GOOD MORNING AND HOW IS THE MIND TODAY? THE CLINICAL VIOLENCE OF WORDS - PIECES OF THE PATTERN OF LIFE OF MAMANA BIBI On 24 October 2012, Mamana Bibi, a 68 year old grandmother from the rural village of Ghundi Kala in North Warizistan, Pakistan, was tending to her crops when a Predator drone terminated her and three of her livestock. At the time, her son described how it took most of the day for her children and grandchildren to gather pieces of her flesh for burial. The target acquisition intel which terminated Mamana Bibi was disseminated from the Counter Terrorism Mission Aligned Cell (CT-MAC) program of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the USA, probably with the support of the Ku-Band satellite link to a ground station at Ramstein Air base in Germany. As per standard procedure, it was operationalised at the US Central Commands Combined Air Operations Centre at Al Udeid Air base in Qatar with real-time video feedback. In all of this techno-securocratic jargon you might have wondered where Maman Bibi, the human being with a name and life is. The answer lies in the process of how she was de-individualised and objectified into what the military jargon abstracts into a nameless category called the enemy, tango, target, etc. Joe Pugliese, in his book titled State Violence, describes this process as follows: The human subject detected by drones surveillance cameras is, in the first scientific schema, transmuted algorithmically into a patterned sequence of numerals; the digital codes of ones and zeros. Converted into digital data coded as a pattern of life, the targeted human subject is reduced to an anonymous simulacrum that flashes across the screen and that can effectively be liquidated into a pattern of death with the swivel of a joystick. Viewed through the scientific gaze of clinical biology, pattern of life connects the drones scanning technology to the discourse of an instrumentalist science, its constitutive gaze of objectifying detachment and its production of exterminatory violence. After a predator drone murdered Mamana Bibi and three of her livestock, more military jargon populated media accounts to explain the probability of how a grandmother, with no evidence Al Qaeda links, was targeted deliberately for termination. Some of the military jargon used the words collateral damage, to exclude criminal culpability. Apart from the fact that the words collateral damage applies to a military engagement where the elimination of a legitimate target results in proximity civilian casualties which was not the issue in the Mamana Bibi case; the clinical violence of these words are of even greater concern in its employ in the so-called war on terror. Disturbing because the words collateral damage, in effect confers a type of anonymity on its victims which strips them of individuality while reducing them clinically to categorical ascription. As for Mamana Bibi the 68 year old grandmother and farmer whose pattern of life, to borrow military drone jargon, was obliterated by a predator drone into a pattern of death; we need to remember what happened to her in words that describe her as an human individual, lest we find comfort in abstractions that reduce our culpability of conscience. We need to heed the words of James Bridle, in his book Under the Shadow of the Drone (2012) wherein he cautioned: We all live under the shadow of the drone, although almost all of us are lucky enough not to live under its direct fire. But the attitude they represent - of technology used for obscuration and violence; of the obfuscation of morality and culpability; of the illusion of omniscience and omnipotence; of the lesser value of other peoples lives; of, frankly, endless war - should concern us all. [Additional references : from the articles titled Kleptocracy by Finn Brunto and Drone Geographies by Derek Gregory; published in the magazine Radical Philosophy, Jan/Feb 2014, vol 183.]
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 03:57:45 +0000
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