What do we make of drone warfare?

Part One

In August 2009, as Jane Mayer described in “The Predator War� (The New Yorker, Oct. 26, 2009), Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan and one of the most-wanted terrorists in Pakistan, lay reclining on a rooftop in the South Waziristan region. He was joined by his wife and his uncle, who was a medic.

Unbeknownst to him, others were watching: Officials at the CIA in Langley, Va., observed him on a live video feed relaying closeup footage captured by the infrared camera of a Predator drone, a remotely controlled plane that had been hovering 2 miles or so above the house.

The image remained stable when the CIA remotely launched two Hellfire missiles from the Predator. After the dust cleared, all that remained of Mehsud was a detached torso. Eleven others died: his wife, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, a lieutenant and seven bodyguards.

Pakistan’s government considered Mehsud its top enemy, holding him responsible for the vast majority of recent terrorist attacks inside the country, including the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto,and the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed more than 50 people. Mehsud also was thought to have helped his Afghan confederates attack American and coalition troops across the border.

The Pakistani press was jubilant. “Good Riddance, Killer Baitullah,� trumpeted the Pakistani newspaper Dawn.

The U.S. military runs America’s drone program in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, targeting enemies of our troops stationed there. The CIA’s program is aimed at terrorism suspects around the world, including in Pakistan and other countries where U.S. troops are not based.

Civilians in the safety of a room thousands of miles away direct the attacks, using joysticks resembling video-game controls as they watch live video feeds on large, flat-screen monitors. “A virtueless war,� Sir Brian Burridge, a former British Air chief marshal in Iraq, has dubbed this form of combat, since it requires neither courage nor heroism.

Killings with missiles fired from unmanned aerial vehicles (often called UAVs or drones) have been labeled targeted assassinations and extrajudicial killings. Gary Solis, an eminent Georgetown scholar on the laws of war, has claimed that CIA agents and CIA contractors who arm and pilot UAVs over combat zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan are themselves unlawful combatants and hence legitimate targets for the enemy.

People who have witnessed an air strike live on a monitor describe it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying.

“You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,� a former CIA officer explained to Mayer.

Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: “squirters.�

Yet drone attacks have become official policy. In an address at West Point in late 2009, President Obama, referring to the border region of Pakistan, said that “we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear.� CIA director Leon Panetta described the Predator program as America’s single most effective weapon against al-Qaeda, “the only game in town.�

According to former CIA officer and presidential advisor Bruce Riedel, now with the Brookings Institution and an active participant in these debates, “The only pressure currently being put on Pakistan and Afghanistan is the drones. It’s really all we’ve got to disrupt al-Qaeda. The reason the administration continues to use [UAVs] is obvious: It doesn’t really have anything else.�

Drone supporters argue that strikes are precise, limited in collateral damage compared to conventional bombing or artillery attacks and they save the lives of U.S. soldiers. Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, and a leading advocate of drone attacks, says on his blog, “The technology represents a step forward in discrimination in targeting that should be understood as a major humanitarian advance.�

According to Thomas J. Billitteri in “Drone Warfare: Are strikes by unmanned aircraft ethical?� (CQ Researcher, Aug. 6, 2010), by August 2010, the Obama administration had carried out at least 101 drone strikes in Pakistan alone, more than twice the total executed by the Bush administration from 2004 through 2008. The U.S. also has targeted suspected militants in other remote trouble spots where it is not engaged in open hostilities, such as Yemen and Somalia. In its 2011 budget, the Air Force has requested more drones than piloted combat aircraft.

This is the first of a two-part series.

Charles R. Church is an appellate attorney in Salisbury who consults with human rights groups on torture, detention and terrorism issues. He thanks The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer for her reporting in “The Predator War,� from which this essay draws.

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