Blind Predator Fools Seymour Hersh; That National ID Card

The usual bosh is getting into the press about the technological prowess of U.S. weaponry as deployed against Afghanistan. He's been getting some great scoops in his New Yorker dispatches, but Seymour Hersh ran some amazing rubbish in that magazine a couple of weeks ago about the capabilities of the Predator unmanned reconnaissance vehicle. So did Thomas Ricks in The Washington Post in a story titled "U.S. Arms Unmanned Aircraft/Revolution In Sky Above Afghanistan."

The Predator is made by General Atomics, a San Diego-based company, and each plane costs $20 million, which is a bargain in this day and age, though you don't get much for your money. Hersh described a Predator operation over Afghanistan wherein the machine was supposedly "capable of beaming high-resolution images...[and] identified a group of cars and trucks fleeing the capital (Kabul) as a convoy carrying Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader... The Predator tracked the convoy to a building where Omar, accompanied by a hundred or so guards and soldiers, took cover."

At this point the Predator's controllers could have directed it to fire its two "powerful" Hellfire missiles to eliminate the one-eyed Mullah Omar. But alas, a finicky military (CENTCOM JAG) lawyer was queried in "real time" and nixed the plan.

This is one hell of a remote-controlled machine, if you believe Hersh's source. It was able to identify a "group of cars and trucks" as conveying Mullah Omar; to distinguish "guards" from "soldiers" and to target the building "where Omar [himself]...took cover." Quite obviously, Predator was able to distinguish the specific signature of Mullah Omar's convoy (from any other conglomeration of "cars and trucks"), and recognize Mullah Omar himself. Sniffing eagerly along the trail blazed by Hersh, The Washington Post article picked up on this event as described by The New Yorker and characterized Predator's capabilities as "a revolutionary step in the conduct of warfare" and "a turning point in military history." The point was confirmed in the Post's article by "an expert in military strategy at Johns Hopkins," Eliot Cohen, who issued the solemn judgment that "this war is going to give you the revolution in military affairs." Whenever you hear the words "revolution in military affairs" be aware that the Brooklyn Bridge is on the auction block.

Discussing the Hersh story, a knowledgeable Hill staffer drew attention to the Pentagon's unclassified "Operational Test & Evaluation Report" on the Predator from September 2001 (i.e., well before the articles). It highlighted numerous shortcomings, such as "poor target location accuracy, ineffective communications and limits imposed by relatively benign weather, including rain, negatively impact missions..." To sum up: The best Predator sensor needs daylight and clear skies, and at operational ranges (15,000 to 30,000 feet) it can make gross distinctions between what type of vehicle it is looking at.

Now recall the Predator of Hersh and the Post's Ricks, distinguishing between not just tanks and trucks (and cars) but between just anybody's car or truck and Mullah Omar's. They also had Mullah Omar himself driving around and running into buildings. There is an alternative explanation for the Predator capabilities described in these articles: Predator got close enough to these targets to overcome its resolution deficiencies; very, very close. If that were the case, the authors failed to mention it.

If that had been the case, Predator also would have almost certainly been extremely vulnerable with its low, slow, predictable flight path. As one seasoned Hill staffer remarked apropos the Predator puffery: "During the course of this conflict, there will likely be more puff pieces on the wondrous capabilities of new (and some not so new) systems. Waiting for GAO or some other entity to show more than one side of the story can take an awfully long time?if indeed GAO or others get it right. We may need a real revolution in military affairs; we also need one on reporting military hardware capabilities."

As recently as last weekend, the amazing eyesight of the Predator was being lauded on CNN.

That National ID Card

The last time there was a big push for a national ID card was back in Reagantime. The notion was being batted around in one cabinet meeting and, as he later related the episode, domestic policy adviser Martin Anderson put up his hand and the Gipper benignly offered the floor. Anderson said he had a better idea. "Why not just tattoo a number on everyone's arm?" That ended the debate for the time being, though like all such instruments of bureaucratic control, the ID card has always been lurking in the wings awaiting fresh opportunity, which of course it found with Sept. 11.

Oracle's Larry Ellison has been pushing the card, as have supposed civil libertarians like Alan Dershowitz, whom I heard duking it out with Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute on CNN the other day. Lynch made a principled case against the idea of the ID card as an intolerable affront to the Bill of Rights. If it comes to pass, the card probably won't do much in the way of foiling terrorists, but it will become a standard tool of law enforcement, like a driver's license, only worse. These days you can have your driver's license yanked without due process, for such offenses as showing up on the computer as a deadbeat dad. No car or truck in many places in this country means you can't work, unless you're prepared to get caught for driving without a license and without insurance coverage, for which repercussions can be heavy.

So suppose, a couple of years down the road, you show up at an airport without your ID card, you join the line going through intensive search and interrogation. Or you have your card, and maybe that misdemeanor conviction for a demonstration 20 years earlier shows up, as well as all your outstanding parking tickets and credit card bills.

Consider what happened to Nancy Oden in Maine the other day. Oden's an organic farmer who lives in Jonesboro. She's also an organizer for the Green Party USA. She was on her way to Chicago for a Green Party convention, got hassled by a National Guardsman at Bangor airport and was finally told she couldn't board her flight. Oden thinks it's because of a Green Party statement she co-authored that ran in the local newspaper. The statement calls for universal healthcare, limitations on free trade and a stop to "U.S. military incursions," including the bombing of Afghanistan. The U.S. Green Party has labeled the U.S. military actions there an act of "state terrorism." Here's how Oden described her experience to Declan McCullagh, political editor of Wired. "Just a few weeks ago I had a piece in the Bangor paper. It's on our website, greenparty.org... I submitted it under my name alone. It's a fairly radical piece; that's what I do. I'm a political and environmental activist.

"I walked into the Bangor airport. What I saw was National Guardfolks all over carrying machine guns... The atmosphere was very tense... This was Thursday... I went over to the American Airlines ticket counter way down at the end. Nobody else was there, except the clerk.

"I gave him my name. He didn't even ask for photo ID. It was almost like they were expecting me. He put it into the computer. He stayed on the computer a long time, like 10 minutes.

"He put an S on the boarding pass, for search. He said, 'You've been picked for having your bag searched.' ...I said to him, 'This wasn't random, was it?' He said, 'No, you were in there to be searched, no matter what.' I went over to baggage to put my bags through the X-ray and then went into the boarding area.

"There was this National Guard guy there. He yells over at me, so everyone can hear, 'Bring your bags over here.' You know how they are when they're all puffed up with themselves. He said, 'Hurry up,' so I slowed down some more. I put my bags on the table. The two women employees were standing there. I tried to help them with a stuck zipper. He grabbed my left arm, he started yelling in my face, 'Don't you know what happened? September 11, don't you know thousands of people died?' I said, 'You can't do that.' He went to grab my arm, and I said, 'Don't touch me.' I saw an older airline guy shake his head, 'No,' and he backed off? They did the wand thing, they were done, and I heard him say real soft, 'Don't let her on the plane,' like he was talking to himself? Then this little guard guy, it wasn't enough to stop me, wasn't done with me. He said, 'Come with me.' I followed very slowly, I sat down for a while. I said I'm carrying these bags; I need a rest... It's called passive resistance.

"He went and found the airport police to come and talk with me. He went and got six other National Guard guys and they all approached me. Here are these six untrained, ignorant, don't-know-how-to-deal-with-the-public, machine-gun-armed young guys in their camouflage suits with their military gear hanging off of it.

"I looked up and started laughing, 'Is all this for me, guys? What is this about?' There was this big burly guy, he was in front. He said, 'You didn't cooperate with the search.' ...I said what he did was grabbed my arm, and I backed away... He said he only hit your arm. I said even if that's all he did, he's not allowed to do that. He can't hit my arm and demand I listen to him. They had the airport policeman tell me, 'You're not flying out of this airport today.' ...Of course I had cooperated; why do I care if they search my bags? ...What I didn't like was being singled out because of my political views? I never made it out of Bangor. I had to turn around and drive 100 miles back home... The fact that they gave the other airlines my name... They told me they did that... That's incredible."

Oden is not the only victim of paranoia in these panicky times. My friend Tariq Ali, the noted radical, was recently hauled off by the polizei in Munich for the crime of having a book by Marx in his suitcase as he was trying to board a plane back to London. The fact that he is Pakistani by ethnic origin probably didn't help. Tariq, whose historical novels are immensely popular in Germany, reports that the guard searching his bags became excited at a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, particularly the notes Tariq had scribbled in the margin. Then the guard espied the slim vol, still in its cellophane, titled Marx on Suicide. That was it. Tariq was hauled off by the guard, who said complacently, "After September 11, you can't travel with books like this." "In that case," Tariq snappily replied, "you should stop publishing them and burn them in full public view."

Finally Tariq pulled rank about his friend the Mayor of Munich and was put back on his plane. Further proof of the advantages of reading Marx. If he'd been properly educated in the classics, the guard would have realized that no follower of Marx would believe in the political efficacy of acts of terror. That was the province of hateful anarchism, as promulgated by Marx's sworn foe, Bakunin. I doubt Marx is on the Al Qaeda reading lists.