Seeing and Not-Seeing: The Military-Aged Male

by tagregory

In a New York Times article from 2012, it was revealed that the Obama administration had embraced a controversial method for counting – or, more accurately, not counting – civilian casualties killed by drones. Concerned about the outcry over non-combatant deaths, both at home and abroad, it was decided that all “military-aged males” within the vicinity of a blast should be counted as combatants ‘unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent’.

The rationale for this was simple, if horribly inaccurate. As the New York Times piece explains:

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbours don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

The problem with this approach – quite apart from it being questionable on both moral and legal grounds – is that it fails to take into account that many of these drone strikes occur in urban areas, where it is quite likely that perfectly innocent “military-aged males” will be living, working and hanging out. Indeed, one of the most disastrous effects of the drone program is the disruption it has caused to ordinary life, destroying local economies, keeping children from school and preventing funerals from being held.

A number of commentators have been highly critical of the Obama administration for employing this deliberately misleading term. Glenn Greenwald, for example, has argued that:

By “militant,” the Obama administration literally means nothing more than: any military-age male whom we kill, even when we know nothing else about them. They have no idea whether the person killed is really a militant: if they’re male and of a certain age they just call them one in order to whitewash their behaviour and propagandise the citizenry (unless conclusive evidence somehow later emerges proving their innocence).

Likewise, a piece in the Huffington Post observed that this “guilt by association” attitude effectively makes anybody who happens to be standing near a terrorist guilty, which might account for the administration’s absurd claim that not a single civilian was killed in a drone strike in 2011.

Given the controversy surrounding the use of this term, it is interesting to read a report by the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), which is an official US Military body, on the dangers of using leading language. In particular, the report states that:

One such commonly used term is MAM (military-age male), which implies that the individuals are armed forces and therefore legitimate target… [but] can also lead to assumptions regarding hostile intent that may be unfounded.

What worries the authors of this report is not the accuracy of the Army’s body counts, but the way that these monikers might shape a soldier’s perception of people around them. Language, it argues, ‘may contain assumptions, have associations, or create visual images that imply more than the facts support’. As a result, a soldier may make a ‘positive identification’ when in fact they have simply misread hostile intent.

Again, questions of seeing and not-seeing seem to involve more than just a physiological capacity.

Update: Further on in the report, a vignette is provided to help illustrate this point:

An AH-64D helicopter describes a group of individuals who appear to be be emplacing [sic] an IED in the road… This is an example of where leading language could have led to a misidentification of civilian noncombatants as enemy. The AH-64D could have described them as “enemy MAMs [military-age males] emplacing an IED”. The objective description the AH-64D gave (“a group of individuals who appear to be emplacing an IED”) was better since:

* It did not know in fact that the group of individuals was enemy.

* It could not tell that the individuals were MAMs, and using the terms MAMs can make forces more willing to declare PID [Positive Identification].

* It did not know for sure that the individuals were emplacing an IED. There was no visible evidence of IED materials.