Drone Warfare

by Medea Benjamin

  In South Africa, meanwhile, in September 2011 two companies—Paramount Group and Aerosud Holdings Ltd—unveiled “a compact plane that they say merges the capabilities of a drone, an attack helicopter and surveillance aircraft,” according to the Wall Street Journal.91

  Billions upon billions of dollars have been spent from America to Asia on machinery, software and workers whose only purpose is building a better flying death robot. The best research centers and universities are dependent on military contracts. But only when one considers the things that time and money have not gone to—health care, education, infrastructure—can the full costs of this militarism be realized. Instead of researching better solar technology or the next generation of pacemakers, many of the world’s top scientists are instead devoting their energy to coming up with the latest and greatest unmanned killing machines.

  Former President Eisenhower spoke to the debilitating cost of devoting money to war and the preparation for war in a 1953 speech that still hits hard these many years later. Addressing a group of newspaper editors, Eisenhower decried the tremendous waste of money and manpower going to develop things that, ideally, the country would never use.

  “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” Eisenhower remarked. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

  Right now, some of America’s brightest scientists are busy crafting new weapons of war on behalf of the merchants of death. As Eisenhower asked, “Is there no other way the world may live?”

  Here a Drone, There a Drone, Everywhere a Drone

  “Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) has said that the drones are so popular that a Predator could be elected president.”92

  —William Booth, The Washington Post

  Drones came of age in the US war on terror, namely during the war in Iraq. Ironically, that war was itself sold to the American public and the international community in part based on the alleged threat posed by drones—in the wrong hands.

  In a February 5, 2003 presentation before the United Nations Security Council, then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell sought to sell the coming war to a skeptical world by pointing to Iraq’s alleged possession of weaponized drones that could be used to attack the West with chemical or biological agents. The claim was debunked almost the moment it was made—the drones were for reconnaissance purposes only—but the story served its purpose: only a lunatic wouldn’t fear a madman armed with flying death robots, corporate media outlets declared.93 The rest is blood-soaked history.

  The war in Iraq provided the US military a platform for perfecting its own deadly drones. In 2003 and 2004, the Army flew UAVs about 1,500 hours a month, according to USA Today; by mid-2006, that number had risen to about 9,000 hours a month.94 In the eyes of many—outside the studios of Fox and CNN, that is—the US, not Iraq, had become the madman armed with flying death robots.

  From the hunter-killer Predators and Reapers to the surveillance Global Hawks to the smaller, cheaper Ravens, the Air Force couldn’t get its hands on enough UAVs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The demand far exceeds all of the Defense Department’s ability to provide these assets,” Air Force Lt. Col. Larry Gurgainous told an AP reporter in 2008.95

  In Afghanistan, by 2010 the Air Force was flying at least twenty Predator drones over stretches of hostile Afghan territory each day, providing a daily dose of some five hundred hours of video.96 Most drones were used for surveillance purposes. “For example, every day we’re analyzing imagery that includes the need to distinguish between normal agriculture and poppy production,” one military officer told the Christian Science Monitor.97

  But they were also used to target low-level Taliban fighters in remote areas and to support US troops in firefights. According to Air Force figures, there were seventy-four drone strikes in 2007, 183 in 2008 and 219 in 2009.

  In Iraq, spy drones were used for everything from protecting oil fields to tracking supposed insurgents to distinguishing between “plastics production…and homemade explosives production.”98 Lethal drones were sent to target government buildings in Baghdad and to kill militants firing upon US positions.99 The US military in Iraq came to rely on drones even more as it began to draw down its troop presence in 2008. The Bush Administration launched a record number of lethal strikes at around the same time President Bush’s “surge” was about to end and both US and Iraqi politicians were trying to figure out the best way to get American troops out of the country without losing face.

  Drones also proved useful after the ostensible US “withdrawal” from Iraq in December 2011. Mandated by the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush administration, the withdrawal resulted in the vast majority of combat troops being removed from the country but left behind more than 11,000 State Department employees—and the world’s largest embassy in Baghdad—as well as a private, 5,000-strong mercenary force to protect them. And a fleet of UAVs.

  As the New York Times reported and President Obama acknowledged in January 2012, US surveillance drones continued to fly through Iraq’s nominally sovereign airspace well after the last Americans were supposed to have left the country.100 The excuse: protecting all the State Department staff the US was leaving behind to meddle in the country’s affairs. And the kicker: the UAVs were being operated not by the military, but the State Department itself, that arm of the US government that once upon a time was associated with diplomacy, not drones.

  At the time its drone program was revealed, the State Department insisted its fleet of UAVs were solely for surveillance purposes and that none of them were armed or even capable of being weaponized. For their part, though, Iraqis were skeptical.

  “We hear from time to time that drone aircraft have killed half a village in Pakistan and Afghanistan under the pretext of pursuing terrorists,” Iraqi businessman Hisham Mohammed Salah told the Times. “Our fear is that will happen in Iraq under a different pretext.”

  While the Air Force was busy hunting and killing in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the US was involved in larger wars involving ground troops, other agencies—even non-military ones—took the killer drones to places around the world like Pakistan, Yemen, the Philippines and Somalia where the United States was not officially at war. In just a decade, the US Air Force, the CIA, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and mercenary groups like Blackwater (currently giving itself the professorial name Academi) had built up a global network of bases to pilot, test, maintain, arm, and launch drones. Many parts of this program are veiled in secrecy, especially those run by the CIA and JSOC, so its full extent is hard to assess.

  As of October 2011, the US government was operating no less than sixty drone bases at home and around the world, according to journalist Nick Turse, from remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan to Ethiopia, Djibouti, Uzbekistan, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.101 A Washington Post exposé of Obama’s global apparatus for drone killing said the network included “dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest, and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.”102

  The most extensive—and lethal—drone program outside a war zone is run by the CIA. Publicly, the CIA does not even acknowledge this program’s existence. When the ACLU tried to get information about the CIA’s drone killings, the agency argued—and the court agreed—that even the “fact of the existence or non-existence” of such a program was classified. But the CIA’s drone assassination squad has become, next to Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal, perhaps the world’s worst-kept classified secret.

  Indeed, in October 2010, while delivering an on-the-record address before an auditorium full of American soldiers stationed in Italy, Defense Secretary and former head of the CIA Leon Panetta even cracked a joke
about the program.

  “[O]bviously I have a helluva lot more weapons available to me in this job than I had at the CIA,” Panetta told the troops, according to the Associated Press.103 “Although the Predators aren’t that bad.”

  Later that same day, Panetta noted US troops had helped affect regime change in Libya using the Global Hawk surveillance drone and the Predator—a hunter/ killer aircraft that, he said, “I was very familiar with in my last job.”

  Panetta was not reprimanded for disclosing top-secret classified information and joking about what many legal experts consider war crimes. In the warped imperial culture of Washington, DC, when a low-level soldier like Bradley Manning leaks classified information with the express intent of revealing to the world the existence of war crimes, he faces life in prison. Panetta’s joking disclosure, like President Obama’s own quip about murdering the Jonas Brothers band with Predator drones, draws a hearty laugh from the establishment, not an indictment.

  Before September 11, the CIA, stung by past assassination scandals, only used drones for surveillance. The week before the 9/11 attack, CIA Director George Tenet was quoted by counterterrorism advisors as saying that it would be a “terrible mistake” for the CIA to “fire a weapon like this.”104 Post-9/11, everything changed. The agency asked for, and received from President Bush, a secret memorandum giving it the right to target Al Qaeda virtually anywhere in the world. With the green light to kill, the CIA began putting its drones to work.

  Begun under Bush and expanded under Obama, the CIA’s program is classified as covert and the agency refuses to disclose where it operates, who is in charge, how targets are selected and approved, or how many people have been killed. It insists that releasing any information would aid the enemy. When former UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston tried to get basic questions answered—both from the Bush and Obama administrations—“they blew me off,” he said.105

  The CIA’s main focus has been in Pakistan, where its missile strikes target suspected Al Qaeda operatives, as well as low-ranking militants believed to be involved in cross-border attacks on US troops or facilities in Afghanistan.

  According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, between 2004–2011, the CIA conducted over three hundred drone strikes in Pakistan, with a spike of 118 attacks in 2010, killing somewhere between 2,372 and 2,997 people. At the end of 2011 the CIA suspended its missile strikes in an effort to mend badly frayed relations between the US and Pakistani government after US gunships mistakenly killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers in November 2011. When the strikes resumed in mid-January 2012, against the wishes of the Pakistani government and people, Pakistani intelligence officials said the drone attacks were on the verge of pushing strained ties between the two nations to the point of collapse.

  The CIA’s partner, the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is even more cloaked in secrecy and less subject to accountability than the intelligence agency.

  Founded in 1980, JSCOC specializes in secret, small-scale operations. Since 9/11 its primary mission has been to identify and destroy perceived terrorists and terror cells worldwide. It is credited as the group that oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. In addition to dispatching clandestine troops, it has a drone hit team that it operates with the help of contracted mercenaries. It has carried out deadly strikes in Yemen and Somalia, but like the CIA, it refuses to disclose any aspect of its counterterrorism operations.

  JSOC reports directly to the president and, as National Journal reporter Marc Ambinder put it, “operates worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directive.”106 John Nagl, a former counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, described JSOC’s kill/capture campaign as “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine.”107

  JSOC targets come from a secret list called JPEL (Joint Prioritized Effects List). According to Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and Foreign Service officer who resigned in 2009 because he felt US tactics were only fueling the insurgency, the list includes bomb makers, commanders, financiers, people who coordinate the weapons transport and even PR people.108

  Another key partner in drone warfare are private contractors. “From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda’s leaders,” the New York Times reported in August 2009.109 “The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the [CIA].”

  A few months after the Times’ story, The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill revealed that the relationship between Blackwater and the US government’s covert drone assassination program ran even deeper. He reported that the company was intimately involved in the drone program run not just by the CIA, but by the military’s ultra-secretive JSOC.

  “It’s Blackwater running the program for both CIA and JSOC,” Scahill quoted a source within US military intelligence as saying. According to the source, while many reported drone strikes in Pakistan are credited to the CIA, it is the parallel Blackwater-JSOC program that is responsible for the bulk of civilian casualties.

  When civilians are killed, Scahill’s source said, “people go, ‘Oh, it’s the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.’ Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that’s JSOC [hitting] somebody they’ve identified through HUMINT [human intelligence] or they’ve culled the intelligence themselves or it’s been shared with them and they take that person out and that’s how it works.”

  While the CIA is not exactly renowned for its respect for the lives of foreigners, the Blackwater-JSOC drone program is supposedly even more cavalier about killing civilians, as it is even less subject to congressional oversight.

  “Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that,” the source said, according to Scahill. “Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don’t care. If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That’s the mentality.”

  In Yemen, both the CIA and JSOC are engaged in a covert bombing campaign aimed at taking out suspected members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Both have their own flying hit teams, with separate but overlapping targets. Unlike in Pakistan, where the CIA has presidential authorization to launch strikes at will, each strike in Yemen requires White House approval and intended targets are drawn from an approved list of militants deemed by US intelligence officials to be involved in planning attacks against the West.110

  In November 2002 the CIA conducted its first drone strike in Yemen, killing Al Qaeda leader Abu Ali Al-Harithi, a suspect in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, and five others. Under the Obama administration, there have been about fifteen strikes in Yemen as of January 2012, although it is not clear how many were carried out by drones or by conventional aircraft and cruise missiles.

  A drone strike in May 2010 mistakenly killed a key mediator between the Yemeni government and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Jaber al-Shabwani, the deputy governor of Maarib. He was killed while conferring with an Al Qaeda leader in an attempt to negotiate a settlement with the government. Also killed in the attack were three of his bodyguards and two operatives with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.111

  The Yemeni government apologized for Shabwani’s death but the killing prompted members of his tribe to strike at government facilities, including a military camp, an oil pipeline, and powerlines.112 On January 30, 2012, a drone strike in southern Yemen killed at least twelve alleged Al Qaeda militants, including four local leaders.

  The most high-profile attack in Yemen was in September 2011, when the CIA used a Predator drone to assass
inate two US citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, alleged propagandists for a Yemeni terrorist organization inspired by Al Qaeda.113 The killings were the first reported instances of the US government executing its own citizens without charging them with a crime or affording them a trial by a jury of their peers. Less than a month later, Awlaki’s sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was also killed in a drone strike.114

  Ironically, the CIA is forbidden under US law from spying on Americans—that’s left to the FBI. It seems that the agency can, however, murder Americans overseas at the behest of the president without so much as a whimper of “impeachment.”

  According to a State Department cable released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, the bombings in Yemen were conducted with the approval of the long-time dictator of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who in January 2010 reassured US officials that he would “continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”115 That promise is credited as one of the reasons the Yemeni people rose up against Saleh’s repressive regime in 2011, despite the specter of frequently violent and bloody crackdowns, and forced him to leave the country in January 2012.

  The drone war in Yemen is implicating another very dicey part of the world, Saudi Arabia. In the summer of 2011, it was reported that the deadly drones flying over Yemen’s skies were coming from bases in the Arabian Peninsula,116 which a senior US military official said means Saudi Arabia.117 You might recall that none other than former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia had proven to be a “huge recruiting device for Al Qaeda” and in fact one of the principle grievances of Osama bin Laden.118

  Elsewhere in the Gulf, the US has reportedly been flying UAVs from Kuwait and Oman, and running a support facility for its drone wars from an air base in Qatar.119 According to Global Security, the Global Hawk has operated from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) since the early days of the invasion of Iraq, using the Al Dhafra Air Base outside the capital Abu Dhabi.120 The move came despite the fact that Islamic groups in the UAE are critical of the government’s close ties to the United States.