The strongly worded protest
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Reports that Russian surveillance drones had flown over Germany prompted Ted Rall to ask whether this still counted as an act of war, as it once would have, and what the Germans could do about it. John Kiriakou's answer deflated both halves of the question.

The geography problem

Kiriakou began by granting the premise for the sake of argument, "I'm going to make an assumption here that these were Russian drones", and then raised a practical difficulty: the aircraft would have had to cross the whole of Poland to get there. Told they were apparently launched from ships in the Baltic Sea, he accepted the correction at once: "that would make more sense to me."

Not an act of war

On the legal characterisation he was direct: "an act of war, not so much, as a violation of airspace."

His reason is that the practice is universal and constant. The Russians do it to the United States "all the time, in Alaska, for example," he said, "and we do it to them with some frequency as well, as do the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Turks." A category of conduct engaged in routinely by every capable state, including the complainant, does not function as a casus belli.

What actually happens

The remedy Kiriakou describes is diplomatic and formulaic. "What you do is you have your ambassador go into the Minister of Defense's office in Moscow and lodge a formal, strongly worded diplomatic protest," he said.

He treated the ritual with open irony, reaching for a comic reference, "you know, to quote the Stooges, why", before Rall interrupted with a joke of his own about Iggy Pop. The interruption is characteristic of the register, but the substantive point had been made: the response to an airspace incursion is a scripted act of protest whose function is to register that the incursion was noticed.

Placement

The answer illustrates a recurring move in Kiriakou's broadcast material. Presented with an incident framed as unprecedented and alarming, he supplies the ordinary institutional response and the frequency with which the underlying conduct occurs, not to excuse it, but to locate it. Here the effect is to place drones over Germany in the same category as bombers off Alaska: a routine intrusion answered by a routine démarche.

See also

- Ted Rall
- John Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
