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In reality, writes Benjamin, the assassinations we are carrying out via drones will come back to haunt us when others start doing the same thing—to us.

Drone Warfare is a comprehensive look at the growing menace of robotic warfare, with an extensive analysis of who is producing the drones, where they are being used, who “pilots” these unmanned planes, who are the victims and what are the legal and moral implications. In vivid, readable style, the book also looks at what activists, lawyers and scientists are doing to ground the drones, and ways to move forward.

Weeks after the 2002 American invasion of Afghanistan, Medea Benjamin visited that country. There, on the ground, talking with victims of the strikes, she learned the reality behind the “precision bombs” on which U.S. forces were becoming increasingly reliant. Now, with the use of drones escalating at a meteoric pace, Benjamin has written this book as a call to action: “It is meant to wake a sleeping public,” she writes, “lulled into thinking that drones are good, that targeted killings are making us safer.”

Medea Benjamin is a co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and the international human rights organization Global Exchange. She has been an advocate for social justice for more than thirty years. Described as “one of America’s most committed—and most effective—fighters for human rights” by New York Newsday, and called “one of the high profile leaders of the peace movement” by the Los Angeles Times, Benjamin has distinguished herself as an eloquent and energetic figure in the progressive movement. A former economist and nutritionist with the United Nations and World Health Organization, she is the author/editor of eight books. Her articles appear regularly in publications such as The Huffington Post, CommonDreams, Alternet and OpEd News.

from Chapter 1

At the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner, President Bush joked about searching

for weapons of mass destruction under Oval Office furniture, since they had never been found in

Iraq. The joke backfired when parents who had lost their children fighting in Iraq said they found

it offensive and tasteless. Senator John Kerry said Bush displayed a “stunningly cavalier”

attitude toward the war and those fighting it.

Six years later, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama made his own not-so-

funny joke about weapons and war. When the pop band Jonas Brothers was about to play to

the packed room, Obama furrowed his brow and sent them a warning to keep away from his

daughters. “Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you:

Predator drones. You’ll never see it coming.”

For people in Pakistan, where American drones have been dropping their Hellfire missiles,

Obama’s joke lost something in translation. According to Pakistani journalist Khawar Rizvi, few

Pakistanis had ever heard of the Jonas Brothers or understood the reference to the President’s

daughters. “But one thing we do know: There’s nothing funny about Predator drones,” said

Rizvi.

That seemed to be the opinion of Faisal Shahzad, a thirty-year-old Pakistan-born resident of

Bridgeport, Connecticut. On May 1, 2010, just one day after President Obama made his

offensive drone joke, Shahzad tried to set off a car bomb in New York City’s Times Square. The

would-be bomber had left his explosive-laden Nissan Pathfinder parked in the middle of the

busiest intersection in New York City at the busiest time: 6:30 p.m. on a Saturday night. Luckily,

the bomb failed to explode, and the authorities—tipped off by local t-shirt vendors—disarmed it

before it caused any casualties. Questioned about his motives by the authorities, Shahzad talked about US drone attacks in

Pakistan.

….The technology for flying remotely has existed for decades. Unmanned aerial vehicles were first

tested by the military way back during World War I. In the 1930s the US, UK, and Germany,

later joined by the USSR and others, all began to use drones for anti-aircraft targeting exercises.

Unmanned crafts were used as guided missiles by the US military in World War II and the

Korean War. It wasn’t until the Vietnam War that unmanned aircraft were used to gather

intelligence.

Anyone who wants to build an unmanned aircraft can order the parts at a hobby shop and

assemble them in their garage. In fact, the prototype for the most popular modern-day drone, the

Predator, was built by Israeli aviation engineer Abraham Karem in his garage in southern

California in the 1980s.

During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis developed a spy drone to try to get real-time,

front-line intelligence, but these unmanned aircraft lasted very few hours in the air and kept

crashing. Abraham Karem went to work with an Israeli defense contractor to improve the plane’s

endurance, and then moved to southern California in 1980 to develop his own company to

produce unmanned aircraft.

With grants from the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and

the CIA, Karem began building a new model at home in his three-car garage. In 1981 he

unveiled what he called the Albatross, an unmanned plane that could stay in the air for up to fifty-six

hours, and later a new version with a powerful flight control computer called the Gnat 750.

But Karem was financially strapped and decided to sell his company to Hughes Aircraft, which

then sold it to General Atomics, keeping Karem on as a consultant.

In 1993 system, adding the now characteristic bulbous nose to the fuselage. Thus the Predator drone was born and was used in the Balkan wars to gather information on

refugee flows and Serbian air defenses. It was not until the 1999 NATO Kosovo campaign,

however, that someone came up with the idea of equipping these planes with missiles,

transforming them from spy planes into killer drones.

Today, drones are used for both lethal and non-lethal purposes. Outside the military, unmanned

aircraft are being drafted for everything from tracking drug smugglers and monitoring the US–

Mexico border to engaging in search operations after earthquakes and spraying pesticides on

crops. But the military is the driving force behind drones.

The Israeli military has a long history of using drones to gather intelligence, as decoys, and for

targeted killings. Their use of drones dates back to the occupation of the Sinai in the 1970s, and

was further developed in the 1982 war in Lebanon and the ongoing conflicts in the Palestinian

territories.

The Israeli unmanned aircraft pioneered in the late 1970s and 1980s were eventually integrated

into the United States’ inventory. Impressed with Israel’s use of UAVs during military

operations in Lebanon in 1982, then-Navy Secretary John Lehman decided to acquire UAV

capability for the Navy. One of the UAVs purchased from Israel, the Pioneer, was used to gather

intelligence during Desert Storm. According to a Congressional Research Report in 2003,

“Following the Gulf War, military officials recognized the worth of UAVs, and the Air Force’s

Predator became a UAV on a fast track, quickly adding new capabilities.”

But it was the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks that led to an explosion in the US military’s use

of drones and a host of other robotic weapons. The hundreds of billions of dollars that Congress

allocated for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made the Pentagon flush with funds to buy up all

manner of robotic weapons that military contractors from General Atomics to Northrop

Grumman had been developing.

The various branches of the military filled their shopping carts with every robot they could find:

tiny surveillance robots that can climb walls and stairs, snake-like robots that slither in the grass,

unmanned tanks mounted with .50 caliber weapons, and ground robots to carry the soldiers’

heavy loads.

They snatched up every type of drone on the production lines and commissioned new ones. They

bought the 38-inch-long Raven that is launched by simply throwing it into the air; the 27-footlong

Predator with its Hellfire missiles, and later the more powerful Reaper version; the 40-footlong

Global Hawk with sci-fi surveillance capabilities.

The Pentagon was ordering these machines faster than the companies could produce them. In

2000, the Pentagon had fewer than fifty aerial drones; ten years later, it had nearly 7,500. Most

of these were mini-drones for battlefield surveillance, but they also had about 800 of the bigger

drones, ranging in size from a private aircraft to a commercial jet. Then Secretary of Defense

Robert Gates said that the next generation of fighter jet, the F-35 that took decades to develop at

a cost of more than $500 million each, would be the Pentagon’s last manned fighter aircraft.

From 2002–2010, the Department of Defense’s unmanned aircraft inventory increased more than

forty-fold. Even during the financial crisis that started brewing in 2007 and led to the slashing

of government programs from nutrition supplements for pregnant women to maintenance of

national parks, the Defense Department kept pouring buckets of money into drones. At the height

of government deficit-reducing cuts in 2012, the US taxpayer was shelling out $3.9 billion for

the procurement of unmanned aircraft, not counting the separate drone budgets for the CIA and

the Department of Homeland Security.

Most military drones are still used for surveillance purposes. The photo sensors the UAVs carry

have become increasingly powerful, allowing the on-the-ground pilots to watch individuals from

an aircraft 30,000–60,000 feet up in the air. The infrared and ultraviolet imaging captures light

outside the spectrum visible to the human eye. UV imaging is useful in space and for tracking

rockets; IR imaging shows heat emitted by an object, making it ideal for identifying humans in

the dark. It is worth noting here that manned aircraft use IR imaging and can use all the same

sensors drones can.

One reason for the great demand in drones was that they graduated from simply tracking and

monitoring targets to actually killing them. In Afghanistan, drones were credited for killing

senior Al Qaeda and Taliban militants. In the Iraq invasion, they were used for everything from

tracking supporters of Saddam Hussein to blowing up government agencies. In 2003, US Air

Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley said, “We’ve moved from using UAVs

primarily in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance roles before Operation Iraqi Freedom,

to a true hunter-killer role.”

Another reason that drones were in such demand was the very nature of the Afghan and Iraqi

wars. The US military had a hard time even finding its enemies, as many local fighters blended

in among the civilian populations. Drones gave the military a way to conduct persistent

surveillance and to strike quickly.

Armed drones are used in three ways. They supply air support when US ground troops attack or

come under attack; they patrol the skies looking for suspicious activity and, if they find it, they

attack; and they conduct targeted killings of suspected militants.

….Drones can also “go rogue,” meaning that the remote control is no longer communicating with

the drone. In 2009, the US Air Force had to shoot down one of its drones in Afghanistan when it

went rogue with a payload of weapons. In 2008, an Israeli-made drone used by Irish

peacekeepers in Chad went rogue. After losing communication, it decided on its own to start

heading back to Ireland, thousands of miles away, and crashed en route.

The Navy’s multi-million dollar drone has the unfortunate feature of starting to self-destruct if

the pilot accidentally presses the spacebar on his keyboard. As Fox News reported, “An

unmanned MQ-8B Fire Scout helicopter can launch by itself, fly by itself—and with a single

slip, can nearly blow up by itself.” According to a June 24, 2011 report from the Defense

Department, a Navy pilot operating an unmanned helicopter accidentally pressed the spacebar

with a wire from his headset. The crisis was averted at the last minute, but the Navy’s MQ-8B

has so many flaws that it failed ten of ten test missions at the Naval Air Station in southern

Maryland. In fact, a glitch led one of the aircraft to fly uncontrolled from the station into

restricted airspace near Washington, DC, before control was regained.