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Death From Above
U.S. Drone Planes Have a Nearly Perfect Record of Failure
By Ted Rall
01/19/06 -- -- NEW YORK--In the dark, pre-dawn hours of Friday,
the thirteenth of January, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, the
buzz of an unmanned robot plane broke the silence. Half a world
and 12 and a half time zones away, someone on the sixth floor of
CIA headquarters keyed a command into a computer. The digitized
message, relayed through the building's circuitry and
transmitted skyward, bounced along an array of aircraft and
satellites before arriving at the RQ-1 Predator drone plane
hovering above the Bajaur region of Pakistan's Federally
Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). Four AGM-114N Hellfire II
missiles, each purchased by American taxpayers from Lockheed
Martin at a cost of $45,000, streaked off toward the hamlet of
Damadola, five miles into Pakistan.
The four missiles, each carrying enough explosives to take out
an armored vehicle, slammed into three local jewelers' houses at
950 miles per hour, nearly twice the speed of a passenger jet at
cruising altitude. "The houses have been razed," reported a
neighbor, a member of the Pakistani parliament. "There is
nothing left. Pieces of the missiles are scattered all around.
Everything has been blackened in a 100-yard radius." The target
of this latest assassination attempt via missile strike, Al
Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, wasn't there. At
least 22 innocent civilians, including five women and five
children, were killed. "They acted on wrong information," a
Pakistani intelligence official said of the Americans.
The political fallout is devastating. The Pashtun tribesmen of
FATA, still enraged at the militarization of an autonomous
region that regular Pakistani army troops first invaded in 2004,
are threatening a general uprising. As tens of thousands of
people chanted "death to America" at protest marches across
Pakistan, the regime of U.S. puppet dictator General Pervez
Musharraf--weakened by the West's failure to provide earthquake
aid in Kashmir--was pushed to the brink of collapse. After
Musharraf: the first civil war in a nuclear power.
This was only the latest botched U.S. attack. Eight days
earlier, another attempt to kill al-Zawahiri failed when a
missile blew up a house in the Saidgi area, also in the FATA,
based on another incorrect report. Eight innocent civilians
died.
If insanity is repeating an action in expectation of different
results, the assassination-by-joystick squad at Langley is
clearly nuts. How many must die before they notice that
precision airstrikes are anything but?
In the wake of 9/11 the Pentagon went gaga over unmanned aerial
vehicles. "These systems...park over the bad guys, watch them
continually, never give them a break," said Dyke Weatherington,
UAV chief in Donald Rumsfeld's office, in 2002. "The other
aspect is that we're doing that without putting service members
at risk." But history belies Rumsfeld's assurance that the
Predator-Hellfire program has a "darned good record."
On February 4, 2002 a Predator fired a Hellfire missile at three
men, including one nicknamed "Tall Man" who was mistaken by CIA
operators for the 6'5" Osama bin Laden, near Zhawar Kili in
Afghanistan's Paktia province. "The people who have the
responsibility for making those judgments made the judgments
that, in fact, they were Al Qaeda," said Rumsfeld. They were
not. The victims were desperately poor civilians gathering scrap
metal from exploded missiles to sell for food. The U.S. has not
apologized.
On May 6, 2002 a Predator fired a missile at a convoy of cars in
Kunar province in an attempt to assassinate Afghan warlord
Gulbuddin Hektmatyar because he opposes puppet ruler Hamid
Karzai. Hekmatyar wasn't there. At least ten civilians were
blown to bits. Hektmatyar, understandably perturbed, has since
declared himself and his militia our mortal enemies. No apology
there either.
And now the massacre in Pakistan.
Mishaps are unavoidable due to the Predator's design
limitations. Image resolution is too fuzzy to make out much of
anything at 10,000 feet up. Fly the drone lower than that and it
becomes vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. Assassinations by
unmanned aircraft seem doomed to failure--out of thousands of
sorties, the Defense Department can only point to a single
success, the alleged Hellfire killing of Al Qaeda's supposed
"number five guy" in Pakistan last year. But it's not just drone
planes. Attempted assassination bombings attempted by
flesh-and-blood pilots haven't fared better.
Ronald Reagan ordered an airstrike on Libyan leader Moammar
Khadafi's home in Tripoli. Khadafi survived, but his baby
daughter and 37 others were killed. In 1998 Bill Clinton ordered
Tomahawk cruise missiles fired at Osama bin Laden's training
camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Bin
Laden wasn't there, but dozens of others died; the Sudanese
facility turned out to be an innocuous aspirin factory. At the
start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq George W. Bush ordered 40
cruise missiles fired at a Baghdad restaurant where Saddam
Hussein was reported to be eating dinner. He wasn't. No Baathist
officials died. Fourteen members of two Christian families,
mostly women and children, did.
Incompetence and poor intelligence are not exclusive to us.
Though brutal, the 9/11 attacks fell far short of their
planners' immediate goals. Tens of thousands would have died at
the World Trade Center had the hijackers known that New Yorkers
start work at nine. And even if one of the two Washington-bound
planes had struck the White House, Bush was in Florida at the
time.
Targeted killing by aerial bombardment, whether it's carried out
by pilots, hijackers or computer-guided drones, is an inherently
flawed concept--too easy to contemplate, too hard to carry out,
and too ham-fisted to execute without also killing civilians.
Intelligence is faulty, guidance systems fail, imagery is fuzzy.
When the target of an assassination is present, small bombs
can't ensure success and big bombs invariably result in
"collateral damage." Technology hasn't changed everything. You
can't know what's going on on the ground from the air.
Civilized nations should band together to renounce and outlaw
these sloppy and obscene aerial assassination attempts, which
send the terrifying message that killing civilians is acceptable
in the pursuit of justice. But if the international community
can't go that far, they can at least ban the use of unmanned
vehicles like the Predator. Murder by mistake is bad enough when
a human being can be held accountable.
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