The Fiat was neat and nippy and the city traffic settled into a morning routine with the rush hour gone. Susan had spent the previous night in the Argyll and travelled south after breakfast, entering Glasgow by its Great Western Road. Her destination was a nineteenth century office building near George Square, generously named after a King of both Great Britain and Hanover.
She was greeted at reception and escorted to a pretentious room that was all axminster, walnut and recessed golden lighting. It parodied an indoor garden of remembrance, lacking only the sinister urbanity of piped organ recitals. The journalists who had found her at the Argyll Hotel had given assurances of their editor’s anxiety to gain her support for the campaign that lay ahead but had not prepared her for this. A fine example of ledged and braced walnut swung open and Nic entered in a sympathetic slouch.
“You must be Susan,” he said. “I’m the editor of this rag. Appreciate your coming to see us. Terrible about your brother. I want to tell you what the Daily News proposes to do. Please be seated and allow me to explain the position of my paper, in the strictest confidence of course,” he ran a hand through his hair. “This all began when I sent two news reporters to cover a forest fire that broke out where your brother was working…”
Susan sat quietly while Nic talked. The cadence of his voice rose and fell and he habitually slid thumbs behind his braces as he spoke. She felt that she was being embalmed in rhetoric. Time passed. His tone was calming, and his attire brought a childhood memory of her grandfather. The room itself was a cocoon of stability and comfort. Between its walls she heard the tragedy of Lashkar Gah repeated, much as her brother had described it to her. Nic’s voice retreated into the background and time slipped past.
She returned to awareness of what the white haired old owl was saying. He seemed to be phrasing a question. Ah, yes, she agreed to give every assistance to the paper, the guardian of the people, in deep gratitude for its unrelenting search for truth and justice. Nic gave her thanks, and her previous escort reappeared with a woman of forever forty, who seemed dressed for an expensive lunch.
“Lunch?” she offered, smiling, and Susan allowed herself to be led out of the walnut.
An hour later, Nic called an emergency meeting and the main conference room at the Daily News building bulged with talent. The Assistant Editor, an apolitical woman, so centrist that she was nicknamed ‘Splitarse’, made a few introductory remarks around the responsibility of the Fourth Estate to expose wrongdoing and protect The People (by which she meant the middle classes) from harm. Before fidgeting reached a disruptive level, Nic took charge. He came immediately to the point.
“We depersonalise. When someone whom we have feelings for ‘passes’ – folks used to ‘pass away’ but we abbreviated death some years back, an American initiative – we try to achieve what we call ‘closure’. Myself, I have no time for all of that, as most of you probably know. But as editor of this rag, I have to cater to the public taste and pay humble attention to the mores of our silly society.
I like David Hume – ‘the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.’ He doesn’t comment on the value to the universe of a woman. Steady, ladies, I’m attempting humour. Hume was simply putting human death into context and downscaling the religious drama that surrounds it. I trust that the pious among you will forgive me whatever cynical atheism you can detect.” He snorted and snapped both braces into his shirt for emphasis.
We are seduced by the idea of killing remotely,” Nic continued. “When a sniper kills from distance we imagine it to be clean and clinical, despite knowing that the death must be bloody and violent. Bombs falling from stratospheric heights deliver a scientific outcome in our minds, and not a gory carnage of torn limbs and burned flesh – that is, unless a dear one is mangled on the receiving end of what the distant button pusher dropped on her or on him. With UAVs, or drones to you ignorant ones, the button can be pushed anywhere; Nevada, Cyprus, Tel Aviv, Al Udeid in Qatar. A little nudge, that is all that is required. Imagine the temptation of the safe kill. Thousands are wiped out and not one liberal gets excited. Hawks are delighted. No surprise that drone sales are going through the slates.”
The journalists listened, several balancing thoughtfully on angled chairs, others bent forward scribbling notes on unlined A4 pads. For some time Nic expounded on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles before becoming specific.
“Today, we have gone to press with a drone incident at Lashkar Gah that took place not too long ago. Tomorrow, we reveal that the man who shot our journos in Lochaber, then committed suicide, was eyewitness to what happened. We have excellent stuff from the north; a recurring nightmare, drone in the sun, torn up mother, a beheaded baby, dying Afghan soldiers, a full pictorial. Tomorrow, we will develop this further and investigate an American denial and cover-up. This is topical stuff. The USA are seeking immunity against prosecution in Afghanistan and the autonomous tribal areas, particularly for killing citizens, aka ‘collateral damage’. With this story hitting the streets and the net,” he weighed his sarcasm, “they’ll be bloody lucky.”
Nic fingered his braces and leaned towards the assembled scribes. “Each of you will choose an element of the bigger picture; the history of drones, drone deaths, drone sales, drone costs, the psychology of drones, terror in the skies, surveillance-creep, extra-judicial killing, international law, and much more. Be imaginative and go delve, you are bloody journalists after all. Humanity is in danger of becoming ruled by eyes in the skies. We are morally obliged to save mankind by breaking this story to every Thomas, Richard, and Harriet. Go raise a new awareness. Crusade. Heighten fears with my blessing, it sells papers. Scare the living shit out of them. I await your copy. Remember our dear Tusitala. Sooner or later everyone will sit down to a banquet of consequences.”
Nic straightened, hooking his thumbs into his trouser braces. Around the long table, people exchanged glances. There was uncertain fidgeting. An uneasy silence fell.
“What more do you want. Get going!” and Nic pulled out his braces for one final snap against his torso. Chairlegs squealed and scraped and the meeting room quickly emptied. It was the beginning, and every floor of the building blazed with light until the early hours of morning.
All undiplomatic hell broke loose. The Daily News story of the American cover-up of deaths by drone strike at Lashkar Gah went viral in each new translation, with more than fifty languages carrying the piece within forty eight hours of publication. Washington and the Pentagon, no apology for either metonymy, went ballistic. Russia deliberately used a compromised cypher to send Afghanistan a pajalsta message promising a new dawn of neighbourliness. GCHQ had the full text within minutes, and for the rest of that day the Permanent Under-Secretary became officially unavailable, all meetings cancelled. It was like a death in his family.
Under the terms of ‘special relationship’, the Director passed the decode to his American counterpart (none to pleased that his code breakers were still trying to decipher the message), having first informed ‘C’ and the FO to which latter office Guthrie was urgently summoned and awarded their Dunce’s cap. The scapegoating of Guthrie was leaked; much too publicly, insiders smirked over caffeine at Claridges. A Classic in showboating, an old FO trick, they smiled knowingly. They knew the way it worked.
Nic began the campaign by using the epithet ‘drone’ as a metaphor for a culture of military stupidity, adopting as an emblem the crimson cross of St. George. Cartoons appeared, showing Daily News journalists attired in the white surtouts of the crusades. By association, the newspaper became linked in the public mind with evangelical patriotism. The Establishment held up its hands to a seething America, and secretly felt a sense of relief.
International organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, given the occasional column by even the Tory Press, now found themselves being championed by Everyman on his 37 bus to Clapham.
Drones had become the topic of the month. Old newspaper reports were resurrected such as the Guardian’s ‘47 men targeted but 1,147 killed’. House of Commons Early Day Motion No 727 which was tabled in November 2012 and had been passed by the House of Commons was recalled to show the public that its political class were not entirely under Washington’s control. The Motion had read:
‘…this House recalls the great successes of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in its quality work revealing or exposing many national and international scandals, including revealing that the CIA falsely claimed that it was causing zero civilian casualties in drone attacks in Pakistan and confirming that the US had deliberately targeted rescuers in follow up strikes…’
America reacted furiously, but the dyke had been breached and the spill was flowing everywhere. Televised magazine programmes had UAVs as the controversy of our time and extra-judicial death the greatest scandal.
Years of misrepresentation, suppression, and cover-up were proclaimed.
The terrorist recruiting narrative that all Western powers were complicit in the death of innocents briefly gained credibility, then lost its potency. A public clamour for truth grew ever louder. The claim that drone strikes were somehow the cutting edge of freedom was being laughed to scorn.