Drone Diplomacy

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Drone Diplomacy

by: Geoff Simons
April - May 2011
The Link - Volume 44, Issue 2
Page 1


There are many types of international diplomacy intended to protect and further the interests of nation states. When Hillary Clinton, U.S. secretary of state, says that the United States will continue to fund the Palestinian Authority only if Mahmoud Abbas remains its leader, we witness a classic case of dollar diplomacy. And yet despite the U.S. funding of Israel and Egypt to the tune of billions of dollars per year, Washington was mysteriously unable to use dollar diplomacy to end the excesses of the Mubarak dictatorship, and still can’t end the many Israeli violations of international law. Of course, behind the diplomatic options that economic dominance provides, there is also the unassailable diplomatic power facilitated by military muscle. The international diplomat, when able to speak for a superpower, can both bribe and bully.

It’s called gunboat diplomacy, and it’s as old as the conflict between nations.

The term originated in the era of European imperialism, when a show of military might off the coast was often sufficient to intimidate other states into granting trade or territorial concessions. The United States has long practiced gunboat diplomacy as an exercise of hegemony. Theodore Roosevelt favored “big stick” diplomacy, and Woodrow Wilson is judged to have practiced conventional gunboat diplomacy in 1914 when the rebel Cándido Agular occupied Veracruz during the Mexican revolution (countless earlier examples could be given from the 19th century).

The most dramatic example of American gunboat diplomacy was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki–not to impress Japan, since the war was already won, but to intimidate the Soviet Union. In March 1944 the Nobel laureate Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat was shocked to hear General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, say: “You realize of course that the real purpose of making the bomb is to subdue our chief enemy, the Russians.” Japan was defeated but the Truman administration wanted to teach the Soviets a realpolitik lesson. In 1948, Professor Patrick Blackett commented that the use of atomic bombs was “not so much the last military act of the Second World War, as the first diplomatic war with Russia.” In the same vein, Secretary of State James Byrnes said in June 1945: “The bomb was needed not to defeat Japan but rather to make Russia more manageable in Europe.”

Today the United States, the most powerful military state on earth, continues to use gunboat diplomacy in different ways. In November 2010 the Christian Science Monitor observed in an article headed “Obama uses gunboat diplomacy with North Korea–and China” that the president had made a “clever strategic move” after a North Korean rocket attack had killed four people on a South Korean island. Obama had ordered the U.S.S. Washington aircraft carrier strike force into the Yellow Sea, off the western shore of North Korea but also in a maritime area that Beijing claims is its own regional zone. Perhaps the Chinese military strategists were suitably impressed. The old European imperialists would have applauded.

But there’s more. Now, to the world’s arsenals of jet planes, aircraft carriers and nuclear bombs, we can add drones.

Variously described as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs), they have facilitated an entire new level of diplomacy. The general principles are the same. We have the technology. Do as we say or we will blast you into submission.

Drone diplomacy is currently being implemented as a practical military device, deployed in various theaters of war and serving as a constant threat to weak states that may be rash enough to challenge the U.S. and other hegemonies, not least Israel’s regional dominance.

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Drone Diplomacy

by: Geoff Simons
April - May 2011
The Link - Volume 44, Issue 2
Page 2


The History of UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), like gunboat diplomacy, have a long evolutionary history.

In their simplest form they date back to centuries before Christ, when the ingenious Chinese first launched kites. On Aug. 22, 1849 the Austrians used unmanned balloons, some launched from the Austrian ship Vulcano, to attack the Italian city of Venice. Some of the balloons, each 23 feet in diameter and packed with explosives, worked as intended to alarm the Italians, while unpredictable winds blew some of the devices back over the Austrian lines.

During the American Civil War a surveillance camera was placed on a tethered balloon; during World War I a camera was placed on the leg of a homing pigeon. In 1915 the Kettering Bug, intended to be the first military drone, was devised as a remotely controlled weapon able to follow a crudely preprogrammed course, shed its wings and dive as a bomb on the selected target. It was never fully developed, partly through lack of funds; then the war ended, probably much to the chagrin of the Bug technicians.

The first operational UAV was A.M. Low’s "aerial target" of 1916, soon followed by a more lethal machine. On Sept. 12, 1916 the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane, dubbed a "flying bomb" and controlled by Elmer Sperry gyroscopes, made its first flight and demonstrated the feasibility of unmanned assault aircraft. In 1924 the scientist Hugo Gernsback saw the advantages of a “pilotless plane which sees” via radio control and a television link, though the current technology was inadequate for such a device.

During the 1930s the U.S. Navy began experimenting with radio-controlled aircraft, and in 1937 produced Curtiss N2C-2 drones, remotely controlled from other aircraft. The following year the U.S. Army Air Corps signed a contract with the Radioplane Company, later the Ventura Division of Northrop Corporation, to produce three radio-controlled target drones. During WWII the United States Air Force (USAF) acquired hundreds of target UAVs, radio-controlled versions of the Culver Cadet two-seat light civil aircraft, and thousands of more sophisticated Culver designs. The German V-1 buzz bomb, used primarily to attack London during the war, has been classed as an offensive drone, a pilotless aerial vehicle carrying a bomb.

The concept of “assault drones” using television cameras began development in the early 1940s. In April 1942 a drone successfully delivered a torpedo attack on a Japanese destroyer at a range of 20 miles from the control aircraft. Then the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics launched a television-assisted remote-control assault drone program of 162 control planes and 1,000 assault drones. At this time the notion of using UAVs as assault vehicles for military targets remained controversial on cost and tactical grounds, and assault drones were not used during the major allied advances in 1944. At the end of July 1944, four drones were used to attack a beached Japanese merchant ship in the Russell Islands, with two hits and two misses. Some 46 American drones were launched in the northern Solomon Islands but while some were effective others failed to reach their targets.

After WWII, with military strategists at last perceiving the many advantages of UAVs, the U.S. began to invest heavily in their development. In May 1960, U2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, which further encouraged the development of unmanned surveillance aircraft, this time under the code name of “Red Wagon.” Camera-carrying drones were used widely for surveillance operations in the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War (1990-91), the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s, and in many subsequent theaters. By 2000 the United States was ready to use drones extensively as launch vehicles for missiles, and in 2001 the Afghans began to feel the benefits. On Nov. 3, 2002, C.I.A. operatives in Djibouti fired laser-guided Hellfire missiles from a drone at a passenger vehicle in Yemen, killing all the passengers, including an American citizen.

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Drone Diplomacy

by: Geoff Simons
April - May 2011
The Link - Volume 44, Issue 2
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The Predator

The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator UAV and the GA MQ-9 Reaper UAV, Tier II systems, are among the most extensively used drones by the U.S. military and the C.I.A.

The Predator was designed in the 1990s to carry cameras and other sensors for reconnaissance operations, and was later upgraded to carry and fire two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and other munitions. The C.I.A. became interested in the "Amber" drone developed by Leading Systems, Inc., whose owner, Abraham Karem, was a former chief designer for the Israeli Air Force who emigrated to the United States in the late 1970s. The company that took over Leading System sold five drones, then called the "Gnat," to the C.I.A., and Karem agreed to produce a quiet engine for the vehicle. Until that time the drone had sounded like a "lawnmower in the sky." The new machine, derived from the GA Gnat 750 UAV, became known as the Predator. Following successful trials in the mid-1990s the Predator was employed in the Balkans in the summer of 1995. At that time a single Predator cost around $3.2 million.

By now the C.I.A. was becoming increasingly enthusiastic about the tactical options being opened up by drone technology, and arranged for USAF teams trained by the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, to fly the agency’s Predators in Bosnia and then in Kosovo. When a number of losses were caused by cold weather flight conditions, later Predators were fitted with de-icing systems, along with an up-rated turbocharged engine and improved avionics. The new system was designated the RQ-1B, or the MQ-1B when munitions were added (‘R’ denotes a reconnaissance function, ‘Q’ an unmanned aircraft system, and ‘M’ a multi-role capability combining reconnaissance and bombing functions). The Predator is now equipped with a multi-spectral targeting system, a color nose camera for flight control, a variable-aperture day-TV camera, and a variable-aperture infrared camera for cloud, smoke or night conditions. The cameras transmit full-motion video and still-frame radar images. Laser designators, standard equipment for all Predators, enables the "pilot" to identify targets for other UAVs and even provides laser guidance for manned aircraft. The designator is also used to aid target-location for the Hellfire missiles.

The Predator has been used to bomb targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia, Serbia and Yemen. It can fly up to 400 nautical miles to a target, loiter overhead for 14 hours, then return to its base. It relies on a ground control station (GCS) and a primary satellite link communication suite.

During operations in the former Yugoslavia the UAVs were controlled by a Predator pilot sitting with other specialists in a van near the runway of the drone’s operating base, sometimes flying Predators secretly out of Hungary and Gjadar, Albania. Later it became possible to shift communications to military satellite networks linked to the pilot’s van, and by 2000 the developing technology allowed operators to fly drones remotely from great distances.

So satellite navigation technology is used not only to help us navigate our automobiles from one city to another but to ensure that we can successfully bomb foreigners in distant villages. The modern Predator is very unobtrusive and since the Hellfire missile is supersonic, targets can be attacked with little warning. For transport purposes the UAV can be disassembled and loaded into a container dubbed “the coffin,” while the entire ground control system can be conveniently rolled into a C-130 Hercules aircraft.

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Drone Diplomacy

by: Geoff Simons
April - May 2011
The Link - Volume 44, Issue 2
Page 4


Following the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Predator became the primary UAV for offensive operations in Afghanistan and Pakistani tribal areas.

Today the vast majority of Predators are operated by United States forces and the C.I.A. In their arsenal are tens of thousands of UAVs, including at least 7,000 of what some observers call “assassination drones.” This makes the U.S. the biggest user by far of unmanned aerial vehicles in a vast range of different types from small surveillance drones that a soldier can control with a handset to the large Reaper-style machines that can pulverize entire villages.

By 2010, as part of the program of battlefield automation, the United States Air Force claimed to be training more drone operators than fighter and bomber pilots, with current plans to vastly expand its UAV fleet over the next few decades.

In 2006, the USAF was able to fly just a dozen drones at any one time, but now it can fly more than fifty. At a significant trade conference outside Washington in 2009, military contractors described a future vision of pilotless aircraft serving as fighters, bombers, transports, and even automatic mini-drones able to attack in swarms. Thousands of robotic vehicles and drones were already deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by 2015 the Pentagon’s arms procurement program of around $230 billion for "Future Combat Systems" expects at least 15 per cent of the U.S. armed forces to be robotic.

One recent study, The Unmanned Aircraft System Flight Plan 2020-2047, predicted that by 2020 $55 billion would be spent on drone funding. General Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, commented: “The capability provided by the unmanned aircraft is game-changing. We can have eyes 24/7 on our adversaries.” In years to come, most American pilots will be sitting at a keyboard in front of a screen rather than operating in the air.

Even now the USAF is flying around 50 drones in Afghanistan, with the number expected to increase to 65 by 2013. In July 2010, WikiLeaks revealed that Predator and Reaper drones, typically piloted by remote control from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, were being used increasingly throughout Afghanistan. In January 2009 the Washington Post reported that the new drone surveillance system "Gorgon Stare," capable of feeding live video images of movement in an entire urban area, was being deployed to Afghanistan. Major General James Poss, the Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, was quoted: “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.” Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a public policy group, observed, “The availability of surveillance drones and attack drones has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years,” and suggested that drones will have “saturated” the airspace in the coming years.

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Drone Diplomacy

by: Geoff Simons
April - May 2011
The Link - Volume 44, Issue 2
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Death by Joystick

One consequence of this escalation of drone diplomacy is euphemistically called “collateral damage.” Here are but a few examples of what has happened at the other end of the digital divide:
• On Feb. 4, 2002, 3 p.m., on a hill near Zhawa Kili, Paktia Province, Afghanistan. A Predator Hellfire missile kills Daraz Khan, Jehangir Khan, and Mir Ahmed, as they scavenge for scrap metal from previous missile attacks. Local villagers tell Doug Struck of the Washington Post that the men, desperately poor, were hoping to sell the scraps in Pakistan, where a camel-load of twisted steel goes for 50 cents. The 16-year-old niece of Daraz Khan asks: “Why did you do this? Why did you Americans kill Daraz? We have nothing, nothing, and you have taken from us our Daraz.” Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clark says, “We’re convinced that it was an appropriate target … [although] we do not yet know exactly who it was.”

• May 6, 2002, Kunar Province, Afghanistan. A Predator fires at a convoy of cars in an attempt to assassinate warlord Gulbuddin Hektmatyer because of his opposition to U.S.-backed Hamid Karzai, then president of the Afghan Transitional Administration. The warlord isn’t in the convoy. Ten civilians are killed.

• Jan. 5, 2006, the Saidqi area of Pakistan. A Predator missile blows up a house where Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is suspected to be. He isn’t there. Eight civilians are killed.

• Jan. 13, 2006, predawn, the 6th floor of C.I.A. headquarters, Langley, VA. A computer operator gives a command to a Predator twelve-and-a-half time zones away to shoot four Hellfire missiles at three houses in Demadola, Pakistan. The missiles, made by Lockheed Martin and costing $45,000 each, obliterate the houses of three jewelers. The target, Ayman al-Zawahiri, isn’t there. Twenty-two civilians, including five women and five children, are killed while celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. “They acted on wrong intelligence,” a Pakistani intelligence officer says of the Americans. An estimated 10,000 people rally in Karachi, many chanting “Death to American aggression” and “Stop bombing innocent people.”

• Aug. 22, 2008, in the village of Azizabad, in Herat Province, Afghanistan. An estimated 78-92 civilians, mostly children, are killed by drone missiles. The Pentagon calls the attack a legitimate strike against the Taliban, and denies any civilian casualties. Five weeks later, the U.S. Department of Defense allows that 33 civilians were killed. An investigation by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan puts the number at 90 civilians, 60 of them children.

• On Oct. 13, 2008, in the town of Miran Shah, North Waziristan. A barrage of U.S. drone missiles kills five people. Local people say none of the dead were militants.

• Jan. 23, 2009, South Waziristan, three days after President Obama’s inauguration. A Predator strikes the home of Malik Gulistan Khan, a tribal elder and member of a local, pro-government peace committee. Five family members are killed. “I lost my father, three brothers, and my cousin in the attack,” says Adnan, his 18-year-old son. His uncle adds: “We did nothing, have no connections to militants at all.”

• April 2, 2009, in the town of Tank, near South Waziristan. Drone missiles kill at least 12 people and wound many more. Some 150 elders protest the strike. Pakistani officials claim that, in the previous year, more than 30 U.S. drone strikes killed approximately 300 people.

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by: Geoff Simons
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The Link - Volume 44, Issue 2
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• April 5, 2009, in the village of Data Khel, near the Afghan border. U.S. drone attacks kill 13 people, including women and children. Thousands of Pakistanis flee the area to escape such attacks, causing a colossal humanitarian crisis. Rabia Ali, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and Maqbool Shah Roghani, administrator for Internally Displaced People at the Commission for Afghan Refugees, report that 546,000 people have registered as IDPs. Thousands more unregistered people are taking refuge with relatives. The Pakistani government is running short of resources to feed and shelter refugees.

• May 5, 2009, in the village of Gerani, near the Iranian border in Afghanistan. In the highest known civilian death toll since fighting began in 2001, over 100 people are killed as they seek shelter in a compound during coalition airstrikes. Using rudimentary tools, villagers dig out the bodies by hand.

• May 19, 2009, Khaisor, North Waziristan. A U.S. drone strikes the homes of villagers suspected of feeding alleged militants, killing 14 women and children and two elders, and wounding a dozen more.

• June 18, 2009, Raghazai, South Waziristan. A U.S. drone fires missiles into a suspected Taliban compound, killing one person. When villagers rush to help wounded survivors, a hovering drone fires a second missile, killing a dozen more people. The target of the assassination attack, Wali Mohammed, is not in the compound, according to a New York Times report.

• July 14, 2009, the Brookings Institute, Washington D.C. Daniel Byman, Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, concludes that an average of 10 civilians to one militant are being killed in U.S. drone attacks.

• Oct. 9, 2009, the Datta Khel region of North Waziristan. Saddam Hussein, 13, loses his 10-month-old niece and sister-in-law in a drone strike on their home. “The drones patrol day and night,” Saddam tells the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC). “Sometimes we see six in the air all at once. When they swoop down, people run out of their houses, even at night. “

• Dec. 26, 2009, the Barbar Raghazi area of North Waziristan. U.S. drone missiles kill four people and injure more in an attack on a private dwelling. Local officials tell al-Jazeera that all those killed were civilians. A week later, the independent media organization Global Research concludes that of the 44 drone attacks carried out in the Pakistani tribal areas over the past year, only five hit their actual targets. Pakistani officials put the number of children killed in 2009 at 708.

• March 2010. The Washington-based New American Foundation reports that 51 drone attacks on Pakistan occurred during the first year of the Obama administration, compared to 45 during the full two terms of the Bush presidency.

• September 8, 2010, Yemen. U.S. launches a series of drone attacks against suspected militants. Original report says 20 are killed. Later reports suggest that most of those killed were tribespeople with no connection to militant groups.

• Nov. 13, 2010, the village Ahmad Khel, in the Mir Ali area in North Waziristan. A U.S. drone kills five people. A correspondent for Geo News, a Karachi-based Pakistani news channel, reports from the attack site that the dead appeared to be ordinary citizens.

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• Nov. 16, 2010, in the village of Bangi Dar, North Waziristan, near the Afghan border. Four drone missiles hit a house and vehicle. Al-Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder reports 16 people, including women and children, are killed in the house and four people in the vehicle.

• Dec. 2, 2010, the Conflict Monitoring Center (CMC), an Islamabad based independent research center, issues a report on deaths by drones. It concludes that U.S. and Pakistani officials are deliberately overlooking civilian deaths, which outnumber those of militants. The CMC estimates 2,043 Pakistanis have been slain in C.I.A. drone attacks in the past five years, the vast majority innocent civilians.

•Jan. 23, 2011, Mir Ali, North Waziristan. U.S. drones kill 13 people in the area. Some 2,000 local tribesmen hold a protest to demand an end to the drone strikes, saying they kill innocent civilians. 75% of all Pakistani deaths over the past five years have occurred during the presidency of Barack Obama.

The Co-Pioneer

Israel is America’s co-pioneer in drone technology.

Today it is the world’s leader.

Israel has modified U.S. designs for its own arsenal and for export. Its primary model, the Hermes, is the Jewish State’s answer to the Predator. It can hover at 18,000 feet for up to 20 hours. Its sensors can discern people on the ground and even distinguish between adults and children. The drones deployed in Gaza during Israel’s 23-day Operation Cast Lead, carried missiles with a lethal blast radius of 10 to 20 yards.

Here are but a few examples of their “collateral damage”:
• Dec. 27, 2008, Gaza City, the first day of the assault. An IDF drone-launched missile hits a group of youths who had gathered around a radio while waiting for a bus, across the street from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). Twelve students are killed, two of them women, along with other civilian casualties. No military activity is reported in the area at the time. “We heard a buzzing noise in the air before the explosion,” says Ibrahim Rayyis, 19, who was in a nearby store. “When I went out to see what had happened, my two brothers Hisham and Allam were lying on the ground, blood gushing from their wounds.” Their father, Nehru Rayyis, later stumbles upon the body of another relative killed in the attack, 20-year-old Abd Allah, outside an overflowing morgue in a Gaza hospital.

• Dec. 27, 2008, Gaza. An Israeli drone missile hits the Gaza City police headquarters, killing at least 40 cadets during a police academy graduation ceremony. Human Rights Watch investigators at the site find hundreds of perfectly cubic pieces of metal shrapnel, circuit boards and other parts—including some marked with Motorola serial numbers—and four small impact craters, all consistent with drone-fired missiles.

• Dec. 29, 2008, east of Jabalya refugee camp, northern Gaza. An Israeli-launched drone missile strikes a truck outside a metal shop killing nine civilians, three of them children. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) say the men were loading rockets onto the truck, but after an on-site inspection, the IDF concedes they were oxygen tanks.

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Drone Diplomacy

by: Geoff Simons
April - May 2011
The Link - Volume 44, Issue 2
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• Jan. 5, 2009, night time, Gaza City. An Israeli drone-launched missile hits the Asma elementary school run by the United Nations. Three young men from the Sultan family are killed. The school has lighted signs, and the U.N. had provided the IDF with the GPS coordinates of all its schools and facilities. On the same day, in the al-Shaaf area of Gaza, an Israeli drone kills 10-year-old Mo’men Allaw, crushing his legs and scattering cubes of shrapnel throughout his chest. According to The Nation, his family was sitting on the roof of their home at noontime, when the missile came literally out of the blue.

• Jan. 16, 2009, Gaza. Mounir al-Jarah is having tea in his courtyard with his sister, her husband, and four of their children. He leaves to go inside his house to get something and when he returns he sees a ball of light hurtling down toward him. There is an explosion and Mounir is thrown backward. When he rises and stumbles into the courtyard, he sees the children: Mohammed, his body cut in half; Ahmed, his body in three pieces; Walid, his body badly burned, his eyes gone; and Nour, her decapitated head never to be found. This would be one of a dozen cases recorded by Amnesty International of civilian deaths by drones during Israel’s 23-day assault on Gaza. Five and a-half months later, Human Rights Watch will release a 39-page report, “Precisely wrong: Gaza civilians killed by Israeli Drone-Launched Missiles,” in which Marc Garlasco, senior HRW military analyst concludes: “Drone operators can clearly see their targets on the ground and also divert their missiles after launch . . . Given these capabilities, Israel needs to explain why these civilian deaths took place.”

So advanced is Israel’s drone technology—and so field-tested in Gaza—many countries now prefer made-in-Israel drones.

Turkey wants them. The daily Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted in June 2010 that Turkey was still using Israeli-made drones against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in northern Iraq. Early in 2010 Turkey concluded a deal worth $185 million with Israel for the supply of ten Heron drones, and Israel’s killing of nine Turkish activists in the flotilla incident didn’t seem to upset the deal.

Other countries knocking on Israel’s weaponry door include Brazil which has signed a $350 million drone deal with Israel to enhance its border protection and police work. India uses Israeli drones to control Kashmir. Georgia used Hermes drones against Russia in 2008, and Russia, impressed with Georgia’s drone performance, has procured $53 million worth of Israeli drones for itself. The British, Germans and Canadians all use Israeli Heron drones over Afghanistan. Even the United States buys Israeli drones for patrolling its border with Mexico. And the Pentagon uses Israeli Skylark drones in Iraq. To better service these contracts, Israel has set up drone factories in Starkville, Mississippi and Columbus, Ohio. Since 2005, it has been training many of these countries’ drone operators and maintenance crews, some of whom have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

... and the Rest

Today’s U.S. drone strikes on Afghanistan and Pakistan and Israel’s attacks on Gaza are only part of the picture.

The WikiLeaks revelations show that the United States was using drones against Islamist targets in Yemen, and that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh told General David Petraeus, then commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, that “we’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.” Drones also are being used to provide surveillance of Iranian targets, with Ali Fadavi, commander of the Revolutionary Guards naval forces, claiming to have shot down “many” Western drones. U.S. drones also protect ships from Somali pirates, and monitor the Manitoba portion of Canada’s border with the United States to prevent transit by migrants, terrorists and drug smugglers.

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But, as the narco cartels are proving, two can play the drone game. In September 2010, the Public Security Secretariat (SSP) of Mexico reported that drug cartels were using unmanned, ultra-light drones weighing around 100 pounds to send 220 pounds of cocaine into the United States, each flight earning the drug traffickers about $2 million. So the question has to be asked, how long will it be before terrorists come up with their own ultra-light drones?

Today the United States is by far the most successful imperial nation—a role it took over from Japan and the European powers. Imperial ambition can of course be furthered in many ways, but the modern drone is an increasingly effective tool in helping the U.S. to fulfill that role.

Other countries perceive this state of affairs and are working in various ways to catch up by acquiring drone technology. Even General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, one-time dictator friend of Washington, suggested in an interview with Fox News in September 2009 that Pakistan, today a victim of drone attacks, could usefully have a few drones of its own for use against terrorists. In early 2011 Pakistan was negotiating a deal with the U.S. to acquire a drone system, the Shadow-III, currently used by the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps.

The Royal Air Force of Britain, a U.S. ally, is heavily involved in U.S. Predator and Reaper operations, most of them launched against targets in Afghanistan from a base in Kandahar but controlled from the Creech U.S. Air Force base in Nevada. In December 2010, the U.K. ministry of defense refused to answer a parliamentary question about whether U.K.-operated drones were firing the Hellfire AGM 114N missile. This is a thermobaric weapon capable of widespread and indiscriminate destruction, and one condemned by human rights groups and judged by many observers to be illegal in international law. By 2011 there was growing speculation that Britain and France were to cooperate in drone production.

In April 2010, Northrop Grumman Corp., the producer of the RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drone, was happy to report that South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Britain, Spain, New Zealand and Canada were considering adding versions of the Global Hawk, already used by the U.S. Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan, to their air forces. Japan had already been moving to ditch its own self-imposed ban on arms manufacture, and to move into the global arms industry. This would involve a conversion of Japan’s robotics industry from civilian to military use to produce remote-controlled hardware, such as drones, to counter military developments by other Asian states. In November 2010, no fewer than 25 different drone models were on display at the Zhuhair air show in China, a record number for a country that revealed its first concept UAVs at the same air show only four years before. Jeremy Page, writing in the Wall Street Journal, commented: “The apparent progress in UAVs is a stark sign of China’s ambition to upgrade its massive military as its global political and economic clout grows.”

In August 2010, a North Korean drone was spotted near the sensitive sea border with South Korea, perhaps a response to U.S. Global Hawks being use to spy on the North. It was known that for some years North Korea had been trying to obtain remotely-piloted UAVs from Europe in order to establish its own drone production program.

In March 2009, the U.S. military confirmed that it had shot down an Iranian drone, an Ababil-3, inside Iraq’s airspace. Already Iran had a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft, some of them with “stealth” features in order to avoid enemy radar, and had supplied Hezbollah with both Misrad and Ababil surveillance drones. At least one had been shot down by Israeli fighter planes. In August 2010, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at an inauguration ceremony for Iran’s first unmanned bomber aircraft, the Karrar (“striker”). “The jet,” said the president, “as well as being an ambassador of death for the enemies of humanity, has a main message of peace and friendship.”

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April - May 2011
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Which brings us to our last two questions:

Are Drones Ethical? Or Even Effective?

According to news reports, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who failed in his attempt to bomb Times Square on May 1, 2010, told investigators that he was acting in retaliation for U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan. This led David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, to ask: “Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan—notably the Predator drone strikes—actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgents to think of targeting Times Square and American airlines, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent?

That certainly is the case in Pakistan, according to David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgent expert who worked for General Petraeus. In a May 17, 2009 New York Times article, he wrote that the “highly unpopular” drone attacks were leading to a loss of the Pakistani government’s control over its people. “We need to call off the drones,” he advised. “They are creating more enemies than they eliminate.” Every dead noncombatant “represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as the drone strikes have increased.”

This, too, is the assessment of Hamid Mir, veteran Pakistani journalist, news anchor, and security analyst. Speaking at the University of California Berkeley on April 9, 2009, he insisted that civilian deaths, attributed to American drone attacks, were contributing to a process of radicalization. “We realize—Pakistan, America, the whole international community—everybody wants to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But blunders in our treatment of the tribal areas are only strengthening their hand.”

Drone manufacturers in the U.S. and Israel claim that drones save lives, that is, no pilots are lost in combat. Yet, as we have seen, for every pilot saved, many innocent civilians are killed or maimed.

Drone supporters also argue that the drone’s laser-guided missiles are more precise killers than unmanned planes. Yet, as Human Rights Watch noted in its June 30, 2009 report on Israel’s attack on Gaza: “Drones, much like sniper rifles, are only as good at sparing civilians as the care taken by the people who operate them. The accuracy and concentrated blast radius of the missile can reduce civilian casualties, but in Gaza, Israel’s targeting choices led to the loss of many civilian lives.”

If the military aim is to exterminate and/or isolate extremists from the communities in which they live, bombing civilians thousands of miles away from the safety of Creech Air Force base in Nevada seems an unlikely way to win hearts and minds.

As for those military “pilots” behind their high-tech consoles: It turns out, they suffer post-traumatic stress disorders at higher rates than soldiers in combat because, it is thought, they have to face with raw immediacy the grisly results of their finger-pressing. This is not the uncertainty of battlefield warfare, where survival and victory depend on a variety of risk factors. This is shooting fish in a barrel, then, going home to supper.

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Drone Diplomacy

by: Geoff Simons
April - May 2011
The Link - Volume 44, Issue 2
Page 11


Ethicists are beginning to challenge the morality of drone warfare. An editorial in the May 18, 2010 issue of the Protestant magazine The Christian Century concluded that, while drones have killed enemy leaders, “they raise terrible questions to those committed to the just war principle that civilians should never be targeted.” Even the “risk-free” argument, that drones prevent U.S. casualties, is challenged because, says the Century, the just war theory holds that it is better to risk the lives of one’s own combatants than the lives of enemy noncombatants.

Are Drones Legal?

There is now a growing debate about the legality of using drones to attack foreign targets, with David Glazier, an American law professor, suggesting that drone pilots could be charged with committing war crimes.

In May 2010, Philip Alston, U.N. special representative on extrajudicial executions, raised a number of concerns, not least the prevalence of a "Playstation" mentality among drone operators. Were they just playing video games with depersonalized and distant targets, games that nonetheless resulted in indiscriminate slaughter of human beings? Alston, a professor of law at New York University, writes:

I’m particularly concerned that the United States … asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe. But this strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other States can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.

The Geneva Conventions of 1949, which provides the basis for international humanitarian law, were expanded In 1977 by Additional Protocols I and II.

The first of these, understood to represent customary international law, specifically addresses the "Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts." It has served as a key document in the International Criminal Tribunal prosecutions of war criminals in regard to the conflicts in Sierra Leone, the former Yugoslavia, and The Democratic Republic of Congo. The United States is a signatory to the Additional Protocols but has not yet ratified them, unlike 168 other states, including every European state.

However, the U.S. failure to ratify does not render it immune to this international law. On the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Additional Protocols the International Committee of the Red Cross clearly stated the general legal view that the 1977 amendments "form a set of rules of customary law valid for every State, whether or not it is party to the Protocols." In short, no state can evade international law simply by ignoring it.

It is enough here to mention some Articles of Protocol I: Article 17 (role of the civilian population and of aid societies), Article 51 (protection of the civilian population), Article 52 (general protection of civilian objects), Article 53 (protection of cultural objects and places of worship), and Article 57 (precautions in attack). In particular, Article 6 of Additional Protocol II, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are directly relevant to a legal assessment of drone policy. Case studies of actual drone attacks in Pakistan—and those in Gaza—demonstrate comprehensive and unambiguous U.S. and Israeli violations of international law.

Nothing in this analysis is surprising. In recent years the United States has frequently shown itself indifferent to international law. Interviewed on CBS’s 60 Minutes on May 12, 1996 about economic sanctions, Madeleine Albright attempted to justify the deaths of 500,000 children in Iraq in consequence of U.S. policy objectives: “We think the price is worth it.” She showed no awareness of the copious legal violations that this policy involved. Similarly, President Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and his attempts to justify torture as a part of American policy showed contempt for both domestic and international law. This attitude, shared by some U.S. allies, is well conveyed by Tzipi Livni, for years a key member of the Israeli government: “I was the minister of justice. But I am against law–international law in particular.”

On 18 February 2011 a U.N. resolution condemning the illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land was vetoed by the United States. Yet again the U.S. had demonstrated its criminal contempt for international law.

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Call Off Drone War in Pakistan, Demands Former US Intel Chief

Submitted by Aurangzeb on July 30, 2011 – 4:54 pm


The former US intelligence chief, Dennis Blair, has demanded to stop drone attacks in Pakistan. “Call off the unilateral US drone war in Pakistan and rethink the idea of spending billions of dollars to pursue al-Qaida.” These aren’t the words of some human rights activist, or some far-left Congressman. They’re from retired admiral and former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair — the man who was, until recently, nominally in charge of the entire American effort to find, track, and take out terrorists. Now, he’s calling for that campaign to be reconsidered, and possibly even junked.

The drone attacks take out some mid-level terrorists, Blair said. But they’re not strategically effective. If the drones stopping flying tomorrow, Blair told the audience at the Aspen Security Forum, “it’s not going to lower the threat to the US” Al-Qaida and its allies have proven “it can sustain its level of resistance to an air-only campaign,” he said.
It’s one of many reasons why it’s a mistake to “have that campaign dominate our overall relations” with countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. “Because we’re alienating the countries concerned, because we’re treating countries just as places where we go attack groups that threaten us, we are threatening the prospects of long-term reform,” Blair said.

The “unilateral” strikes in Pakistan have to come to an end, he added, and be replaced with operations that had the full cooperation of the government in Islamabad. The effort needed “two hands on the trigger,” Blair said. And strikes should be launched only when “we agree with them on what drone attacks” should target.

The statements won’t exactly win Blair new friends in the Obama administration, which forced him out of the top intelligence job about a year after he was nominated. Not only has Obama drastically escalated the drone war — there’ve been 50 strikes in the first seven months of this year, almost as many as in all of 2009. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called the remotely-piloted attacks the “only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaida leadership.”

Plus, American relations with the Pakistani government are at their lowest point in years. And every time Washington tries to tip off Islamabad to a raid, it seems, the targets of the raid seem to conveniently skip town. No wonder the US kept the mother of all unilateral strikes — the mission to kill Osama bin Laden — a secret from their erstwhile allies in Pakistan.

But Blair believes the cooperation – not only with Pakistan, but with the government in Yemen and whatever authorities can be found in Somalia — are the only way to bring some measure of peace to the world’s ungoverned spaces. “We have to change in those three countries,” he said.

Source: The Nation

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Damage Done by Drones in Pakistan

Submitted by BZ on August 1, 2011 – 1:20 pm



By Jemima Khan

If you want to understand the impact of the “war on terror” on America’s ally, Pakistan, look no further than Noor Behram’s photographs which show, he says, collateral damage as a result of US drone strikes in the tribal area. Behram, who is from Waziristan, has spent the past four years interviewing survivors of drone attacks, shooting video footage and close-up stills of the damage. The photographs – part of a new London exhibition – are gruesome.

Images of a severed hand, a child with half his head blown off, mangled body parts, demolished homes, a mosque reduced to rubble and the blood-splattered clothes of a woman held aloft by her widower have been converted to QuickTime films by the Beaconsfield gallery and projected, unedited, on to a giant cinema screen which plays on a loop. There is video footage of a lone drone hovering above a village in Miranshah, which resembles a fly on the camera lens. The background noise is of children playing and a rooster crowing.

There is another image, of an empty grave. Eighty mourners attending a funeral were struck by a missile and killed before they could bury the body. A local man who was digging the grave lies mutilated beside it. Similar images are regularly printed in local Pakistani papers, fanning the flames of anti-Americanism. A recent Pew poll found that 97 per cent of respondents viewed drones negatively and 69 per cent now view America as the enemy.

Here in the UK, we are more likely to read reports of how many militants have been killed from unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials. For foreigners, the only way to cover the Afghanistan conflict is to get permission from defence ministries and their press minders to be embedded with the Western armies.

Behram’s work appears to reveal the truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan’s tribal region – that far more civilians are being killed than the Americans or Pakistanis will admit. His images cannot be independently verified but are backed up by credible documentation. It also raises questions about the ethics of this new video-game warfare. How likely is it that a “reachback operator” sitting at a video screen up to 7,500 miles away at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, will hit the right target in the middle of the night?

The New America Foundation, which tracks drone strikes, estimates non-militant deaths at 20 per cent of the total of 2,464 fatalities, though Behram believes the toll is far greater: “For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant.”

Clive Stafford Smith, founder of legal action charity Reprieve, who together with Pakistani lawyer, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, has launched lawsuits on behalf of victims’ families, believes that 95 per cent of those killed by drones are not legitimate targets. He says: “We need transparent figures. We know that the US is lying as they say no civilians are being killed by drones and we’ve seen pictures of dead women and children.” He believes that Behram’s photographs provide evidence.
There are other questions which the images raise. How can people surrender to a drone? Why is the US regularly bombing its ally Pakistan in the first place?

Since President Obama came to office, the use of unmanned aircraft has drastically increased. Bush used unmanned predator drones 45 times in his eight years in office, while Obama unleashed 118 drones on Pakistan last year alone.
It’s not just America however that is reducing its military’s dependence on human beings – within 20 years nearly one third of the RAF could be made up of remotely controlled drones.

Reprieve has called its anti-drone campaign Bugsplat – the official term used by US authorities when human beings are successfully killed with drone missiles. Who needs satire? –Independent

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A Drone Strike Every Four Days Under Obama

Submitted by Aurangzeb on August 12, 2011 – 12:48 am



LONDON: At least 2,200 people, including women and children, have been reported killed in CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, according to a new study by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism in conjunction with The Express Tribune.

The dead include up to 21 alleged militants that were killed in North Waziristan on Wednesday.

The fundamental reassessment of US drone strikes has revealed there have been many more CIA attacks on alleged militant targets than previously reported. At least 291 US drone strikes are now known to have taken place since 2004.

The Bureau’s analysis also reveals that at least 2,292 people are credibly reported to have died – some 40% more deaths than generally claimed.

The intended targets of the CIA campaign – militants in the tribal areas – appear to make up the largest proportion of those killed. There are 126 named militants among the dead since 2004. But as many as 168 children have also been killed among at least 385 civilians.

More than 1,100 people are also revealed to have been injured in the US drone attacks – the first time this number has been gathered.

A counter-terrorism official revealed to the Bureau that internal US government figures record an estimated 2,050 people killed by the drone strikes, of whom all but 50 were militants. No ‘non-combatants’ – civilians – have been killed in Pakistan in the last year, the US official claimed.

The Bureau’s investigation took a team of journalists many months to complete. It involved a complete re-examination of all that is known about each US drone strike. More than 2,000 credible Pakistani and international media reports were examined. This was then cross-referenced with field reports from researchers; with details of civilian legal cases; with leaked intelligence documents; and with the writings of politicians, journalists and former intelligence officers.

The result is the clearest public understanding so far of the CIA’s covert drone war against the militants.

Despite this, a US counter-terrorism official told the Bureau that its numbers were ‘way off the mark’. The Washington-based official said: “These actions target militants planning actively to kill Afghans, Pakistanis, Europeans, and Americans among others, and most often the operations occur when they’re training or on the move, getting ready to attack. Over 4,000 Pakistani civilians have been killed by terrorists since 2009—the threat is clear and real.”

Civilian deaths

With the US military unable to operate overtly inside Pakistan, the Obama administration has come to rely heavily on CIA drone strikes to attack alleged militants in the country’s western tribal areas. To date, at least 236 drone attacks have been ordered in Obama’s name.

The Bureau’s research shows at least 1,842 people have been killed in the Obama strikes, most of them militants.

Recently, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan reported that the president has ‘insisted’ that Pakistan drone strikes ‘do not put… innocent men, women and children in danger’. Yet at least 218 of those killed in drone attacks in Obama’s time in office may have been civilians.

Civilian casualties do seem to have declined in the past year. Yet the Bureau still found credible evidence of at least 45 civilians killed in some ten strikes in this time. The US continues to insist that it ‘can’t confirm any noncombatant casualties’ in the past year.

In comparison, there were 52 Pakistan drone strikes during President Bush’s years in office. One in three of those attacks resulted in the reported deaths of children.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (www.thebureauinvestigates.com) has a 22,000-word database covering each individual strike in Pakistan in detail. The most recently reported civilian fatality was on July 12. Abdul Jalil, a migrant worker home on leave from Dubai, died as the CIA attacked a car carrying eight alleged militants, the Bureau’s researchers in Waziristan report.

“It is simply unclear what ‘rules of engagement’ the CIA are following in Pakistan. It’s also unclear how the USA is investigating the impact of attacks in order to assess their impact and compliance with international law. Given the failures of US intelligence…in Afghanistan, where conditions are relatively more conducive, there are real grounds for skepticism about the US’ ability to target accurately and to assess the impact of strikes accurately,” said Amnesty International’s Director of Asia Pacific Sam Zarifi.

The Bureau’s key findings

291 CIA attacks have taken place in Pakistan – 8 % more than previously reported. Under President Obama alone there have been 236 strikes – one every four days.

Between 2,292 and 2,863 people are reported to have died in the attacks – most of them militants
The minimum number of reported deaths is far higher than previously believed – with 40% more recorded casualties. Most of those killed are likely to be low-ranking militants.

126 named militants have so far been killed.
At least 1,114 people have been wounded

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Drone Strikes: More Than 1800 Civilians Killed Since 2008

Submitted by Aurangzeb on August 13, 2011 – 3:56 pm

[Areff]

The civilian victims of the CIA's drone war

A new study gives us the truest picture yet – in contrast to the CIA's own account – of drones' grim toll of 'collateral damage'

Clive Stafford Smith
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 August 2011 20.30 BST



Sameeda Gul, 6, who was injured in a drone strike in Pakistan in 2009. Photograph: Getty Images

"I would not deny that the pilotless plane, flying bomb, or whatever its correct name may be, is an exceptionally unpleasant thing, because, unlike most other projectiles, it gives you time to think. What is your first reaction when you hear that droning, zooming noise? Inevitably, it is a hope that the noise won't stop. You want to hear the bomb pass safely overhead and die away into the distance …"

– George Orwell, "As I Please", Tribune, 30 June 1944

George Orwell wrote of V2 attacks on London in 1944. Yet, there are many more in Britain who identify with that voice, speaking 67 years ago, than with events that are a regular reality in Pakistan today.

This week, a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism gives us the best picture yet of the impact of the CIA's drone war in Pakistan. The CIA claims that there has been not one "non-combatant" killed in the past year. This claim always seemed to be biased advocacy rather than honest fact. Indeed, the Guardian recently published some of the pictures we have obtained of the aftermath of drone strikes. There were photos of a child called Naeem Ullah killed in Datta Khel and two kids in Piranho, both within the timeframe of the CIA's dubious declaration.

The BIJ reporting begins to fill in the actual numbers. It's a bleak view: more people killed than previously thought, including an estimated 160 children overall. This study should help to create a greater sense of reality around what is going on in these remote regions of Pakistan. This is precisely what has been lacking in the one-sided reporting of the issue – and it doesn't take an intelligence analyst to realise that vague and one-sided is just the way the CIA wants to keep it.

The BIJ's study is everything that the CIA version of events is not: transparent, drawn from as many credible sources as possible and essentially open. It is clear about where its material comes from and what the margin of error may be. You should look, and you should engage, not just with the bare numbers, but also some of the stories: the attack on would-be rescuers by drones that had lingered, circling over the site of a previous strike, and opened fire – on the cruel assumption that any Good Samaritan must be a Taliban Samaritan; or the teenager who lost both legs when his family home was hit.

Sadaullah was 15 when the missiles, aimed at a militant leader who was never there, struck a family gathering, killing his wheelchair-bound uncle and two cousins. When he woke up in hospital, he was missing both legs and an eye. "The injured who survive with their severed limbs, they often tell me, 'you cannot really call me lucky'," says his lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar. "This is not London or Islamabad. There are no facilities for the disabled in Waziristan; such people can have zero opportunities ahead of them in life."

The primary question the CIA should answer is how it comes to be conducting an undeclared and illegal war in Pakistan, which is nominally a US ally. But beyond this, every time we read news of the latest drone strike in Pakistan, we need an honest assessment of the civilian casualties – and of whether we feel comfortable with an unaccountable spy agency carrying out killings on a military scale (the CIA's strikes now outweigh the firepower used in the opening round of the Kosovo war).

We also need to think about what it is like for ordinary people to live under George Orwell's circling threat, wondering whether it is going to strike, or to die away into the distance. And to note what lengths the CIA will go to silence human rights lawyers such as Akbar, who are trying to break the cycle of violence by bringing victims' cases against the CIA through the courts.

Or we could think in terms of enlightened self-interest: what do these strikes do to people's views of the US and its allies? Sixty-seven years after Orwell warily wondered whether he would be the next victim, how many angry relatives of a Waziristan child are plotting an attack on London or Washington, DC?

The BIJ study begins to bring the CIA's covert war out of the shadows. Since we may all become collateral damage, we should be grateful to them.

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‘Munter Resigned in Protest on US Drones Policy’

Submitted by Aurangzeb on May 30, 2012 – 8:00 pm

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK: The outgoing US Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, found the drone strike-driven American policy unacceptable and complained to his colleagues that “he didn’t realise his main job was to kill people”, a colleague told The New York Times.

An extensive report in Tuesday’s newspaper says that President Barack Obama has taken personal responsibility for drone attacks. He approves every name on the target list, reviewing their biographies and the evidence against them, and then authorises “lethal action without hand-wringing”.

The report says that Mr Obama’s focus on drone strikes has made it impossible to forge the new relationship with the Muslim world that he promised in his June 2009 speech in Cairo.

“Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr Obama became president,” the report notes.


In Pakistan, according to the report, Mr Obama had approved not only “personality” strikes aimed at named, high-value terrorists, but “signature” strikes that targeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by militants.

Some State Department officials, however, have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the CIA for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax.

“Signature strikes in Pakistan were killing a large number of terrorist suspects, even when CIA analysts were not certain beforehand of their presence.”Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence until he was fired in May 2010, told the newspaper that discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy against Al Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus on strikes. “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’ — reminded me of body counts in Vietnam,” said Mr Blair, a retired admiral who began his Navy service during the Vietnam War.

“Mr Blair’s criticism, dismissed by White House officials as personal pique, nonetheless resonates inside the government,” the report adds.

The report points out that the counting method the Obama administration uses allows it to claim that civilian deaths in these strikes are very low.Under this approach people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Al Qaeda operative, are also considered enemy combatants.

This accounting method has so troubled some administration officials outside the CIA that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

The report notes that the case of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was problematic on two fronts. The CIA worried that Mr Mehsud, whose group mainly targeted the Pakistan government, did not meet the Obama administration’s criteria for targeted killing: he was not an imminent threat to the United States. But Pakistani officials wanted him dead, and the American drone programme rested on their tacit approval. The issue was resolved after the president and his advisers found that he represented a threat, if not to the homeland, to American personnel in Pakistan.

Then, in August 2009, the CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, told the White House that the agency had Mr Mehsud in its sights. But taking out the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr Panetta warned, did not meet Mr Obama’s standard of “near certainty” of no innocents being killed. In fact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with his wife at his in-laws’ home.

President Obama told the CIA to take the shot, and Mr Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, by some reports, other family members as well, the report adds.

Source: The Dawn

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Living Under The Drones

Submitted by Aurangzeb on October 4, 2012 – 4:40 pm

PKKH supports Imran Khan’s Peace March to Waziristan against the Drone Policy.

PKKH stands with all Pakistani and International humanitarian orgs, such as the PinkCode, that has arrived in Islamabad to join IK’s rally.

PinkCode has met PKKH reps. and we understand that the common people of US and Canada are human at heart and share our loss and pain.

PKKH Editorial

After almost 12 years of the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, the US has still not achieved anything but hatred from general masses of the globe and particularly from the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Obama who came with a promise of shift and change in the policy, not only enhanced and extended this war, but is actually held responsible for a more brutal tactic used against ‘enemy combatants’; this tool, this weapon is none other but the infamous pilotless drones.

The very first ever claim of the work of a Drones or predators, was the killing of Naik Muhammad Wazir including some civilians, totaling casualities between 5-8 people including two children. The strike of Naik Muhammad Wazir in Wana, South Waziristan was carried out after a peace negotiation which took place between Pakistan Army and local inhabitants. This strike sabotaged this peace move and started a war in which our army and our masses are suffering heavily to date.

There is a lot of debate about the effectiveness and use of drone strikes within and outside US, on the other hand even in the countries victimized by these predators, we find sympathizers of such brutality. Drones are a weapon, which cannot differentiate between combatants and non-combatants, it is a machine, controlled remotely, mostly by those who have never had an experience of battle field or fresh pass-outs from military academies of the US, these young chaps use drones like video game tools and are induced to kill anything moving.

Reports surface time to time from human rights organizations, UN, US freelance journalists and activists that have elaborated horrible stories about the devastated targeted communities. There is an uprising within America against the use of this weapon. There are reports that Obama administration has given go ahead for the use of Drones for their own public. This has actually created a stir in the American people and they are now questioning about their civil liberties and freedom of access to information.

PKKH conjoins with the common people of America, in their strife for their basic human rights, we believe that unquestioned use of Drones has brought devastation to our people and will bring nothing different to the American people. We believe that if humanity has to save itself from being exploited, it is humanity itself that will have to take the stand. We appeal to the people of Pakistan to stand up in their true conscience and urge the authorities to outrightly condemn and completely bar the use of this blind technology upon the people whose lives and property it vows to defend. We appeal to our nation to stop playing blind to the illegal killing and inhuman suffering of their brethren, who share the soil we call ours.

[Areff]

Expansion of Drone Fleet

Submitted by Aurangzeb on October 22, 2012 – 12:09 am



The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is seeking an approval for the expansion of the fleet of drones from the White House, a move that would extend the intelligent agency’s decade-long transformation into a paramilitary force, The Washington Post quoted US officials as saying.

US officials said that CIA Director David H Petraeus moved the proposal to strengthen the spy service’s campaign of launching strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. The CIA might further its drone campaign towards budding al Qaeda threats in North Africa or other trouble spots, if directed.

The officials revealed that once the proposal is approved, the CIA could add as many as 10 drones to an inventory that has ranged between 30 and 35 over the past few years.

However, officials from the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon declined to comment on the proposal. The officials, who revealed the details of this development, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Washington has been pushing Islamabad for years to carry out a military offensive in the area against the Haqqanis, who have launched some of the most audacious attacks on the US-led foreign forces in Afghanistan.

Despite Islamabad’s repeated protests, the Obama Administration is not willing to halt the CIA drone campaign in the tribal areas — notwithstanding Islamabad’s offer of a new mechanism suggesting use of drones only for surveillance.