As a witness to the removal of fallen U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Army Chaplain Christopher John Antal can’t recall a time when that solemn ceremony wasn’t conducted without the presence of drones passing along the horizon.

They were sleek and quiet, making a gentle humming noise as they flew over the flight lines — where aircraft can be parked and serviced — of the Kandahar airfield in Afghanistan, where he was stationed in 2012. Not everyone had access to the flight lines, according to Antal, but he was responsible for participating in dignified transfer ceremonies, also known as ramp ceremonies, which were set there to greet the caskets of fallen service personnel as they were returned to base, en route to the U.S. On these occasions, he would watch the drones drift in and out, loaded with Hellfire missiles.

“It was [a] stark contrast to the solemnity of what I was doing at the ceremonies,” Antal, a Unitarian Universalist minister, told ABC News about watching the drones during the ceremonies. “When I would watch them and think about where they had been and where they were going, it would break my soul.”







On April 12, Antal resigned his commission as an officer in the Army because of his conscientious objection to the United States’ drone policy. In a letter addressed to Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama, Antal wrote, “The executive branch continues to claim the right to kill anyone, anywhere on Earth, at any time, for secret reasons, based on secret evidence, in a secret process, undertaken by unidentified officials. I refuse to support this policy of unaccountable killing.” In doing so, he joined other previous members of the armed forces who have addressed Obama to criticize his drone strike policy, including four former members of the Air Force who penned a letter in November of 2015 warning the president that the strikes “served as a recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay.”

The White House has defended the use of force in certain situations. "Since his first day in office, President Obama has been clear that the United States will use all available tools of national power to protect the American people from the terrorist threat posed by al-Qa’ida and its associated forces," reads a 2013 fact sheet on policies and procedures for counter-terrorism operations outside the U.S. and areas of active hostilities.



Christopher Antal’s Resignation Letter



Earlier this year, the Obama administration agreed to publish a redacted version of the so-called playbook for U.S. drone operations overseas. Antal hopes that with the publication, Americans will open their eyes to what is really happening with armed drones. The administration has not made clear when the documents will be released.





Civilian Casualties

The release of the drone playbook by Obama administration officials could provide the clearest window yet into a military program that has been shrouded in mystery since it began during George W. Bush’s administration in the early stages of the war in Afghanistan.

The numbers of civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes has been a source of controversy for years now, and precise data have been difficult to verify because of government secrecy on the subject and a scarcity of firsthand reports from areas where drone strikes take place.

In April, Obama told the press in reference to drone strikes, “There’s no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn’t have been” — a change in tone from 2012, when he told an online forum, “Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.”

According to documents that a whistleblower provided to The Intercept in 2015, drone strikes frequently kill civilians, and “nearly 90 percent” of the people killed in airstrikes during Operation Haymaker, a five-month military operation in 2012 targeting al-Qaeda operations in eastern Afghanistan, were “not intended targets.” A current U.S. official and a former one who were involved in drone operations told ABC News at the time that the unintended targets were often suspected militants traveling to or at meetings with intended targets.

London’s nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which says it pursues “research, investigations, reporting and analysis which is of public benefit,” estimated that from 2004 to 2014, there were 2,379 casualties from U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. Of the 704 people killed who have been identified by the bureau, only 295 were reported to be militants, meaning that about 58 percent were believed to be noncombatants.

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