The New York Times has a chilling account from the civilians in a town plagued by U.S. drone warfare.
But viewed from Miram Shah, the frontier Pakistani town that has become a virtual test laboratory for drone warfare, the campaign has not been the antiseptic salve portrayed in Washington. In interviews over the past year, residents paint a portrait of extended terror and strain within a tribal society caught between vicious militants and the American drones hunting them. . . .
.It has become a fearful and paranoid town, dealt at least 13 drone strikes since 2008, with an additional 25 in adjoining districts — more than any other urban settlement in the world.
Even when the missiles do not strike, buzzing drones hover day and night, scanning the alleys and markets with roving high-resolution cameras.
Imagine if New York or Washington, D.C. or any small American town buzzed with the sound of another country's drones flying overhead, looking for targets to obliterate with seemingly little care for whether innocent civilians are also in the vicinity.
Government officials have touted the drone campaign as the most ethical, humane way to kill terrorists. Here's what now CIA Director John O. Brennan, then Obama's assassination czar, had to say about drones last year:
By targeting an individual terrorist or small numbers of terrorists with ordnance that can be adapted to avoid harming others in the immediate vicinity, it is hard to imagine a tool that can better minimize the risk to civilians than remotely piloted aircraft.
For the same reason, targeted strikes conform to the principle of humanity which requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering. For all these reasons, I suggest to you that these targeted strikes against al-Qa’ida terrorists are indeed ethical and just.
Thanks to some rare but much needed investigative reporting and the tireless work of countless human rights groups, it's a well known fact that the U.S. government's estimates of civilians killed and maimed by drones is far lower than the true number. The
report in today's New York Times as well as two new studies from
Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch all confirm that drones are far from the perfect, precise warfare the administration makes them out to be. Rather the drone campaign is a brutal method of killing that terrifies the innocent civilians not killed or maimed by drone attacks.
On top of having friends, relatives and neighbors obliterated by drones townspeople are suffering tragic psychological consequences from living in a modern war drone laboratory:
Unusually for the overall American drone campaign, the strikes in the area mostly occur in densely populated neighborhoods. The drones have hit a bakery, a disused girls’ school and a money changers’ market, residents say. One strike occurred in Matches Colony, a neighborhood named after an abandoned match factory that is now frequented by Uzbek militants.
While the strike rate has dropped drastically in recent months, the constant presence of circling drones — and accompanying tension over when, or whom, they will strike — is a crushing psychological burden for many residents.
Or, as one eight-year-old girl in
Amnesty's report put it:
I wasn't scared of drones before, but now when they fly overhead I wonder, will I be next?
- Nabeela, eight-year-old granddaughter of US drone strike victim Mamana Bibi
Drone warfare is conducted in secret and without meaningful congressional oversight. The President claims the authority to assassinate even American citizens without court approval. With these latest reports, Americans must realize that not only is their government conducting a secret war, but that U.S. government officials have misled the American public about the consequences of drone warfare for thousands of innocent civilians living in targeted areas.
The government's misleading statements on the legality and accuracy of drone attacks are all too typical for the U.S. national security apparatus, which in recent months, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed had been spying on hundreds of millions of innocent Americans (not to mention allied nations) and lying about it. Americans must demand to know more about the actions their government is taking in the name of "national security."