Laura Flanders on The Nation June 23: Drone Attacks to Stimulate Economy?

Flanders writes, "No mention there—or anywhere—of what peace activist Kathy Kelly described on GRITtv. Namely, the charred flesh of children killed by accident, by remote—or, for that matter, Peter Singer's studies showing that drone pilots suffer PTSD at the same or greater rates as other soldiers

Perhaps the lack of concern is because drones are already flying the Canadian border and Americans are already getting used to them. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson recently told The Hill, 'We are working hard to make round-the-clock aerial surveillance the standard for all 2,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border,' too.

Or it could be the impact of all those Northrop Grumman ads on TV. Or maybe it's just the economy. At $4.5 million apiece, the drone program's great for Grumman. Almost everywhere its being sold as good news in a troubled economy."

Drones at home: UAVs and the border patrol

The eye in the sky comes home from the battlefields. An El Paso Times story by Maggie Ybara.

"The Federal Aviation Administration announced Friday that it authorized a drone to fly back and forth between Fort Huachuca, an Army installation near Sierra Vista, Ariz., and Big Bend National Park beginning June 1, said Vincent Perez, spokesman for U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas."

LA Times: CIA receives permission to expand targeting for UAV drone program

CIA drones have broader list of targets
The agency since 2008 has been secretly allowed to kill unnamed suspects in Pakistan.
By David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times
May 5, 2010 | 8:37 p.m.

The secrecy aspect of the predator drone program is on some levels rapidly eroding. This story, like Robert Fisk's Belfast Independent story of last week, pulls up some detailed and informative numbers on drone attacks, their hellfire missiles and the results of those efforts. Also particularly compelling is how concern for the blowback factor is shifting, also contained in David Cloud's story.

Excerpt— Missile attacks have risen steeply since Obama took office. There were an estimated 53 drone strikes in 2009, up from just over 30 in Bush's last year, according to a website run by the New America Foundation that tracks press reports of attacks in Pakistan. Through early this month, there had been 34 more strikes this year, an average of one every 3 1/2 days, according to the site's figures

The 2010 attacks have killed from 143 to 247 people, according to estimates collected by the site, but only seven militants have been publicly identified. Among them are Al Qaeda explosives expert Ghazwan Yemeni, Taliban commander Mohammad Qari Zafar, Egyptian Canadian Al Qaeda leader Sheikh Mansoor, and Jordanian Taliban commander Mahmud Mahdi Zeidan.

A brief history of the unmanned aerial vehicle

An illuminating article appears on the Nebraskans for Peace web site about drone warfare and the history of UAV's.

StratCom: The Fulcrum for Drone Warfare by Loring Wirbel, Citizens for Peace in Space Colorado Springs, Colorado

Excerpt— "In the early years of the ‘War on Terror,’ missions involving Unpiloted Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) could be divided into those sponsored directly by regional combat commands in the Pentagon, and the more covert missions planned and executed by the CIA—both of which were supported by space and intelligence assets. The Pentagon-conducted missions tended to adhere to stricter rules of military engagement, which meant that if a drone directly targeted an individual al-Qaida suspect, chances were good that the mission was clandestine and run by the CIA.

In recent months, however, a third level of management has emerged, raising even greater questions of responsibility and accountability. According to journalist Jeremy Scahill and several other sources, the Pentagon’s secretive 'Joint Special Operations Command' (JSOC) manages unacknowledged armed UAV missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. These missions are run directly by Blackwater/Xe and several of its subsidiaries. Yet, because the ultimate authority for the missions goes back to JSOC, Strategic Command in Omaha (particularly its ‘Global Strike’ component) plays a more direct role in these even more deeply covert UAV strikes, than it does in CIA missions.

Demonstrators who went to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia January 16 to protest the Agency’s drone attacks provided a rare and needed public face to these UAV missions which have become so commonplace in the past several years. Yet the protests only scratch the surface. The passing of armed-UAV authority among official combat commands, quasi-official CIA bases, and deniable JSOC/Blackwater missions allows the Pentagon to play a shell game that keeps activists from understanding who does what. And the central player shuffling the shells is Strategic Command."

LA Times story on Predator and Reaper campaigns

Drones have transformed combat against Islamic militants in Pakistan's tribal areas, the rugged belt of villages and badlands hugging the border with Afghanistan. Since 2004, analysts say, Predator and Reaper drones operated by the CIA have killed at least 15 senior Al Qaeda commanders, as well as several top Pakistani Taliban leaders and hundreds of fighters.

The small unmanned planes can hover for hours while gathering infrared camera footage. Onboard lasers pinpoint targets for supersonic Hellfire missiles or 500-pound bombs. The attacks cost no American lives.

But civilians who had nothing to do with the Taliban or Al Qaeda also die in these strikes. Calculations of how many vary widely, from fewer than 30 since 2008 to more than 700 just last year. The Pakistani government restricts access to the tribal areas and has only nominal control there. Militants seal off attack sites, and victims are buried quickly, according to Islamic tradition.

Still, the deaths inflame anti-American suspicions, particularly among middle- and upper-class Pakistanis outside the tribal areas, many of whom are convinced that Washington wants to colonize their country or wrest control of its nuclear arsenal.

Inside the poor, isolated and politically powerless tribal areas, the reaction is more nuanced. Some say bluntly that they would avenge the killing of their relatives, if they could only reach those remotely piloting the drones buzzing thousands of feet over their heads. Others say they understand the need for the program, and even support it if it helps drive out the militants. They loathe the constraints the Taliban places on everyday life.

But many don't understand why a technology that pinpoints its targets with lasers and infrared cameras can also kill innocents. And they would prefer that Pakistanis, rather than Americans, were flying the drones.

The CIA's covert Predator and Reaper drone missions over Pakistan are separate from the U.S. military's unmanned flights in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military officials say.

Pakistanis are in some ways partners in the effort. U.S. conventional forces are banned from the tribal areas, but Pakistan tacitly acquiesces to Washington's reliance on drones to strike militant camps and hide-outs. The U.S. also relies heavily on the Pakistani military and intelligence services for on-the-ground information. If the intelligence is faulty, or if civilians are near militant targets, civilian casualties are almost inevitable.

Robert Fisk piece from inside Pakistan 4/6

I missed this one until now, in the Irish press.

Robert Fisk is a British journalist who grew up in the Middle East, traveling with his father. His knowledge of cultures and customs in the region arcs from Cairo to Khyber Pass.

Writing for the Belfast Telegraph, Fisk writes in the usual exceptional prose partly resulting from keen observation and knowledge of the topic ...

I am sitting in a modest downstairs apartment in the old British cantonment. A young Peshawar journalist sits beside me, talking in a subdued but angry way, as if someone is listening to us, about the pilotless American aircraft which now slaughter by the score – or the four score – along the Afghanistan border. "I was in Damadola when the drones came. They killed more than 80 teenagers – all students – and, yes they were learning the Koran, and the madrasah, the Islamic school, was run by a Taliban commander. But 80! Many of them came from Bajaur, which would be attacked later. Their parents came afterwards, all their mothers were there, but the bodies were in pieces. There were so many children, some as young as 12. We didn't know how to fit them together."

The reporter – no name, of course, because he still has to work in Peshawar – was in part of the Bajaur tribal area, to cover negotiations between the government and the Taliban. "The drones stayed around for about half an hour, watching," he says. "Then two Pakistani helicopter gunships came over. Later, the government said the helicopters did the attack. But it was the drones."

Read more: Robert Fisk for Belfast Telegraph April 6