It was mid-morning in the village of Datta Khel, in Pakistan’s remote North Waziristan, when tribal leader Daud Khan arrived to chair a town-hall meeting on a local mining dispute.

He was joined by about 50 leaders from nearby communities, seated in the bus terminal they had chosen as a safe place — so open it would be ignored by the deadly drones that buzzed overhead in pursuit of local Al Qaeda militants.

They were fatally wrong. Within minutes Khan and his colleagues lay dead and dismembered in the rubble of the building that had fallen to a bevy of Hellfire missiles. Survivors picking through the chaotic mass of blood and body parts could only bury those they hoped belonged to their relatives.

Killer robots. Spies in the skies. Video game war.

Those slogans have stuck to the increasingly popular but lethal unmanned weapons that descend — like the fist of a vengeful god — on the enemies of America. A deus ex machina that neatly solves the problem of hunting terrorists on territory where no American forces can reasonably go without politically and economically costly losses or waging war on other another country’s soil.

But while the indiscriminate casualties of traditional warfare elicit horror, there’s a particular revulsion to a sci-fi assassin that’s the psychological equivalent of an alien from outer space. It is to hear, in the background, the hollow chuckle: “earthlings, there is no place to hide.”

Drone strikes are an existential leap in warfare — from the slogging all-against-all combat of Second World War epics to the fingerprintless elimination of terrorists and even potential terrorist acts by people in other countries who have never encountered them on a battlefield.

But they also open the door on a moral and legal miasma. Ultimately they are your judge, jury and executioner — but they give you no case to answer. They blur the laws of war and stretch the rule of law to the breaking point.

To the U.S., almost the sole operator of attack drones, the justifications for strikes are implicit in the “war on terror” to eliminate Al Qaeda leaders who perpetrated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and shrink its ranks, potentially saving thousands of innocent lives. Published accounts say it has been remarkably successful.

But because the aims are kept secret, and many of the strikes carried out by the virtually unaccountable CIA, drones face ongoing opposition. The Obama administration’s preparation of a new rule book for targeted assassination met with protest from human rights groups who say it only subverts rules of war that already exist.

Yet drone attacks are increasing in scope and sophistication. Their casualties include civilians as well as militants, and their unintended blowback, the fury of frustrated onlookers who will seek vengeance after shaking their fists at the empty sky.

Although there are no proven links, escalating drone strikes go along with a rise in terrorist attacks: In Yemen, Al Qaeda’s ranks swelled after drone strikes began. A recent Pew Research poll showed that 94 per cent of Pakistanis believe that drones kill too many innocent people.

Politicians who focus on drones score points by stoking anger against the U.S., notably in Pakistan, where conservative party leader Imran Khan has boosted his popularity by leading a growing protest movement against drones. Opposition leaders, government members and MPs have also won popular support for railing against them.

The civilians who are the collateral damage of the drones’ rough justice count the toll not in votes, but in widows and orphans, shattered limbs and decimated homes. And the daily battle with fear and paranoia as the airborne assassins circle overhead spying, spotting and striking who knows why or when?

In Pakistan’s border region, and tiny, embattled Gaza, where Israeli forces have used drone strikes to pursue rocket-firing militants, the presence of deadly eyes in the sky adds to a sense of claustrophobia.

“I began to feel suffocated in the house,” said Dr. Mona el-Farra, director of Gaza projects for the Middle East Children’s Alliance.

“I took my daughter with me and we went to the shops, just 150 metres away. It was very quiet. But suddenly I heard that noise of a drone in the sky. It was so loud, I thought it was about to kill me. We rushed home and 10 minutes later the explosions started. It’s like psychological war: you feel like you are always controlled and always under siege.”

Not knowing is the bane of those who live under drones — but also those who make up the kill lists and use them to target their enemies.

In Datta Khel, only four of the 42 dead tribal leaders were identified by locals as Taliban, and family members bitterly contested Washington’s view that all the dead, in an area identified as an Al Qaeda stronghold, were terrorists.

But who’s to prove innocence or guilt in remote areas where independent human rights monitors and journalists are barred, impartial witnesses nonexistent and intelligence suspect? Furthermore, asked Jennifer Gibson, a staff lawyer with the British-based charity Reprieve, “how do you prove you’re innocent after they have killed you?”

The problem is compounded by the shaky intelligence on the ground in remote areas. “We’ve heard stories of informants who are given locator (targeting) chips to put near militants but they actually put them on the homes of those with whom they’re in family feuds,” said Sarah Holewinski, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Civilians in Conflict.

Officially, the U.S. denies that civilians are mistakenly targeted, and insists that the unintended casualties are few and far between. U.S. President Barack Obama said drones are “on a tight leash.” When American officials comment at all on civilian deaths, their figures are low, and sometimes conflicting. The CIA, which directs the largest drone strike program, on Pakistan, told The New York Times the toll of civilians since May 2010 was “zero.”

Human rights groups and think tanks dispute those claims. “We have close to 100 clients whose family members have been killed,” said Gibson, who was a researcher for the Stanford Law School and New York University School of Law’s comprehensive report on Pakistan, Living Under Drones. And she added, counting fighting-age men as militants until proven otherwise “lacks any legal paradigm.”

But estimating civilian deaths is fraught with difficulties, and totals vary widely. In Pakistan they range from the New America Foundation’s low figure of up to 191 civilian casualties since 2004 to a high of up to 881 by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Outside of Pakistan, figures are equally difficult to verify. In Somalia, the Bureau said, drone strikes claimed up to 170 civilian lives in covert attacks meant to downgrade Al Shabab forces. In Yemen, it said, up to 178 civilians were killed in pursuit of Al Qaeda, (including one American teenager.) The U.S. will also install a drone base in Niger, extending its military reach in the Sahara.

Israel has killed at least 375 people in Gaza with the remote weapons since 2006, claims the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. But the number of civilians is unclear, and Israel refuses to acknowledge the use of drones.

To penetrate the fog of drone war, UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson, a British lawyer, has begun an investigation of 25 test cases of drone attacks and targeted killing that is expected to include the U.S. and Israel, as well as Britain’s use of unmanned vehicles in Afghanistan. It is one of a series of UN reports that have so far been disregarded by the U.S.

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Emmerson will examine one of Washington’s most criticized practices, “double tap” strikes that attack a target a second time, while rescuers are working to save survivors. “One of the questions we’ll be looking at is whether, given the local demography, aerial attacks carry too high a risk of a disproportionate number of civilian casualties,” he told the Guardian.

To Noor Khan, the son of Daud who died in Datta Khel, the answer is already clear. He has asked Shahzad Akbar, director of the Pakistan-based legal charity Foundation for Fundamental Rights, for help in obtaining justice for his father’s death in a case with wide-ranging legal and political ramifications.

On Feb. 13 it will be heard in a Pakistani court, charging that his country failed to protect the lives of its citizens, and asking the government to take a complaint against Washington to the UN Security Council, to seek compensation from America, and to demand an end to drone strikes.

If won, the case would be a landmark, forcing Pakistan to confront the United States — its biggest aid donor—in the international arena, and publicizing a covert campaign the U.S. has sought to keep from public view. It is the kind of confrontation Washington hopes never to encounter, one that the use of drones was supposed to prevent.

Another of Akbar’s cases, a suit brought by Kareem Khan, could also lead to charges in international courts against Americans accused of perpetrating attacks that killed Khan’s brother, son and a guest in his house in North Waziristan. He is asking for $500 million in compensation and an end to drone attacks in the region.

“People’s rights are directly affected in Waziristan,” said Akbar in a phone interview from Islamabad. “They are living under constant fear. Drones are overhead almost on a daily basis. They are quite low flying and they can be easily seen. It affects their right to life, to livelihood, to security. Children don’t go to school. Women won’t go outside. There’s no community life, and nobody knows if or when their families will be targeted.”

Of all the ethical and practical questions surrounding drones, targeting is the most fraught.

“The most agonizing issue in the drone program is figuring out who is an enemy combatant, who is not, and how one knows,” said Georgetown University philosophy professor David Luban in the Boston Review. Under the modern rule of law, he said, a line must be drawn between civilians and military objectives, and only those that are military attacked — a hazy distinction for those who make judgments on who the military objectives are.

On a practical basis, said Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Getting a missile from a computer screen to a terrorist on the ground is no casual exercise, but immensely complex and costly.

“Predator drones are more expensive to maintain than F-16s. You need something like 125 personnel to keep one combat air patrol in the sky at one time. You have to launch it, have people watching as monitors, sensors, controlling the firing, recovering the drone, securing the site. Then there are repairs and maintenance.”

The meticulousness of targeting is underrated by critics, said Gregory McNeal, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., who has written extensively on the issue.

“It’s an inter-agency process that pulls on all the intelligence capabilities of U.S. bureaucratic analysis,” he said. “The State Department will look at all the information on the targets, and may disagree with (who is selected.) They ask will it have blowback in the local theatre?

“In the military, there is rigorous collateral damage methodology based on evidence, battlefield intelligence. If it’s clear that an individual is associated with Al Qaeda, for instance, approval authority may work its way up through the Department of Defence chain. The operations are pre-planned, not called in like airstrikes. There must also be positive identification of a target before a strike can take place.”

Added to that, McNeal said, is a painstaking analysis of how the weapons will be used to limit collateral damage.

Proportionality is also taken into account when setting up targets — if the damage the strike will do outweighs the benefits of killing a dangerous militant.

However, the secretive targeting practices of the CIA have brought calls for a transfer of authority to the more accountable military.

On the borders of Pakistan, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda hide out among anxious villagers, those deliberations seem remote.

“If you live in North Waziristan, you can’t just pick up and move somewhere else,” said Reprieve’s Gibson. “People are living in poverty. Those who could leave have gone. The ones who are there may support the aims of Al Qaeda, or they may not. But that doesn’t mean they should be targeted for death.”

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