Glenn Greenwald describes the video below as “one of the most flagrant and repellent examples of rank government propaganda masquerading as objective journalism that I have ever seen”.

In his ongoing defense of drone warfare — in tandem with the promotion of his new book — Klaidman writes:

The fact that a CIA or military operator can take out a target from the comfortable confines of their cubicle, far removed from the battlefield, without subjecting themselves to any risk, troubles people. The suggestion is that the ability to kill remotely dulls one’s moral sensibilities. But is that true? It’s hard to know without talking to CIA drone operators themselves. Since the program is covert, that’s not possible. But in reporting my book, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, I was able to get a remarkable, if second hand, glimpse into the mind set of a CIA drone operator.

In the book, I report out a conversation between the State Department’s legal adviser, Harold Koh, and a drone operator at CIA headquarters. Koh, perhaps the most forceful advocate of human rights law in the Obama administration, was preparing a speech in defense of targeted killing, and wanted to do his homework; he wasn’t going to put his reputation in jeopardy without knowing the drone strike program and its protocols inside and out. He spent hours at Langley grilling agency lawyers and operators. The operators were naturally suspicious of Koh—a wariness only fueled by Koh’s blunt demeanor. “I hear you guys have a PlayStation mentality,” he said.

The operators of the unmanned drones were civilians, but most were ex-Air Force pilots who took umbrage at the idea that they were “cubicle warriors” morally detached from killing. The lead operator lit into Koh. “I used to fly my own air missions,” he began defensively. “I dropped bombs, hit my target load, but had no idea who I hit. Here I can look at their faces. I watch them for hours, see these guys playing with their kids and wives. When I get them alone, I have no compunction about blowing them to bits. But I wouldn’t touch them with civilians around. After the strike, I see the bodies being carried out of the house. I see the women weeping and in positions of mourning. That’s not PlayStation; that’s real. My job is to watch after the strike too. I count the bodies and watch the funerals. I don’t let others clean up the mess.”

The conversation must have proved persuasive; Koh gave his speech, defending the legal underpinning of the job the drone operator and his colleagues do.

The expression “take out” has become so widely adopted it might seem that it barely warrants attention these days, but still, I find it a revealing euphemism. Journalists like Klaidman clearly prefer “take out” rather than “kill” even though the expression conjures up images of a gangster ordering the elimination of a rival. To speak of taking out targets is to transparently align oneself with those who exercise the power to order executions.

Klaidman mounts a defense of drone operators and attempts to demonstrate that their remoteness from the battlefield does not shield them from the moral weight of warfare. Indeed, through the words of the operative that he cites, Klaidman implies that a drone operator who spends hours following the movements of his target, acquires through this intimate view a deeper and more moral understanding of what it means to kill. He ignores the possibility that the predator hunting his prey gains just as much insight into premeditated murder.

Both Klaidman and the unnamed drone operator invoke this perverse image of humanitarian concern: that if a child’s father is blown to shreds but the child survives because the assassin didn’t fire his missile until after the child had moved a safe distance from the blast zone, then the drone operator, the CIA or Pentagon, the U.S. government, and by extension the American people, can all regard themselves as merciful. Look, we don’t kill the little children. How tender and caring we all are.

In the comic book categories through which Americans are encouraged to view the world, label someone a “terrorist,” and all other labels, such as “father,” “husband,” “brother,” suddenly fade into irrelevance.

For those not fully convinced by Klaidman’s argument, the apparent clincher is that the only alternative to drone strikes is much more destructive air strikes. A Hellfire missile does less damage than a 500lb bomb and that’s why its use constitutes a “humanitarian advance.” Case closed, Klaidman would have it.

The lie embedded in this line of reasoning is that absent the bomb or the missile we are inviting another 9/11 attack on the United States and thus strikes of one kind or another are a necessity. Klaidman, like all true believers in the war on terrorism, refuses to acknowledge that just as was the case eleven years ago, the ability of terrorists to attack targets in the United States does not hinge on the freedom of movement of a handful of al Qaeda operatives in North Waziristan.

Klaidman’s how-I-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-drone mission seems like a kind of sexual infatuation. During a couple of years research he has concluded that drones are simply irresistible. And since he appears to have confined himself to interviewing advocates of remote warfare it’s not surprising he would reach that conclusion. Presumably the idea of going to Pakistan and talking to survivors of drone attacks is something Klaidman would have viewed as unthinkable — even though had he wanted to balance his research in this way, I have no doubt that The Bureau of Investigative Journalism or Clive Stafford Smith at Reprieve could have facilitated such interviews.

Klaidman makes a feeble appeal for greater transparency around Obama’s drone warfare policy, but secrecy applied to drone attacks is no different from secrecy applied anywhere else: it’s primary function is to impede the political, legal, and media scrutiny that might undermine the operation of the program. As always, secrecy serves as a license for criminality.

The drone operator is really the high tech equivalent of a sniper and as Randall Collins has noted, the sniper, even within the military, is regarded as a different kind of killer.

Snipers tend to be disliked even by their fellow soldiers, or at least regarded with uneasiness. A British sniper officer in World War I noted that infantrymen did not like to mingle with the snipers “for there was something about them that set them apart from ordinary men and made the soldiers uncomfortable”… World War II soldiers sometimes jeered at them. U.S. snipers in Vietnam were met with the comment: “Here comes Murder Incorporated.”

For Klaidman though, the unassailable virtue of drone warfare is precision. “It is precisely the pinpoint accuracy of drones that makes them such a significant humanitarian advance over other kinds of weaponry.”

But as a method of assassination, a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone is actually among the least precise weapons. That’s why Osama bin Laden was assassinated by a more traditional method — a bullet in the forehead — Obama couldn’t risk the uncertainty that would prevail from a drone attack.

And those of us who object to drone warfare are not as Klaidman would have it, afraid of the drones’ supernatural power — we are afraid of a very worldly presidential power which claims the right to execute anyone anywhere.

When a handful of officials can meet in secret, review secret evidence, and apply a secret legal rationale to issue a death sentence and when the revelation of a “kill list” created in this way prompts virtually no public outcry, then we should not only fear our government — we should fear the passivity of those around us who seem blithely indifferent about America’s slide towards totalitarian rule.

Glenn Greenwald writes: In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that after the U.S. kills people with drones in Pakistan, it then targets for death those who show up at the scene to rescue the survivors and retrieve the bodies, as well as those who gather to mourn the dead at funerals: “the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals.” As The New York Times summarized those findings: “at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile” while “the bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals.”

This repellent practice continues. Over the last three days, the U.S. has launched three separate drone strikes in Pakistan: one on each day. As The Guardian reports, the U.S. has killed between 20 and 30 people in these strikes, the last of which, early this morning, killed between 8 and 15. It was the second strike, on Sunday, that targeted mourners gathered to grieve those killed in the first strike:

At the time of the attack, suspected militants had gathered to offer condolences to the brother of a militant commander killed during another US unmanned drone attack on Saturday. The brother was one of those who died in the Sunday morning attack. The Pakistani officials said two of the dead were foreigners and the rest were Pakistani.

Note that there is no suggestion, even from the “officials” on which these media reports (as usual) rely, that the dead man was a Terrorist or even a “militant.” He was simply receiving condolences for his dead brother. But pursuant to the standards embraced by President Obama, the brother — without knowing anything about him — is inherently deemed a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target for death solely by virtue of being a “military-age male in a strike zone.” Of course, killing family members of bombing targets is nothing new for this President: let’s recall the still-unresolved question of why Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen two weeks after his father was killed. [Continue reading…]

Clive Stafford Smith writes: Last October I was at a jirga in Islamabad where 80 people from Waziristan had assembled to talk about the US Predator drones that buzz around overhead, periodically delivering death by Hellfire missile. A jirga is the traditional forum for discussing and resolving disputes, part parliament, part court of law. The turbaned tribal elders were joined by their young sons on a rare foray out of their region to meet outsiders and discuss the killing. The isolation of the Waziris is almost total – no western journalist has been to Miranshah for several years.

At our meeting I spoke as the representative westerner. I reported the CIA claim that not one single innocent civilian had been killed in over a year. I did not need to understand Pashtu to translate the snorts of derision when this claim was translated.

During the day I shook the hand of a 16-year-old kid from Waziristan named Tariq Aziz. One of his cousins had died in a missile strike, and he wanted to know what he could do to bring the truth to the west. At the Reprieve charity, we have a transparency project: importing cameras to the region to try to export the truth back out. Tariq wanted to take part, but I thought him too young.

Then, three days later, the CIA announced that it had eliminated “four militants”. In truth there were only two victims: Tariq had been driving his 12-year-old cousin to their aunt’s house when the Hellfire missile killed them both. This came just 24 hours after the CIA boasted of eliminating six other “militants” – actually, four chromite workers driving home from work. In both cases a local informant apparently tagged the car with a GPS monitor and lied to earn his fee. [Continue reading…]

Daniel Klaidman, author of the soon-to-be-released Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, could be compared to a crow which feeds by ripping flesh off rotting carcases — but I think that would be unfair to crows. After all, they are just doing what they need to do to survive. Klaidman on the other hand is feeding off death for profit.

An excerpt from his book which appeared at the Daily Beast earlier this week is an example of servile propaganda at its worst.

At least in totalitarian states with their ministries of information and state-controlled newspapers, no one is under any illusion about the way in which governments shape public discourse. But in the United States with a nominally free press, accounts such as Klaidman’s purport to offer Americans outside government a rare glimpse into its innermost workings.

In this case we are being led to believe that we can now better understand what is actually happening when President Obama and a small circle of advisers make the weightiest decision anyone could ever make: when (if ever) it is justifiable to execute someone while suspending the legal constraints that otherwise control the use of capital punishment.

Klaidman’s approach to this story suggests that he investigated the issues in a similar way that an interior designer might discuss color choices with her client. His idea of depth is that he wants to find out how his subjects feel about killing people.

Klaidman tells us that Harold Hongju Koh and Jeh C. Johnson, the top lawyers at the State Department and the Pentagon, have found it stressful helping decide who gets to live or die. In other words, those observers who might imagine that a cold bureaucratic process is at work can be assured that Obama’s death panel operates with feeling and sensitivity and an acute sense of moral responsibility. These are not casual killers.

Like Koh, [Johnson] wondered whether he could withstand the heavy pressure exerted by the military to expand operations. After approving his first targeted killings one evening, he watched the digital images of the strike in real time — “Kill TV,” the military calls the live battlefield feed. Johnson could see the shadowy images of militants running drills in a training camp in Yemen. Then suddenly there was a bright flash. The figures that had been moving across the screen were gone. Johnson returned to his Georgetown home around midnight that evening, drained and exhausted. Later there were reports from human-rights groups that dozens of women and children had been killed in the attacks, reports that a military source involved in the operation termed “persuasive.” Johnson would confide to others, “If I were Catholic, I’d have to go to confession.”

If watching ones victims get executed on Kill TV evokes an image of cold brutality, we are assured that Washington’s practitioners of targeted killing, just like their Israeli counterparts, shoot and cry.

What Klaidman does through this style of narrative is set up a false intimacy — a sense that we really know what goes on in the so-called Terror Tuesday meetings because we now know that when Obama decides to kill someone who considers the matter very carefully.

The president is not a robotic killing machine. The choices he faces are brutally difficult, and he has struggled with them — sometimes turning them over in his mind again and again.

Is this what “due process” now means: that when executioner Obama issues a death sentence, it’s not an impulsive action; it’s something he actually spends some time thinking about? How reassuring!

If Klaidman was a serious journalist he would ask some serious questions. For instance, even though he might not be shown the intelligence information that forms the basis for Obama’s “kill list”, there are some relevant comparisons that he could attempt in order to expose the legal implications of what is now happening inside the White House.

For instance, is the process of deliberation inside Obama’s Star Chamber, more thorough than what happens inside a district attorney’s office in the process of considering a major criminal indictment? I suspect not, but if he had chosen to approach his subject with this amount of seriousness, Klaidman could easily have collected the kind of anecdotal evidence that would most likely make it clear that in the Obama administration, death sentences get handed out more casually than indictments. (In a summary of key moments from Klaidman’s book we learn that the State Department’s top legal adviser “would be presented with the classified PowerPoint slides, and would often have less than an hour to flick through them and determine whether or not the government had the legal authority to take out the target.”)

The picture Klaidman prefers to construct is one framed to a tee by the interests of President Obama. Whereas the CIA and the military are eager to kill as many suspected terrorists as possible, Obama is deeply concerned about the risk to innocent life.

Schooled as a constitutional lawyer, he had had to adjust quickly to the hardest part of the job: deciding whom to kill, when to kill them, and when it makes sense to put Americans in harm’s way. His instincts tilted toward justice and protecting the innocent, but he also knew that war is a messy business no matter how carefully it is conducted.

What Klaidman is doing here — and I suspect doing so in a completely mindless way — is sustaining a narrative that shapes the whole approach to drone warfare: that it goes without saying that the targets of drone strikes are guilty. In other words, no one even raises the possibility that the innocent might not only include bystanders but even the target himself.

The only time “mistakes” get reported they are of the form that a strike targeted such-and-such a suspect but ended up killing someone else. Whenever the intended target gets killed, it’s case closed. The dead are always guilty.

But how could this possibly be so? We know that it’s possible inside the elaborately constructed American capital punishment system, that after lengthy trials, appeals and sentence reviews, innocent people can still end up being executed. Why on earth would we assume that Obama’s execution process operates more efficiently?

When Klaidman presents the case of the first presidentially authorized assassination of a U.S. citizen, he doesn’t stray a fraction from the official narrative.

In Barack Obama’s mind, Anwar al-Awlaki was threat No. 1. The Yemen-based leader of AQAP had grown up in the United States, spoke fluent American-accented English, and had a charisma similar to that of Osama bin Laden: soft eyes, a mastery of language, and a sickening capacity for terror. Obama told his advisers that Awlaki was a higher priority than even Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had succeeded bin Laden as al Qaeda’s top commander. “Awlaki had things on the stove that were ready to boil over,” one of Obama’s national-security advisers observed. “Zawahiri was still looking for ingredients in the cupboard.”

What worried President Obama most was Awlaki’s ingenuity in developing murderous schemes that could evade America’s best defenses. Already he had launched the Christmas Day plot, in which a Nigerian operative had nearly brought down a packed airliner by trying to set off explosives hidden in his underwear. Then, in October 2010, AQAP had managed to put improvised bombs—ink toner cartridges filled with explosive material—on cargo planes headed to the United States. (They were intercepted as a result of a tip from Saudi intelligence.) During the summer of 2011 Obama was regularly updated on a particularly diabolical plan that AQAP’s master bomb builder, Ibrahim Hassan Tali al-Asiri, was devising. The intelligence indicated that he was close to being able to surgically implant bombs in people’s bodies. The wiring was cleverly designed to circumvent airport security, including full-body scanners. AQAP’s terror doctors had already successfully experimented with dogs and other animals.

The president made sure he got updates on Awlaki at every Terror Tuesday briefing. “I want Awlaki,” he said at one. “Don’t let up on him.” Hoss Cartwright even thought Obama’s rhetoric was starting to sound like that of George W. Bush, whom Cartwright had also briefed on many occasions. “Do you have everything you need to get this guy?” Obama would ask.

But that sense of fierce determination was a product of long experience and didn’t come easily. By the time United States intelligence agents got Awlaki in their sights, Obama had adjusted and readjusted his views on targeted killings several times. Usually he tried to measure the possible benefits of a specific killing or killings against the possible downsides, including the slaying of innocents and getting the United States more deeply embroiled in civil conflicts. The Awlaki case was in a special category, however: By almost anyone’s definition, he was a threat to the homeland, but he was also an American citizen, born in New Mexico.

The capture of a Somali operative who worked closely with Awlaki produced key intelligence, including how he traveled, the configuration of his convoys, his modes of communication, and the elaborate security measures he and his entourage took. Finally, in the spring and summer of last year, U.S. and Yemeni intelligence started to draw a bead on him. A tip from a Yemeni source and a fatal lapse in operational security by the cleric eventually did him in.

The claims that Awlaki masterminded and led terrorist operations have never been substantiated. If there really was significant evidence that he had such an operational role, it seems extremely unlikely that Obama would have any reason to need to press the case for the urgency of Awlaki’s elimination. The CIA and the Pentagon would be leading that charge without any need for Obama to crack the whip.

A much more plausible explanation for Obama’s obsession with Awlaki is one that could not be easily accommodated inside a legal framework. It wasn’t that the American cleric was in the process of devising a dastardly new way to insert explosives into underwear; it was the real threat he posed as a propagandist. That is, Awlaki represented one of the worst fears of anyone involved in counterterrorism: that as an American-born, charismatic and articulate preacher, he was capable of recruiting radicalized Caucasian converts to Islam.

Of course it this was Obama’s fear, killing Awlaki with a drone strike was no way to avert the danger since even now, as a propagandist he remains alive and well on YouTube. But these are issues that are of no apparent interest to Klaidman as he tells us how Obama learned to kill.

Perhaps the worst feature of Klaidman’s work is that he is collaborating in the definition of the new normal.

When Bush and Cheney instituted the use of torture, this provoked national debate. Even if they were able to exploit national fears that had produced a widely permissive attitude towards so-called “harsh interrogation” methods, Bush and Cheney were in some measure held accountable for choosing to adopt these practices.

When Obama entered office with the support of many Americans who imagined he was the antidote to the extremism of the previous administration, he swiftly reinforced that perception by banning the use of torture.

But when it transpired that he had banned torture only to replace it with murder, rather than this prompt loud expressions of outrage, we are being told to see this as the “evolution” of a president who is grappling with the harsh realities of the era.

This is a much more insidious message: that Obama is simply doing what anyone in his shoes would feel compelled to do; that targeted killing should now be seen as an enduring feature of U.S. foreign policy.

Seumas Milne writes: More than a decade after George W Bush launched it, the “war on terror” was supposed to be winding down. US military occupation of Iraq has ended and Nato is looking for a way out of Afghanistan, even as the carnage continues. But another war – the undeclared drone war that has already killed thousands – is now being relentlessly escalated.

From Pakistan to Somalia, CIA-controlled pilotless aircraft rain down Hellfire missiles on an ever-expanding hit list of terrorist suspects – they have already killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians in the process.

At least 15 drone strikes have been launched in Yemen this month, as many as in the whole of the past decade, killing dozens; while in Pakistan, a string of US attacks has been launched against supposed “militant” targets in the past week, incinerating up to 35 people and hitting a mosque and a bakery.

The US’s decision to step up the drone war again in Pakistan, opposed by both government and parliament in Islamabad as illegal and a violation of sovereignty, reflects its fury at the jailing of a CIA agent involved in the Bin Laden hunt and Pakistan’s refusal to reopen supply routes for Nato forces in Afghanistan. Those routes were closed in protest at the US killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers last November, for which Washington still refuses to apologise.

Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan’s high commissioner in London, describes the latest US escalation as “punitive”. But then Predators and Reapers are Barack Obama’s weapons of choice and coercion, deployed only on the territory of troublesome US allies, such as Pakistan and Yemen – and the drone war is Obama’s war. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: President Barack Obama’s administration appears set to notify the U.S. Congress of plans to arm a fleet of Italian MQ-9 Reaper drones, a step that may spur a wider spread of remotely piloted hunter-killer aircraft.

The administration could move ahead within two weeks on the proposal to let Italy join Britain in deploying U.S. drones with weapons such as laser-guided bombs and Hellfire missiles, U.S. officials said.

Italy has a fleet of six Reapers. The sale of the technology to arm them, including bomb racks and “weaponization” kits costing up to $17 million, would help the United States redistribute the burden of its global military operations as the Pentagon’s budget is being squeezed by deficit-reduction requirements.

Aides to Obama have been informally consulting the House of Representatives’ and Senate’s foreign affairs committees about the proposed sale to Italy since last year, congressional staff said.

The latest such period of “pre-consultations” ended May 27 without a move to block the sale, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the coming formal notification to lawmakers.

A transfer to Italy would make it harder for the United States to deny armed-drone technology if asked for it by other members of the 28-country NATO alliance or by close U.S. partners such as South Korea, Japan and Australia, arms-sale analysts said.

“I think that if you sell armed drones to Italy, you will very likely make a decision that any member of NATO that wants them can also get them,” said a former congressional staff member who followed the issue.

Some lawmakers fear that a decision to arm Italian drones may spur overseas sales of related technology by Israel, Russia and China.

Jefferson Morley writes: Around midnight on May 21, 2010, a girl named Fatima was killed when a succession of U.S.-made Hellfire missiles, each of them five-feet long and traveling at close to 1,000 miles per hour, smashed a compound of houses in a mountain village of Mohammed Khel in North Waziristan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Wounded in the explosions, which killed a half dozen men, Fatima and two other children were taken to a nearby hospital, where they died a few hours later.

Behram Noor, a Pakistani journalist, went to the hospital and took a picture of Fatima shortly before her death. Then, he went back to the scene of the explosions looking for evidence that might show who was responsible for the attack. In the rubble, he found a mechanism from a U.S.-made Hellfire missile and gave it to Reprieve, a British organization opposed to capital punishment, which shared photographs of the material with Salon. Reprieve executive director Clive Stafford Smith alluded to the missile fragments in an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times last fall. They have also been displayed in England.

“Forensically, it is important to show how the crime of murder happened (which is what it is here),” said Stafford Smith in an email. “One almost always uses the murder weapon in a case. But perhaps more important, I think this physical proof — this missile killed this child — is important to have people take it seriously.”

In the religious rhetoric used by al-Qaida’s online allies, Fatima was a “martyr.” In a statement quoted by Long War Journal, the al-Ansara forum said the senior al-Qaida commander Mustafa Abu Yazid had been killed in a “convoy of martyrs on the road with his wife and three daughters and his granddaughter; men, women and children; neighbors and loved ones.” But Fatima was not Yazid’s daughter, according to Noor, who reported from the scene. She was the daughter of another man who lost two wives and three children in the barrage.

In the euphemistic jargon of Washington, Fatima was “collateral damage” in the successful effort to assassinate Yazid, an Egyptian jihadist also known as Saeed al-Masri. In disregard for the official secrecy that envelops the drone war, U.S. intelligence officials leaked the classified details of the attack, telling the New York Times that they considered Yazid to be al-Qaida’s “No. 3 leader.” Relying on similar sources, the Washington Post said that al-Masri was the group’s “chief organizational manager.” Unlike other news organizations reporting on the attack, neither the Post nor the Times mentioned that women and children had been killed in the attack. [Continue reading…]

If the average American pauses to consider what it’s like living in the vicinity of missile attacks launched from Predator drones, I expect that the popular conception is of a sudden strike that seemingly comes out of nowhere. “You will never see it coming,” President Obama jokes.

Administration officials sell remote warfare as military precision at its most advanced, as though innocent victims are a rarity that barely merits attention. In a speech he delivered at the end of April, White House Counter Terrorism adviser John Brennan said:

With the unprecedented ability of remotely piloted aircraft to precisely target a military objective while minimizing collateral damage, one could argue that never before has there been a weapon that allows us to distinguish more effectively between an al-Qaida terrorist and innocent civilians.

Yet neither Brennan nor any other administration official talks about what it means to live with drones ever-present — what it means for the drone of death to become a background noise that haunts everyday life.

Clive Stafford Smith traveled to Peshawar in Pakistan to hear some of the victims of Obama’s war describe the waking nightmare in which a drone attack is never far away.

Rasul Mana comes from the village of Sirkut Burakhel Supulga in Waziristan. As we meet, he produces from his pocket a sheet of ES-PRAMCIT (Escitalopram), an anti-stress drug that is manufactured in Karachi. There is only one left in the packet of eight.

I come from the village of Sirkut Burakhel Supulga. There are around 40 houses in the village, with perhaps a total of population of 3000 people. I know that’s an average of 75 people crammed into each compound. That’s the way it is. We all live with extended families.

Drones have had a great effect on me. Eighteen people have been killed by them in my village alone. When the drone is 5 km away the sound is very different. It sounds like a missile. As they come closer, it turned into a repetitive humming. Bangana is the word we use for drones. It means bee in Pashtu. I first heard that term in 2005, and the killer bees have been all over us ever since.

The kids know what the voice of the drone now. Every day we hear the voice of the drones at least six or seven times. We listen for the voice 24 hours a day. We are afraid at night as we lie in our beds.

The drones are going around and around over our heads. There may be four or five at any given time. They are normally very high, but sometimes they come down if there is a dust storm or it is cloudy. They also tend to come down lower to attack, which is when you get very scared.

When the missile is launched it makes a loud noise – zzhhooo – as it drops onto its target.

Many of the strikes are in the black of night. We run to where the attack has happened, we see people dead and crying in pain. No matter what time of night, the children will all be awake and crying. When we look for the injured, or pick up the pieces of the dead bodies, we know that the Americans may do another attack. It’s called a Good Samaritan attack, aimed at anyone who tries to help the injured, as they’re assumed to be friends of the original victims, who are themselves assumed to be militants.

People curse the Americans, calling on God to destroy them with flood, lightening, pestilence or any natural disaster.

The Americans put GPS tags in places. Spies put them on their enemies, just people for whom they have animosities. The GPS is half the size of a finger. We call it a Sim card. Something like a UV light comes out of it. The spy sends a note via a satellite phone that the target is tagged.

And then death descends. [Continue reading…]

Jefferson Morley writes: Stung by mounting hostility from the left and right, America’s drone industry is fighting back.

“We’re going to do a much better job of educating people about unmanned aviation, the good and the bad,” said Michael Toscano, president of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the industry’s trade group in Washington. “We’re working on drafting the right message and how to get it out there.”

The P.R. blitz comes after drones suffered a round of negative attention last week. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called for a ban on drones in U.S. airspace, and two other conservative commentators endorsed the idea of shooting down unmanned aircraft flown by U.S. law enforcement agencies. (Opposition to the U.S. government’s deployment of unmanned vehicles had previously come from left-liberal groups concerned about civilian casualties in the drone war in Pakistan and potential threats to civil liberties at home.) The nation also witnessed drone “scares”: An unidentified flying object nearly collided with a plane over Denver, and rumors circulated of a surveillance drone flying near the NATO summit in Illinois.

After issuing a statement denouncing Krauthammer’s remarks as “irresponsible” and “dangerous,” Toscano said the AUVSI would go on the offensive against critics. While the strategy is still being shaped, Toscano made it sound like something straight out of a crisis-management textbook — or Orwell. The AUVSI wants to bombard the American public with positive images and messages about drones in an effort to reverse the growing perception of the aircraft as a threat to privacy and safety. [Continue reading…]

White House counterterror chief John Brennan and his team have implemented a new process through which they decide who they want to kill.

In describing Brennan’s arrangement to the Associated Press, the officials provided the first detailed description of the military’s previous review process that set a schedule for killing or capturing terror leaders around the Arab world and beyond. They spoke on condition of anonymity because U.S. officials are not allowed to publicly describe the classified targeting program.

One senior administration official argues that Brennan’s move adds another layer of review that augments rather than detracts from the Pentagon’s role. The official says that in fact there will be more people at the table making the decisions, including representatives from every agency involved in counterterrorism, before they are reviewed by senior officials and ultimately the president.

The CIA’s process remains unchanged, but never included the large number of interagency players the Pentagon brought to the table for its debates.

And the move gives Brennan greater input earlier in the process, before senior officials make the final recommendation to President Barack Obama. Officials outside the White House expressed concern that drawing more of the decision-making process to Brennan’s office could turn it into a pseudo military headquarters, entrusting the fate of al-Qaida targets to a small number of senior officials.

Previously, targets were first discussed in meetings run by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen at the time, with Brennan being just one of the voices in the debate.

The new Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Martin Dempsey, has been more focused on shrinking the U.S. military as the Afghan war winds down and less on the covert wars overseas.

With Dempsey less involved, Brennan believed there was an even greater need to draw together different agencies’ viewpoints, showing the American public that al-Qaida targets are chosen only after painstaking and exhaustive debate, the senior administration official said.

But some of the officials carrying out the policy are equally leery of “how easy it has become to kill someone,” one said. The U.S. is targeting al-Qaida operatives for reasons such as being heard in an intercepted conversation plotting to attack a U.S. ambassador overseas, the official said. Stateside, that conversation could trigger an investigation by the Secret Service or FBI.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: Though the hour was late, Yemen’s social media was still very much awake.

A US drone’s missiles had just slammed into a convoy of vehicles in a remote part of Yemen, killing three alleged militants.

The attack – like all other US drone strikes outside warzones – was supposed to be clandestine. Yet within minutes Sanaa-based lawyer Haykal Bafana was reporting the strike in almost-realtime. Just after 1am on May 17 he posted the following on Twitter:

#Yemen NOW | Missile strike on car in Wadi Hadhramaut. Near city of Shibam. Suspected US drone attack.

— Haykal Bafana (@BaFana3) May 16, 2012

As Bafana later explained to the Bureau, his relatives live in Shibam, a town of 30,000. ‘When the drone struck, the town – which was then experiencing a power cut – had completely lit up. My relatives got straight on the phone to tell me about the attack.’

The day prior to the strike Bafana had already tweeted that drones were behaving suspiciously in the area. Hadhramaut province, a sparsely-populated former sultanate, is far from Yemen’s troubled south, where most of the fighting and US drone strikes are currently taking place.

There has been militant activity there for some years, report locals, and surveillance drones have been active at night since 2010. But until now there had never been a drone strike. ‘But suddenly four or five days ago, my relatives were reporting drones over them in daylight, all the time, which was rare. Militants were also being seen moving about in the area, maybe preparing the way for an evacuation from the fighting in the south. Everyone was expecting something to happen’, Bafana recalls. He tweeted the news to his followers.

#Yemen | Hearing multiple claims of drone sightings in Hadhramaut, especially in Shibam/Qatn directorates (KSA route). No attacks so far. — Haykal Bafana (@BaFana3) May 15, 2012

When the deadly attack finally came in the early hours of Thursday morning, the target itself was hardly a secret.

Earlier, Arabic-language online media in the provincial capital of al-Mukalla had reported that a convoy of alleged al Qaeda rebels was heading north. That news was also swiftly tweeted.

Others were clearly also charting the convoy’s progress. As the vehicles approached Shibam at around 1am local time, at least one car, a Toyota Hilax, was destroyed by missiles from above. Yemen’s own air force has neither the know-how nor the equipment to launch a precision strike on moving vehicles in the dark.

News agencies would later report the attack as a drone strike, naming two of the dead as Zeid bin Taleb and Mutii Bilalafi, both described as local al Qaeda leaders. Like the dozens of US drone strikes in Yemen that preceded it, Thursday’s attack was supposed to be secret. Yet Twitter and other social media were tracking in near-real time the events surrounding the operation. [Continue reading…]

Glenn Greenwald writes: Muhammad Danish Qasim is a Pakistani student at Iqra University’s Media Science and is also a filmmaker. This year, Qasim released a short film entitled The Other Side, a 20-minute narrative that “revolves around the idea of assessing social, psychological and economical effects of drones on the people in tribal areas of Pakistan.” A two-minute video trailer of the film is embedded below. The Express Tribune provided this summary of the film, including an interview with Qasim:

The Other Side revolves around a school-going child in Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan. The child’s neighborhood gets bombed after the people of the region are suspected for some notorious activities. He ends up losing all of his loved ones during the bombing and later becomes part of an established terrorists group who exploit his loss and innocence for their own interests.

On the reasons for picking such a sensitive topic, the film-maker said, “Most of the films being made right now are based on social issues, so we picked up an issue of international importance which is the abrogation of our national space by foreign countries.”

When asked how this film on terrorism will be different from all the others that have been released since 9/11, he said, “The film takes the audience very close to the damage caused by drone attacks. I have tried my best to connect all the dots that lead to a drone attack and have shot the prevailing aftermath of such attacks in a very realistic and raw manner.”

In particular, “the film identifies the problems faced by families who have become victims of drone missiles, and it unearths the line of action which terrorist groups adopt to use victimised families for their vested interests.” In other words, it depicts the tragedy of civilian deaths, and documents how those deaths are then successfully exploited by actual Terrorists for recruitment purposes. [Continue reading…]

Jefferson Morley writes: Stark Aerospace of Mississippi is perhaps the only foreign-owned company with FAA permission to fly a drone in U.S. airspace. Based in the town of Columbus, the home of Mississippi State University, Stark is a subsidiary of the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries — not that you could tell from looking at the company’s website, executive leadership or affiliations. You have to go to the Mississippi secretary of state website to learn that two of Stark’s three directors are Israelis.

So too with the America’s drone industry. The Israeli influence is not visible but it is real, documented and extremely relevant to the future of drones in America. If you want to know how drones may change American airspace in coming years, just look to Israel, where the unmanned aerial vehicle market is thriving and drones are considered a reliable instrument of “homeland security.”

“There are three explanations for Israel’s success in becoming a world leader in development and production of UAVs,” a top Israeli official explained to the Jerusalem Post last year. “We have unbelievable people and innovation, combat experience that helps us understand what we need and immediate operational use since we are always in a conflict which allows us to perfect our systems.”

Israel’s drone expertise goes back to at least 1970, according to the UAV page of the Israeli Air Force. Mark Daly, an expert on unmanned aircraft at Jane’s Defense in London, notes the Israelis were the first to make widespread use of drones in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when the aircraft were used to monitor troop movements.

Now, as the Arab media and Western reporters such as Scott Wilson of the Washington Post have reported, the Israeli Defense Force uses fleets of constantly hovering drones to intimidate and control the Arab population in the Gaza Strip. (The residents call these drones “zenana,” which both sounds like the aircraft’s distinctive buzz and is Arabic slang for a nagging wife.) The IDF regularly uses drones for targeted assassinations of suspected militants, saying the drones enable them to use “precision strikes” to avoid hurting civilians. Yet as Human Rights Watch has documented, the drone strikes during the Gaza War killed scores of children who were nowhere near armed combatants.

James Joyner writes: In a speech Monday at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, John Brennan, President Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor, made a forthright defense of the drone war currently being conducted against Islamic militants in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. “As a result of our efforts,” he declared, “the United States is more secure and the American people are safer.” Brennan’s argument deserves credit for its boldness. Unfortunately, however, there’s good reason to doubt its veracity.

The first point in need of recognition is that while the Obama administration has long since dropped the phrase “Global War on Terror” from its lexicon, it has, through its amplified use of drones, escalated and expanded that war in all but name. On Monday, Brennan cited his administration’s achievements—the “death of bin Laden was our most strategic blow yet against al Qaeda” and “al Qaeda’s leadership ranks have continued to suffer heavy losses” from drone strikes inside Pakistan—but he also acknowledged that the government’s strategic focus simply shifted elsewhere as a result. Yemen’s al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has become “al Qaeda’s most active affiliate and it continues to seek the opportunity to strike our homeland.” Additionally, he pointed out, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has a growing presence in North and West Africa, while the al Qaeda affiliate Boko Haram is gaining steam in Nigeria.

The wider the drone war spreads, however, the more scrutiny it deserves. After all, strikes aimed at truly high-value targets like Osama bin Laden and other major terrorist leaders make obvious tactical and strategic sense. But willy-nilly targeting of low-level militants is quite likely do more harm than good. In a now-famous October 2003 memo, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reasonably figured that the key question in determining whether “we are winning or losing the global war on terror” was “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” [Continue reading…]