Living Under Drones

Dear Mr. President,

You probably won’t read the report, “Living Under Drones” and there’s nothing new or startling in it, nothing I haven’t written about in previous letters, but now it’s official from two respected research groups at Stanford and NYU: death by drone has claimed some 3,000 people in Pakistan alone, perhaps 800 civilians and at least 176 children; less than 2% of those killed were “high value targets”; villagers tell of the anxiety and terror they feel as drones circle overhead 24 hours a day, never knowing when a missile will strike, helpless to defend themselves; secondary strikes on first responders and funerals make people fearful to help the injured or attend funerals. The report also counters assurances that drone strikes are surgically precise, they are not. Latency (the time for signals to travel from drone to satellite to an operator in the U.S. and back again assures that what is fired on is what the drone spotted 3, 4 or 5 seconds ago, not what is there now, and the blast radius from a Hellfire missile is 15-20 meters, 40-60 feet in every direction—anyone within that wide circle of destruction will die. The low civilian casualty count is because all males killed in a strike are classified as militants and many victims are unidentifiable, better yet for the claim of “militant.” Your drone wars have not made us safer but rather, caused widespread hatred of America (75% of Pakistanis view the U.S. as the enemy), and made drones a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militant groups. You may consider drone wars smart wars—war on the cheap without American casualties and bad publicity—but there are hidden costs: the destruction of the national soul, the national identity, conscience and compassion for our fellow man that lessens us all. And there is also something inherently evil and deeply immoral about a “pilot” going to his work station in the U.S. killing people in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia or Pakistan, taking a lunch break, killing more helpless victims 8,0000 miles away in the afternoon, then going home to dinner and helping the kids with homework. The War on Terror is an illusion, Mr. President, but the consequences are real. The dealers in death and destruction are “just following orders,” the same unacceptable excuse of the Nazis of the last century. Predator drones, predator nation. Hellfire missiles and Reaper drones: what ye sow, that shall ye also reap. Everything has a price and we will eventually pay.