A recent Congressional report on the death of missionary Veronica Bowers and her baby places blame on the CIA for their utter failure to follow their own procedures, but assigns no real consequences for their acts and omissions that led to the death of these innocent people. They gave the green light to the Peruvian air force to shoot down the missionaries’ plane without even reading the call sign off the tail of the plane or checking any flight plans to verify who they were. The Bowers were suspects simply because they were there, and Veronica and her baby were executed without trial, without any due process at all, any kind of process at all that any reasonable person would be expected to comply with to whom the state grants the legal use of deadly force. The CIA’s actions showed them to be nothing short of blind brutes shooting in the dark without any knowledge or care for whom they hit.
One interesting thing about the video of the incident is that the CIA officers expressed remorse as the events unfolded for what they were doing, as they did it. Yet, the CIA program had operated in violation of their own procedures “from the first shootdown” according to the report, and continued to do so for years afterward. So, you see a situation in which the consciences of these men are active, they even acknowledge they are making a mistake in violation of their own rules, and they feel bad about it. Yet, the incident still occurred. They still gave the green light, as if they were not in control of their own actions.
This illustrates all too well the problem inherent to hierarchical systems of authority and power among human beings. The people entrusted to wield violence on behalf of the state and the citizens are apparently powerless even over their own actions. This is not just because these particular people suffered no consequences and were protected from investigation or punishment; it is a deeper, psychological and metaphysical problem. Though some part of their minds is actively disgusted by what they do, they continue to do what they do in spite of themselves and that part of them that is still human. They continue to do what they do, in spite of the agency’s own rules and procedures that are intended to keep incidents like this from happening. They act like powerless robots trapped by a sequence of unfolding events that seems to occur regardless of their intentions. It almost seems like they are possessed by some demonic force.
In a certain, very real sense, they are possessed. This is what we American people, and the world, have the potential to learn, but have not yet wrapped our minds around. The dogs of war, once unleashed, cannot be controlled, will attack anything that comes within their sight, friend or foe, and that they can never be leashed again– they can only be put down. That is what war is, in any case: allowing our animal instinct for destruction to rule over us. Our politicians can talk all they want about “tactical strikes,” “projection of power,” and “the rule of law.” For that matter, Kim Jong-il can talk all he wants about “democracy,” “peoples’ power,” or “popular uprisings.” It is all the same. It is all crap. War is hell, and when war happens, demons are unleashed that take over the actions of people who you would otherwise say are perfectly normal, nice, even honorable human beings.
We could draw some limited conclusions about the “war on drugs,” though they seem trite. Anyone in America can get drugs, thanks to the money provided to our economy by politicians who borrow at high interest and give it away to foreign countries and Wall Street for free. Interdiction efforts do not make a difference in any way. Being illegal does not make a difference either, it just puts money in the hands of criminal gangs to buy guns and wage war on themselves. Were the lives of Veronica Bowers and her baby worth it? I think, definitely not. People can and will choose to use drugs regardless of the law, and people can and will choose to seek recovery from drugs and alcohol regardless of any legal punishment– they choose to seek recovery when they hit bottom. That is human nature.
I personally think we can draw larger conclusions about our place in the world. However, we have to fight our own instincts to be self-defeatist, to say that we are powerless to affect history, that we are powerless to make the world a better place.
Imagine if Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had thrown up their hands and said, well, too bad, we’re powerless over the decisions that Adolph Hitler and the Germans have made for themselves, gosh, there’s nothing we can do about it. Luckily, in the face of that kind of horror, that loss of connection with their humanity that the Germans suffered from during that period of time, many people had the courage to stand up and say that it was wrong.
In fact, we do have a lot of power without violence, when we realize it, just by speaking up, by speaking the truth, and by being honest in our own lives and with others. Violence is not necessarily the only way to exert power in the world; in fact, it is often counter-productive because it brings out another fact of human nature, the spirit of rebellion. If we stand up for what is good and right first, then, when someone belligerent attacks us, repeatedly, and refuses to listen to reason, we are justified in “shaking the dust off our sandals” and leaving them behind in history, perhaps even as leaving them behind in history as dead people while we move on and go forward.
I’m not sure. It seems like treading a thin line to me, and it’s difficult to see. Jesus, I think, has seen a new world beyond this one, beyond death, so would possibly argue that it makes no difference whether we are killed, whether we suffer, because in the world to come, God will restore the faithful, and death will be powerless. Perhaps that is already so. I can’t speak for Jesus. I can only speak for myself. Certainly I feel the logic of the argument that if someone tries to hit me, that I should hit back, but perhaps that is flawed logic that appeals to the high I get from adrenaline while thinking through that hypothetical violent situation. Perhaps we should take a lesson from aikido, that when someone tries to hit me, by blending with that energy I can redirect the attacker to a place of non-conflict in which we can have a reasonable conversation. It takes a lot of chutzpah to figure out how to do that when someone is threatening you with a terrorist attack or a nuclear bomb.
In any case, if we take the attitude that we are entitled to wage pre-emptive violence against those whom we suspect maybe want to hurt us, even though we don’t know for sure, then the people whom we give the means for violence will do so, without reason, without law, without even the force of their own wills, as we see in the case of Veronica Bowers and her baby. I would guess that the expanded use of Predator drones by the CIA in their secret campaigns against the Taliban and other terrorist suspects has incurred more than its fair share of innocent victims. After all, if the target-acquisition agent chooses a target of innocent victims, and the bomb or missiles destroy everything in the vicinity, then the agent can simply declare that there were terrorists there, and no one will ever be the wiser. They can have procedures to ensure “two-person integrity,” administrative review, and all that, but they had those procedures in the Airbridge Denial Program, and they didn’t save Veronica Bowers or her baby. How are those procedures any more effective in the heat of an active, widespread multi-national conflict? They are not, especially when not enforced. They might be more effective when enforced by real discipline and severe punishment of the agents and soldiers who are violating the President’s orders, but even then, the incidents would still occur, because human nature is still flawed.
There are no easy solutions. Innocent people die at the hands of people whose hearts feel remorse even as they are mindlessly killing, at the hands of the people who are supposed to be “the good guys.” Yet it happens. But if we stand by and do nothing while terrorist groups and rogue authoritarian nations like North Korea attack innocent neighbors and their own citizens, the world will descend into chaos.
As Americans, we traditionally value personal responsibility, and are extremely reluctant to retaliate against groups for the actions of a few people. Our own civil laws have special punishment for that motivation in the commission of crimes that would otherwise be lesser offenses; we call that a “hate crime.” We must resist the temptation to issue blanket judgments or apply blame in all cases with similarities based on the facts of one specific case.
However, the report on the specific cases of the CIA’s drug plane shootdown program makes one thing abundantly clear– these officers were not disciplined. They are not Central, meaning they disobeyed the authority of the rules and procedures laid out by the agency. They are not Intelligent, which needs no explanation. And they are not Agents, in the sense that an “agent” is that which performs an act of will. Listening to them as they gave the clearance for the Peruvian air force to shoot down the missionaries’ plane, it’s clear that they were taking action in contradiction to their own conscience. They felt they were bound by the course of events to its worst possible outcome, instead of taking charge of themselves and taking responsibility for their own actions. That is not what a human being does, it’s what an animal does.
If our nation is to succeed in our destiny to be the light of hope and freedom for the world, the President must discipline these officers, and others like them, for their failure to obey their own rules. Unfortunately, it means the current President must take responsibility for the mistakes and omissions of his predecessor, who let arbitrary violence within the ranks spiral out of control. It may not be a popular course of action to punish those under his authority, but it is the right one, and the necessary one. If we do not do that, in this program, in the Predator drone program, and in all our affairs, then the administration and representatives of the United States will justify the nation’s enemies, which would make them traitors.
Innumerable other actions were available to these CIA agents. How was a single-propeller plane going to outmatch or out-run a surveillance jet and two jet fighters? It wasn’t. The program could have been to fire warning shots and escort planes back to airports, where they could be investigated and prosecuted if carrying drugs. Yet, the operating procedure was to shoot down any plane with an unregistered flight plan, and the operating practice was to shoot down any plane that they encountered at all. If you learned about this program, and this incident, and were not outraged, disgusted and horrified by the actions of our government agents, then you are not a functional human being.
We live in dangerous and troubled times. Many people are frustrated with the growing sense of that the people running our government are completely irrational, if not dangerously insane. Certainly these particular agents display all the hallmarks of clinical psychosis– acting contrary to their own thoughts and wills in a way that is dangerous to others. If they did not have the rubber stamp of the CIA, they would be locked up and subjected to medication or shock treatment.
Yet, many of the media sources on the “conservative” side are calling for exactly the wrong kind of change, for a revolution that would lead to fascism, which would be worse than the limited amount of control we have over our government now. They are deceivers, and they are also deceived by their own lies and lust for power.
Regardless of the vocal minorities in the extremes, the American people are, for the most part common-sense people with good hearts. Besides the threats from abroad, they are the more important reason why the government must bring all its agents and soldiers in line with common-sense reason and common decency as human beings. If pushed to their breaking point, the American people will take charge of their country again by violent means, and it will not go the way that anyone planned. In that event, everyone will lose.
That outcome is not desirable, and it is not necessary. We are not inexorably bound to the worst possible outcome by the sequence of events. We can direct our own actions to a better outcome, if we each take a step back and think about what it means to be a good person, to be a person period, instead of rushing to judgment and death with no information like these witless CIA agents did. If these agents had committed themselves to their own personal higher ideals, and their own consciences, which they expressed even as they were giving the clearance to shoot down the innocent missionaries, the incident would not have happened.
All it takes is a brief moment to step outside of your impulses and remember your whole self and your higher ideals. Whatever those higher ideals may be, if we all practiced that, the world would be a much happier, more peaceful, and safer place.
And a sense of humility. If we didn’t have freedom, how could we laugh? We’d end up burning a lot of witches. Instead, we can make fun of them on TV! That is SO MUCH BETTER, in my opinion.
