highly classified National Security Agency surveillance programs.
Leaks by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden to the Washington Post and the U.K.s Guardian
newspaper exposed programs that sweep up telephone call data from millions of U.S. citizens as well as Internet
traffic that the Obama administration says involves foreigners based outside the U.S. suspected of plotting terrorist
burgeoning concern for many of us, Senator Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat, said of drone use, by the
hostage and barricaded himself in an underground bunker. After almost a week, the FBIs Hostage Rescue Team
breached the bunker, killing Dykes and rescuing the child. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said during a March hearing
Senate floor for almost 13 hours in March over concerns that the U.S. could use armed drones to attack Americans
on U.S. soil. Paul, who filibustered the nomination of eventual Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan,
was told in a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder that the president didnt have that authority. FBI Guidelines
judge's approval, and the FBI said the flights are used for specific, ongoing investigations. In a recent 30-day period,
Aerial
surveillance represents a changing frontier for law enforcement, providing what the
government maintains is an important tool in criminal, terrorism or intelligence
probes. But the program raises questions about whether there should be updated policies protecting civil liberties
the agency flew above more than 30 cities in 11 states across the country, an AP review found.
as new technologies pose intrusive opportunities for government spying. The FBI confirmed for the first time the
wide-scale use of the aircraft, which the AP traced to at least 13 fake companies, such as FVX Research, KQM
Aviation, NBR Aviation and PXW Services. Even basic aspects of the program are withheld from the public in
ground that could be handed over for prosecutions. Some of the aircraft can also be equipped with technology that
can identify thousands of people below through the cellphones they carry, even if they're not making a call or in
public. Officials said that practice, which mimics cell towers into coughing up basic subscriber information, is rare.
Details confirmed by the FBI track closely with published reports since at least 2003 that a government surveillance
program might be behind suspicious-looking planes slowly circling neighborhoods. The AP traced at least 50 aircraft
back to the FBI, and identified more than 100 flights since late April orbiting both major cities and rural areas. One
of the planes, photographed in flight last week by the AP in northern Virginia, bristled with unusual antennas under
its fuselage and a camera on its left side. A federal budget document from 2010 mentioned at least 115 planes,
including 90 Cessna aircraft, in the FBI's surveillance fleet. The FBI said it also occasionally helps local police with
aerial support, such as during the recent disturbance in Baltimore that followed the death of 25-year-old Freddie
Gray, who sustained grievous injuries while in police custody. Those types of requests are reviewed by senior FBI
Justice Department seeks to navigate privacy concerns arising from aerial surveillance by unmanned aircrafts, or
drones. President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance, and has called for
more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified programs. "These are not your
grandparents' surveillance aircraft," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union,
calling the flights significant "if the federal government is maintaining a fleet of aircraft whose purpose is to circle
over American cities, especially with the technology we know can be attached to those aircraft." During the past
few weeks, the AP tracked planes from the FBI's fleet on more than 100 flights over at least 11 states plus
Washington, D.C., most with Cessna 182T Skylane aircraft. These included parts of Houston, Phoenix, Seattle,
Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis and Southern California. Evolving technology can record higher-quality video from
long distances, even at night, and can capture certain identifying information from cellphones using a device known
as a "cell-site simulator" -- or Stingray, to use one of the product's brand names. These can trick pinpointed
cellphones into revealing identification numbers of subscribers, including those not suspected of a crime.
Officials say cellphone surveillance is rare, although the AP found in recent weeks FBI flights
orbiting large, enclosed buildings for extended periods where aerial photography would be less effective than
electronic signals collection. Those included above Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and the Mall of
America in Bloomington, Minnesota. After The Washington Post revealed flights by two planes circling over
Baltimore in early May, the AP began analyzing detailed flight data and aircraft-ownership registrations that shared
similar addresses and flight patterns. That review found some FBI missions circled above at least 40,000 residents
during a single flight over Anaheim, California, in late May, according to Census data and records provided by the
website FlightRadar24.com. Most flight patterns occurred in counter-clockwise orbits up to several miles wide and
roughly one mile above the ground at slow speeds. A 2003 newsletter from the company FLIR Systems Inc., which
"Aircraft
surveillance has become an indispensable intelligence collection and
investigative technique which serves as a force multiplier to the ground
teams," the FBI said in 2009 when it asked Congress for $5.1 million for the program. Recently,
makes camera technology such as seen on the planes, described flying slowly in left-handed patterns.
independent journalists and websites have cited companies traced to a bank of Virginia post office boxes, including
one shared with the Justice Department. The AP analyzed similar data since early May, while also drawing upon
aircraft registration documents, business records and interviews with U.S. officials to understand the scope of the
The FBI asked the AP not to disclose the names of the fake
companies it uncovered, saying that would saddle taxpayers with the expense of creating new cover
companies to shield the government's involvement, and could endanger the planes and
integrity of the surveillance missions. The AP declined the FBI's request because the
operations.
companies' names -- as well as common addresses linked to the Justice Department -- are listed on public
documents and in government databases. At least 13 front companies that AP identified being actively used by the
FBI are registered to post office boxes in Bristow, Virginia, which is near a regional airport used for private and
charter flights. Only one of them appears in state business records. Included on most aircraft registrations is a
mysterious name, Robert Lindley. He is listed as chief executive and has at least three distinct signatures among
the companies. Two documents include a signature for Robert Taylor, which is strikingly similar to one of Lindley's
three handwriting patterns. The FBI would not say whether Lindley is a U.S. government employee. The AP
unsuccessfully tried to reach Lindley at phone numbers registered to people of the same name in the Washington
area since Monday. Law enforcement officials said Justice Department lawyers approved the decision to create
fictitious companies to protect the flights' operational security and the Federal Aviation Administration was aware of
the practice. One of the Lindley-headed companies shares a post office box openly used by the Justice Department.
Such elusive practices have endured for decades. A 1990 report by the then-General Accounting Office noted that,
in July 1988, the FBI had moved its "headquarters-operated" aircraft into a company that wasn't publicly linked to
The FBI does not generally obtain warrants to record video from
its planes of people moving outside in the open, but it also said that under a new policy it
the bureau.
has recently begun obtaining court orders to use cell-site simulators. The Obama administration had until recently
been directing local authorities through secret agreements not to reveal their own use of the devices, even
encouraging prosecutors to drop cases rather than disclose the technology's use in open court.
Fourth is security relationsEliminating drones would bring back Mexico to its state of
terror and unconventional threats surveillance is key to
maintain effective border cooperation
Baker Institute Policy Report, 9
[James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University, April 2009,
Developing the U.S.Mexico Border Region for a Prosperous and Secure
Relationship, http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dmares/Border%20Security%20Prosperity.pdf
, p. 1-2, accessed 6-25-15, DA]
Prior to September 11, 2001, efforts were in place to create seamless borders that would improve regional
economic performance from BrownsvilleMatamoros all the way to San Diego-Tijuana. Between 1993 and 2006,
Mexicos agricultural exports to the United States increased by US$6.7 billion while those from the United States
to Mexico rose by US$7.3 billion. Texas border cities have reaped most of the benefits on the U.S. side because of
transportation and customs services that can handle the maquiladora trade; in the process, distribution facilities
and administrative offices fueled the growth in industrial real estate, and jobs were generated in the legal,
accounting, and financial professions. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas concluded, In short, maquiladoras
attacks of September 11, 2001, protecting the United States from another terrorist act became a U.S. priority.
However, the concept of protection has been narrowly defined when it comes to Mexico, with the United States
largely ignoring the impact on a relationship that had experienced an historic degree of cooperation predicated on
long-term mutual benefit following the 1994 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Mexico has had to understand its new relationship with the United States in light of this drastically heightened
are due to the same factors that have boosted legitimate economic activity (e.g., freer trade under NAFTA and
financial deregulation). Claims that sovereignty is at risk when laws are violated at the border polarize rhetoric
and emotions, reducing a complex situation to a singular focus that obscures areas of mutual interest. Terrorism
and drug lords are not the only causes 3 for the difficulties facing the United States and Mexican economies.
Globalization has generated its share of challenges, opening the door to more competitors in the production of
goods and services, tightening commodity markets, and facilitating the free movement of capital to the highest
bidder. Indeed, the two countries face a trilogy of challengessecurity, migration, and economic and social
developmentthat impacts virtually every other issue confronting national policymakers and citizens alike, and
anchors the border agenda. It must be recognized that economic and social development are critical to manage
the drive to migration and the stresses it creates.
United States seek to develop their human and material capabilities in ways that
meet the needs of their societies. Such development cannot proceed efficiently and
effectively when people fear for their security, either as citizens of a nation under
attack or as individuals subject to domestic harassment, violence, corruption, or a
paucity of material goods and services that meet basic human needs. Although
migration is primarily a social and economic phenomenon, the movement of large numbers of people disrupts
both the communities they leave as well as the communities in which they settle or temporarily congregate
during their journey. The disruptions affect not only these communities, but also the individual migrants. The
region along the international border bears the brunt of the adjustments as both nations struggle to adopt and
stakeholders do not always play a constructive role in the dialogue to ease common problems. Rather, specific
environmental and citizens groups block individual infrastructure that might ease environmental and congestion
problems overall, and local law enforcement faces budgetary constraints that greatly constrict its ability to be
effective. Meanwhile, funding goes to national resources that will be less effective in local communities. The
actions of several national policymakers and stakeholder groups show an unfortunate lack of understanding of
the fact that prosperity and security for the nation and its border regions are interdependent. As the United States
moves forward with a new president and Mexico heads into midterm elections, it is an appropriate moment to
take stock of what is happening on the border and consider how to improve the current situation. Some argue
that the United States needs to vigorously pursue a comprehensive seal the border policy until Mexico solves its
domestic problems. But the border problems do not reside only inside Mexico.
Yet its
unique abilities could shine an uncomfortable light on the agencys ability to
effectively patrol the border. The radar system is providing the Border Patrol with an important snapshot
testified before Congress that it is changing the Border Patrols long-term strategy on securing the border.
to judge what it calls situational awarenesswhats actually happening at the border. But it has left the agency
grappling to measure its own success and define security. Using the system, remote operators can track vehicles
outlines several limitations of the system, including the obviousit cant tell the difference between a U.S. citizen
and noncitizen. On-the-ground video and other sensors are sometimes needed to confirm these so-called nefarious
tracks. And simply identifying someone crossing the border is just the first step. On the ground, Border Patrol
agents often are not available to respond because of rugged terrain or other assignments. As a result, thousands of
people have slipped through. At the Border Patrol, theyre known as gotaways. In one week in January, for
instance, the sensor detected 355 dismounts, or on-foot movement, on the U.S. side of the border in Arizona.
Border Patrol agents caught 125 of those, about 35 percent, while an additional 141 people evaded apprehension
and 87 more turned back south to Mexico. Two were unaccounted for. The sensor detections led to more than 1,100
In the dead of night, from a trailer humming with surveillance monitors, a pilot for the U.S. Customs and Border
Protection agency was remotely flying a Predator drone more than 1,000 miles away. From an altitude of 15,000
feet, over the desert ranchlands of Arizona, the drones all-seeing eyeball swiveled and powerful night-vision
infrared cameras zeroed in on a pickup truck rattling along a washboard road. Hey, wheres that guy going? the
mission controller asked the drones camera operator, who toggled his joystick, glued to the monitors like a
teenager with a Christmas morning Xbox. This is the semi-covert cutting edge of homeland security, where federal
law enforcement authorities are rapidly expanding a military-style unmanned aerial reconnaissance operation along
Fans of
the Predators say the $20 million aircraft are a perfect platform to keep a watchful
eye on Americas rugged borders, but critics say the drones are expensive, invasive
and finicky toys that have done little compared with what Border Patrol agents do
on the ground to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, drug smugglers or
terrorists. Over Arizona, the Predator circled a ranch, as unseen and silent as a hunting owl. On a bank of
the U.S.-Mexico border a region that privacy watchdogs say includes a lot of American back yards.
computer screens, the monitoring team watched the truck, which appeared in ghostly infrared black and white, turn
and pull up by a mobile home. In the yard, three sleeping dogs quickly woke up, their tails wagging. Welcome
home, one of the agents said. A popular security solution
Border Protection agency five, and soon to be six, along the southwestern border. After a slow rollout
that began in 2005, drones now patrol most of the southern boundary, from Yuma, Ariz., to Brownsville, Tex. For
Predators are the new, sexy, futuristic fix for immigration control. They are
irresistible to border hawks and the Drone Caucus in Congress, who consider the
aircraft a must-have technology to meet the threat of spillover violence yet
unrealized from Mexican drug cartels . Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) has said that the drones
are so popular that a Predator could be elected president . Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.)
pronounced domestic drones invaluable. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) called them
ideal for border security and counter-drug missions. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a GOP
supporters,
presidential contender, argues that the solution to security along the frontier is not a border fence but more
Predators. In his trips to testify on Capitol Hill, Michael Kostelnik, the retired Air Force general and former test pilot
who runs the Office of Air and Marine for the CBP, said he has never been challenged in Congress about the
appropriate use of domestic drones. Instead, the question is: Why cant we have more of them in my district?
though operated by the CBP, have been deployed to assist sister law enforcement agencies. This month, the Los
Angeles Times reported that Predators were used in North Dakota to help police run down a trio of ordinary crime
suspects in a cow pasture. These unarmed Predator Bs are the same as the aircraft known for lethal hunter-killer
missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, except they dont carry the missile package. One of the first Predators
deployed by the border service crashed in 2006 when its remote pilot, a contractor for the plane manufacturer
General Atomics, turned off the engine by mistake. The plane missed a residential area by 1,000 feet as it plunged.
U.S. protocols require the drones to stay on the American side of the Rio Grande.
We
dont do Mexico, said Lothar Eckardt, director of the Homeland Security Departments National Air Security
feet, you can see windshield wipers, you can see if a person is running or walking, you can see backpacks
sometimes. We can see Border Patrol, but not their uniforms, and so we can communicate with them and say,
Wave your arms, and that way we can distinguish between our guys and the bad guys. Privacy and cost
concerns Privacy watchdogs are concerned about the use of drones over domestic airspace. The loss of privacy is
real. You want to sunbathe in the nude on your own property? Now you cant be sure nobody is watching you, said
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. Americans will have to wonder if our
enthusiasm for catching illegal immigrants is worth sacrificing our freedoms. U.S. courts allow law enforcement to
conduct surveillance from helicopters and airplanes, and privacy protections end when the public ventures
outdoors. The domestic Predators surveillance cameras do not allow them to see through windows. Despite its
initial reluctance, the Federal Aviation Administration allows the drones to fly a high-altitude corridor along the
Mexican and Canadian borders but forbids them over congested urban areas for safety, not privacy, concerns.
Because of the orientation of the runway at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, the Predators are grounded when
the wind direction requires them to pass over a neighboring suburb. The mission over the Arizona ranchlands last
month was typical. The Predator was searching for scouts who hide in the brush and signal with a cellphone when
smugglers can attempt to cross with a load of marijuana or humans. The drone did not find any scouts that night.
The night before, however, they helped the Border Patrol in Texas capture a dozen illegal migrants. The Predators
reached a milestone in June, having flown 10,000 hours.
reported that their drone operations have led to the apprehension of 4,865
undocumented immigrants and 238 drug smugglers since the program began.
American assistance has been kept secret because of legal restrictions in Mexico and the heated political
sensitivities there about sovereignty, the officials said. Before the outbreak of drug violence in Mexico that has left
more than 34,000 dead in the past four years, such an agreement would have been all but unthinkable, they
said. In addition, the United States trains thousands of Mexican troops and police officers, collaborates with
specially vetted Mexican security units, conducts eavesdropping in Mexico and upgrades Mexican security
equipment and intelligence technology, according to American law enforcement and intelligence officials. It
wasnt that long ago when there was no way the D.E.A. could conduct the kinds of activities they are doing now,
said Mike Vigil, a retired chief of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. And the only
way theyre going to be able to keep doing them is by allowing Mexico to have plausible deniability. In addition to
wariness by Mr. Calderns government about how the American intervention might be perceived at home, the
Mexican Constitution prohibits foreign military and law enforcement agents from operating in Mexico except
under extremely limited conditions, Mexican officials said, so the legal foundation for such activity may be shaky.
the Mexican government by American diplomats, setting off a firestorm of resentment in Mexico. Then in
February, outrage in Washington over Mr. Zapatas murder prompted Mexican officials to complain that the
United States government paid attention to drug violence only when it took the life of an American citizen. In the
end, however, mutual interests prevailed in the March 3 meeting after a frank exchange of grievances, Mexican
and American officials said. Mr. Caldern told Mr. Obama that his country had borne the brunt of a scourge driven
by American guns and drug consumption, and urged the United States to do more to help. Mr. Obama, worried
about Mexico falling into chaos and about violence spilling over the border, said his administration was eager to
play a more central role, the officials said. The leaders emphasized the value of information sharing, a senior
Mexican official said, adding that they recognized the responsibilities shared by both governments in the fight
against criminal organizations on both sides of the border. A senior American administration official noted that
all counternarcotics activities were conducted at the request and direction of the Mexican government.
Mr.
Caldern is intensely nationalistic, but hes also very pragmatic, said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico
Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Hes not really a fan of the
United States, but he knows he needs their help, so hes willing to push
the political boundaries. Mexican and American officials said that their cooperative efforts
had been crucial to helping Mexico capture and kill at least 20 high profile drug
traffickers, including 12 in the last year alone. All those traffickers, Mexican officials
said, had been apprehended thanks to intelligence provided by the United States.
Still, much of the cooperation is shrouded in secrecy. Mexican and American authorities, for example, initially
denied that the first fusion center, established over a year ago in Mexico City, shared and analyzed intelligence.
Some officials now say that Mexican and American law enforcement agencies work together around the clock,
while others characterize it more as an operational outpost staffed almost entirely by Americans. Mexican and
American officials say Mexico turns a blind eye to American wiretapping of the telephone lines of drugtrafficking
suspects, and similarly to American law enforcement officials carrying weapons in violation of longstanding
Officials on both sides of the border also said that Mexico asked the
United States to use its drones to help track suspects movements. The officials
said that while Mexico had its own unmanned aerial vehicles, they did not have the
range or highresolution capabilities necessary for certain surveillance activities.
One American military official said the Pentagon had flown a number of flights over
the past month using the Global Hawk drones a spy plane that can fly higher
than 60,000 feet and survey about 40,000 square miles of territory in a day. They
cannot be readily seen by drug traffickers or ordinary Mexicans on the ground.
Mexican restrictions.
But no one would say exactly how many drone flights had been conducted by the United States, or how many
were anticipated under the new agreement. The officials cited the secrecy of drug investigations, and concerns
that airing such details might endanger American and Mexican officials on the ground. Lt. Col. Robert L. Ditchey,
a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday that the Department of Defense, in coordination with the State
Department, is working closely with the Mexican military and supports their efforts to counter transnational
criminal organizations, but did not comment specifically on the American drone flights. Similarly, Matt Chandler,
a Homeland Security spokesman, said it would be inappropriate to comment on the use of drones in the Zapata
case, citing the continuing investigation. Though cooperation with Mexico had significantly improved, the
officials said, it was still far from perfect. And American officials acknowledged there were still internal lapses of
coordination, with the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration at
times unaware of one anothers operations. More than anything, though, officials expressed concern about
I think
most Mexicans, especially in areas of conflict, would be fine about how much the
United States is involved in the drug war, because things have gotten so scary they
just want to see the bad guys get caught , said Mr. Selee of the Wilson Center. But the Mexican
reigniting longstanding Mexican concerns about the United States usurping Mexicos authority.
government is afraid of the more nationalistic elements in the political elite, so they tend to hide it.
County, Colorado, sheriff's deputy. "But the reality is you'll have a mission like that once or twice a year," he said.
"The
real utility of unmanned aerial systems is not the sexy stuff. It's the crime scene
and accident reconstruction." Miller's department in rural western Colorado has the widest approval
to fly drones of any local law enforcement agency in the U.S. Mesa has flown 40 missions in just over
three years, "none of them surveillance," said Miller, who crafted the department's
drone program and spent a year devising training protocol for fellow deputies before
receiving FAA approval. "We can now bring the crime scene right into the jury box,
and literally re-enact the crime for jurors," he said. Miller can program the department's GPSenabled, 3.5-pound DraganflyerX6 quad copter to fly two concentric circles, at two elevations, capturing about 70
photos, for about $25 an hour. He then feeds those images into online digital mapping software, which creates a
virtual crime scene that he uploads to his iPad. Holding the iPad with one hand, Miller recently demonstrated for
Miller
said the same technique can often eliminate the need to shut down highways after
accidents so investigators can take accurate measurements. "For most small law
enforcement agencies like ours, the revolution is not in the equipment, but in the cost," he
said. Recent applications to the FAA, obtained by the civil liberties group Electronic Freedom Foundation, indicate
Reuters how 3-D digital reconstruction can serve as a road map for investigators, and, soon, for juries.
many police want drones for drug investigations, covert surveillance and high-risk tactical operations. Domestic
drones currently cost anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 for a small system like the DraganflyerX6, which stays
aloft only 15 minutes, to more than $1 million for sophisticated fixed-wing drones that can remain aloft for hours.
Military models are also being used by the Department of Homeland Security, which
has a fleet of at least 10 unarmed Predator drones, powerful enough to identify a
tennis shoe from 60,000 feet up. First-generation drones can't yet carry an onboard sense-and-avoid
system, a requirement of manned aircraft. Experts said mass-produced, drone-mounted sense-and-avoid
technology is still two to five years away. FAA officials are required to open U.S. skies in 2015 to widespread use of
authorities and causes Executive Branch attorneys to waste countless hours distinguishing distinct lines of authority
and funding.
Uniqueness
sometimes I think we forget this is a massive trading partner, responsible for huge amounts of commerce and huge
numbers of jobs on both sides of the border," Obama said this week. But writing a new narrative on U.S.-Mexico
relations that doesn't lead with Mexico as a major transit point for narcotics, or the United States as a market
hungry for the drugs, isn't easy. That was made clear by the spate of news reports this week on both sides of the
border about changes to how Mexico cooperates with the Americans. Under the new rules, all U.S. requests for
collaboration with Mexican agencies will flow through a single office, Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong
confirmed to Mexico's state-run Notimex news agency. It is a drastic change from recent years, when U.S. agents
enjoyed widespread access to their Mexican counterparts. So in the days leading up to Obama's arrival in the
Mexican capital, the buzz was not about the economy, but whether Mexico was being uncooperative with the United
Osorio Chong downplayed the idea that the change signified a retreat in security cooperation. The
United States "should have the confidence that things are on a good path," he told
Notimex. In a conference call with reporters, Obama administration official Ben Rhodes
said it was natural that Pea Nieto, who has been in office for only five months,
would want to revisit its security structure. "We're currently working with the Mexicans to
States.
evaluate the means by which we cooperate, the means by which we provide assistance, and we're certainly open to
discussing with Mexico ways to improve and enhance cooperation, streamline the provision of assistance," said
Rhodes, who is the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. " Our
security will
likely remain a key part of how U.S.-Mexico relations will be judged . Among
wide-open like it used to be," he said. There is a lot to boast of on the economic front, but
U.S. officials, there is an unspoken concern about whether Pea Nieto will merely give lip service to the the idea of
security cooperation or whether he will provide real substance, said David Shirk, former director of the Trans-Border
Institute in San Diego. "I've talked to many people at very high levels that have expressed these concerns," Shirk
said. "There is a kind of wait-and-see attitude. I think U.S. ofificals want to give Pea Nieto the benefit of the
doubt." What is clear is that Pea Nieto rejects the "kingpin" strategy of his predecessor, Felipe Calderon, who
made the capture of cartel leaders the centerpiece of his security plan. A number of high-ranking drug cartel
leaders were killed or captured during Calderon's term, but the results usually backfired -- new leaders rose in their
place, rival cartels fought for the leftovers and a high level of violence persisted.
about focusing on violence reduction , and engaging in educational, social and economic reforms. But
this broad vision has not yet produced a defined security strategy. "The question is, what (do) you replace the
kingpin strategy with?" Grayson said. The changes to protocols between U.S. and Mexican officials are likely part of
the process to figure that out, but one that could rankle the United States, said Tony Payan, a Mexico expert and
fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
especially true in Ciudad Jurez, Nuevo Laredo, Tijuana and other cities on the border with the United States, which
had been the epicenters of bloodshed during Calderns administration. But the encouraging trend has reversed in
an alarming fashion in recent months. Although some once-dominant trafficking organizations, such as the Gulf
Cartel and La Familia, have faded or disappeared entirely, new and equally ruthless competitors have taken their
is rocking Pea Nietos administration, as angry demonstrators in several cities have demanded his resignation.
Concerns that Mexico might become a failed statewhich had gained traction
during the most turbulent years of Calderns presidency are again on the rise.
Such concerns are excessive, since Mexico has an array of powerful institutions ranging from the Catholic Church to
well-organized political parties to a significant (and growing) legal business community. Mexico is not Somalia,
Bosnia, Yemen, Sudan or other failed states, where such stabilizing features are largely absent; nor is it fractured by
Mexican government may have become less blatant during Pea Nietos administration, such groups remain very
powerful players, and in some areas of the country verge on constituting a parallel government.
more rapidly than we had thought and Mexico has very close ties to the U.S. economy. In fact, a lot of Mexicos manufacturing exports go to the United States, so better growth in the
Now they've opened the door for private participation in virtually all dimensions of the energy sector. So the private sector can invest in oil exploration, development, and production.
Private firms will be able to refine oil and sell it at the retail level, generate their own electricity, and invest in natural gas. So this is a complete transformation, and given Mexico's vast
energy reserves this should lead to much more investment in the sector and ultimately raise production. The telecommunication sector is being completely reformed. Previously this
had been dominated by several large firms that accounted for 80 percent or so of the market. Now the government has implemented regulation that creates an incentive for the
dominant firms in the sector to shrink, and also opens the door for competition in the sector. This could bring down the cost of internet services, and a whole array of communication
markets have been dominated by lack of competition. So through greater anti-trust enforcement the government can promote competition that can lower costs and expand investment
Labor market reform is another area where Mexico has moved forward,
creating a number of incentives to move workers into the formal labor sector, which
and growth.
has higher productivity. The country also embarked on a comprehensive education reform that creates much more performance-based assessment of
teachers and also introduces a number of other steps to improve the quality of education. I think those are the key reforms. All of these have the potential to boost growth by making
the economy more efficient and by stepping up energy production. We estimate a boost to growth on the order of a half a percentage point to a point per year over the medium term.
The fact that Mexico introduced a lot of reforms together allows for them to benefit from the synergies of the reforms. So overall this is very positive for the Mexican economy.
Answers To
organizations. The government of Pakistan has taken steps in recent years to allay these fears, yet reason for
number of efforts to decrease the risks of terrorists accessing nuclear material. UN Security Council Resolution
1540, the 2005 Amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, and the 2005
International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism all seek to increase global cooperation to
because the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, who reportedly operate the drones,
did not publicly comment. "All
But McCaul
said it is a positive sign to increase the role of the United States in the Mexican drug
war. Mexico, he said, has been reluctant to accept U.S. intervention, but he said times are changing. "It's a
flew over Mexico before Wednesday. "They are probably trying to do it under the radar," he said.
significant departure in the right direction," he said. "We are seeing the (Mexican President) Felipe Caldern
administration welcoming our military presence." McCaul said he learned from agencies on Wednesday that a drone
House on March 3, he said, officials sought to be "very open-minded and search for more creative solutions." "It
seems to me that we are experiencing extraordinary circumstances that call for extraordinary actions by our
governments," Caldern said. Mexican army and embassy officials declined to comment on the U.S. drones flying
over Mexico, and instead referred inquiries to the National Security Council. Earlier this week, Jurez Mayor Hctor
Murgua hosted Carlos Pascual, the U.S. ambassador in Mexico, to discuss national security matters. Murgua
appeared welcoming to ideas such as placing ICE agents on the ground in Jurez. He also said he is pleased to
receive any support the neighboring country could give to the city of 1.3 million that has been ravaged by drugcartel violence. Murgua refused to comment on whether he and Pascual spoke about the drones, calling it a matter
"There is enormous sensitivity, but there is also a realization that the threat posed by drug cartels is severe." Olsen
said the U.S. presence is still
American agents are not armed.
Bennett Counterplan
Information
First some background,
Right now, states are regulating drone use. Most states have banned it, and others
have skeletal frameworks to prevent their use. For example, Some states, like
Florida, Utah, and Montana, generally preclude police from using drones, unless
officers obtain a judicial warrant founded on probable cause or confront an
emergency. States also have independent privacy laws that will be applied to
drone use. This includes the prevention of filming campers or fishers.
Whats important to note, is that the states are regulating public (governmental)
use of drones. Private drone usage is regulated by the Federal Aviation
Administration. The FAA has regulations due by the end of September to
incorporate drone usage, however they only play a marginal role in privacy
regulation. The issue is that private drones will be allowed surveil just as much as
government drones. Thats concerning.
Federal drone regulation is minimal. No bill regarding privacy has been passed
through congress as per the writing of this paper. Edit: Congress has introduced bills
one would require a warrant before drones are used.
Now for the issues with the AFF plan,
The argument to make with this CP is that the plan regulates too much and too
quickly. The FAA and the states will regulate slowly and not as much as the AFF.
There are a 2 reasons why thats good. 1) It doesnt link to the Terror DA
surveillance can still happen and only the worst instances of privacy violations are
reprimanded. 2) Over regulating the drones causes their price to get jacked up
which would probably collapse the industry.
Lastly is the solvency question,
The CP should be able to resolve the AFF. It might be slower, but it still solves. It also
maintains a slow federal role so you can sweep up the feds key warrant. The
difference between the federal action of the plan and the federal action of the CP is
that in the CP it is slow and doesnt regulate. Good luck.
To note The FAA is a federal agency. Its in the executive branch. Federal
involvement isnt necessarily bad. Whats bad is too much too quickly.
1NC
Text: The FAA should conduct a study on the implications of
UAS integration into national airspace on individual privacy.
The fifty states should utilize this study to regulate and litigate
private drone use
That solvesThe counterplan incrementally adjust done policy- its slower
approach avoids the links to surveillance good and doesnt
overregulate the drone industry which turns solvency
Bennett, Brookings National Security Law Fellow and Lawfare
Managing Editor, 14
[Wells C. has a B.A. from Georgetown University and a J.D. and L.L.M. from Duke
University School of Law, September 2014, Brookings Institute, Civilian Drones,
Privacy, and the Federal State Balance,
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/civilian-drones-and-privacy,
accessed 6/27/15, GE]
private universities and
companies can and do fly surveillance-capable aircraft, both with and without the
specific blessing that the FAA requires.9 As unmanned flight technology matures and
grows ever cheaper, it will find its way into more private hands. The already swift
clip will quicken, once the FAA writes rules for wider domestic drone flight. Suffice it to
say private actors will soon operate drones in equal if not greater numbers than the
government doesand also acquire the potential to undertake just as much
surveillance. As pressing as the question of how best to safeguard public
privacy, is the question of how best to safeguard its understudied
counterpart, private privacy. The urgency is reflected in a handful of legislative proposals
concerning drone surveillance, and in a decision reportedly forthcoming from the Obama Administration. Though
details remain sketchy, the White House is set to order the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to develop, in
consultation with various stakeholders, voluntary privacy guidelines for commercial
drone use.10 This essay examines the current division of labor between state and federal governments, with
But thats just the thing: private aircraft matter, too. These days individuals,
respect to civilian drones and privacy. It proceeds in three parts, the first of which recognizes the most compelling
reason, put forward by advocates of a state-based regime, for the states primacy in shielding private privacy
in private drones and surveillance, though small, has been quietly increasing since
2012. This rather subtle development informs an argument at the heart of the third segment: the
FAAs emerging presence in private privacy and unmanned aerial
surveillance supports a continued role for the agency in addressing the issue.
Doing so would be consistent with recent practice. Moreover, incrementally adjusting the status
quo, perhaps by having federal aviation officials take away the worst privacy
violators drone flying credentials, would even be a good idea . A fourth section offers
concluding thoughts.
2NC
States and the FAA solve they have existing frameworks and
the ability to regulate non-governmental drones
Bennett, Brookings National Security Law Fellow and Lawfare
Managing Editor, 14
[Wells C. has a B.A. from Georgetown University and a J.D. and L.L.M. from Duke
University School of Law, September 2014, Brookings Institute, Civilian Drones,
Privacy, and the Federal State Balance,
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/civilian-drones-and-privacy,
accessed 6/27/15, GE]
Some say the federal government should be principally responsible for regulating
drones,1 nongovernmental actors, and privacy; others have suggested a blended
approach, with states taking center stage and the national government cast in a
supporting role. This essay takes essentially the latter position. As drones are folded
further into American airspace, states should take the initiative, both by
applying longstanding liability rules and by devising new ones. But we also should
take advantage of the Federal Aviation Administrations (FAA) small but
growing competence in nongovernmental drones and privacyand have the agency
perform a kind of superintendence function. Remotely controlled flying robots are
increasingly cheaper, and at times more capable of sustained flight, than some
manned counterparts. Many can be outfitted with imaging or other recording
equipment, which is increasingly more affordable and widely available. An airborne
droid might take in more information over a much longer period of time than a
human eye or ear; and it might also find its way to areas where other aerial
platforms might not be able to go. In this way, drones pose real if manageable
privacy risks. And policymakers have aimed to manage them following Congresss
call to broaden drones access to the skies by late 2015. The timing raises any
number of big-ticket privacy questions. Two are recurring: which arm of the
government (states or feds) ought to balance a proliferating technologys benefits
against its privacy costs; and which drones (government or private) will present the
greatest threats to privacy.
individuals. For this reason, the FAA is directed to conduct a study on the
implications of UAS integration into national airspace on individual privacy. The
study should address the application of existing privacy law to UAS integration;
identify gaps in existing law, especially with regard to the use and retention of
personally identifiable information and imagery; and recommend next steps for how
the FAA can address the impact of widespread use of UAS on individual privacy as it
prepares to facilitate the integration of UAS into the national airspace.42 Note the
next steps phrase and its gesture towards future FAA privacy work. It would be
wrong to over-read the language above, much as it would be wrong to over-read the
FAAs malleable privacy rules for drone-test ranges. Congress is not making the FAA
the foremost guarantor of privacy rights in the United States; it is not giving the FAA
the authority to sue for egregious privacy lapses; it is not calling for the FAA to
become some aviation focused outpost of the Federal Trade Commission. Instead,
the legislature is simply doing what the FAA has been doing for a while: reiterating
the FAAs traditional remit in aviation safety, rejecting any implied dilution of its
safety portfolio, and yet also quietly imposing modest new privacy responsibilities.
Its more mission creep than power grab. That mission creep should inform our
thinking about civilian drones, private privacy, and federal-state cooperation. The
work of the FAA since 2012 can be plotted out as data points on a white board. And
when connected, these suggest a slightly upward trajectory. Federal regulators
gradually are taking on (unilaterally, or on instructions from Congress) more work, in
addressing the privacy and technology tradeoffs posed by domestic drones. Call this
informing dialogue, regulating privacy or something else; the label doesnt
matter especially. More important is the fact that federal oversight of civilian
dronesmarginal though that oversight may beis on the upswing.
and First Amendment litigation will have to happen before workable and broadly
applicable solutions come fully into view. As that process goes forward, the national
governmentthe FAA in particularhas sufficient experience to minimize the shortrun privacy costs. It should take further steps to minimize them as domestic drone
integration proceeds, and without fretting too much about diluting the agencys
heartland expertise in aviation safety. The dividing line between safety and privacy
isnt especially neat or obvious, as the post-FMRA years amply demonstrate.49 And
when all is said and done, the FAA will have a basic fluency in drone privacy, as well
as a broad and deep understanding of drone safety, perhaps the two most critical
pieces of the of domestic drone puzzle. The combination is unique and should not
go to waste, as civilian drones grow less novel and more commonplace, and the
country mulls the best approach to private privacy and aerial surveillance.
have not yet determined whether privacy or speech triumphs in this conflict, or more subtly, how privacy and
speech interests interact. We are at the beginning of this conversation, not the end of it. n20 One recent example of
behavior that raises these tensions between privacy and the First Amendment is
cellphone recording of police activity. States may want to afford citizens protection from being
videotaped or audio-recorded without consent, reasoning that such technologically aided recording creates a
protection is founded on a right to gather information, as part of speech or a precursor to it. n24 In a strange twist
to this already-complex issue, the police in a number of states have used the wiretap laws that protect citizens from
being videotaped without consent to arrest citizens who videotape police activity. n25 Thus, a law that was intended
to be privacy protective may in fact prevent oversight over [*62] government functions, thereby empowering law
police. n26 The Eleventh Circuit has noted that there is a First Amendment "right to record matters of public
interest," subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. n27 The Seventh Circuit considered the Illinois
eavesdropping statute, which makes it a felony to audio record a conversation unless all parties to the conversation
consent, regardless of whether the communication was private. The Seventh Circuit found that the statute "restricts
far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy interests; as applied to the facts alleged here, it likely
violates the First Amendment's free-speech and free-press guarantees." n28 The Third Circuit, by contrast, found
that there is no clearly established right to record police officers; the "right to record" is heavily contextual, so it is
difficult to determine whether the right exists in a given fact pattern that courts have not yet considered. n29 And
notably, even those courts that found a First Amendment right to record have heavily weighed the context of such
recordings. Courts have looked to the fact that the subjects were government officials, in public places, or that the
action as a whole was a matter of public interest. n30 There are thus substantial unanswered questions about how
broad or narrow the First Amendment right to record is, and how broad or narrow privacy measures must be to not
impinge on it. One intuition that frequently arises in privacy cases, both under tort law and under the Fourth
Amendment, is that the location of the recording matters. A First Amendment right to record is most likely to
outweigh privacy concerns [*63] in a public space, where one person's privacy collides with other peoples'
experience and memory. n31 But creating a special delineation for privacy laws by restricting their application to
non-public spaces runs into problems on both ends: public acts sometimes occur in private spaces; and private acts
on any individual's property without consent. n32 So does the proposed Texas Privacy Act. n33 Such laws follow
popular intuitions about privacy, because they protect a visual trespass where physical trespass is not allowed.
However, they may run into preemption problems, and could also prevent information-gathering essential to
political and social movements. n34 In Dallas, for example, a hobbyist drone photographer uncovered pollution by a
meat packing plant through aerial observation of activity on the plant's property. n35 A number of states are
currently considering bills sponsored by the cattle industry that criminalize video recording at farms. n36 These bills
target activists and journalists who have been recording conditions in industrial agriculture. Whatever one may
think of the politics behind food production, it is clear that the video-making is part of an expressive chain of
criticism that goes to the heart of the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not prevent people from being
arrested for trespass; but if they are legitimately on a property, it might prevent their arrest for recording video of
the privacy rights of photographic subjects over the First Amendment rights of the photographer or videographer.
This may be the balance states and courts eventually choose, but as the developing circuit split over videotaping
hobbyists model aircraft are mostly exempted from FAA regulation.46 Going forward, how you feel about the
evident regulatory gap probably has to do with how you feel about likely sources and locations of unmanned aerial
surveillance. Thus, if you worry most about rampant Quadcopter eavesdropping, then the above proposal might not
do that much to assuage you; such machines seemingly can be operated as model aircraft, and thus require no
[Wells C. has a B.A. from Georgetown University and a J.D. and L.L.M. from Duke
University School of Law, September 2014, Brookings Institute, Civilian Drones,
Privacy, and the Federal State Balance,
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/civilian-drones-and-privacy,
accessed 6/27/15, GE]
Of course, that the above or any other policy change would fit nicely with existing institutional arrangements does
Politics
Links
Building with displays of the latest drones an industry show introduced in glowing speeches by highly influential
House leaders, notably Buck McKeon, the Southern California Republican who chairs the House Armed Service
Committee and co-chairs the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus (CUSC). Advances in communications,
drones are
not solely about technological advances. Money flows and political influence also
factor in.
aviation and surveillance technology have all accelerated the coming of UAVs to the home front. Yet
should not be seen as an equal threat to flying small UAS into a crowded stadium with an improvised explosive
device, or near an airport where drones can find their way deliberately or accidentally -- into the intake of a
number. Traffic, debris, and collateral damage are real considerations. While long-anticipated definitive legal
guidance on the commercial use of UAS is still being pursued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); the
creation of an FAA Center of Excellence (CoE) to investigate these issues could be seen as ensuring that the U.S.
continues to foster innovation, remains competitive, and achieves commercial success. To date, the private sector
and academic response in the U.S. has been overwhelmingly positive to the idea of some form of informed and
rational policy. Whatever the reason for industrys participation, it is in its interest and the publics for them to
The threat of a
UAS being used for a dangerous activity must always be weighed against the
benefit of a UAS being used for good. We must be clear that no countermeasure is
without costs, and any cost must be weighed against the benefit it produces, or
inhibits. All too often there have been knee-jerk responses to perceived threats that
have resulted in failed systems, cavalier spending, and loss of public confidence.
continue to keep their feet firmly on the ground when considering how to best mitigate risk.
Case Frontline
Solvency
aerial surveillance," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "But we haven't
had all in one place a clear picture of how this technology is being used. Nor is it clear that the agencies themselves
Department and the Commerce Department. Military and law enforcement agencies would not have to reveal
sensitive operations. But they would have to post basic information about their privacy safeguards for the vast
amount of full-motion video and other imagery collected by drones.
Fear-mongering is rife. Its a tactic used to scare people to believe theyre safer by sacrificing fundamental
freedoms. Mass surveillance is a defining rogue state characteristic. T uesday
it takes on a life of its own. In the last decade, FBI aerial spying expanded to civilian air force level. In April alone,
AP identified at least 50 FBI aircraft conducting more than 100 flights over urban and rural areas in 11 states. It
cited a 2009 budget document indicating 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft. FBI aerial spying is longstanding.
Today, drones and other aircraft are equipped with high-tech cameras for close-up visual surveillance as well as
technology able to monitor thousands of cell phones a blatant breach of privacy. According to Senate Judiciary
Committee chairman Charles Grassley (R. IA): Its important that federal law enforcement personnel have the tools
they need to find and catch criminals. But whenever an operation may also monitor the activities of Americans
who are not the intended target, we must make darn sure that safeguards are in place to protect the civil liberties
of innocent Americans. No safeguards whatever exist nor does Congress back up high-minded rhetoric with
inaction effectively rubber-stamps them. It permits unaccountable police state practices no free society would
tolerate. AP learned the FBI uses at least 13 fake companies to conceal its activities
including FVX Research, KQM Aviation, NBR Aviation and PXW Services. ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley called its
flights significant if theyre maintaining a fleet of aircraft whose purpose is to circle over American cities, especially
with todays sophisticated surveillance technology. Details the FBI confirmed concur with published reports since at
least 2003 about suspicious-looking planes overflying US cities being government ones. The Drug Enforcement
Agency (DEA) and US Marshals Service have their own aerial surveillance programs using sophisticated technology,
much like the FBIs. Basic information about these programs are secret . Heavily redacted Justice
Department Inspector General documents alone inadequately explain what the public has a right to know. Theyre
spied on by the FBI, NSA, CIA, DEA, Homeland Security and other government agencies, especially post-9/11.
Spies R us defines US policy. America is a total surveillance society unfit to live in. Big Brother watches everyone
intrusively in blatant breach of fundamental constitutional protections. Fabricated national security threats justify
the unjustifiable. The so-called war on terror is phony. The war OF terror by Washington on its citizens is real.
Unconstitutional spying today in America is pervasive. Its institutionalized. Privacy rights no longer matter.
Fundamental freedoms are being trampled. Theyre disappearing in plain sight.
to disclose operational methods and techniques. But drones are in a special category of sensitivity, given the topsecret role they've long played in CIA and military counterterrorism missions. There's also evidence that federal
agencies simply have been unable to develop internal guidelines and policies quickly enough to keep up with rapid
advances in drone technology. "Federal
Crosson, a Defense Department spokesman, said officials hoped to provide an interim response next week and a full
inspector general reported last fall that the FBI had not developed new privacy guidelines for its drone surveillance
and was relying instead on old rules for collecting imagery from regular aircraft. Since then, Justice officials have
said they are reviewing their drone surveillance policies but have not disclosed any results. An FBI spokesman did
Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit group that pushes for transparency in government, sued the FBI last year
under the Freedom of Information Act for records on its drone program. Although the FBI has turned over thousands
of pages of documents, many have been redacted or provide only limited insights. "They've been dragging their
feet from the outset, and it's been enormously frustrating," said Anne Weismann, CREW's chief counsel. "I don't
know if it's because they don't want to expose the fact that they've been operating without any clear guidance or if
de facto ban on commercial drone flights. The FAA permits government agencies to fly drones only under tightly
controlled circumstances. Under a 2012 law passed by Congress, however, the FAA is developing rules that will
gradually open the skies to drones of all kinds. The drone industry, which lobbied Congress to pass the law, predicts
$82 billion in economic benefits and 100,000 new jobs by 2025. On Thursday, the FAA approved requests from six
Hollywood filmmakers to fly small camera-equipped drones on movie sets, the first time businesses will be allowed
to operate such aircraft in populated areas. About 40 companies, including Amazon.com, have filed similar requests
Federal lawmakers
have introduced several bills in recent years to regulate the use of drones by law
with the FAA. Amazon's chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post.
enforcement agencies and strengthen privacy protections, but none has passed.
No
department flies more drones than the Pentagon, which has about 10,000 of the aircraft in its inventory, from fourpound Wasps to the 15-ton Global Hawk. While many are deployed overseas, Defense Department documents show
that the military is making plans to base drones at 144 sites in the United States. Pentagon officials have said they
soon expect to fly more drones in civilian airspace in the United States than in military-only zones. The Department
of Homeland Security also conducts extensive surveillance with unarmed drones. Its Customs and Border Protection
service has nine large Predator B models, which account for about three-quarters of all drone flight hours reported
by federal civilian agencies. Customs and Border Protection drones patrol a 25-mile-wide corridor along the nation's
northern and southern borders, as well as over the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Records obtained by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation show that the Border Patrol has also outsourced its drones on hundreds of occasions
to other law enforcement agencies throughout the United States. Details of most of those operations remain secret.
Drone Industry
The regulations,
among other things, prohibit the use of commercial drones outside the line of sight
of the pilot, meaning some ambitious ideas such as Amazons desire to deliver packages via
drone would not be not viable. The FAAs draft proposal, released Sunday, also
would outlaw flying drones over any persons not directly involved in the
operation, a provision that amounts to a de facto ban on using drones for news
coverage and a host of other activities. If the administrations true goal is to keep
the U.S. at the forefront of aviation, the regulatory structure as currently written
isnt acceptable, analysts say. That cant work, Michael Drobac, executive director
of the Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Coalition, said of the FAAs approach,
particularly the measure prohibiting flights above anyone not involved with the
operation. It really is so far behind where other countries are. Its not
progressive enough, said Mr. Drobac, whose coalition includes leading technology
companies. The FAA rules would apply to drones weighing less than 55 pounds and
being used for non-recreational activity, such as commercial use by private
companies. Business interests as varied as real estate developers, film producers
and farmers have all expressed a keen interest in the commercial possibilities of
advanced drones. The regulations require all drone operators be at least 17 years old,
pass an aeronautical knowledge test and get an operators certificate from the
agency. Drones also could not exceed an altitude of 500 feet or a speed of 100 mph,
nor could they fly over populated areas or restricted airspace, such as airports . An
proposal, and some on Capitol Hill already appear open to changing the strict FAA rules.
incident late last month when an out-of-control private drone crashed on the White House grounds only highlighted
FAA Administrator
Michael Huerta said the agency tried to be flexible with its approach, but key
lawmakers say certain aspects of the proposal are too limiting. These FAA rules
are a solid first step but need a lot more refining, Sen. Chuck Schumer, New York
Democrat, told the USA Today. The inclusion of the rule that drones must be flown
within the operators line of sight appears to be a concerning limitation on
commercial usage. I urge the FAA to modify that as these rules are finalized . In the
House, Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster,
Pennsylvania Republican, said its critical that the FAA listen to the concerns of the
drone industry and others as it finalizes the rules, which will be open to public comment for
fears of allowing commercial drones to operate without well-defined regulations.
the next 60 days. We need to properly balance safety, privacy and access while ensuring the United States
remains at the forefront of aviation technology, he said in a statement. As we continue to review this proposal and
as the FAA finalizes the rule, I look forward to hearing reactions and input from all stakeholders. Meanwhile,
other
nations already are far ahead of the U.S. in allowing private companies to use
drones. Canada, for example, also has line-of-sight provisions but does not require
operators certificates, provided the craft in question weighs less than 55 pounds .
Analysts say some European countries, Australia and other nations also have more
flexible regulatory systems and, as a result, are better positioned than the U.S. to
reap the economic benefits of a thriving commercial drone industr y.
vice president for global public policy, criticized regulators for paying little heed to rules for such autonomous flight.
process removed both the knowledge of, and the political support for, the traditional agricultural processes. Within
a matter of generations the traditional ecological knowledge gained over centuries that supported the previous low
energy input farming methods was lost in one area after another. Even the memory that proved that industrialized
The separation of
people from the land through the urbanization that was facilitated by the laborsaving mechanization of food production in general , also separated the vast majority of the
high energy agriculture was not the only way of growing crops disappeared over time.
population from any first-hand knowledge of food production. In the rich countries of today the average person is
used to food magically appearing on the shelves of the supermarket, disembodied from the actual crops and
animals that were the living inputs to the production of that food .
All such actions are incremental changes to the hegemonic industrial food
production systems rather than any fundamental change to them . The production
concern.
processes for many of the inputs required for industrialized agriculture have large scale efficiencies which benefit
worldwide, the top 10 biotechnology companies have 75% of industry revenue. There has also been significant
concentration in seed providers, with 6 of the leading seed companies also being within the top 10 companies for
farm and transportation equipment used by farmers are also very large corporations. In addition to the above levels
of economic concentration, there are numerous industry associations that concentrate the political weight of a
given industry. An example is the International Fertilizer Industry Association which has some 540 members in
about 85 countries. About half of the membership is based in developing countries. IFA member companies
represent all activities related to the production, trade, transport and distribution of every type of fertilizer, their
raw materials and intermediates. 19 These trade organizations, as well as individual companies, employ large
numbers of lobbyists and other staff to help direct government policies, and international agency decisions, in ways
beneficial to them.
of the biggest corn-producing states. Farmers pay the company $10 an acre. ENLARGE ENLARGE No one knows how
much is being spent to develop and market high-tech planting services, but 20% of Monsanto's projected growth in
per-share earnings by 2018 could come from FieldScripts and other technology-fueled improvements, estimates
Michael Cox, co-director of investment research at securities firm Piper Jaffray Cos. "I see it as another potential
transformation of the company," says Robert Fraley, chief technology officer for Monsanto, based in St. Louis. He
helped develop Monsanto's first genetically modified seeds in the early 1980s. In November, Monsanto paid $930
million to acquire Climate Corp., a weather-data-mining company in San Francisco launched by former Google Inc.
executives. Agricultural cooperative Land O'Lakes Inc. bought satellite-imaging specialist Geosys in December for
an undisclosed amount. DuPont announced earlier this month a collaboration with a weather-and-market analysis
firm, DTN/The Progressive Farmer, to provide real-time climate and market information to DuPont's data-services
users. Late last year, Deere & Co. agreed to beam data from the Moline, Ill., company's green tractors, combines
and other machinery to computer servers where DuPont and Dow Chemical Co. can formulate specialized seedplanting recommendations. "When a farmer buys a combine or buys a tractor, they've got all these ways to collect
information," says DuPont marketing manager Joe Foresman. The Wilmington, Del., company's Pioneer unit has
been sifting through farm-level data for about a decade, but now "this space is starting to mature." DuPont and
Monsanto are excited about their data-driven services, partly because they can be rolled out to farmers much faster
than new seeds, which often must endure a decade of development and regulatory review. Many farmers who have
tried prescriptive planting are enthusiastic about the results. David Nelson, a farmer near Fort Dodge, Iowa, who
began testing FieldScripts about three years ago, says it recognized nutrients in soil on a patch of land previously
used as a cattle feedlot. The conclusion was based on fertilizer maps and soil samples gathered by Mr. Nelson, 39.
Monsanto's system said the land could support denser rows of corn, and FieldScripts helped Mr. Nelson increase his
corn harvest last year by 8 to 12 bushels an acre above the 10-year average of 190 bushels. The increase brought
Mr. Nelson an additional $34 to $51 an acre. "We're pushing every acre to its maximum potential," Mr. Nelson adds.
Other farmers are reluctant. The American Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group
for farmers, has warned members that seed companies touting higher crop yields
from prescriptive planting have a vested interest in persuading farmers to plant
more. The trade group also says the services might steer farmers to buy certain
seeds, sprays and equipment for their land . Jerry Demmer, a 61-year-old corn and soybean farmer
near Albert Lea, Minn., is thinking about trying a data-analysis service but has "tossed and turned" over who will
control the information. "It's our data," Mr. Demmer says, but "I'm not sure how we're going to protect that." One
reason that suspicions run deep among some farmers: a surge in seed prices as the biggest companies piled up
more market share during the past 15 years, largely through takeovers. Monsanto and DuPont sell about 70% of all
corn seed in the U.S. Last year, farmers paid about $118 an acre for corn seed, up 166% from the inflation-adjusted
cost of $45 an acre in 2005, according to estimates from Purdue University. Companies say the higher prices reflect
the benefits of using their genetically modified seeds, including bigger crops and resistance to insects and weedkilling sprays that have helped reduce the usage of harsh pesticides. Mr. Fraley, the technology chief at Monsanto,
says it also decides annual seed prices based on seed supplies and commodities prices. Data gathered by
FieldScripts aren't likely to be "a particularly big" factor in pricing decisions, he says. "We'll price our seed the way
we've always priced our seed." Mr. Foresman of DuPont says the company doesn't use data it collects from farmers
to help set seed prices. Battles with seed makers over who controls the seeds produced by genetically modified
crops make some farmers even more wary about sharing information with the companies. In 2012, DuPont hired
Agro Protection USA Inc., an intellectual-property-protection firm staffed largely by retired law-enforcement officers,
to watch for signs of farmers who are saving second-generation seeds. Saving the seeds violates licensing
agreements farmers sign when they buy seeds. Monsanto has filed lawsuits against nearly 150 U.S. farmers since
1997 for replanting seeds that contain the company's proprietary characteristics. Last year, the company won a
The mostworried farmers fear that somehow rivals could use the data to their own
advantage. For example, if nearby farmers saw crop-yield information, it might spur
unwanted competition to rent farmland, pushing land costs higher. Other farmers
fret that Wall Street traders could use the data to make bets on futures contracts. If
such bets push futures-contract prices lower early in the growing season, it might
squeeze the profits farmers otherwise could lock in for their crops by selling futures.
U.S. Supreme Court victory in a case against an Indiana farmer who was 75 years old at the time.
of catching on in the United States. I read with amazement several recent news articles about the research being
conducted by the Yamaha Motor Corp. USA and ag engineers at the University of California-Davis. Imagine some
day in the not too distant future utilizing 200-pound motorcycle-sized pilotless helicopters and fixed-winged aircraft
to apply products to fields. To Americans the scenario might seem mindboggling but the fact is that
drones
have been in use in Japan for the last 20 years . The government introduced them into the
Japanese agricultural industry to address an aging farming population. There are more than 2,500 Yamaha RMAX
helicopters in use over 2.5 million acres of rice fields in the country .
At full spray it can operate for about 10 to 15 minutes and cover about
four to 12 acres per hour, which makes it obviously faster than a tractor. The
helicopter is operated by a two-person team a controller and spotter who must
pass written tests and be FAA certified. UC Davis researchers test a remote-controlled helicopter to
to be refilled.
spray pesticides on vineyards, which are normally sprayed using ground vehicles. Yamaha, who supplies Japanese
rice farmers with flying sprayers, provided the helicopter for these tests. Photos taken at the UC Davis Oakville
Station in Oakville, Calif. on May 7, 2013. Out of curiosity, I contacted Jeff Vanderbilt, manager of Valley Crop
Dusters, Inc., in Westley, to get his take on the feasibility of eventually using such drones in his own business. From
a safety viewpoint, any time you
[Jeremy, water supply and sanitation @ Institute for Development Studies, frmr
professor MIT, The sustainability and resilience of global water and food systems:
Political analysis of the interplay between security, resource scarcity, political
systems and global trade, Food Policy, Vol. 36 Supplement 1, p. S3-S8, January,
Accessed 6/28/15, NP]
The question of resource scarcity has led to many debates on whether scarcity
(whether of food or water) will lead to conflict and war. The underlining reasoning
behind most of these discourses over food and water wars comes from the
Malthusian belief that there is an imbalance between the economic availability of
natural resources and population growth since while food production grows linearly,
population increases exponentially. Following this reasoning, neo-Malthusians claim
that finite natural resources place a strict limit on the growth of human population
and aggregate consumption; if these limits are exceeded, social breakdown, conflict
and wars result. Nonetheless, it seems that most empirical studies do not support
any of these neo-Malthusian arguments . Technological change and greater inputs of capital have
dramatically increased labour productivity in agriculture. More generally, the neo-Malthusian view has suffered
because during the last two centuries humankind has breached many resource barriers that seemed
has gained increased attention these last decades. This has a direct impact on the global food system as water
The likelihood of
conflicts over water is an important parameter to consider in assessing the stability ,
sustainability and resilience of global food systems . None of the various and
extensive databases on the causes of war show water as a casus belli. Using the
International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data set and supplementary data from the
University of Alabama on water conflicts, Hewitt, Wolf and Hammer found only
seven disputes where water seems to have been at least a partial cause for conflict
(Wolf, 1998, p. 251). In fact, about 80% of the incidents relating to water were limited
purely to governmental rhetoric intended for the electorate (Otchet, 2001, p. 18). As
shown in The Basins At Risk (BAR) water event database, more than two-thirds of
over 1800 water-related events fall on the cooperative scale (Yoffe et al., 2003).
Indeed, if one takes into account a much longer period, the following figures clearly
allocation agreements determine the amount of water that can used for irrigated agriculture.
demonstrate this argument. According to studies by the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO), organized political bodies signed between the year 805 and 1984 more
than 3600 water-related treaties, and approximately 300 treaties dealing with water management or allocations in
Gleditsch, 2006). In terms of international relations, the threat of water wars due to increasing scarcity does not
make much sense in the light of the recent historical record. Overall,
conflict to occur over water, and appears to suggest that violence is a viable means of securing national
water supplies, an argument which is highly contestable. The debates over the likely impacts of climate change
have again popularised the idea of water wars. The argument runs that climate change will precipitate worsening
ecological conditions contributing to resource scarcities, social breakdown, institutional failure, mass migrations and
in turn cause greater political instability and conflict (Brauch, 2002 and Pervis and Busby, 2004). In a report for the
US Department of Defense, Schwartz and Randall (2003) speculate about the consequences of a worst-case climate
change scenario arguing that water shortages will lead to aggressive wars (Schwartz and Randall, 2003, p. 15).
Despite growing concern that climate change will lead to instability and violent conflict,
These claims are all flat wrong. While they make great headlines,
they create a misleading impression that periodic honeybee losses seriously
threatens our food supply. It is true that hive health issues are of concern because farmers rely on
honeybees for the production of many fruits, nuts, and vegetables. About one third of food production in the United
States benefits from honey bee pollination, according to USDA California almond growers depend on honey bees
exclusively to pollinate crops, requiring 60 percent of the commercial honey bee hives in the country to produce 80
percent of the world's supply of almonds. Almonds constitute California's highest-valued agricultural export,
according to agricultural economist Hoy Carman of the University of California-Davis. While poor hive health is
unlikely to completely undermine production of these foods, it could make them more expensive. In fact, according
prices and decreased food availability if honey bees continue to die at the current rate. The almond industry
illustrates this point well. Not all food depends on honeybees, and essential grains, particularly corn, rice and
wheat, constitute the largest part of our diets and these are pollinated by the wind. Researchers from the University
of Minnesota and U.S Geological Survey, writing in Environmental Science and Technology , point out: " Thus
the
prospect of human starvation in the absence of bees IS remote, but crop declines in
the most nutritiousand arguably, most interestingparts of our diet like fruit,
vegetables, and alfalfa hay for meat and dairy production, are possible" Other
researchers have raised concerns that the amount of honey bee-dependent crops has increased globally and
exceeds the number of honeybees produced for pollination. They concluded that one of two things must be
happening: Either the current number of hives is sufficient tor pollination or wild pollinators are providing an
Another consideration
regarding organic production is that the best approach to building soil quality is
minimizing soil disturbance (e.g. no plowing or tilling) combined with the use of
cover crops. Such farming systems have multiple environmental advantages,
particularly with respect to limited erosion and nutrient movement into water.
Organic growers frequently do plant cover crops, but without effective herbicides,
they tend to rely on tillage for weed control. There are efforts under way to find a way to do
organic no-till, but they are really not scalable. Now, turning to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). GMOs have
the potential to increase crop yields, enhance nutritious value, and generally improve farming practices while
reducing the need for synthetic chemicals which is exactly what organic farming seeks to do .
At this
moment, there are sweet potatoes being engineered to be resistant to a virus that
currently decimates the African harvest annually, which could feed millions of some
of the poorest nations on the globe. Scientists have created carrots high in calcium to battle
osteoperois, and tomatoes high in antioxidants. Also, potatoes are being modified so that they do not produce high
concentrations of toxic glycoalkaloids, and nuts are being engineered to lack the proteins which cause allergic
investments in new technology development and farmer innovation, modern agriculture has been achieving
remarkable environmental progress and will continue to be sustainable. To continue to be successful, we need to
encourage both systems relying on facts, and not denigrating one system to market another.
Hapless, junk-food
addicted Americans spend almost half of their food dollars supersizing themselves
on GMO and factory-farmed fare in fast food outlets and chain restaurants. Although
continue planting GMO crops and spraying their fields and crops with toxic chemicals.
there are a growing number of non-chain, farm-to- table restaurants where cooked-from-scratch organic foods
and grass-fed meats and animal products are featured on the menu, most restaurant ( as well as school and
including the best-selling book by New York Times columnist Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants
Hooked Us, the bulk of the nations processed foods, beverages and restaurant fare have been deliberately
chemically engineered (i.e. laced with addictive, unhealthy combinations of sugar, salts and fats) by a network of
food technologists employed by large food corporations determined to turn us into food addicts. As Moss explained
aided and abetted by an army of advertising wizards and lobbyists, have perfected the art of turning children and
adults into junk food addicts. How? By changing our taste buds, altering physiological brain circuits, and
engineering our appetites so as to reduce ingredient costs, maximize profits and keep a growing, bulging army of
food addicts, especially children, adolescents and low-income Americans, coming back for more. The nutritional
bottom line is that even though most Americans are overweight and suffering from diet-related health problems,
millions feel powerless and helpless, (much like tobacco addicts) to change their eating habits and sedentary
lifestyles. The junk food addict (especially children), brainwashed by thousands of commercials and ad images, and
whose sense of taste has been chemically mutated by constant exposure to junk food, truly believes that Coca-Cola
tastes better than any beverage made from real, organic ingredients, and that a large order of fries or soda or
sweetened breakfast cereal is necessary to satisfy their appetite. Lack of money and time. The majority of
Americans are victimized not only by a powerful, shadowy network of food technologists, chemical companies and
mass media propagandists, but also by a corporatized and inequitable economy. Even if you want to feed yourself
or your children organic food, and serve up healthy home-cooked meals, in todays Fast Food Nation consumers
face a host of major obstacles, including the high cost of living, lack of free time, lack of cooking skills, cultural
distractions and sub-standard wages. If you ask the majority of people why they arent buying more organic food
and grass fed meat, their answer is certainly not that they prefer chemically engineered, GMO and unhealthy foods.
What they complain about is the high price of organics or that they dont have enough free time (and if you press
them, adequate cooking skills) to cook meals at home from scratch.
people' are associated with images of hungry children, unchecked disease, squalid living conditions, and awful
planning initiatives worldwide. In the late 1970s, the Chinese government introduced its famous one-child-per-
While many question whether such schemes are humane, the policy
clearly slowed down Chinese population growth to the extent that India will soon be
the world's most populous country.
family policy.
competition between states requires large amounts of resources, and rivals require
even more attention. Leaders may choose to negotiate a settlement that ends a rivalry to free up important
resources that may be reallocated to the domestic economy. In a "guns versus butter" world of
economic trade-offs, when a state can no longer afford to pay the expenses
associated with competition in a rivalry, it is quite rational for leaders to reduce
costs by ending a rivalry. This gain (a peace dividend) could be achieved at any time by ending a rivalry.
However, such a gain is likely to be most important and attractive to leaders when
internal conditions are bad and the leader is seeking ways to alleviate active
problems. Support for policy change away from continued rivalry is more likely to develop when the economic
situation sours and elites and masses are looking for ways to improve a worsening situation. It is at these
times that the pressure to cut military investment will be greatest and that state
leaders will be forced to recognize the difficulty of continuing to pay for a rivalry .
Among other things, this argument also encompasses the view that the cold war
ended because the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could no longer compete
economically with the United States.
European internal security has been called into being that can be deployed should (food) crises strike. The
Maastricht Treaty (1992) created a quasi-decision-making platform to respond to transboundary threats. Since 9/11
In the
Solidarity Declaration of 2003 member states promised to stand by each other in
the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or human-made calamity (the European
the definition of what constitutes a threat has been broadened and the protection capacityreinforced.
Security Strategy of 2003). Experimental forms of cooperation are tried that leave member-state sovereignty intact,
mentality between the European directorates is also unhelpful, leading to Babylonian confusion. Thus, in the
context of forest fires and floods the Environment DG refers to civil protection. The European Security and Defence
Policy( ESDP) of 2006, which is hoped to build a bridge between internal and external security policy, on the other
hand refers to crisis management, while the security concept mainly pertains to pandemics (Rhinard et al. 2008:
512, Boin et al. 2008: 406).
exactly the same reason he has been repeatedly wrong about the alleged famine-inducing potential
Not all plants are pollinated by bees. Some plants are self-fruitful , meaning the
pollen simply drops from the stamen to the ovary on the same flower or on other flowers nearby. Other crops
are wind-pollinated. Bees are necessary only if the fruit is the portion of the plant that is consumed and the
plant is insect-pollinated. Root and Leafy Green Vegetables While pollination is necessary to produce
seeds for root and leafy vegetables, once you plant the seed in the garden, bees are
not necessary because you will be eating the vegetative parts. Radishes (Raphanus sativus), beets (Beta
vulgaris), carrots (Daucus carota), onions (Allium cepa), lettuce (Latuca sativa), members of the cabbage family
many herbs will grow and produce food in the garden without any
need for pollination by bees or other methods. Self-Fertile and Wind-Pollinated Vegetables Large,
juicy tomatoes (Lycopersicon esculentum) and full ears of corn (Zea mays) are possible
without bees in the garden. Corn is wind-pollinated and tomatoes are self-fertile ,
although more tomatoes will be produced if the wind blows or the plant is shaken slightly. Beans (Phaseolus spp.)
and peas (Pisum sativum) are also self-fertile. High temperature, low moisture or shade are more likely
(Brassica spp.) and
causes of poor fruit set in wind-pollinated or self-fruitful crops as those can reduce the viability of the pollen. InsectPollinated Vegetables Melons (Cucumis melo), squash (Cucurbita spp.) and some cucumbers (Cucumis sativus) are
insect-pollinated. Without bees or some other insect pollinator, the vines will grow, but they will not set fruit. Male
and female plant parts are on different flowers. The bees transfer pollen from the male to the female as they collect
nectar. The vines must be producing both male and female flowers. Temperature affects the number of male and
female flowers and the viability of the pollen, so fruit may not be produced in high temperatures even if bees are
present. Fruit Most common tree fruit including apple (Malus spp.), peach (Prunus persica), pear (Pyrus communis),
Widespread
deaths among bees, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, were first reported about a
decade ago, but the problem has not diminished and may have been especially bad recently. Beekeepers
across the United States lost roughly 40 percent of their colonies from April 2014 to April
crops that depend on the insects, and about the future of the beekeeping industry in America itself.
2015, according to an annual survey conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership and Apiary Inspectors of America,
with funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (Tweet This) That's the second highest percentage loss since
according to the results. The total number of bee colonies in the United States declined from 6 million during the
1940s to 2.5 million about 10 years ago, but it has remained relatively stable since then. The most recent numbers
place the total estimate at 2.74 million. Beekeepers expect to lose a small number of colonies every year, especially
in winter months when food supplies are scarce. Beekeepers can replace those losses by splitting a healthy colony
of bees in half and buying a new queen to start a new colony. -Dennis vanEngelsdorp, researcher, University of
Maryland But the costs of maintaining colonies have mushroomed. Farmers who lose 40 percent of their colonies
have to split nearly every remaining colony just to maintain their total number. Each new queen bee costs about
$20, sometimes more. Beekeepers suffer productivity losses while they're splitting colonies. And weaker, smaller
colonies do not command the same prices among the farmers who pay keepers for pollination services. " You
aren't going to be able to get as much money for pollination rental, the colony won't
make as much honey, so you are losing productivity," said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a bee
scientist from the University of Maryland who was involved in the research. Read MoreLandowners square off in
California water wars That has driven up prices for pollination. The price to use a healthy colony for pollination used
to run about $70. Now it has more than doubled to $175, vanEngelsdorp said. No one is certain what is causing
these losses, but three factors or a combination of them seem likely: parasites, pesticides and lack of adequate
food. For backyard beekeepersgenerally noncommercial ventures of fewer than 50 bee coloniesthe parasitic
varroa mite has taken a toll. Many backyard beekeepers struck with varroa mite infestations are not adequately
treating them, vanEngelsdorp said. In some cases, this is well-intentioned. Some beekeepers hope they can breed a
colony that builds a natural resistance to the mite. That may not be possible, but in the meantime, infected bees
spread the mites to other colonies. Commercial beekeepers are treating their colonies, but some of the pesticides
they use to attack the mite may either be ineffective or may have other negative effects on bee colony health.
Pesticides that other farmers use on crops could also be having an effect, he said. Finally, bees may be struggling to
manage only about 5 percent of the bees. The relatively small number of commercial beekeepers make up the rest.
"We are not worried bees are going to go extinct," vanEngelsdorp said. "What we
are worried about is that the commercial beekeeper won't be able to stay in
business. Losing this number of colonies every year is very financially hard, and it is
difficult to replace these guys, because these are the last migratory farmers in America."
Department of Agriculture (USDA). That's a problem, given that entomologists have yet to come up with a viable
orchard mason bee, is one of 3,000 bee species native to the U.S. and is currently the subject of intensive study by
the USDA's Pollinating Insect Biology, Management and Systematics Research Unit at Utah State University in
Logan. James Cane, an entomologist at the Logan bee lab, has been working for 10 years to increase the availability
The reason
these bees are considered the best potential honeybee stand-ins, Cane says, is that
unlike some specialist native species, blue orchard bees, like honeybees, can
pollinate a variety of cropsincluding almonds, peaches, plums, cherries, apples
and others. In just about every other respect, however, these bees are totally unlike their European brethren.
For one, they tend to live alone. In the wild, rather than hives, they inhabit boreholes drilled by beetles into
the trunks and branches of dead trees. When cultivated, they will happily occupy holes drilled
into lumber or even Styrofoam blocks. The blue orchard bees also do not produce honey, rarely sting
and, owing to their solitary nature, do not swarm. They are incredibly efficient pollinators of many
tree fruit cropson a typical acre, 2,000 blue orchard bees can do the work of more
than 100,000 honeybees. Their biggest drawback is that beekeepers can only increase their populations
of these bees and he says there are now a million blue orchards pollinating crops in California.
by a factor of three to eight each year. (Honey bees can grow from a small colony consisting of a queen and a few
dozen workers to a population of 20,000 foragers in a few months.) "We're still in the development stage of
applying all the research that has been done" by USDA's Agricultural Research Service, says David Moreland, CEO of
Of the nearly
700,000 acres (285,000 hectares) of almonds cultivated in California this growing
season, as many as 300 acres (120 hectares) were pollinated by blue orchards ,
AgPollen, the worlds leading producer of blue orchard bees for the California almond industry.
according to Moreland. Growers' inspiration for trying the new pollinator is simple economicslast season they
were paying up to $300 an acre to rent honeybees, 10 times what they paid a decade ago.* This trend has made
blue orchard bees cost-competitive with honeybees, but only barely. "It's not clear we can [raise blue orchard bees
on a commercial scale] in a cost-effective way," says Karen Strickler, an entomologist at the University of Idaho
from 1993-2000 who has worked with solitary bees and who currently distributes them to beekeepers and hobbyists
through the bee dealership PollinatorParadise.com, located in New Mexico. A nother
we
got to the point that we could not maintain populations [of honeybees]," he says,
"this is one way to ensure that the largest dollar specialty crop in California for
exportthe almonddoesn't lose its pollinator."
Honeybees wont die absent the aff- the White Houses new
policy concerning pollinators proves that the status quo solves
for honeybee decline
Naylor, NPR-Washington Correspondent,5-19
[Brian, 5-19-2015, NPR, Plan Bee: White House Unveils Strategy To Protect
Pollinators, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/19/407955318/planbee-white-house-unveils-strategy-to-protect-pollinators, accessed 6-28-15, -MBk]
There is a buzz in the air in Washington , and it's about honeybees. Concerned about an alarming
decline in honeybee colonies, the Obama administration has released a National Strategy to
Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators . NPR's Dan Charles says the strategy,
despite its rather bureaucratic title, is pretty straightforward: " The government will provide money
for more bee habitat and more research into ways to protect bees from disease and
pesticides. The Environmental Protection Agency also will re-evaluate a class of insecticides called
neonicotinoids ... which are commonly used on some of the most widely planted crops in the country." As NPR's
pesticides may also be contributing to the decline of bees. "Neonics, as they're known for short, have become
among the most widely used insecticides in the world. The pesticide is coated onto the seeds that farmers plant to
grow their crops. These pretreated seeds are used extensively in corn, soy and canola crops. In fact, it's estimated
human activities related to the extraction, transportation, refining, storage, and utilization of petroleum (crude oil
and natural gas). An example is marine oil spills, caused by failures in human-designed transportation systems such
as tankers and pipelines, which are built to move crude oil from one place to another. The second process involves
natural oil seepage. The term oil seepis used here to mean naturally occurring seepage of crude oil and tar.
Crude-oil seeps are geographically common and have likely been active through
much of geologic time (Hunt 1996). The importance of crude oil entering the marine environment was
recognized by the US National Academy of Sciences in a series of three reports (NAS 1975, 1985, 2003). The NAS
(1975) report Petroleum in the Marine Environment was NASs first comprehensive attempt to estimate the
amount of crude oil that enters the oceans from all known sources. A significant conclusion was that about 10% of
crude oil entering the oceans during the early 1980s came from natural oil seeps, whereas about 27% came from oil
production, transportation, and refining. The remaining 63% came from atmospheric emissions, municipal and
rates (Quigley et al. 1999). However, secondary recovery methods using increased formation pressures could
possibly cause increased rates of oil seepage. Nevertheless, crude oil that enters naturally into the marine
environment does establish a contaminant backgroundagainst which pollution resulting from human activities (i.e.,
oil spills) can be measured.
No Impact to Biodiversity
Ridder, Researcher @ University of Tansania, 08
[Ben, 2008, Phd School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of
Tasmania, Questioning the ecosystem services argument for biodiversity
conservation Biodiversity and conservation yr:2008 vol:17 iss:4 pg:781,accessed
6/28/15, NP]
*ES = environmental services
The low resilience assumption Advocates of the conservation of biodiversity tend
not to acknowledge the distinction between resilient and sensitive ES. This low
resilience assumption gives rise to, and is reinforced by the almost ubiquitous claim
within the conservation literature that ES depend on biodiversity . An extreme example of
this claim is made by the Ehrlichs in Extinction. They state that all [ecosystem services] will be threatened if the
rate of extinctions continues to increase then observe that attempts to artificially replicate natural processes are
When society
sacrifices natural services for some other gain it must pay the costs of
substitution (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1982, pp. 9596). This assertionthat the only alternative to
protecting every species is a world in which all ES have been substituted by artificial
alternativesis an extreme example of the low resilience assumption . Paul Ehrlich
no more than partially successful in most cases. Nature nearly always does it better.
revisits this flawed logic in 1997 i nhis response (with four co-authors) to doubts expressed by Mark Sagoff
systematic attempts to verify propositions of this sort, the evidence assembled is usually anecdotal and we are
Fortunately a number of
highly respected people have discussed this topic, not least being the prominent
conservation biologist David Ehrenfeld. In 1978 he described the conservation
dilemma, which arises on the increasingly frequent occasions when we encounter
a threatened part of Nature but can find no rational reason for keeping it (Ehrenfeld
1981, p. 177). He continued with the following observation: Have there been permanent
and significant resource effects of the extinction, in the wild, of John Bartrams
great discovery, the beautiful tree Franklinia alatamaha, which had almost vanished
from the earth when Bartram first set eyes upon it? Or a thousand species of tiny
beetles that we never knew existed before or after their probable extermination?
Can we even be certain than the eastern forests of the United States suffer the loss
of their passenger pigeons and chestnuts in some tangible way that affects their
vitality or permanence, their value to us? (p. 192) Later, at the first conference on
biodiversity, Ehrenfeld (1988) reflected that most species do not seem to have any
conventional value at all and that the rarest species are the ones least likely to be
missed by no stretch of the imagination can we make them out to be vital cogs in
the ecological machine (p. 215). The appearance of comments within the environmental literature that
forced to trust that an unbiased account of the situation has been presented.
are consistent with Ehrenfeldsand from authors whose academic standing is also worthy of respectis
uncommon but not unheard of (e.g., Tudge 1989; Ghilarov 1996; Sagoff 1997; Slobodkin 2001; Western 2001). The
low resilience assumption is also undermined by the overwhelming tendency for the protection of specific
endangered species to be justified by moral or aesthetic arguments, or a basic appeal to the necessity of
conserving biodiversity, rather than by emphasising the actual ES these species provide or might be able to provide
humanity. Often the only services that can be promoted in this regard relate to the scientific or cultural value of
conserving a particular species, and the tourism revenue that might be associated with its continued existence. The
preservation of such services is of an entirely different order compared with the collapse of human civilization
predicted by the more pessimistic environmental authors. The popularity of the low resilience assumption is in part
explained by the increased rhetorical force of arguments that highlight connections between the conservation of
the nature of nearby marine environments. For this reason, they serve as natural laboratories where researchers
can learn how marine organisms adapt over generations of chemical exposure. Seeps
illustrate how dramatically animal and plant population levels can change with exposure to ocean petroleum".
Biological diversity (or biodiversity) is a measure of ecosystem health and function. The California Public Resources
Code Section 12220[b] defines biodiversity as the number and genetic richness of different individuals found within
the population of a species, of populations found within a species range, of different species found within a natural
community or ecosystem, and of different communities and ecosystems found within a region. California has at
least 2,153 endemic taxa of vascular plants (species, subspecies, varieties). This means that 34% of the 6,272
native plant taxa in California are found nowhere else on the planet. Many plant species, subspecies, and varieties
have evolved in ecological niches created by the unique confluence of climate, topography, and soils found in
California and nowhere else on the planet. California has many different landforms in close proximity that interact
with climate and soil to produce multiple niches for evolution that do not exist in other areas of North America.
California can therefore be considered an evolutionary pump generating more endemic species than any other
region of the United States. California has not only the highest number of endemic plant species in North America,
but also the highest amount of plant ecological richness as defined by the number of plant associations. A plant
association is a group of plant species that is defined by the most dominant plant species in the grouping. California
has over 2,000 types of plant associations, which is about 50% of the known plant associations in the United States.
The California Biodiversity Hotspot continues to get hotter every year as an estimated ten new species of endemic
plants are discovered every year in California. There may be hundreds of other endemic species waiting to be
There are four areas within the California Biodiversity Hotspot that glow
more than the rest: the Sierra Nevada, the Transverse Ranges, the Klamath-Siskiyou
region, and the Coast Ranges. The California Biodiversity Hotspot contains the highest numbers of
endemic amphibian and mammal species in North America. There are 51 species of amphibians
(frogs, toads, and salamanders) in California, of which 17 are endemic. There are 17
discovered.
endemic mammal species in the California Biodiversity Hotspot including the Channel Island Fox found off the coast
of Ventura County and the Mount Pinos Chipmonk in northernmost Ventura County. As of 2003 (Roth and Sadeghain
2003 - Checklist of the Land Snails and Slugs of California. [Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Contributions
in Science No. 3.] Santa Barbara, California.), there were known to be 360 terrestrial gastropod taxa native to
California. A good many of these species (including subspecies/varieties) of terrestrial gastropods are endemic to
California.
The gulf is, of course, the site of the giant oil spill that began April 20 with the
explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drill rig. The question is what the oil pouring
into the gulf means for these deep, dark habitats. Seep researchers have voiced strong concern
about the threat to the dark ecosystems. The spill is a concentrated surge, they note, in contrast to the slow,
diffuse, chronic seepage of petrochemicals across much of the gulfs northern slope. Many factors, like the density
of oil in undersea plumes, the size of resulting oxygen drops and the potential toxicity of oil dispersants all
unknowns could grow into threats that outweigh any possible benefits and damage or even destroy the dark
ecosystems. Last year, scientists discovered a community roughly five miles from where the BP well, a mile deep,
subsequently blew out. Its inhabitants include mussels and tube worms. So it seems that researchers will have
some answers sooner rather than later. Theres lots of uncertainty, said Charles R. Fisher, a professor of biology at
Pennsylvania State University, who is leading a federal study of the dark habitats and who observed the nearby
community. Our best hope is that the impact is neutral or a minor problem. A few scientists say the gushing oil
despite its clear harm to pelicans, turtles and other forms of coastal life might ultimately represent a subtle boon
minority view. Over roughly two decades, the federal government has spent at least $30 million uncovering and
investigating the creatures of the cold seeps, a fair amount of money for basic ocean research. Washington has
provided this money in an effort to ensure that oil development does no harm to the unusual ecosystems. Now, the
nations worst oil spill at sea with tens of millions of gallons spewing to date has thrown that goal into doubt .
The agency behind the exploration and surveying of the cold seeps is none other than the much-criticized Minerals
Management Service of the Department of the Interior not its oil regulators but a separate environmental arm,
which long ago began hiring oceanographers, geologists, ecologists and marine biologists to investigate the gulf
seabed and eventually pushed through regulations meant to protect the newly discovered ecosystems. The
minerals service is joining with other federal agencies to study whether the BP spill is harming the dark habitats.
Scientists say ships may go to sea as soon as July, sending tethered robots down to the icy seabed to examine the
seep communities and take samples for analysis. It is a bittersweet moment for scientists like Dr. MacDonald of
Florida State University, who has devoted his career to documenting the ecosystems richness and complexity. In an
interview, he said the sheer difficulty of trying to fathom the ecological impacts of the spill had left some of his
colleagues dejected. Once, we had this career studying obscure animals down there, he said. And now, its
looking at this probably for the rest of my career. It becomes this huge unknown. Inky darkness, icy
temperatures and crushing pressures conspire to make studying the deep oceans arduous and remarkably costly.
Humans are estimated to have glimpsed perhaps a millionth of the ocean floor. By contrast, people looking at the
surface of the gulf have known about the seeping oil for centuries. Spanish records dating from the 16th century
note floating oil. In the early 1980s, scientists investigating the oil seeps wondered if nearby creatures on the
seabed might suffer chronic harm from pollution and serve as models for petrochemical risk. They lowered nets
photosynthesis. The corresponding method among the microbes of the dark abyss is known as chemosynthesis. The
minerals service proceeded to finance wide expeditions. It issued thick reports in 1988, 1992 and 2002. By then,
scientists had discovered dozens of seep communities and found some of their inhabitants to be extraordinarily old.
In the journal Nature, Dr. Fisher of Pennsylvania State University and two colleagues reported that gulf tube worms
could live more than 250 years making them among the oldest animals on the planet. The latest expeditions
have looked at seep communities as deep as 1.7 miles far down the continental slope toward the gulfs nether
regions. In an interview, Dr. Fisher said investigations of the deeper communities suggested that tube worm species
there grew slower and lived longer. How long? Its likely they can live a lot longer, he answered. Im
Over the
years, scientists have found that the deep microbes not only eat exotic chemicals
but also make carbonate (a building block of seashells) that forms a hard crust on
the normally gooey seabed. The carbonate crusts can grow thick enough, they say, to reduce the flow of
uncomfortable with an exact number, but were talking centuries four, five or six centuries.
gas and oil through the seep communities and form attachment points for a variety of other sea creatures,
Environment Improving
Berg, research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and
editor of the IPA Review, 8
[Chris, Columnist The Age, Isn't All This Talk of an Apocalypse Getting a Bit
Boring?, The Age, http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/isnt-all-this-talk-of-anapocalypse-getting-a-bit-boring/2008/01/26/1201157736917.html, January 27,
2008, accessed 6/28/15, NP]
But there are substantial grounds for optimism on almost every measure, the
state of the world is improving. Pollution is no longer the threat it was seen to be in
the 1970s, at least in the developed world. Changes in technology, combined with our greater
demand for a clean environment, have virtually eliminated concerns about pungent waterways and dirty forests.
Legislation played some role in this, but as Indur Goklany points out in his recent study, The Improving State of the
Infant mortality has dramatically declined, as has malnutrition, illiteracy, and even
global poverty. And there are good grounds for hope that we can adapt to changing
climates as well. History has shown just how capable we are of inventing and
adapting our way out of any sticky situation and how we can do it without crippling our
economies or imposing brutal social controls. Environmental alarmists have become more and
more like those apocalyptic preachers common in the 19th century always
expecting the Rapture on this date and, when it doesn't come, quickly revising their
calculations. Optimism is in too short supply in discussions about the environment .
But four decades after The Population Bomb, if we remember just how wrong visions
of the apocalypse have been in the past, perhaps we will look to the future more
cheerfully.
chorus of industry observers has started to ask questions about the reliability of AUVSIs findings. This post is a
good example. These individuals, many of whom are among the true pioneers in commercial UAS usage, can best
be characterized as enthusiastic but pragmatic UAS evangelists who dont want to see unwarranted hyperbole lead
to unmet expectations. Many realize that initially overhyped industries never recover because customers, investors,
and employees who were burned in the initial wave of unmet expectations are difficultif not impossibleto ever
win back. They are passionately committed to the industrys success and believe that rational expectations are a
key part of it. With no axe to grind or agenda to advance, I [Mitch Solomon] partnered with Colin Snow
@droneanalyst to explore whether the skeptics and pragmatists were on to some something. We felt our combined
backgrounds in market intelligence and tech market strategy would give us a reasonable set of expertise to draw
upon and would help others form a more balanced opinion of AUVSIs forecasts. So over the past several weeks,
weve been carefully reviewing AUVSIs report, as follows: Compared their research methodologies to what we
believe to be best practices in market research based upon our own experience. Conducted an in-depth interview
with the researchers themselves, so that we could directly ask them questions about their methods and results that
were not made clear in the report. Initiated a follow-up discussion with AUVSI leadership to understand their
perspective on the report and its origins. Performed intensive primary research with about 20 carefully selected
professionals in the field of precision agriculture to understand their UAS adoption plans, since the reports findings
are almost entirely based upon rapid adoption by American farmers. We then synthesized our findings into the
following
it is not an
objective piece of research. The report was commissioned not to paint an accurate
picture of how the commercial UAS market is expected to evolve, but to give the 50
states and their elected officials the data they needed to: lobby for funding during the
Dont Assume It Is First and foremost, every reader of AUVSIs report needs to understand that
now completed FAA-sponsored competition for UAS test sites, and push the FAA to move more quickly on the
integration of UASs into the national airspace. These are certainly worthwhile goals, and AUVSI should be
commended for pursuing them. But as a direct result, the implicit (if not explicit) mission for the two researchers
who did the work was to come up with the biggest numbers the largest market, fastest growth rates, and biggest
costs of delaying integration that they could. An objective attempt to size, segment, and forecast the commercial
UAS market (all of which the report appears to be), is something it never actually was, and we believe its critical
that all participants in the UAS industry know this and avoid making decisions based upon it. Methodology Boring
An
equally important part is the quality and reliability of the research methods . Generally
But Oh So Important A biased agenda is only one part of the story regarding the reliability of AUVSIs findings.
speaking, strong research methods yield highly defensible results. While presented somewhat differently in the
the methodology used by the researchers can be summed up as: Studying UAS
Adjusting the Japanese experience for the US market Asking experts
how big they think the market is / will be Applying research on new technology adoption to the US
UAS market As experienced researchers, it sounded pretty good to us at first. But, unfortunately, it did not hold
up very well to careful scrutiny. Japan When the Best Available Proxy Just Isnt We like the idea
of searching for analogous markets and scenarios that can serve as the basis for
forecasting the US market. The question is: Is Japan an analogous market for the US? We believe
report,
adoption in Japan
that the US and Japan are so different, and the magnitude of the required
extrapolations so enormous, that the resulting data is not useful. Most in the industry
already know that Japans UAS market remains dominated by one product, the Yamaha RMAX (77% market share in
Japan), which is used to spray a large percentage of the countrys rice fields. These fields tend to be small (less than
five acres), are often in densely populated areas, and are located on steep hard-to-reach hillsides. In contrast, rice
represents a tiny percentage of US agricultural output. Our farms are comparatively huge (very often running well
into the thousands of acres). No single product, much less a relatively large, unmanned helicopter from Yamaha is
likely to dominate the American market. And remote sensing, not pesticide application, is almost certain to be the
the absence of a better alternative cannot justify the use of a bad one. Expert Opinions or Really Just Guesses?
more important, not every question is one that experts can necessarily answer well .
Certainly UAS industry experts would generally be well prepared to share their opinion on whether fixed wing or
rotor aircraft will be more useful for particular applications, or what regulations make the most sense for the small
UAS market. But the idea that you can ask experts for opinions about the size of a market and obtain meaningful
results is, we believe, inherently flawed. Unless these experts were professionals focused on sizing, segmenting,
and forecasting the commercial UAS market (and nothing close to 30 such professionals exist), the opinions voiced
by the experts are nothing more than guesses, akin to asking 30 people how many clouds there are in the sky and
expecting to get the right answer. Our experience in sizing markets, and in working with many experts across a
wide variety of markets over many years, gives us considerable confidence in stating that very few people have
good insights into how big a market is today, much less how big it will be years from now, even if they work directly
in it. The lack of insight is only compounded for complex, nascent markets like the one for commercial UAS.
and hard to do the work yourself. In defense of the reports authors, we need to acknowledge that they did a lot
with a little. They had a budget to work within that was much smaller than is typical for an assignment of this
complexity, and they invested much more time and effort than the budget allowed. Like virtually almost everyone
else in the brand-new (some would say still non-existent) commercial UAS industry, they had limited prior exposure
to the commercial UAS market, making their learning curve steep. And they had complex agendas to meet in order
to satisfy their client, AUVSI, and its many stakeholders. In light of the foregoing, there is much for which they
Indeed, its not what they set out to do in the first place, so they cant really be faulted for not accomplishing it.
others will unnecessarily result in big missed opportunities, significant wasted time and resources, disappointed
customers, angry investors, disgruntled employees, and many other negative outcomes that certainly could have
been avoided.
sourcing and
delivering components, will hopefully ramp up a number of notches. The launch customer
guaranteeing work for years to come. This means that demand for Pattonair's services,
for the long-awaited Dreamliner, All Nippon Airways, has just received the first aircraft. And a number of other
airlines will start receiving theirs. Meanwhile, development work on the Airbus A350 XWB is carrying on apace.
Advanced orders for the aircraft are mounting up. It is all good news for Pattonair and as orders grow, the firm will
be aiming to grow with it. At present, Pattonair provides approximately 100 million parts per year to over 1,000
seems to lurch from major downturn to exciting new models and a scramble for extra capacity in the space of very
"The key manufacturers, Airbus and Boeing, are both heavily into expansion programmes with new aircraft
launched or about to be. "The first production Boeing Dreamliner, sold to ANA, touched down without incident last
month a couple of years late in the making but nevertheless, now on track to be built at almost three a week in
the coming years. "With two fantastic Rolls-Royce engines on many of these 787s, plus numerous components from
British aerospace companies, this signals the start of a long-term, job-protecting programme. "Similarly, the Airbus
A350 is taking shape many companies around the globe will benefit from this and Pattonair is no exception." A
good way to gauge the state of the industry is the level of activity at the major air shows. The company always has
a stand at the Farnborough Air Show and the Paris Air Show. The show alternates each year between the two
locations. This year, it was Paris. The feedback from exhibitors was positive with a more positive feel to the event
compared to when the show was in the French capital two years ago. At this year's event, Pattonair signed longterm agreements with three leading manufacturers, Lisi Aerospace, Bristol Industries and Paolo Astori. But Pattonair
is by no means resting on its laurels or restricting itself to supply aircraft parts. Last month, the Pattonair stand
was present at Helitech, the largest dedicated helicopter exhibition in Europe, which took place at Duxford. The
company is also planning to exhibit at the Singapore Air Show in February next year, and, of course, at Farnborough,
which will take place in July, 2012.
John said: "If we take the Paris Air Show this year, more than 90 billion of
orders were taken. "Companies like Pattonair are inextricably linked to this level of growth and investment. For all
our employees and all the others in aerospace around Derby and beyond, this is very, very good news. "Of course,
the increased demand for more environmentally friendly and cost-efficient aircraft was a reason behind airlines
wanting to replace their fleets. He said: "The continued drive towards 'green' is another major advantage in our
favour. "The
major airlines and therefore the major aircraft manufacturers are all
pushing for new, environmentally friendly and efficient aircraft with lower fuel costs.
"The push for efficient, lean-burn engines has never been so great. This means new
aircraft are on the way to replace the current fleets. "There is much speculation about many of the final decisions
that will be made, but undoubtedly, there will be new aircraft, which will bring jobs and prosperity." Although the
future looks rosy, John is conscious of keeping his feet on the ground and those of his staff. He said: "For 40 years,
Pattonair has served the aerospace industry. "While we never get too carried away, there is a genuine belief
throughout the company that we are in the right place at the right time. "Giving staff briefings as I do every month,
I often start with some realism. "I'll remind the team that we're in a growing industry working with great customers.
"Others, maybe their own friends and family, are not that fortunate and we need to remember that and continue to
give 100% back to the industry and the customers that provide us with business and continue to keep Derby
flying."
Soviets invaded Afghanistan. In the 1980s, Americans looked with awe and fear at Japan's growing economic
predict the future with certainty, but the evidence is that there has long been a tendency to underestimate
Today, the declinists are back, arguing that China will soon
overtake us and that our gridlocked politics, long-term deficits, and decaying
infrastructure will prevent us from playing the same global role that we have since
World War II. We must take these concerns seriously and not assume that America will retain its primacy simply
because declinists in the past have turned out to be wrong. Leadership is not
something the United States has by happenstance -- it is something we
have had to earn over and over again. So how do we actually quantify power? Former National
Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his latest book, Strategic Vision, assigned the United States
a strategic balance sheet of assets and liabilities . His framework sets up a useful way of analyzing
America's staying power.
where we stand today. We certainly have strategic liabilities that we cannot ignore. But what is sometimes lost in
quantifiers that we used to use, like steel outputs and troop numbers. While our military might is tremendous and
It is not measuring strength in one or two dimensions that captures a country's position, but rather the
accumulation and the interaction between these assets. Here, then, are five of those core strengths: Economic
said, "Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power." The 2008 financial crisis tested our resilience and dealt a
real blow to our international prestige and authority. Long-term challenges remain. But the fact is
that no country comes close to matching our fundamental economic strength. The U.S. economy is built on a sound
measure, the United States has the largest national economy in the world today, generating nearly $17 trillion in
GDP. Our economy is nearly double the size of the second-largest, China's. Our stock market capitalization is five
times bigger than China's. We lead the world in attracting foreign direct investment and are also the world's largest
single investing economy. An economy's most important asset, however, is not its sheer size. China's enormous
population base will put it on a path to become the largest economy in the world at some point in the future. But
size alone has not been the most important factor in determining the
most powerful nation. At the peak of Britain's global power, it was China that had the world's largest
history shows that
economy, even though the country was then a middling power in the throes of what the Chinese refer to as their
technologically advanced. China has a very large economy, but it's still a poor country. According to the World Bank,
U.S. GDP per capita is $53,143; China's is $6,807. That provides an important perspective. And when we look to our
prospects for the future, it's clear that the United States is well poised to maintain our leading position. Think about
three aspects of our economy: innovation, energy, and higher education. First,
of oil by the end of the decade. Unconventional energy will propel our economy and support American jobs -- nearly
need be, punish adversaries. The success of the international sanctions on Iran, for example, was made possible in
large part because Washington was confident that increased American supply afforded it the possibility of removing
a million barrels of Iranian oil off the market each day without dramatic increases in gasoline costs to U.S.
consumers. And it was the bite of those sanctions that ultimately brought the Iranians to the negotiating table last
year. Like our success in innovation, this energy renaissance did not happen by accident or because of luck -- it is
820,000 foreign students were enrolled at U.S. universities. Warren Buffett summed it up nicely in his latest letter to
his shareholders: "I have always considered a 'bet' on ever-rising U.S. prosperity to be very close to a sure thing.
Indeed, who has ever benefited during the past 237 years by betting against America? If you compare our country's
present condition to that existing in 1776, you have to rub your eyes in wonder. And the dynamism embedded in
year on defense than the next 10 nations put together. Our defense budget is more than five times bigger than that
of our nearest competitor, China -- despite that country's rapid military buildup. Even after 13 years of war -- the
longest period of continuous conflict our armed forces have ever seen -- we remain capable of defeating any
our special operations forces have become a unique American asset. The May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's
compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan -- over 7,000 miles away from the United States -- was only the most visible
example of how our battle-tested special operators successfully execute complex missions in dangerous places
across the globe. And by historical measures, the current U.S. defense burden is not excessive as a share of GDP. As
we wind down the war in Afghanistan, our military now stands on a more sustainable footing, without the kind of
Europe, this network has been built for over half a century on a bipartisan basis. No other country can look to
anything like it. These enduring partnerships are a unique American strength, and we continue to deepen them
across the globe today. The luck of geography Geography and natural resources are our most natural advantage.
These enduring strengths are rarely discussed, but they have provided for the safety and prosperity of the American
people from the days since the first settlers arrived. We are an Atlantic and a Pacific power, an American and an
Arctic nation. We are protected by oceans and peaceful borders. We live in a hemisphere of mostly stable
democracies, and we enjoy friendly, productive relations with our fellow American states. The bottom-line strategic
point is that the United States does not face any real threats in its own hemisphere.
United States is not a dependent power. In addition to our energy resources, we have other
diverse and valuable sets of natural resources. The United States has the largest deposits of rare-earth minerals at
a time when competition for those resources is on the rise. Our country is situated on the largest fertile land mass,
helping make us the breadbasket of the world. We are the largest food exporter, and our rich farmlands help
insulate Americans against price shocks and food shortages. None of this means that the United States can afford
to ignore what takes place beyond our shores -- our interests are too great and the fate of nations is too
interconnected -- but it provides us greater latitude to pursue our interests across the globe. Demography and
immigration We are likewise blessed to have a bright demographic future. Our workforce is relatively young and still
growing. Between now and 2050, the U.S. population is expected to grow by nearly 100 million people, expanding
our workforce by 40 percent. Contrast that with the populations of other developed nations in Western Europe,
Japan, and South Korea, which are aging and shrinking. By 2050, the median age in China will be nearly 50; in the
United States it will be 40. A big part of the reason our demographic profile looks better than the rest of the world's
is that we are a nation of immigrants. Immigrants are both younger than the population at large and participate in
the workforce in larger numbers than those born in the United States. Immigrant communities are also a
tremendous source of creativity, and the United States has a distinct advantage over other developed nations when
it comes to attracting highly skilled immigrants. Foreign entrepreneurs and scientists choose to make the United
States their home because it is easier to enter our labor markets and move within them than in any other
developed country. Our open society allows for more seamless integration than anywhere else. That's why it's so
important for Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Reform is not just a domestic issue -- it's a
strategic issue -- and it's crucial to locking in our global advantage in human capital. The virtues of leadership The
final asset is America's unique global leadership role. For generations, Americans have taken up the mantle of
leadership in a world torn by war and scarred by oppression. We have repeatedly put American blood and treasure
on the line to defend our values and advance universal rights. The world still expects us to lead today. People
everywhere look to America to protect global commerce, ensure the free flow of energy, and control the spread of
dangerous weapons. Plenty of countries have leverage. But there is a very big difference between leverage and
leadership. The United States brings to bear more than just resources. It has an unmatched ability to convene
countries and coordinate international efforts. That's because of the attractiveness of our ideas, our tradition of
leadership, and the fact that we've nurtured such a successful international system.
epicenter of the fast-growing commercial drone business is in Silicon Valley, not Southern California, and the new
players are quite different from the giant contractors that dominate the military drone market, such as Northrop
Grumman Corp. or General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. They're more like the classic Silicon Valley
stereotype: geeks working in garages. "The
One industry that seems to weather storms quite well is aerospace and
defense. According to the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (Deloitte Global) Manufacturing Industry
groups 2015 Global Aerospace and Defense Outlook, after weighing the pros and cons, the industry is likely
to grow at a 3 percent rate this year . It is anticipated that the global commercial aerospace sector
will sustain revenue and earnings growth in the range of 8 percent . Tom
Captain, Deloitte Global Aerospace and Defense Sector Leader, says that the primary driver will be increased
production rates due to the accelerated replacement cycle of obsolete aircraft with
next generation fuel-efficient aircraft, as well as the continued increases in passenger travel demand,
especially in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. Deloitte predicts that by 2025 annual commercial
aircraft production levels will increase by an estimated 20 percent and found that from
1981 to 2014 passenger travel demand increased 428 percent, load factors (utilization of aircraft) have risen 25.4
percent, and the number of people flying per year increased 340 percent due to more affordable ticket prices and
route options.
Latin America
already strike the U.S., not as a terrorist but as a people's person, his strategy is completely unusual, he is given
free oil using CITGO Company, a subsidiary of Petrleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), that is located is the U.S., to the
people who are living in shelters, and subsidizing up to 40 per cent of the oil market price for the people with low
income. This strategy is making him to be recognized as a hero on the east coast of the U.S. But this is not
everything, the resulting savings from this initiative, known as Low Income Heating Oil Program, are being used to
pay the rent of the people with the lowest income in those communities. Also is dividing politicians, in one side John
Negroponte said `Chavez is using Venezuelan petrodollars to finance an extravagant international policy, with no
direct reference to the generosity with the poor of U.S.', on the other side Charles Rangel, a Democrat, says `This
gesture is an example, more Americans are complaining and asking for help to tackle the high price of heat their
places (status quo disruption) (6). This strategy have been a complete success, his populism has strike the heart of
the United States. Hugo Chavez is following also the scholarship of Griecco: ` Dealing
counterpart.
"Latin
America is violent
and some large cities such as Caracas. With 140,000 homicides in 2010, it is understandable how Latin America got
this reputation. Each of the countries in Central America's "Northern Triangle" (Guatemala, Honduras, and El
Salvador) had more murders in 2010 than the entire European Union combined. Violence in Latin America is
related to poverty and inequality. When combined with the insatiable international appetite for
As strongly argued by a number of
prominent regional leaders -- including Brazil's former president, Fernando H. Cardoso, and Colombia's
strongly
former president, Cesar Gaviria -- a strategy based on demand reduction, rather than supply, is the only way to
reduce crime in Latin America. Although some fear the Mexican drug violence could spill over into the southern
America. Although the region has not been immune to radical jihadist attacks -- the 1994 attack on a Jewish
Community Center in Buenos Aires, for instance -- they have been rare. Terrorist attacks on the civilian population
have been limited to a large extent to the FARC organization in Colombia, a tactic which contributed in large part to
the organization's loss of popular support.
Kritik
production of control regimes. This certainly reflects important aspects of contemporary campaigns to regulate
pariah weapons but, as I suggest below, it offers a rather incomplete account. Moreover, if such accounts did
indeed provide a complete understanding of the dynamics underpinning these control agendas it would certainly
represent a novel development, not least because the long history of pariah weapons regulation illustrates the way
the rather less successful attempt of the Second Lateran Council to ban the crossbow a ban partly motivated by
the fact that crossbows could pierce the armour of the knight and a ban that was notably not extended to use
against non-Christians.49Similarly, whilst the restrictions on the slave, arms, and liquor trade to Africa embodied in
the 1890 Brussels Act were certainly grounded in an ethical discourse, the restrictions imposed on the trade in
firearms were primarily rooted in concerns about the impact of the trade on colonial order. As one British colonial
official noted at the time, the restrictions on the small arms trade to Africa reflected imperial concern to avoid the
development and pacification of this great continent ... [being] carried out in the face of an enormous population,
same, or other, powerful actors also provide countervailing pressures the immediate interests of nobles in
winnings wars with crossbows mostly won out over their broader class interests,51 whilst colonial competition to
secure arms profits and local allies mitigated the impact of the various restrictions on the firearms trade in the late
19th century.52 But the point is that whilst the genesis of earlier attempts at pariah regulation may, in part, be
that will be taken up below. Pariah Weapons, Heroic Weapons, and Legitimized Military Technology A further
sometimes constructed as the antithesis of the heroic weapon a weapon deemed to embody positive values such
as honour and / or which is deemed central to national defence. Thus, the series of relatively successful Acts
implemented in England between 1508 and 1542 banning crossbows were largely rooted in a concern to preserve
the use of the heroic longbow, deemed central to a long line of English military successes.53
The Japanese
ban on the gun was similarly connected to the romanticization of the heroic samurai
sword as the visible form of ones honour, as associated with grace of movement in battle and even
its status as a work of art.54 In effect both the crossbow in 16th century England and the gun in 17th and
18th century Japan became the other which defined legitimized military
technologies and militarism. Redford makes much the same point about English attitudes to the
submarine, which was constructed as an other partly because of the British romanticization of the battleship (the
upper class or aristocracy of warships)55 as central to British security and linked to British notions of valour and
standard weapon, to be taken off the shelf conventional ironmongery.57 This is not to suggest that American
use of cluster munitions in this period went unremarked. There were certainly some critics at the time who argued
that such weapons were inhumane.58 There were also attempts, sponsored by the International Committee of the
Red Cross (ICRC) and Sweden in particular, to promote restrictions on cluster munitions in negotiations in the 1970s
on the Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions.59 The point is however, that these efforts never
achieved traction either with diplomats or with a wider public in the way that the issue would 30 years later .
The
labels attached to cluster munitions and also landmines only changed dramatically
as the move into the post-Cold War era occurred when they moved from being
treated as unproblematic elements in global military arsenals to a form of
technology non grata weaponry deemed immoral, inhumane, and indiscriminate .
Crucially, such a successful process of stigmatization was only made feasible in the
context of a post-Cold War widening of the security labe l to incorporate the notion of human
security as a referent object; by the turn to casting security interventions in humanitarian
terms; and the representation of modern weaponry as humane because of
its perceived capacity to better discriminate between civilians and
combatants. The widening and deepening of the security label created the permissive
environment necessary for activists to reframe cluster munitions (and APMs) as threats
to the human. At the same time, the discussion of intervention in humanitarian terms60
and of precision weapons as instruments of humane warfare61 created a legitimized
discursive space into which campaigners could insert a re-representation of
landmines and cluster munitions technology as inhumane . Indeed, such a rerepresentation only exerted a powerful appeal because it was consonant with both the
predominant framing of security threats in a postCold War world and a new divide between good and
odious military technology. This is not to suggest that such developments reflected some teleology in
which security and arms control practice progressively evolved to be more humane. As Krause and Latham have
noted, for example, whilst the post-Cold War era concern with the impact of inhumane weapons represents a
notable shift compared with the Cold War arms control agenda, it does have similarities with the late 19th century
when a Western discourse of civilized warfare was also prominent. One corollary of this then as now was a
concern to specify what constituted an inhumane weapon62 manifest, for example, in the negotiations in the
Hague conferences over problem technologies such as the dum dum bullet. As Michael Howard has suggested
prohibitions on cluster munitions and also APMs can be understood as similarly ambiguous developments. On the
the legitimizing discourse of Western militaries and arms firms was turned
against them in order to generate powerful taboos against particular categories of
weapons even in the face of opposition from these militaries. The language of state security was
coopted to promote human security, to preserve life, and prevent threats to its
existence. On the other hand, the same prohibitions can ultimately be understood less as
progressive initiatives imposed on foot-dragging states by the bottom-up
power of global civil society and more as performative acts that
simultaneously function to codify aspects of a new set of criteria for
judging international respectability in a post-Cold War era, to reinforce the
security framings of the era and to legitimize those categories of weapons
successfully constructed as precise, discriminate, and thus humane . Indeed, to
one hand,
the extent that states such as the United States have been able to circumscribe their commitments on landmines
etc. they have been able to benefit from the broader legitimizing effects of specific weapons taboos without being
unduly constrained by the specific regulatory requirements they have given rise to. Moreover, as already noted,
link between regulation and the paradigms of political economy go beyond this, reflecting a much more
fundamental common sense about economy and trade. For example, the rise of mercantilism from about the 1600s
meant the previous dominance of private arms traders was replaced by that of government arsenals64 and the
emphasis on autarky encouraged a more restrictive approach to the regulation of arms transfers.65 In England for
example, Queen Elizabeth I issued an order in 1574 restricting the number of guns to be cast in England to those
for the only use of the Realm66 and further Ordnances restricting the export of arms were passed in 1610 and
1614.67 In contrast, the shift in economic ideology from mercantilism to capitalism led to the more laissez-faire
approach to the regulation of arms transfers in the late 19th century already described above. Britain moved to a
more laissez-faire basis from 1862 onwards, France passed legislation in 1885 reinstituting the private manufacture
of arms and also repealed the law prohibiting exports.68 Indeed, this was an era in which the Prussian government
did not even feel able to compel Krupp to abjure exports to Austria on the eve of war with that country in 1866.69
Economic philosophy also shaped both discourse and practice on the regulation of the arms trade in the aftermath
of World War I. Against the background of what Buzan and Waever have described as a broader attempt to
construct war as a threat to civilisation after World War I70 private arms manufacturers were particularly
castigated for the role they had supposedly played in fomenting war fever to promote sales, a role facilitated by
their alleged control over the press in many countries.71 This partly explained the attempts in 1919 and 1925 to
develop international agreements on the regulation of the arms trade, although in reality a broader set of
international order and security concerns were also at work (see below). However, the 1919 and 1925 agreements
never received the necessary ratifications to come into force (although they did have important legacy effects) and
the laissez faire approach to the arms trade still predominated throughout the 1920s. It was only in the 1930s that
concern about the activities of the arms manufacturers gained particular salience in both the media and policy
circles. In part this may have been a function of the deteriorating international situation, but as Harkavy has
argued, it was also a function of the fact that the Great Depression had prompted widespread doubts about the
general viability of the capitalist system.72Consequently,
administrations in the United States have attempted to ease restrictions on exports to key allies, most notably in
the form of defence trade cooperation treaties with Australia and the United Kingdom announced in 2007, although
these have yet to be ratified by the Senate.77 The effect of these agreements will be to permit the licence-free
The Obama
administration has, in addition, committed itself to a radical overhaul of the
American export control system to make it easier to export weapons to American
allies and to emerging markets such as China . For example, the administration has claimed that in
transfer of defence goods between the United States and each of the signatories.78
the case of items related to tanks and military vehicles, the new rules would remove 74 per cent of the items
currently on the US Munitions List.79 In other words, the export of brake pads for tanks may no longer be subject to
a regime of extraordinary measures. Similar processes have been at work in other countries. For example, in 2002
the United Kingdom announced changes to its methodology for assessing licence applications for components to be
incorporated into military equipment for onward export, a reform generally interpreted as opening a significant
export licensing loophole,80 whilst in 2007 the French government announced it would ease restrictions on
products moving within the European Union.81 At the same time as this occurred NGOs became more focussed on
the security outcomes stemming from the trade in small arms and landmines. To the extent that NGOs and
academics have engaged with the issue of major conventional arms transfers, they have tended to follow the lead
set by government and industry by engaging with the economic rationale for defence exports albeit in an attempt
to debunk them.82The combined effect of this has been to give a more central place to a technocratic discourse on
major weapons transfers focussed on their economic costs and benefits to suppliers. This is not to suggest that
strategic rationales for arms transfers have disappeared completely they still remain important factors in specific
cases, particularly post-9/11. Nevertheless, as Hartung has noted, with the end of the Cold War, the economic
rationales for arms sales moved to the forefront.83One corollary of this greater emphasis on the economics of
arms sales has been the post-Cold War deproblematization of major arms transfers84 at least in terms of debates
about their security outcomes. Today, such sales are primarily discussed (by exporters at least, if not by recipients
and their neighbours) in the language of the technocrat and the banker - the language of jobs, financing terms,
market share, and performance evaluation. Indeed, both government and NGO security concerns about the
negative effects of the arms trade have bifurcated with concern focussed either on the problem of weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) (problematized primarily in terms of their potential acquisition by rogues) or, at the other
end of the scale, on issues such as small arms (primarily problematized in terms of the illicit rather than the legal
If neoliberalism has
facilitated a more permissive approach to arms transfer regulation then this raises
the question of why any limits have been introduced at all ? As already noted above, one
part of the answer is rooted in the relationship between legitimized and heroic
weapons and those military technologies that lie outside the boundaries of the
heroic and the legitimized. Being the other of legitimized military
technology facilitates successful problematization and indeed extrasecuritisation. Additionally however, the architecture of global arms trade regulation has been transformed
trade in such weapons). Arms Trade Regulation and the Security Problematique
in the post-Cold War era along with the transformation in the objects of security that accompanied the end of the
Cold War. During the Cold War, the global architecture of conventional arms trade regulation, like arms control more
generally, was principally focussed on managing East West tensions. One consequence was a substantial extension
of the range of dual-use goods invested with security labels in relation to trade with Eastern Europe, most manifest
in debates in the early 1950s between the United States and European states over the operation of CoCoM
(Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls).85 In contrast, the developing world was merely an object
of security competition between the superpowers and therefore a site for the supply of arms to allies. With the
dissolution of the Soviet threat the focus has turned more to the management of NorthSouth relations as the
developing world has been reconstructed as the source of diverse security threats86 and as humanitarian
intervention has resurrected similar concerns with the maintenance of order in the developing world that animated
the arms restrictions in the Brussels Act. One manifestation of this has been in the reframing of small arms as
instruments of disorder rather than the means to shore up Cold War allies. A further example is the replacement of
the CoCom regime with the Wasennaar Arrangement, focussed particularly on restricting transfers to pariah
regimes in the global South. This shift in focus is also manifest in the significant rise in the use of arms embargoes
characterized by a relatively more permissive approach to arms transfers in general but also a redirection of
controls away from the governance of East West relations and towards the governance of North South relations
and particularly the disciplining of those actors framed as rogue or pariah in the security narratives of dominant
The campaign to promote an arms trade treaty may yet produce a more
meaningful architecture of arms transfer control the jury is out. However the framing of the
actors.
Arms Trade Treaty to the defence industry is perhaps instructive. For example, the UKs Ambassador for Multilateral
Arms Control has noted, the ATT ... is about ... export controls that will stop weapons ending up in the hands of
terrorists, insurgents, violent criminal gangs, or in the hands of dictators.88 It should also be noted that current
efforts to develop a global agreement on the arms trade echo late 19thth and early 20thth century initiatives to
govern the international arms trade, most notably: the Brussels Act, the 1919 St Germain Convention for the Control
of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, and the 1925 Arms Traffic Convention. Although the latter two never received
the necessary ratifications to come into force both were animated by the same imperial concern to prevent disorder
in the colonies that had underpinned the Brussels Act. As Stone has noted with regards to the St Germain
convention for example, there was little doubt among representatives in Paris [where the Convention was signed]
that keeping arms out of African and Asian hands was St Germains chief task.89Accordingly, the convention
imposed far stricter restrictions on sales to these areas as well as a ban on arms shipments to any country which
refuses to accept the tutelage under which it has been placed.90 Indeed, although the convention never came into
being, European powers nevertheless agreed informally to carry out its provisions in Africa and the Middle East.91
The 1925 convention similarly imposed more severe restrictions on exports to special zones that covered most of
Africa and parts of what had been the Ottoman Empire.92 Thus, viewed against this broader history of arms
regulation, negotiations on a putative Arms Trade Treaty (rather like action on APMs or cluster munitions) do not
represent a novel post-Cold War development that symbolizes progress on an emancipatory human security agenda
consonant with the promotion of local and global peace. Instead, it reflects the emergence of particular sets of
relationships between power, interest, economy, security, and legitimized military technologies that in turn create
the conditions of emergence for historically contingent architectures of global regulation. Conclusion The preceding
analysis has a number of implications for campaigners, but also speaks to the debates about the utility of the
securitization framework outlined at the start of this article. First, it provides support for Abrahamsons notion of the
security spectrum. Viewed in a more historical perspective, what is notable about the post-Cold War emergence of a
humanitarian arms control agenda is the way in which action on landmines, cluster munitions, and even small arms
have been made possible by a quite dramatic transformation in the way such technology is represented. They have,
in Abrahamsons formulation, been moved along the spectrum of security from normal, run-of-the mill,
stigmatization, one factor can be the way their particular qualities are depicted as the antithesis of those possessed
by legitimized and particularly heroic weapons. Conversely, the stigmatization of pariah weapons works to delineate
other weapons as normal and legitimate. There is therefore a process of mutual constitution that is at work in the
way different sets of weapons technology are framed and understood. Third, the preceding analysis illustrates the
relevance of Floyds argument that processes of securitization or desecuritization can be positive and negative,
particularly when considered in terms of their emancipatory effects. As noted above ,
in the case of
landmines a process of relative desecuritization vis-a`-vis the state combined with a
process of extra-securitization vis-a`-vis the human to bring about the production of
a ban widely considered to have produced positive security outcomes for
individuals, communities, and the human as a collective. In contrast, the relative
desecuritization of major weapons transfers represents a much more ambiguous
development. It could, of course, be argued that such a change in the security labels attached to the weapons
holdings of neighbouring states would not only reflect but reinforce a move to more peaceable relations. In addition,
the relative deproblematization of defence transfers might be conceived as a positive development, particularly for
states that possess minimal domestic defence industrial capacity, and are threatened by hostile neighbours. At the
same time however, such a shift along the spectrum of security arguably represents a quite regressive
irrespective
of the powerful ways in which the security labels attached to major weapons are
shaped by discourse and other forms of representation, they still possess a residual
materiality, however thin, that is characterized by their capacity to facilitate the
organized prosecution of violence. More generally, the transfer of such technologies can also be
development when applied to the issue of arms transfers. This is particularly the case given that,
viewed as symptomatic of a world characterized by deeply problematic higher order paradigms of security and
economy. At the very least then, the relative (if not complete) desecuritization of major arms transfers would
appear to raise further questions about the Copenhagen Schools normative commitment to desecuritization.
Although more accurately, it highlights the effects that come from ratcheting down the security labels attached to
normal arms transfers and subjecting them to the kind of standard bureaucratic routines highlighted by Bigo,
many thousands
of export licences granted for the transfer of weapons other than landmines, cluster
munitions, and small arms are far less likely to become the object of public scrutiny
or become subject to intense public and political contestation about the security
effects of such exports. In this sense at least, the switch from a Cold War arms transfer system where
albeit the routines of the export licencing process in this case. One consequence, is that the
security motivations for exports often predominated to one where economic motivations are more to the fore, has
also been accompanied by a corresponding depoliticization of contemporary transfers, a phenomenon that
highlights the problematic nature of the neat division between politicized and securitized issues outlined in the CS
conception of securitization and one that highlights the downside of even partial moves towards the
desecuritization end of the security spectrum. Fourth, the success of campaigns on landmines and cluster munitions
demonstrates how moments of intervention undertaken on behalf of the voiceless by supposedly weak securitizing
actors such as NGOs can, nevertheless, produce quite effective securitizations in this case, the hypersecuritization of particular weapons technologies. Both campaigns also highlighted the ways in which actors can
utilize media images and, through survivor activism that extended to the conference room, provide a context for
the body to speak security. Moreover, the success of these campaigns highlights the ways in which the language of
threat, survival, and security can be deployed to achieve positive security outcomes. At the same time however,
the success of the humanitarian arms control agenda around landmines and cluster
munitions in particular was only achieved because NGOs adopted exactly the same
discourse around humanitarianism, human security and weapons precision that has
been deployed to legitimize post-Cold War liberal peace interventionism and in the
marketing of new weapons developments . On one reading, this might point to the potential for
actors to deploy dominant forms of security speech in order to achieve progressive ends. On a more pessimistic
munitions were successful because they did not threaten, and in many ways were quite consistent with, the
dominant security paradigm and security narratives of the post-Cold War era. Equally, whilst the regularized
routines and working practices of the security professionals of the export licensing process are certainly important
in understanding the treatment of defence transfers, this body of professionals were themselves, brought into being
as a result of historical changes in the fundamental assumptions about security and economy. Moreover, their very
working practices and modes of behaviour are currently being altered as a result of similar fundamental shifts in the
paradigms of security and economy which, in turn, are a function of particular combinations of power and interest.
Although these shifts certainly predated the post-Cold War era, they have become particularly concretized in this
example, overall, world defence expenditure in 2008 was estimated to be $1,464 billion (of which NATO countries
accounted for 60 per cent and OECD countries 72 per cent) representing a 45 per cent increase in real terms since
1999,93whilst global arms sales were 22 per cent higher in real terms for the period 2005 2009 than for the
preceding period 2000 2004.94 Moreover, largely because of the dominance of American and European defence
spending, the defence trade is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the United States and to a lesser extent,
European companies. For example, in 2006 American and European companies accounted for an estimated 92.7
per cent of the arms sales of the worlds 100 largest defence companies.95 Most arms trade NGOs have largely
neglected issues such as the rises in defence expenditure in major weapons states such as the United States, intranorthern trade in arms, and the dominant role played by Western companies in the arms trade, in favour of an
agenda that conceives the South and in particular pariah actors in sub-Saharan Africa as the primary object of
conventional arms trade regulation.96With regard to transfers of small arms and major conventional weapons it
might be argued that this, at least, also requires impressive self-abnegation from arms trade profits on the part of
powerful states in the international system. In practice however, international initiatives such as the EU Code or the
Wassennaar Arrangement, national export regulations of the major weapons states and the local initiatives of client
states mostly combine to produce a cartography of prohibition that corresponds more closely with the disciplinary
geographies advocated by the powerful rather than any global map of militarism and injustice. One illustration of
this is the way in which a recent review of British defence export legislation downgraded long-range missiles and
the heroic Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV the Maxim gun of modern imperial wars) from a category A
classification (goods such as cluster munitions whose supply is prohibited) to the less restrictive category B,97
whilst in 2010, the Afghan government proscribed the import, use, and sale of Ammonium Nitrate Fertilizer because
it is one of the elements used in the making of IEDs.98 More generally, as one recent econometric analysis of major
weapons transfers from the Britain, France, Germany, and the United States concluded, despite much rhetoric about
Neither human
rights abuses nor autocratic polity would appear to reduce the likelihood of
countries receiving Western arms, or reduce the relative share of a particular
exporters weapons they receive. In fact, human rights abusing countries are actually
the need for a more ethical approach to arms sales from governments in all these countries:
more likely to receive weapons from the US, while autocratic regimes emerge as more likely
recipients of weaponry from France and the UK.99 Of course, arms trade NGOs have often been the first to highlight
such hypocrisies and the work of most organizations include, to a greater or lesser extent, elements of critique or
advocacy that might be considered transformational. However, one of the principle features of arms trade activism
in the post-Cold War era is the extent to which many NGOs have downgraded radical critique in exchange for
insider influence and government funding.100 Instead ,
had methods of doing this thing before todays remotely-operated weapons were invented. Back in the day, when
you wanted to avoid the bad publicity of USAF or USN platforms getting formally involved in shadow wars (and
they often were anyway, as they very obviously are now), you started a secret air force. Former USAF or USN
airframes, crewed and often even supported by foreign nationals or deniable covert operators. This was what
foreheads decide to do so. If it was, then wed see being drones use din the expendable, cost-free ways that our
assets with which the CIA can emply and is now employing in its modern shadow conflicts. The very same
compartmentalization and secrecy that protect the drone campaign also protects the activities of manned strike
interventions of the 1990s and 2000s (themselves, as Carl Schmitt foresaw in the 1950s, an outgrowth of naval
technology). Whats at least slightly novel about these campaigns is the way in which bureaucracies and
secrecy have been utilized to obscure policymakers use of all manner of overt and
covert strike, ground, intelligence and proxy assets from proxy criticism, even
though even this was essentially cultivated during the Cold War . Perhaps some day in the
future drone capabilities will improve enough that they will actually encourage the lack of accountability and
bellicosity that critics blame for them. But
we must realize that this demonstration is not enough; that focusing on drones is
not enough. We must battle the War On Terror overall, as drones are only a small
part of that. The global drone attacks started under Bush and have continued and massively expanded under
Obama, with Obama going so far as to assassinate four US citizens (officially speaking). Yet,
while this is extremely problematic, it is a symptom of Americas global militarism . Contrary to
popular thinking, this global militarism didnt start in the Bush era, but rather in the time
of FDR, with World War II, and has continued and intensified since then . The US has,
overtly, either already been involved in or started new wars/conflicts every single decade since the 1940s. This has
created destruction all over the world, not just physically in terms of destroyed infrastructure, but mentally[1],
It can be seen in everything, from attacks on mosques[5] to anti-Muslim ads[6]. This hatred and racism has heavily
infected every part of our society to the point where it is seen as OK for TV pundits to spew anti-Muslim hatred.
Americans relationship with their government has greatly changed ever since the War on Terror was launched.
While the government had previously spied on American citizens[7] (and even assassinated some[8]), it was mainly
Framework
rights occupy the liberty field because of the practical issue of attention
bandwidth, which potentially applies both to agencies and advocates. After all, even large organizations have
limited capacity.319 NSA compliance is such an enormous task that little room remains for
more conceptual weighing of interests and options . Recall that of the dozen-plus offices I
described in Part II, just twothe Civil Liberties and Privacy Office at the NSA, and the Privacy and Civil Liberties
Oversight Boardare currently playing a policy rather than strictly a compliance role. They are also, not
coincidentally, the two newest and two smallest of the offices listed. I think, though, that this bandwidth issue is
Stasi or the NSA? Definitely the Stasi. East German citizens had no defense
whatsoever against its intrusions. American citizens can still exercise control
over our own intelligence organizations, which are still bound (or so we are told) by
the rule of law. But do we really have the will to restrain them ? There is admittedly some
faint courage in being willing to even make the comparison, but there is something utterly more
remarkable in the ideological refrain of asking if American citizens can still exercise
control over our own intelligence organizationas if the states intelligence
apparatus had ever been democraticor so we are told. But this is hardly uncommon.
Dan Gettingers recent piece for the Center here frames the question in terms of legislative
oversight in the application of the AUMF: Understanding this legal debate and the evolving
strategic situation determines how this country deploys its forces abroad, the kinds
of military technologies that we invest in, and the degree of oversight that Congress
has over the use of force by the Executive Branch. While the outcome of this debate
will likely result in some form forever war against terrorism, the question
remains as to whether it will be conducted in the shadows of ambiguity or limited
by some degree of Congressional observation. And here we are back at the lesser evil. It is
significant, I think, that it is fundamentally impossible it is to reconcile any of this with
anything like actual democracy. These are questions for policy elitesand perhaps
for those who imagine themselves among their ranks. But the question is always
between more killing and less killing, between more secrecy and less secrecy,
more oversight and less oversightalways witheringly loyal to the same order of
violence that produced these choices in the first placeand which never bore any of
us any loyalty. As the American liberal left has foundered for years, attempting to articulate a challenge to the
logic of permanent war and the terror state, it has failed to recognize that the War on Terror does not
represent an aberration or a failure of policy. It is not an imperial venture run
rampant. Neither is it the military-carceral response of an empire incapable of
delivering prosperity for anyone beyond its increasingly rapacious aristocracy. Nor is
it even the immanent danger of building weapons that will always one day be
turned inwards. Of course, it is all these thingsbut at its heart, the forever war is only
an unusually visible moment in the only war theres ever been.
2011 National Strategy for Counterterrorism (NSC) was released just thirteen months later
states that the paramount terrorist threat has
continued to evolve and due to the successes of the United States in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaidas leadership and organisation has been
significantly weakened. The terrorist threat is now located beyond its core
safehaven in South Asia, to groups affiliated with but separate from the core of
the group in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The focus of the NSC is not just al-Qaida the organisation,
and advances the narratives in the 2010 NSS. It
but the collection of groups and individuals who comprise its affiliates and adherents who accept al-Qaidas
affiliates is not an authorised legal term, and is instead a broader category of entities against whom the United
States must bring various elements of national power, as appropriate and consistent with the law, to counter the
threat they pose.41 Downloaded by [Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries] at 16:12 26 June 2013 Predator
unmanned aerial vehicle in either document, despite these technologies clearly forming a central pillar in Obamas
counterterrorist strategy (and oftentimes the only strategy used in countries such as Pakistan). But what matters is
that the NSS and NSC set in motion powerful national strategies that legitimise the geopolitical conditions for the
the Pentagons release of a shorter but no less controversial Defense Strategic Guidance (DSG) at the start of 2012
entitled Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense.43 The document, which aims to
further the objectives of the 2010 NSS, attracted criticism because it called for the end of Americas ability to fight
two wars at once (which was still a strategy enshrined in the 2010 NSS). Effectively the DSG spells the death knell
of large ground wars and counterinsurgency, which were trumpeted only years earlier by Gen. David Petraeus and
the widely celebrated Field Manual FM 3-24. As the DSG states, U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct
largescale, prolonged stability operations.44 Taking its place is a Joint Force that Obama calls agile, flexible, ready
and technologically advanced,45 capable of hunting affiliates and non-state threats in anti-access
environments and ungoverned territories. Speaking about the DSG, former Secretary of State
Leon Panetta
stated: As we reduce the overall defence budget, we will protect and in some cases
increase our investments in special operations forces, new technologies like
unmanned systems, space and in particular cyberspace capabilities and in the
capacity to quickly mobilize.46 Panettas words are telling: future American national
strategy will be performed by special operations forces and drones, and while the
enormous US ground presence around the world will be reduced (but by no means
eliminated), US aerial presence is set to expand. And if the trends in Pakistan,
Somalia, and Yemen continue, such an aerial presence will be spearheaded by the
CIA and underwritten by the White Houses bureaucratic playbook .47 The CIA
attracts controversy because its targeted killings have led to civilian causalities. The
year 2010 was the deadliest year in the programmes history . Yet John Brennan,
President Obamas former chief counterterrorism adviser, and now CIA director,
claimed at the time that one of the things President Obama has insisted on is that
were exceptionally precise and surgical in terms of addressing the terrorist threat ...
we do not take such action Downloaded by [Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries] at 16:12 26 June
2013 8 Ian G. R. Shaw that might put those innocent men, women and children in
danger, adding that nearly for the past year [August 2010 to July 2011] there hasnt been
a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the
capabilities that weve been able to develop .48 And yet, The Bureau of Investigative
Journalism found that there were 116 secret CIA strikes in Pakistan over the period
Brennan mentions, with at least 45 civilians killed, 10 of which were children. 49 Of course,
the divide between militant and civilian is itself problematic given the absence
of due process for the people killed, and the legal ambiguity of what a militant
actually is. In 2012 it came to light that Obama himself defines who counts as a militant. Amongst a media
maelstrom, the New York Times reported that Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for
counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all militaryage males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration
officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them
innocent.50 Quite how (and if) analysts collect posthumous evidence is unknown. In sum, while the
White House goes to great lengths to connect drone warfare to a clean, crisp
battlespace, where the conduct of war comes to be ever more calculative than
corporeal,51 the reality for those subject to Hellfire missiles is similar to the drone
programme itself: messy52 and all-too-human.
The modern Predator drone dates back to the GNAT-750 (and Amber before it) flown in Bosnia
in 1994 by the CIA under codename LOFTY VIEW. Six years later in 2000, the CIA first started
flying Predators in Eastern and Southern Afghanistan in the hunt for Osama bin
Laden. The agencys first targeted killing took place on February 2002; the
Counterterrorism Center unleashed a Hellfire missile at a tall man believed to be
none other than Downloaded by [Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries] at 16:12 26 June 2013 4 Ian G. R.
the al-Qaida leader and his lieutenants. But the analysts had wrongly identified
civilians gathering up scrap metal.12 All were killed. And in a mark of irony that
often haunts the drone wars the site of the strike was Zhawar Kili, a mujahideen
complex built by Jalaluddin Haqqani in the 1980s with CIA and Saudi support.13 This
model of extrajudicial killings, one developed almost exclusively in-house,14 would
soon be rolled out across the Durrand Line to become the model of drone strikes in
Pakistan. Since 2004, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has been the
primary target for the agencys clandestine attacks. Hundreds of civilians and
thousands of militants have died15 in an undeclared war that generates
international controversy for its seeming violation of national sovereignty and
international law.16 While the number of drones carried by the CIA is classified, in 2012 the agencys former
Shaw
director David Petreaus requested that the number of Predators and Reapers increase by 10, from an inventory of
remain shrouded in secrecy, despite Obamas admission on a web chat that he was keeping the strikes on a tight
the paper will examine these strategic discourses in more depth, especially in light of the 2012 Defense Strategic
(CIVIC)32 and a 2012 report by Stanford Law School and the New York School of Law.33 From these empirical
materials I then make a number of theoretical points concerning the changing face of US national security or the
Links
Johnson, the primary witness to the shooting, claims Officer Wilson gunned down a wounded Brown who had his
hands raised in surrender. Browns corpse was left on the street for four hours. Blacks in Ferguson, Missouri, have
long decried systematic violence at the hands of a virtually all-white police force. Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis,
has shifted from 74 percent white to 63 percent African-American since 1990, and has been pummeled by the
grab bag of military aid through the 1033 program, the Law Enforcement Support Office, and Department of
Homeland Security grants, enabling local enforcement agencies to snatch up drones, mine-resistant vehicles, battle
extension entire communities. Civil liberties deteriorated even further after September 11. In an atmosphere where
the public has been stampeded into trading freedom for security, police violence and lack of accountability
Americans.
Given the systematic crimes by Ferguson police, Missouri State Gov. Jay Nixon was complicit in their
lawlessness by not replacing them immediately. Nixon dragged his heels and employed half measures, such as
bringing in a state police commander with limited powers and deploying National Guard troops to protect the police
10 days after the police violence began. But at no point were local police ordered off the streets. President Obama
whose oath of office is to uphold the Constitution laid low before finally dispatching Attorney General Eric Holder to
Ferguson. Police enjoy social power, which is demonstrated by the crowd-funding webpage for Darren Wilson that
raked in nearly a quarter-million dollars in donations. Elected officials vacillate because they are afraid to challenge
the social power of police.
clear. Brown was a thing, a thug, and a waste of good ammo. Blacks [use] every excuse in the book to loot
and riot. One person exhorted, Wake up White America. Another said, All self-respecting whites have a moral
responsibility to support our growing number of martyrs to the failed experiment called diversity. The racially
charged aggression reveals the hollowness of the age of Obama. In 2008 Obama presented himself as an avatar of
a post-racial America. The more he succeeded, the more it proved America had triumphed over its racist legacy.
Liberals embraced this fantasy because through Obama they could see themselves as good, just, and free of bias.
the post-racial ideology made Obama impotent to confront the structural racism
that still exists in America. White liberals are no less complicit than white conservatives in supporting and
But
benefiting from the economic and social power they gain from segregated housing, educational and employment. If
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for breaking into his own home and the stalking and killing of an unarmed
Trayvon Martin by a vigilante,
Obama was met with derision by the right and silence by most
liberals.
Obama learned his lesson. He had nothing to gain from confronting racism because his power was
based on denying, and not confronting, how America is fractured by race and class. If he had successfully
challenged it in his first presidential run, which is no mean feat, that would have brought together an organized
social base to counter the white reactionary response to Ferguson. Instead, Obama vacationed in silence on
Marthas Vineyard, the summer redoubt for Americas elite, and took five days to issue a statement that was tone
For Obama to state the obviousthat the police are the architects
of the violence in Ferguson, that they act like an occupying army towards the Blacks
there, and that unreconstructed racism is alive and wellwould provoke a huge
backlash among many whites, and a fair number of Asians and Latinos as well. To
reduce the issue of police violence in America to the equipment they use can easily backfire. While it will be a
real struggle to shelve the armored vehicles, body armor, machine guns, and
chemical weapons thats a small part of the battle. Removing all the military gear is
not going to magically transform the police into officer friendly in a fifties patrol car. The racist
policing and profiling wont end, nor will the wide license society, the courts, and
the media give them. Ive watched the NYPD in action for 25 years. They rarely rely on military weapons,
deaf and disappointing.
though they probably have every one imaginable. The New York police brass is savvy. Using tanks, which they once
did in 1995 as a show of force against squatters, looks bad for tourism. Using tear gas, rubber bullets, or other
less-lethal weapons is a no-no given how many bankers and executives might get hit. As observers of Occupy
Wall Street witnessed the police used good old-fashioned fists and clubs to bash demonstrators. I talked to one
reporter who caught sight of cops bloodying handcuffed activists in the back of a police van during an Occupy
protest. But the most devastating weapon the NYPD has is a policy: stop and frisk . Since
2002 the NYPD has been under court order to collect, compile, and make public data regarding stop-and-frisks. By
explain the vast disparity is the policy is racist. Stop and frisk assumed Black and
Latino males were criminal suspects based solely on their race . In 2010, former NYPD
Commissioner Ray Kelly allegedly told New York State elected officials outright that the police deliberately
targeted young Black and Latino men because he wanted to instill fear in them ,
every time they leave their home they could be stopped by the police. During the last decade a movement came
together in New York to stop the racist policing that has destroyed tens of thousands of lives by sending innocent
men to prison or for nothing more than possessing a little marijuana. More court orders were handed down. Many
media outlets called for an end to stop and frisk, and Bill de Blasio won the mayoralty in 2013 by making the policy
a campaign issue. Once victorious, however, de Blasio angered many supporters by rehiring Bill Bratton as NYPD
infractions like pan handling, pot smoking, graffiti, and subway fare jumpers deliberately targets minorities as well.
In three overwhelmingly Black and Latino neighborhoods in Brooklyn, more than 50,000 summons were issued for
biking on sidewalks between 2001 and 2013. I never have to worry about that in Manhattan, where I live. Bikers on
sidewalksof which there are manyin the tony white neighborhoods of Tribeca and the Finance District received
only 325 tickets during the same period. Making this crime central to policing will mean many more young men of
sending police to look for minor nuisance and imposing quotas on them for arrests, as the NYPD reportedly does,
guarantees needless and hostile encounters. On Staten Island, police targeted Eric Garner on July 17 because he
was involved in breaking up a fight. At every point the cops escalated the confrontation and eventually piled on
because whenever excesses happen like the killing of Michael Brown occur (or Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Trayvon
precedents of the crossbow, aerial bombardment and colonial warfare are any
indication, then one would think that efforts to regulate drone warfare
would be headed the same way because it simply beggars belief to think
that parties who have such an edge would voluntarily limit, let alone
relinquish, their advantage. Beyond mere differentials in technology, it seems that what is at stake
is something deeper relating to the very structuration of war as a social activity and the ability to define it. It should
come as no surprise in this respect that the normative register of the crossbow mapped a not so subtle civilizational
divide. Ultimately the question was not whether the crossbow was inherently unlawful, but against whom it was
inherently unlawful and against whom it might be used. Similarly when it came to the 19th century laws of war the
question was as much what the laws should regulate as whom they should apply to, and especially, against. 121
Aerial bombardment of civilians, as well as the use of gas against them, was pioneered in the deserts of Abyssinia.
Whether it be the Saracens or savages, it was the presumed unwillingness or inability to respect the laws of war
that justified the use of extraordinary techniques that the West claimed to shun normatively in its midst (although
obviously not necessarily in actual fact). As Professor Sam Moyn puts it, there is arguably a continuum, not a
break, between the aesthetics, subjectivity, and morality of colonial warfare and its successors today, including in
drone campaigns.122
thus cease to be pertinent as a basic scenario for the bilateral use of violence, or would at least become
The second
scenario is of course the one that proved most pertinent in the context of the
crossbow and aerial bombardment, namely that most armies rushed to develop a
similar capability in a way that might not ensure victory but at least rescued war
from becoming an entirely one-sided killing enterprise and therefore a normative investment
unrecognizable through persistent subtraction of at least one purported player in the game.
that the other side had no interest in making. In this scenario, it is technological diffusion and relative
party that has drones and must make sense of its superiority . At one end of the spectrum,
the use of drones may inaugurate the dismantling of restraints on war through a
realization that there is no legitimate adversary, no one on the other side still
capable or willing of engaging the drone manipulators on their terms . This might then give
rise, rather somberly, to a view of statecraft, as the administration of death, a high-tech form of a regime of
disappearance whose inspiration is Machiavelli124 and in which the killing power will take advantage of the fact
that it is neither in a situation of war nor in a situation where human rights obligations are owed. In many ways, this
the more
technologically endowed party could continue to seek to wage war even against
parties that were committed not to wage war against it, effectively applying a sort
of unilateral laws of war and reinforcing the notion that asymmetrical norms must
correspond to asymmetrical conflicts. Perhaps, then, the application of sui generis rules,
somewhere at the intersection of the laws of war and international human rights
law, might make most sense with regards to the evolving challenges of drone
warfareone in which the heightened capacity of the attacker and his ability to wage war without really waging
one is matched by an added scruple in terms of safeguarding civilian lives.125 Drone warfare might
be seen as a bizarre synthesis of war-making and policing,126 requiring a new
historical compromise between law and morality. It would conceptualize drone fighting as part of
has been the preferred route of the war on terror in the last decade. At the other end of the spectrum,
a body of norms rooted less in expectations of reciprocity or in some fundamental obligation owed to those targeted
as human beings, than in a sense that with immense power must come heightened responsibilities. Although this
path might still be associated with a sort of exit from war in that it seems to burden the technologically superior
side with obligations that it cannot expect the asymmetrically disadvantaged side to reciprocate, it could also be
understood as maintaining the very ethos of war by keeping alive a sense of drone operators military self-worth
and human dignity as a particular way of ethically living up to ones potential for death and destruction.127
use of drones domestically has sparked heated debate around the potential
threats to both privacy and safety. The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that
drones "raise significant issues for privacy and civil liberties" since they are capable of "highly advanced
surveillance." In terms of commercial use, the Federal Aviation Administration has proposed rules to limit where
military drone usage abroad has been opposed by various groups, it hasn't drawn
the same kind of attention stateside as the emergence of commercial drones . The
US appears more interested in whether drones will be approved for
package delivery than whether it's acceptable to use drones for targeted
killings in Yemen. I recently spoke with John Kaag about that contradiction. Mr. Kagg is an
associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He recently
drones can fly. While
coauthored a book called "Drone Warfare" with Sarah Kreps, an associate professor in the Department of
oversight on the government using drones for domestic surveillance than international military missions? Kaag:
Theres a simple answer to this question. It can. Once Congress approves the Authorization of Use of Military Force
(AUMF), an extension of the War Powers Resolution, it has relatively little authority over the actions taken by the
in 2001. But that authorization was made against Al Qaeda, not ISIS, and these two organizations are largely
rivals. So, an extension of presidential power has occurred, and Congress has little power to curtail it. At the same
time, Congress has considerably more oversight over domestic matters, and members of Congress have been
consistently pushed by their constituents to oversee the FBI and other government agencies to secure their
at least originally, supposed to be checked by the will of the people. The issue of moral myopia is a bit simpler.
Just because it may be true, psychologically, that its easier to turn a blind eye to
injustice far away, does not mean that its morally justified to do so. Many drone strikes
are in fact legitimate. But certain signature strikes, I would argue, are not. And the American public should be aware
of this difference. Selinger: Why have some argued new courts should be created to review when drones are used
for targeted killings that are modeled upon the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court system? Kaag: On the face of
it, the implementation of FISA-like courts makes sense. The FISA courts were created in 1978, after Watergate, to
regulate government eavesdropping. When government agencies such as the NSA or the FBI want to spy on
American citizens, they often have to go through the FISA court to get approval before doing so. The FISA courts are
an extension of domestic law enforcement that issues warrants without compromising the secret nature of
intelligence collection activities. Many senators, particularly Angus King [of Maine], have called for establishing
similar courts to monitor and approve the kill lists used in the US drone program. The proposed drone courts
would evaluate the imminence of threat, whether the drone strike upholds distinction and proportionality in the
laws of war, and whether a target could be captured rather than killed. Senator King, sticking to the model of the
FISA courts, is especially worried about the targeting of American citizens abroad. Selinger: Why are you skeptical
about replicating the FISA court model in this context? Kaag: The FISA courts are very weird. Our legal system is
based on an adversarial model. In other words, courts are places to dispute charges and impartial parties a judge
and jury make a decision about the case. The FISA courts arent like this. At all. FISA requests are not disputed.
Only a very, very small percentage of FISA requests have been denied over the courts 30 year history. Most are
approved as a matter of course. Sarah Kreps and I have argued that one of the more disturbing aspects of the FISA
courts are their recent expansion of the special needs doctrine, which allows the government to carry out
surveillance without detailed warrants in order to address an overriding public danger. We are concerned that this
sort of governance, when applied to the issue of drones, might provide strategists and policy makers with a type of
carte blanche over the targeted killing program. The alternative proposed by the Obama administration what the
President called an independent oversight board in the executive branch doesnt make us feel much better. It
does not address the question of checks and balances that has prompted calls for judicial oversight. Selinger: What
do you mean by checks and balances? Kaag: The call for transparency in the targeted killing program was
amplified early in 2013 around the confirmation hearings of John Brennan as the director of the CIA. At this time,
there was a call for the Obama administration to release secret legal memoranda concerning the targeting of
American citizens on foreign soil. Some of these documents were released to Congress in the lead up to the
Brennan confirmation. This is the sort of information exchange at the heart of checks and balances. And this
exchange shouldnt simply be used in the deal making of a confirmation hearing, but rather should slowly and
carefully become the norm in our age of drone warfare. Obviously, Congress is regularly briefed about the drone
program, but the Brennan hearing highlighted that there is a long way to go for sufficient oversight. This is what
Obama in two elections hoping that he would uphold the legacy of the real "Jedi order" of civil and human rights
advocates. But alas, it is a loss and a profound disappointment that he opted for the allure of the "Dark Side".
What would Martin Luther King, Jr and Nelson Mandela say about the drones? The
easy, silent and clinical deployment of death and destruction while constructing
the illusion that it is a sound, legally defensible policy and in-line with universal
human right principles is confusing at best, and outrageous at worst. Blood is not
an argument and the ability to kill without being seen and not knowing how many
are being killed is not a rationale or an argument for dealing with the threat of
terrorism. Drones and the military industrial complex The military industrial complex is alive
and well in the US and around the globe, and during Obama's presidency it has
have met the enemy and he is us," is a more apt description of what we
collectively have become as a nation and what we have allowed to be done in our
name. Raining death indiscriminately from a drone represents our collective national kneeling to the "Dark Side"
and accepting the politics of revenge as a convenient substitute for values, ethics and principles. What made the
"Death Star" such a powerful symbol in the "Star Wars" franchise is its total massive, destructive power
warfare moved from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen to US and European urban centres, where
Indeed, the American public accepted its utility first in fighting terrorists abroad but it was only a matter of time
before corporate and security interests saw the giant domestic market and moved to create the needed rationale
contradiction perfectly insurmountablecontradiction for the military-industrial complex of the U.S. and other
these same materials. This tangle complicatesany sustainable progress in the implementation of new technologies
in combat activity. For example, many advanced electronic components, such as those used for the so-called "smart
bombs", or satellite communications, etc., rely on the use of rare minerals that are refined up to 95% by China, and
whose global reserves are found in 60% in the hands of China, India, Korea, and countries ofsoutheast Asia. Global
manufacturing of high-flux magnets, superconductors, lasers, nuclear magnetic resonance equipment, aerospace
equivalent. The other problem is that the U.S. is not the only global player who came up with that idea. Iran, for
example, has developed its own drones from captured RQ- 170 Sentinel and Scan Eagles. Even Mexico, has
financial headaches for imperialism when using them to defend profits that are in turn absorbed by the use of their
the secret service program is not so secret anymore. Olympia has noticed an abnormal increase in its sales of
typewriters, and the FSO (Russian intelligence) have ordered a massive purchase of typewriters with a special tape
to avoid their communications being intercepted. If the complex could not be destroyed by the simple, there would
offensive over 100 military colonialist posts. The Bolsheviks took control during the insurrection of
telephones, telegraphs, drawbridges, etc., and they ceased to serve the bourgeois government, which was isolated.
There is hope for our struggle, with an efficient organization, bold and correct tactics, it can still sink imperialism.
But is not only that imperialist intervention is loaded with these contradictions but
also that it has historical limits that constantly threaten to tear it down completely.
Social collapse and war are odious calamities for the peoples, but at the same time
accelerate contradictions, and expose to sunlight the class nature of State and the various political forces, creating
dialectics, as Hegel described it ( Herrschaft und Knechtschaft ), of the master and slave, when the slave rebels not
only he puts himself at risk but also the master that confronts the double risk of being destroyed or cease to be
master if he cannot control his former slave without destroying him. The Cuban Revolution was a huge
After
decades and decades of war and military intervention, of launching against the
FARC-EP operationssuch as LASO, Destroyer 1, Destroyer 2, Sonora, Casa Verde,
Plan Patriota, Plan Colombia, etc., the guerrillas still thrives, expressing the heartfelt
yearnings of peasants and workers in Colombia , attracting thousands of new young people that
demonstration that a revolution can be done even with an imperialist center thrown into preventing it.
are brought to its ranks harassed by paramilitaries themselves and the dreadful economic situation.
Alternative
2NC- Solvency
The alternatives engagement in interrogating US society and
its relationship with drones reveals the invisible kill chain and
question the existence of a safe civilian space in the drone
wars.
Delmont, Scripps College American studies assistant professor,
13
[Matt, 2013, Muse.jhu.edu, Drone Encounters: Noor Behram, Omer Fast, and Visual
Critiques of Drone Warfare,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_quarterly/v065/65.1.delmont.html, Accessed
June 23, A.H]
Behrams photographs contest one aspect of the visual power of drones, the ability
to see and kill precisely and accurately across great distances , Omer Fasts short
film 5000 Feet Is the Best offers an imaginative critique of the ability of
drones to resist being seen. In a Las Vegas hotel room in fall 2010, Fast conducted two interviews
If
with a former Predator drone pilot turned casino security guard. The video and audio from these interviews appear
occasionally in the thirty-minute video, with the pilots face and voice obscured. Rather than use these interviews to
present a documentary picture of a drone pilot, however, Fast uses the real interviews as small pieces in three
fictionalized sequences that use staged interviews with a fictional drone pilot. Each sequence begins with the
camera focused on the drone pilot (played by Denis OHare) seated on a bed, being interviewed by a man who is
partly off-screen, his back to the camera. As
So the family drives down their quiet block on a weekend morning on their
way to the country. They take a left, then a right. Stop at the usual checkpoints to
present their documents to the occupying forces (fig. 2).17 While aspects of the
narrative, such as provisional authority and occupying forces, evoke militarized
zones, the film is deliberately misplaced and miscast. The setting is suburban Las
Vegas, and it is a white family who stops their Volkswagen station wagon at the
security checkpoint. As the family drives into rural Nevada, they encounter a pickup truck and three white
authority. . . .
men with shovels and guns. Again the narration does not mesh with the images. A teenager with a traditional
headdress is portrayed by an actor with a baseball cap, while the older men dressed in clothes more typical of
fictionalized drone strike in Nevada near Creech Air Force Base, the center of operations for drone pilots ,
Fasts
film questions the existence of safe civilian spaces in the drone wars and
offers an evocative homecoming for drone technology. Fast uses the real
interview excerpts with the drone pilot to similarly unsettling effect. As the pilot
describes details of operating a drone and the images that the system affords, the images on
the screen show aerial video of Las Vegasarea landscapes. When the pilot describes why
surveying at 5000 feet above is the best and muses that infrared cameras produce images that [End Page 198]
differentiates the drones that hover over Afghanistan, Pakistan, and more recently Yemen and Somalia from drones
and similar remote-controlled aircraft used to patrol the US-Mexico border and for surveillance by the FBI, DEA, and
bright lights shining against the night sky. As the camera moves to close-up images of the thrill rides on top of the
Stratosphere Las Vegas tower, the pilot describes his first drone kill: Usually other outside observers
would come into the GCS [ground control station] at this point, just to kind of watch and monitor the situation. And
the people who sit in the main building, they have projected images up on the wall of camera feeds that are coming
references to the video cameras and screens that link Creech Air Force Base, the Pentagon, and the target site in
Afghanistan,
the pilot makes it clear that he is not an independent operator but part of
an attack progression, or what the Air Force calls the [End Page 200] kill chain. As the geographer Derek
Gregory describes, the kill-chain can be thought of as a dispersed and distributed
apparatus, a congeries of actors, objects, practices, discourses and affects, that
entrains the people who are made part of it and constitutes them as particular kinds
of subjects.24 Drone warfare depends on visual technologies that make its
targets visible while making the kill chain invisible, and 5000 Feet Is the
Best reworks the visual tropes of drone warfare to disrupt the ability of
these systems to resist being seen.
***KRITIKAL DRONE
NEGATVE***
Information
Some cards from the affirmative answering the criticism may be used and vice
versa. The majority are posted in both files
Case Frontlines
Reactionary claims such as these get the publics attention and are
easy to make, but have the predicted harms come true? Is the sky truly falling? We
should be careful to not craft hasty legislation based on emotionally charged
rhetoric. Outright bans on the use of drones and broadly worded warrant
requirements that function as the equivalent of an outright ban do little to protect
privacy or public safety and in some instances will only serve to protect criminal
wrongdoing. Legislators should instead enact legislation that maintains the current balance between legitimate
surveillance and individuals privacy rights. The best way to achieve that goal is to follow a
propertycentric approach, coupled with limits on pervasive surveillance, enhanced
transparency measures, and data protection procedures.
wrongdoing.74
technology is changing our everyday lives and our notions about what is considered private, a more appropriate
way to understand
power.206 This paradigm shift is a dramatic move away from how we have thought about privacy and its
relationship to the Fourth Amendment for over half a century. But it is not without precedent. Prior to Katz, 207
property was considered that which the Fourth Amendment was created to protect. But Katz changed that by
replacing privacy for property as a proxy for Fourth Amendment protection.208 Ohm and others suggest that in this
era of rapid technological growth, we substitute power as the proxy for that which the Fourth Amendment was
created to restrain.209 Ohms proposition makes sense when one considers how new technologies have made it
networks.212 Cell phone companies typically retain this data for a year or longer.213 In June 2011, more than 322
million wireless devices were in use in the United States.214 Most users are aware of the phones tracking
capability, yet most opt for the convenience of having their phone with them and choose to ignore concerns of
Biopower is inevitable
Wright, Fellow at the Centre for Global Political Economy, 08
[Nathan, Fellow at the Centre for Global Political Economy, 2008, Camp as
Paradigm: Bio-Politics and State Racism in Foucault and Agamben,
http://gh0stwritten.blogspot.com/2007/02/camp-as-paradigm-bio-politics-andstate.html, Accessed 6/28/15, AMM]
Perhaps the one failure of Foucaults that, unresolved, rings as most ominous is his failure to further examine the
At the
end of the last lecture, Foucault suggests that bio-power is here to stay as a fixture
of modernity. Perhaps given its focus on the preservation of the population of the
nation it which it is practiced, bio-power itself is something that Foucault accepts as
here to stay. Yet his analysis of bio-politics and bio-power leads inevitably to statesanctioned racism, be the government democratic, socialist, or fascist. As a result,
he ends the lecture series with the question, How can one both make a bio-power
function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the function of
death, without becoming racist? That was the problem, and that, I think, is still the
problem. It was a problem to which he never returned . However, in the space opened by
problem of bio-political state racism that he first raises in his lecture series, Society Must Be Defended.
Foucaults failure to solve the problem of state racism and to elaborate a unitary theory of power (Agamben 1998,
5) steps Agamben in an attempt to complete an analysis of Foucauldian bio-politics and to, while not solve the
problem of state racism, at least give direction for further inquiry and hope of a politics that escapes the problem of
this racism.
lective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the state and new claims upon the state. In particular,
the core of what we now call citizenship consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the
course of their struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of war. In more recent times,
constituencies associated with womens, youth, ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also issued
through which we understand the constitution of the political has been a necessary precondition for making sense
of Foreign Policys concern for the ethical borders of identity in America. Accordingly, there are manifest political
implications that flow from theorizing identity. As Judith Butler concluded: The deconstruction of identity is not the
deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.
effecting bureaucratic secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing science
Germany and
genocidal government
not independent of circumstances. An analysis of the history of each case plays an important part in explaining
where and how genocidal governments come to power and analysis of political institutions and structures also
But it is not
just political factors which stand in the way of another Holocaust in modern
society. Modern societies have not only pluralist democratic political
systems but also economic pluralism where workers are free to change jobs and bargain
helps towards an understanding of the factors which act as obstacles to modern genocide.
wages and where independent firms, each with their own independent bureaucracies, exist in competition with
for people to move between organizations whether economic, political, scientific or social, Bauman overlooks
It is these very
ordinary and common attributes of modernity which stand in the way of
modern genocides.
crucial but also very ordinary and common attributes of truly modern societies.
types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in
attitudes toward war and the military may be the most important way to reverse womens oppression/ The
dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies and moral grounding,
by capitalism and fully incorporated into the capitalist world economy, posing the question of whether the causes of
WWI lay in the capitalist dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry (Blackbourn and Eley 1984), or in processes of belated
and incomplete liberal-capitalist development, due to the survival of re-feudalized elites in the German state
classes and the marriage between rye and iron (Wehler 1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and early Nazi
turn towards the construction of an autarchic German regionalism Mitteleuropa or Groraum was not deeply
influenced by the international ramifications of the 1929 Great Depression, but premised on a purely political
existentialist assertion of German national identity. Against a reading of the early 20th century conflicts between
the liberal West and Germany as wars for humanity between an expanding liberal modernity and its political
objections and caveats to the binary opposition between the Western discourse of liberal humanity against non-
long histories of Western anti-liberal colonial and post-colonial legacies. If these states (or social forces within them)
turn against their imperial masters, the conventional policy expression is blowback.
And as the
particularities, which renders challenges to American supremacy possible in the first place.
individual, civil liberties are nothing but expressions of governance and disciplinary power.98 Gaete writes: [A] PostModern perspective would assume that human rights are neither the expression of a universal truth nor a denial of
it and regard their truth claims as only local moves in a game the subject enters when formulating his/her
relationship to power in the language of fundamental rights.99 The postmodern hymn of relativity rules out the
legitimation and justification of almost any belief and practice in the realm of rights. This conservative support of
the prevailing status quo is an obvious rejection of the revolutionary nature of universal human rights. At the end
of the day, the notion of rights is forced to surrender its power as a legitimating factor of political regimes. With the
always upheld the right to rebel against an unjust power.101 Touraine also reminds the murderers of the subject
what a subject-less world would look like: [T]he day when the Subject is debased to meaning introspection, and the
Self to meaning compulsory social roles, our social and personal life will lose all its creative power and will be no
more than a post-modern museum in which multiple memories replace our inability to produce anything of lasting
is equally
problematic. The very idea of uncertainty itself implies the existence of a certainty, after all: [ I]f you
tried to doubt everything, you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game
of doubting itself presupposes certainty.103 Human beings live with their values, and
importance.102
need to rank them. Their highest values, or what Charles Taylor calls hypergoods,104 play a
central role in our lives. Individuals define and are defined by these hypergoods, be they a divine being,
Brahma, Nirvana, Justice, Reason, Science, Progress, Cogito or Superman. To kill our hypergoods therefore
means an attempt to kill the sources of the self , sources which confer meaning on the
lives of human beings. The need for hypergoods points to the necessity of an
absolute truth, to use Sartres phrase.105 This necessity is also the precondition of any critique.
Thus Habermas claims that Nietzsches critique consumes the critical impulse itself; for if thought can no longer
operate in the realms of truth and validity claims, then analysis and critique lose their meaning. 106 Oddly,
perhaps, Derrida seems to agree with Habermas when he says that he cannot conceive of a radical critique which
would not be ultimately motivated by some sort of affirmation, acknowledged or not.107 Postmodernity, despite its
He states that the great narratives are now barely credible. And it is therefore tempting to lend credence to the
amounting, ironically, to both the ethical relativism of John Keane116 and the moral universalism of
Habermas.117 Keane writes: [T]o defend relativism requires a social and political stance which is throughly modern.
It implies the need for establishing or strengthening a democratic state and a civil society consisting of a plurality of
public spheres, within which individuals and groups can openly express their solidarity with (or opposition to)
others ideas.118 In an interview, Habermas explains what his moral universalism stands for: [W]hat does
universalism mean, after all? That one relativizes ones own way of life with regard to the
legitimate claims of other forms of life, that one grants the strangers and the others, with all
their idiosyncrasies and incomprehensibilities, the same rights as oneself, that one does not insist
on universalizing ones own identity, that one does not simply exclude that which deviates from it,
that the areas of tolerance must become infinitely broader than they are today moral universalism means all
these things.119 At the core of this pluralism required by ethical relativism and moral universalism alike lies the
conception of autonomy.120 Indeed, as Raz puts it, pluralism is a necessary requirement of the value of
autonomy is constituted by rights and nothing else: the autonomous life is a life within unviolated rights.123
autonomy constitutes a
sufficient ontological justification for rights and thus gives an invaluable support to
those who seek for a justificatory ground for them.124 Autonomy requires the existence of the
Since it is an essential part and parcel of human being (or being human),
Other(s).125 The Other is not simply external to me, but he or she at the same time constitutes my identity: I am in
a way parasitic on the Other. My autonomy makes sense only insofar as there exist others. As Sartre puts it, [T]he
other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself.126 And unless I in
turn recognise others as autonomous beings I shall end up in the fundamental predicament of absolute loneliness
and terror.127 This points to the absolute necessity of living with others,128 as a zoon politikon in Marxs
words.129 Thus autonomy is a key value not only for I, but also for others. The postmodernists must take into
account autonomy, if they are to present an ethical/political project part of which involves rights, however locally.
They can do so, furthermore, without having to abandon their conceptual tools. Difference and otherness, the
magical terms of postmodern discourse, are in fact quite compatible with such conceptions as autonomy and
universality. As Lyotard himself argues, a human being has rights only if she is also an other human being. Likewise,
undermined by certain militant particularisms of our day .130 V. CONCLUSION Whatever the
merits of the entirety of their arguments, the postmodernists emphasise the paramount importance of human
rights: they are, after all, its starting-point. As Bauman points out, [T]he great issues of ethics like human
rights . . . have lost nothing of their topicality,131 and he is well aware of the fact that [m]oral issues tend to be
increasingly compressed into the idea of human rights .132 Lyotard himself likewise states that [A] human being
has rights only if he is other than a human being. And if he is to be other than a human being, he must in addition
become an other human being.133 More importantly, influenced by the communitarian and postmodern critique of
metaphysical grounds for ethical and political claims, some liberal rights theorists such as Ronald Dworkin and John
Rawls adopt a kind of apologetic attitude towards the theoretical foundation of rights, refusing to play the
traditional role of moral magician by plucking ethical claims out of a metaphysical hat. In a recent essay, Rawls
human beings are moral persons and have equal worth or that they have certain particular moral and intellectual
powers that entitle them to these rights. To show this would require a quite deep philosophical theory that many if
not most hierarchical societies might reject as liberal or democratic or else as in some way distinctive of Western
political tradition and prejudicial to other countries.134 This passage implies that in fact the idea of human rights is
a product of the western liberal tradition, but in order to make it universally applicable we must refrain from any
theoretical attempt to reveal this fact. Lets pretend that human rights are simply there. They do not need any
Its good
at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic
constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages,
structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here Im reminded
by the underpants gnomes depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that
goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their
work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: UltraRadical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we
seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the
critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques
nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be
produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where
to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of
the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can
afford, with presses that dont have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic
conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many
activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure,
than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesnt make a sound!
too
often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not
engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they
dont embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting
and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet
Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all
understood that Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the
This type
of revolutionary is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do
more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning
ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business . Well done! But this
Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?).
isnt where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase
We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for
what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when
we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of
all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to
fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete
proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network
2.
of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution
does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and
communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What
are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic
and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the
cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists
speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they
generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system
of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and
production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned
economy, ie. Who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of microfascism that arise with party systems (theres a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou
contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these
things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the
ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. Were not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem
attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle.
a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would
he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound
we havent even gotten to that point. Instead were like underpants gnomes, saying revolution is the answer!
without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it
would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation. Underpants gnome
We need
less critique not because critique isnt important or necessary it is but because we know the
critiques, we know the problems. Were intoxicated with critique because its easy
and safe. We best every opponent with critique. We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do
we really do anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or
carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is
destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the
economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing
alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.
deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation.
Their moral tunnel vision is complicit with the evil they criticizeutilitarian thought it better
Issac 2 (Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the
Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale (Jeffery C.,
Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, Ends, Means, and Politics, p. Proquest)
It is assumed that U.S.
military intervention is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is
given to the aggression to which intervention is a response. The status
quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace,
but rather terrorist violence abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose
to power through brutality and repression. This requires us to ask a question that most
"peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the
violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What
means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and
international law are well intended and important; they implicate a
decent and civilized ethic of global order. But they are also vague and
empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how
diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the
problem at hand campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it to
contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility .
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked.
Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an
unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of
power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to
the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to
develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond
morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality . As writers such as
Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding
concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility . The concern
may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to
that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals
Also- using the state is a double turn with their evidence- Any
attempt to reconcile social ills within the structure of the
state is doomed to fail it must be abandoned
Duffield, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global
Insecurities Center University of Bristol, 07
[Mark Duffield, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities
Center, University of Bristol, Development, Security and Unending War Governing
the World of People, Pg. 230-232, AMM]
self-reliance but of its
essential success; that is, its ability to allow non-insured people, groups and communities to
forge livelihoods and survival strategies beyond and outside the state (Keen 1994 and
1998; Duffield 2001: 136-60). The increase in Western interventionism is occurring at a time
when people are actively deserting the state . The vast literature on 'war economies', for example,
is illustrative of an innovative and radical self-reliance. Transborder and shadow economies have
expanded at the same time as a medley of actors - ranging from ethnic associations,
Humanitarian emergencies are, in some respects, not the result of the breakdown of
clan leaders and religious groups to warlords, Mafiosi and terrorist organizations have all learned the biopolitical art of enfranchising the dispossessed through
alternative forms of protection, legitimacy and welfare as a necessary adjunct of
their own political survival (Tishkov 1997; Goldenburg 2001; Kent et al. 2004). Such 'actually
existing development' beyond and outside the state deepens the crisis of
containment and gives urgency, for example, to Western efforts to reconstruct fragile
states and reterritorialize the people living within them . Apart from highlighting the fact that
such states have no established or centralized welfare function, the difficulty is that even if successfully
reconfigured as governance states, they can only promise the non-material salvation of sustainable development
In one of the few attempts to examine global development from a comparative welfare regime perspective, Wood
and Gough (2006) identify three generic types: the welfare state, the informal security regime and the insecurity
regime. The last two are systems where self-reliance, in terms of the familyzand community forms of reciprocity,
provides the bulk of public welfare. The insecurity regime, however, corresponds to zones of crisis and state fragility
where these reciprocities have broken down. Whereas welfare states are characterized by the de-commodification
of life, for example, through protection from employment risks, within informal security regimes patron-client
relations predominate. Reflecting the absence of a mass labour market rather than de-commodification, especially
within insecure societies, generalizing welfare is argued to require a process of 'de-clientization' - that is, the
practice 'of de-linking client dependants from their personalized, arbitrary and discretionary entrapment to persons
with intimate power over them' (ibid.: 1708). In framing this argument, the authors have unwittingly rearticulated
the global 'hearts and minds' role into which unending war has channelled development assistance (DAC 2003).
When nationalists and liberation movements sought to remake the state during the
Cold War, such events were labelled as radical or even revolutionary . Today, as the
West takes on this role directly, it finds itself embroiled in expansive and totalizing
forms of counter-insurgency. The idea that an alternative development lies in the
'insuring' of the non-insured raises many difficulties. Given the widespread
desertion of the borderland state by the dispossessed, such endeavours easily
become means of recapturing and bolstering the West's own security; in other words, it
would have to contend with the governance function of insurance-based technologies of biopower. This
includes the importance of welfare rights as a means of excluding migrants and
encoding racial identity and conflict in mass consumer society . At the same time, through
the digitalization of life processes, insurance technologies are providing increasingly finely textured mechanisms for
the monitoring and modulation of conduct more generally (Ericson and Doyle 2003). These difficulties suggest that,
that my reason cannot be that the two compensate for the loss of the one. Consider Hill's example of a priceless
object: If I can save two of three priceless statutes only by destroying one, then I cannot claim that saving two
makes up for the loss of the one. But similarly, the loss of the two is not outweighed by the one that was not
clear how the extreme interpretation justifies the ordinary killing/letting-die distinction or even how it conflicts
with the conclusion that the more persons with dignity who are saved, the better.8
Utilitarian argument
of policy, however, would seem secure from that objection. They do not
suppose that any form of life is inherently more valuable than any other ,
but instead base their claim, that constraints on liberty are necessary to advance some
collective goal of the community, just on the fact that that goal happens to be desired more
widely or more deeply than any other. Utilitarian arguments of policy, therefore, seem not to
oppose but on the contrary to embody the fundamental right of equal concern
and respect, because they treat the wishes of each member of the
community on a par with the wishes of any other, with no bonus or
discount reflecting the view that that member is more or less worthy of
on the claim that certain forms of life are inherently more valuable than others.
concern, or his views more or less worthy of respect, than any other. This appearance of egalitarianism has, I
think, been the principal source of the great appeal that utilitarianism has had, as a general political philosophy,
over the last century. In Chapter 9, however, I pointed out that the egalitarian character of a utilitarian argument
is often an illusion. I will not repeat, but only summarize, my argument here. Utilitarian arguments fix on the
fact that a particular constraint on liberty will make more people happier, or satisfy more of their preferences,
depending upon whether psychological or preference utilitarianism is in play. But people's overall preference for
one policy rather than another may be seen to include, on further analysis, both preference that are personal,
because they state a preference for the assignment of one set of goods or opportunities to him and preferences
that are external, because they state a preference for one assignment of goods or opportunities to others. But a
utilitarian argument that assigns critical weight to the external preferences of members of the community will
not be egalitarian in the sense under consideration. It will not respect the right of everyone to be treated with
equal concern and respect.
To sum up
the worth of our species by reference to some particular standard , goal, or
ideology, no matter how elevated or noble it might be, would be to prepare the
way for extinction by closing down in thought and feeling the openended possibilities for human development which extinction would close
down in fact. There is only one circumstance in which it might be possible to sum up the life and
this would be to make of our highest ideals so many swords with which to destroy ourselves.
achievement of the species, and that circumstance would be that it had already died; but then, of course, there
would be no one left to do the summing up. Only a generation that believed itself to be in possession of final,
only generations
that recognized the limits to their own wisdom and virtue would be likely to
subordinate their interests and dreams to the as yet unformed interests
and undreamed dreams of the future generations, and let human life go on.
absolute truth could ever conclude that it had reason to put an end to human life, and
When we
pursue several values simultaneously, we face the fact that they often
conflict and that we face difficult tradeoffs. If we make one value
absolute in priority, we are likely to get that value and little else.
Survival is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of other values, but
that does not make it sufficient. Logical priority does not make it an absolute value. Few
democratic way of life and cherished freedoms that give meaning to life beyond mere survival.
people act as though survival were an absolute value in their personal lives, or they would never enter an
Counterplan
merely manages resources in the service of unexamined wants, without considering whether things (especially
preferences) should be any different from what in fact they now are? The link of corporate and public policy with
utilitarian theory is virtually axiomatic, with little or no recognition given to the objective goals or philosophical
purpose. At the same time, its procedures have been severely criticized and are well-known to policy analysts
[MacIntyre, 1977; Tribe, 1972; Tribe, 1974). Such problems will not go away, but will continually serve to keep
makers of policy firmly if comfortably immersed in the fluid reality of human wants and needs. Yet, the focus of this
paper goes beyond these well-known procedural difficulties to defend utilitarian policy-analytic techniques against
charges of alleged distortion to human nature inherent in its use. If procedures have flaws, that is one matter, but if
a method intrudes upon essential relationships or modifies important social processes, that is quite another.
this paper cannot respond to Horkheimers large assertions head on, it does respond to
two specific charges made against utilitarian processes in the world of corporate and
public policy making. The first is the claim that utilitarian policy processes systematically discriminate
Therefore, although
against the rights of non-human life and suppress any feelings of sympathy or obligations humans might feel for
animals or plants. The second is the argument that utilitarianism circumvents considerations of process which are
essential to the development of individual and societal identity. This paper hopes to show that from a philosophical
point of view,
certain powerful
and specific complaints. In that event, the monkey is places on the back of those who are so critical of the
predominantly utilitarian nature of policy processes ti show what the objective function of reason and add to policy
processes beyond the present contribution of utilitarian techniques. Continues A second criticism of utilitarian
theory applied in policy making objects to its circumvention of a process valuable to society, viz. the constitutive or
value-learning process. Marx, for example, objects to utilitarianism from the perspective of a social reformer. For
him, utilitarian methods promote a static society: the theory of utility [changes]into a mere apology of what
exists; into a demonstration that under the existing conditions the present relations among men are the most
advantageous and in the general interest. It has this character in all the recent economists [Bottomore, 1956, p.
166]. That is, utilitarian ethics only inquires after the strength of current values; it does not promote their review or
change. Of course, Marxs interest in promoting societal dynamism is motivated by a sense of direction; a dynamic
society is a revolutionary society which will, in the long run, promote the classical Marxist ideals. On the other hand,
ones interest in societal dynamism need not be instrumental; awareness and self-criticism can be prized for their
own sake, regardless of the outcome. More specifically, the process in which a society chooses what it will value is
one in which the society continually constitutes itself; and contrasted with a system of runaway technology, for
example, where societal values are in part determined by the forward momentum of technological development, a
society which continually or periodically studies the implications of technological development for its well-being
chooses itself. It may do so incrementally and without lofty vision, but all that is important is that society takes its
development into its own hands. Laurence Tribe (1972) has argued that the utilitarian system of technology
assessment institutionalized in the United States often results in the circumvention of the kind of process essential
for the development of the higher forms of human rationality and for the promotion of democracy. That is, standard
utilitarian assessment techniques are outcome-oriented: they collapse what might otherwise be a healthy review of
public values into a speedy judgment regarding the comparative merit of possible outcomes. In most areas of
human endeavor from performing a symphony to orchestrating a society the processes and rules that constitute
the enterprise and define the roles played by its participants matter quite apart from any identifiable end state
that is ultimately produced. Indeed, in many cases it is the process itself that matters most to those who take part
in it. By focusing all but exclusively on how to optimize some externally defined end state, policy analytic methods
distort thought, and sometimes action, to whatever extent process makes or ought to make an independent
difference. (Tribe, 1973, p. 631) Thus, he fundamentally utilitarian nature of technology assessment may distort or
abbreviate an important societal process simply in order to obtain closure on an issue. Another way to describe the
phenomenon involves seeing technology assessment procedures as a scientific method in terms of scientific ideals,
no measuring technique should have an effect upon the items is seeks to measure. Yet, if Tribe is correct, utilitarian
assessment techniques do distort the nature of the phenomenon they inquire after, principally by virtue of the fact
that they ignore the truly societal nature of policy processes in the course of sampling personal preferences. Daniel
Bell is getting at the same problem when he writes that utilitarianism neglects the reality of structures that
necessarily stand outside individuals. (1976, p. 257) Nevertheless, despair over the propriety of utilitarian
corporate experience with utilitarian policy making. It simply is not clear that the traditionally utilitarian character of
corporate decision-making stifles the more constitutive or value-choosing functions of reason. Indeed, the decisionmaking phase of weighing preferences at least causes executives to consider the comparative strengths of
corporate values, if not absolute strengths. A company, for example, which is wrestling with the issue of expansion
of facilities must review the comparative strengths of several goals: the short-term interests of stockholders, the
long-term survival and growth interests of the corporation, public image, the sacrificing of alternative uses of the
question How badly do I want it? The later question is not far removed from Why do I want it? and What ought I
respect human rationality in its own right and not just for its
instrumental capacities. The second reason for justified optimism is the cyclical
nature of utilitarian assessment process. Descriptions of utilitarian decision-making often
conclude with a feed-back loop. (Rowen, 1969) The effect of the loop on the process is to diffuse some
of the thrust toward closure and to promote continued reflection and assessment. That is, when
to want?, which
one feels intuitive discomfort with the result of a utilitarian assessment, the cause may be failure in any or all of
the freedom and lack of closure inherent in these earlier stages of utilitarian procedures. So, if these two arguments
Marxs initial complaint regarding the alleged natural tendency of utilitarian techniques to defend the status quo
one might conclude that the alternative to utilitarian rationality , viz. constitutive
thinking, could have posed an even greater obstacle to societal dynamism! The
contribution of the constitutive function of rationality s discovery the identification of values or principles which
fair to conclude, then, that Marx would have been unhappy with too much societal stability, whether it were due to
policies derived from the utilitarian inertia of present preferential relations among men or to the privileged status of
corporations must rely upon an uncomfortable balancing of instrumental and constitutive rationality - of operating
in an ambiguous realm of no knowing fully what should be achieved or how it should be achieved of the
counterposition of incremental policy formulation with fell swoop analysis.
The CLS
critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities
know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the
Promised Land is at hand. The critique is imperialistic in that it tells minorities and
other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them . A court
order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may
postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a number
of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a
comfortable academic working in a warm office. lt smacks of paternalism to assert that the
the effort to find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion.
possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The
Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some
revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all small reforms induce
complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a
tenants union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars critique of
piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total
change, when it comes, will be what we want. 3. CLS Idealism The CLS program is also
idealistic. CLS scholars idealism transforms social reality into mental construct. Facts become intelligible only
through the categories of thought that we bring to experience. Crits argue that the principal impediments to
achieving an ideal society are intellectual.
Disadvantage
places, Eland (2004, 185) suggests that such behavior might stem from military or national security bureaucrats
attempts to enhance their personal status and organizational budgets, or even from the influence and dominance of
the military-industrial complex; viz.: Maintaining the empire and retaliating for the blowback from that empire
keeps what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex fat and happy. Or, in the same section: In
the nations capital, vested interests, such as the law enforcement bureaucracies . . . routinely take advantage of
crisesto satisfy parochial desires. Similarly, many corporations use crises to get pet projects a.k.a. porkfunded
by the government. And national security crises, because of peoples fears, are especially ripe opportunities to grab
largesse. (Ibid., 182) Thus, bureaucratic-politics theory, which once made several reputa- tions (such as those of
Richard Neustadt, Morton Halperin, and Graham Allison) in defense-intellectual circles, and spawned an entire subindustry within the field of international relations,5 is put into the service of dismissing putative security threats as
imaginary. So, too, can a surprisingly cognate theory, public choice,6 which can be considered the right-wing
analog of the bureaucratic-politics model, and is a preferred interpretation of governmental decision- making
domestic policy, it may be more severe in foreign policy because citizens pay less attention to policies that affect
them less directly. There is, in this statement of public-choice theory, a certain ambiguity, and a certain degree of
contradiction: Bureaucrats are supposedly, at the same time, subservient to societal interest groups and
state autonomy is a
likely consequence of the publics ignorance of most areas of state activity (e.g., Somin
1998; DeCanio 2000a, 2000b, 2006, 2007; Ravenal 2000a). But state autonomy does not necessarily
mean that bureaucrats substitute their own interests for those of what could be
called the national society that they ostensibly serve . I have argued (Ravenal 2000a) that,
precisely because of the public-ignorance and elite-expertise factors, and especially
because the opportunitiesat least for bureaucrats (a few notable post-government lobbyist cases
nonwithstanding)for lucrative self-dealing are stringently fewer in the defense and
diplomatic areas of government than they are in some of the contract-dispensing
and more under-the-radar-screen agencies of government, the public-choice
imputation of self-dealing, rather than working toward the national interest (which,
autonomous from society in general. This journal has pioneered the argument that
however may not be synonymous with the interests, perceived or expressed, of citizens!) is less likely to hold. In
short,
reviewed, so as to be consistent with expectations; surviving the particular individual and trans- mitted to
successors and ancillaries; measured against a standard and thus corrigible; defined in terms of the performed
function and therefore derived from the state function; and uncorrrupt, because personal cheating and even
because something important is riding on the causal analysis and the contingent prediction. For these reasons,
public choice does not have the feel of reality to many critics who have participated in the structure of defense
decision-making. In that structure, obvious, and even not-so-obvious,rent-seeking would not only be shameful; it
would present a severe risk of career termination. And, as mentioned, the defense bureaucracy is hardly a
productive place for truly talented rent-seekers to operatecompared to opportunities for personal profit in the
deliberately targeted and the murder of the maximum number of noncombatants is the explicit aim, using terms
like "fighter" or "soldier" or "noble warrior" is not only beside the point but pernicious. Such language collapses the
distance between those who plant bombs in cafs or fly civilian aircraft into office buildings and those who fight
the in-tended targeting of peaceable civilians and the deliberate and indiscriminate sowing of terror among
civilians, we live in a world of moral nihilism.
shade of gray and we cannot make distinctions that help us take our political and
moral bearings. The victims of September 11 deserve more from us.
1997 whether stopping terrorism required citizens to cede some civil liberties, less than one-t hird of Americans said
yes. By the spring of 2002, that had grown to almost three- quarters. Public support for the governments right to
inverted the assumption of security that C. Vann Woodward called central to Americas national character. The
the government has responded with largescale intrusive security measures. In this dystopian future, two arms dealers, one with jihadist
United States has been attacked again and
ties, text- message about a potential nuclear deal. One notes that terrorist networks have turned into mini-s
tates. The other jokes about the global recession sparked by the latest attacks. And he muses about how terrorism
has changed American life. That
The attorney general announced that 480 individuals had been detained as of Sept.
28; 10 days later another 135 had been picked up; and in one single week during
October, some 150 individuals were arrested. As of Nov. 5, the Justice Department
announced that 1,147 people had been detained. While trumpeting the numbers of arrests in
an apparent effort to reassure the public, the Department has refused to provide the most basic information about
who has been arrested and on what basis. We know that the detainees include citizens, legal residents, and,
according to INS director James Zigler, 185 individuals were being held on immigration violations. According to the
attorney general and FBI director, the remaining group includes a small number of individuals held on material
witness warrants and others held on violations of local, state, or federal laws. Apparently none have been charged
as terrorists, indeed only 10 or 15 are even suspected of being terrorists. At this time, we do not have any idea how
As the number of secret detentions increased, press reports
began to appear, which if accurate, raise serious questions as to whether the rights
of the detainees are being violated. As each successive week has brought hundreds more arrests,
demands for release of basic information have intensified. The unprecedented level of secrecy
surrounding the extraordinary detention of hundreds of individuals, prompted us,
along with nearly 40 other civil liberties, human rights, legal, and public access
organizations to demand release of the detainees' names and the charges against
them under the FOIA request. The chair and other members of this committee and of the Congress have
also demanded a public accounting of the arrests. In response, the department has only stonewalled. Justice
Department officials have refused to release further information on the detentions, and have stopped keeping a
record of those detained, presumably in order to avoid having to answer questions about who is being counted in
the tallies. Public disclosure of the names of those arrested and the charges against them is essential to assure
that individual rights are respected and to provide public oversight of the conduct and effectiveness of this crucial
investigation. Public scrutiny of the criminal justice system is key to ensuring its lawful and effective operation.
Democracies governed by the rule of law are distinguished from authoritarian societies because in a democracy the
public is aware of those who have been arrested. Individuals may not be swept off the street and their whereabouts
kept secret. The government has made varying claims to justify this secrecy. Ironically, it now claims that it is
withholding the names of detained individuals in order to protect their privacy. What is needed to ensure the
protection of the rights of these individuals, who have been jailed by the government now worrying about their
privacy is what we have always relied upon in protecting against government abuses, namely public sunshine.
Likewise, the department's claim that releasing the names and charges could harm
the investigation is contradicted by its own disclosures . Not only have officials already
identified several suspected terrorists, but they have also outlined evidence against them. The attorney general
himself described the evidence against the three individuals whom he believes had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11
attacks. Finally, the Department has made the astonishing claim that because it asked courts to seal some of the
proceedings, it is now helpless to disclose even the identities of the courts or the authorities under which those gag
orders were sought. While we are not seeking the details of the investigation or an outline of the evidence being
collected by the FBI, we do urge this committee to secure the release of information crucial to public accountability:
the names and charges against those who have been detained. There is every reason to fear that the cloak of
secrecy is shielding extensive violations of the rights of completely innocent individuals. These violations include
imprisonment without probable cause, denial of the constitutional right to bail, interference with the right to
counsel, and abusive conditions in detention. We will only outline a few examples, but there are many more. a.
Imprisonment without Probable Cause. While the government has admitted that it has evidence of terrorism
monitor, but the son spent two more months in jail until a federal judge determined that the plastic covering had
split. The key factor in their arrest appears to be their Arabic-sounding names. While the
attorney general has announced that terrorists will be arrested for spitting on the sidewalk, he has yet to explain
In a handful of cases,
carefully the circumstances of those detentions, which are now all shrouded in secrecy, and to consider the
dangerous ramifications of using the material witness statute not to secure testimony but to authorize preventive
There is growing evidence that the FBI has abandoned any effort to comply
with the constitutional requirement that an individual may only be arrested when
detention.
there is probable cause to believe he is engaged in criminal activity . The FBI is now
seeking to jail suspicious individuals until the agency decides to clear them. The FBI is providing a form affidavit,
which relies primarily on a recitation of the terrible facts of Sept. 11, instead of containing any facts about the
particular individual evidencing some connection to terrorism, much less constituting probable cause. The affidavit
simply recites that the FBI wishes to make further inquiries. In the meantime, the individual is held in jail. b. Denial
of the Constitutional Right to Bail. The right to be free on bail until trial is a vital part of the constitutional
whether a particular individual is likely to flee, the department is attempting to detain all individuals picked up as
part of the Sept. 11 investigation. If the past few weeks are an example of what the future holds, it is likely that
individuals charged with "spitting on the sidewalk" may serve more time in jail pretrial than they would if they were found guilty. All these circumstances raise serious questions
about the effectiveness of the current effort. Is the FBI carrying out a focused investigation
executing the work necessary to identify and detain actual terrorists, or is this
simply a dragnet, which will only be successful by chance. The fact that 1,000, or even 5,000,
individuals are arrested is no assurance that the truly dangerous ones are among them.
Consular Notification and Outreach Unit, said, "We are concerned about these failures of notification when they
happen to us overseas, so it becomes more difficult for us to assert our rights under the Vienna Convention if we
are not doing a good job in giving the same notification here." We urge this Committee to examine whether since
conversations between detainees and their attorneys, there were numerous reports of interference with the right to
or simply intimidated into silence with threats of actions organized against their clients.