Children in these communities are particularly vulnerable.

"When children hear the drones, they get really scared, and they can hear them all the time so they're always fearful that the drone is going to attack them," an unidentified man reported. "Because of the noise, we're psychologically disturbed, women, men, and children .... Twenty-four hours, a person is in stress and there is pain in his head." A journalists who photographs drone strike craters agreed that children are perpetually terrorized. "If you bang a door," Noor Behram said, "they'll scream and drop like something bad is going to happen."

Americans seldom hear from the people in Pakistan's tribal regions, ground zero for U.S. drone strikes. The interviews the NYU/Stanford report conducted were an important reminder that the Obama Administration's secretive drone war affects not only dead militants and the many innocents killed as "collateral damage." Drone strikes increase terror in whole communities—rational, fully justified terror.

How terrified would you be if a foreign power flew armed drones over your house day after day?

The Amnesty International report released today is an effort to shed more light on targeted killing in remote areas of Pakistan. Its researchers gained rare access to people who live there, and relied on more than 60 interviews conducted between late 2012 and September 2013. There are too many noteworthy findings to lay them all out here, but having already written about the awful effects that U.S. drone strikes have on whole communities, I thought I'd return to that subject. In short, Amnesty International's new research is consistent with what NYU and Stanford researchers found. The hundreds of innocents killed by U.S. drones are their biggest victims, but far from the only humans who bear terrible costs. America makes life worse for a lot of innocent people who aren't ever killed or maimed every time it sends a Predator drone buzzing over populated areas.

There's no doubt that U.S. strikes have killed a lot of bad guys in tribal areas of Pakistan, as the Obama Administration's defenders are quick to point out. But official secrecy has obscured the severe human costs of U.S. drone policy, helped the U.S. to avoid compensating families of those it wrongfully kills, and perhaps enabled the death of more innocents than would be deemed acceptable under a more transparent policy of targeted killing with drones. As the report puts it, "While parts of the tribal agency serve as a base for insurgent operations, they are also home to around 840,000 people, who face the constant fear of being killed by armed groups, the Pakistan armed forces or US drone strikes."

A few relevant excerpts from the report: