Around midnight on May 21, 2010, a girl named Fatima was killed when a succession of U.S.-made Hellfire missiles, each of them five-feet long and traveling at close to 1,000 miles per hour, smashed a compound of houses in a mountain village of Mohammed Khel in North Waziristan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Wounded in the explosions, which killed a half dozen men, Fatima and two other children were taken to a nearby hospital, where they died a few hours later.
Behram Noor, a Pakistani journalist, went to the hospital and took a picture of Fatima shortly before her death. Then, he went back to the scene of the explosions looking for evidence that might show who was responsible for the attack. In the rubble, he found a mechanism from a U.S.-made Hellfire missile and gave it to Reprieve, a British organization opposed to capital punishment, which shared photographs of the material with Salon. Reprieve executive director Clive Stafford Smith alluded to the missile fragments in an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times last fall. They have also been displayed in England.
“Forensically, it is important to show how the crime of murder happened (which is what it is here),” said Stafford Smith in an email. “One almost always uses the murder weapon in a case. But perhaps more important, I think this physical proof — this missile killed this child — is important to have people take it seriously.”
In the religious rhetoric used by al-Qaida’s online allies, Fatima was a “martyr.” In a statement quoted by Long War Journal, the al-Ansara forum said the senior al-Qaida commander Mustafa Abu Yazid had been killed in a “convoy of martyrs on the road with his wife and three daughters and his granddaughter; men, women and children; neighbors and loved ones.” But Fatima was not Yazid’s daughter, according to Noor, who reported from the scene. She was the daughter of another man who lost two wives and three children in the barrage.
In the euphemistic jargon of Washington, Fatima was “collateral damage” in the successful effort to assassinate Yazid, an Egyptian jihadist also known as Saeed al-Masri. In disregard for the official secrecy that envelops the drone war, U.S. intelligence officials leaked the classified details of the attack, telling the New York Times that they considered Yazid to be al-Qaida’s “No. 3 leader.” Relying on similar sources, the Washington Post said that al-Masri was the group’s “chief organizational manager.” Unlike other news organizations reporting on the attack, neither the Post nor the Times mentioned that women and children had been killed in the attack.
(In news reports published before the Post and Times stories, CNN cited Pakistani intelligence officials as saying that two children and two women had been killed in the attack. Dawn, a leading Pakistani news site, reported three children and two women had died. Reuters quoted residents as saying four women and two children were killed.)
Some might say that Yazid invited the killing of his wife and children by traveling with them while allegedly plotting attacks on U.S. targets. But Fatima was not his child. She was just a girl in the neighborhood who came into the crosshairs of the CIA.
“It seems easy to say it was the children of a terrorist rather just the children of anyone else,” said Shahzad Akber, a Pakistani lawyer who represents families of the drone victims. “For us it is difficult to say otherwise. How do we question that, because the CIA, who is [doing the] killing, is not sure either.”
Whether Fatima was murdered, as Stafford Smith alleges, has yet to be determined. But the responsibility for the chain of events that culminated in her death are becoming clearer as the mechanics of the drone war continue to emerge.
The Hellfire Romeo
The laser-guided missile that killed Yazid, Fatima and the others was probably made at Lockheed Martin’s “Mission and Fire Control” facility in Troy, Alabama. The Hellfire missile, the most frequently cited weapon used in drone attacks, is produced in a factory located 30 miles south of Montgomery. The plant, which employs 271 people and is a mainstay of the local economy, produces a wide variety of missiles for the U.S. Armed Forces. The latest version of the missile, known as the Hellfire Romeo, “defeats a broad range of targets,” according to Lockheed Martin.
The missile destined to land in Mohammed Khel was then shipped by plane to a base in Afghanistan, where U.S. airmen fitted the missile onto the fuselage of another technological miracle, the Predator B drone (also known as the MQ-9 Reaper), which is built by Pentagon contractor General Atomics. Assembled at three different General Atomics factories in San Diego, this mammoth unmanned aircraft with a 66-foot wingspan was first deployed to Afghanistan for combat sorties in October 2007, according to the company.
But in as early as 2002, the CIA had obtained its own Predator for use in armed attacks in Pakistan, according to news reports. Because of the need to officially deny U.S involvement in Pakistan, the CIA — not the U.S. Air Force — runs the drone program in Pakistan. The CIA now controls a fleet of up to 30 drones worldwide, according to a Washington Post story last year. The Federation of American Scientists says the CIA fleet includes several Predators/Reaper drones.
The CIA flight crew that sent the armed Reaper aloft in May 2010 was probably operating out of a U.S. air base in Afghanistan. Once in the air, the drone was most likely controlled by a two-man crew sitting at an ergonomically adjusted ground control station in a CIA office in northern Virginia. Former CIA counsel John Rizzo told Daily Beast reporter Tara McKelvey last year that he had witnessed drone attacks at such an office. The drone operators acted on the orders of senior Agency officials, he said.
In the first officially sanctioned public description of how the drone attacks work, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said last month that individuals targeted for assassination must actively be involved in a plot to attack American forces, facilities or other targets. “The intelligence is vetted at high levels, and the decision to fire a missile is made with extraordinary care and thoughtfulness,” he said.
In his interview with McKelvey, Rizzo said that he had signed off on CIA cables requesting “approval for targeting for lethal operation.” Rizzo, who resigned as general counsel in June 2009, said the cables provided a space for his signature, along with the word “concurred.” A typical cable targeted 30 people, he said. “The agency was very punctilious about this,” Rizzo said. “They tried to minimize collateral damage, especially women and children.”
The CIA general counsel at the time of the attack that killed Yazid and Fatima was Rizzo’s successor, Stephen Preston, appointed by President Obama. In a talk at Columbia University Law School last October, Preston insisted that all decisions in cases of lethal force complied with “the four basic principles in the law of armed conflict governing the use of force: Necessity, Distinction, Proportionality, and Humanity.”
“Great care would be taken in the planning and execution of actions to satisfy these four principles and, in the process, to minimize civilian casualties,” he said in remarks that were cleared for release by the CIA.
“To enforce the law”
The specific actions U.S. officials believed Yazid was planning in May 2010 have not been disclosed, but Yazid was public in his desire to retaliate for U.S. drone strikes. He had praised the “supreme bravery” of the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees at the U.S. airbase in Khost in December 2009 to avenge the death of a Pakistani militant leader in a previous CIA drone strike.
Whether CIA officials watching Yazid’s convoy on live video feed on the afternoon of May 21, 2010, were aware that it carried women and children is not known. So it is impossible to know if “great care” was taken to prevent the death of Fatima and the other children in the convoy. The presence of non-combatants in the immediate vicinity of targeted individuals has not prevented other CIA drone attacks in the past, most notoriously in the case of a June 2009 drone attack on a funeral ceremony that killed an estimated 60 people.
In the face of persistent complaints from the Pakistani government and near universal opposition in Pakistani society, the U.S. has since reduced the number of drone attacks. After a peak of 118 reported attacks in 2010, attacks declined to 70 in 2011, according to the New America Foundation in Washington. So far in 2012 there have been 14 drone attacks in Pakistan. The most recent one was on Monday, in which eight people were reported killed, none them named or identified.
Civilian casualties from U.S. drone attack are “exceedingly rare,” Brennan said in his public comments, a characterization that critics hotly dispute with hard data and eyewitness testimony. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which monitors news reports of drone strikes, says 175 children have been killed in CIA drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004. Using a different methodology, the New America Foundation estimates that 11 percent percent of all victims in 2011 were civilians. Akbar’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights says U.S. attacks “frequently hit civilians.”
Stafford Smith says Reprieve hopes to end the drone attacks by publicizing evidence from the scene of the strikes and taking legal action.
“Not all drone use is a war crime,” he said in his email, “but what is happening in Waziristan most definitely is — as was Nixon’s illegal war in Laos and Cambodia 40 years ago — so we will be pressing to enforce the law.”
In response to questions about the Hellfire missile debris found at the scene of May 2010 attack , a Lockheed Martin spokesperson referred Salon to a U.S. Army Public Affairs office in Alabama near the factory where the missiles are built. Salon has asked the Army if the serial numbers found near the place where Yazid was killed and Fatima was fatally injured came from missiles built in Troy. The Army has yet to reply.
In response to questions from Salon, a CIA spokesman cited Stephen Preston’s remarks, added some “off the record” observations about Yazid, but otherwise declined to comment.
The conventional wisdom is that the growing Latino vote is key to President Obama’s reelection prospects. By all accounts, Latinos favor the president over Mitt Romney by wider margins than they favored him over John McCain in 2008, when he won two-thirds of the Hispanic vote and captured crucial swing states with large Hispanic populations, including Colorado, Nevada and Florida. Bloomberg reported this week that lower-than-average unemployment in the key battleground states “coupled with the growth of adult minority populations in those states create a higher bar” for Romney in his quest to oust the incumbent.
But a closer look at the numbers is not so reassuring for the president. Much of the growth in the Latino population has occurred in California, Texas, Illinois and New York, which are not likely to be competitive come Election Day. While the Latino population is growing fast, the Latino electorate is not. Compared to other ethnic/racial groups, Latinos are more likely than whites to be under 18 years of age or to be non-citizens. “For every 100 Hispanic residents in the United States, only 44 are eligible voters aged 18 and over and U.S. citizens,” notes William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. “In contrast, 78 of every 100 white residents are able to vote.”
Frey has argued that “minorities will decide” the 2012 election, but he acknowledged in a telephone interview that Latinos, as a group, do not loom large in most of the dozen battleground states. According to his analysis of 2008 and 2012 census data, Latinos comprise less than 2 percent of the voting population in Ohio and Virginia. In North Carolina, New Hampshire and Iowa, they comprise 3 percent or less of the electorate. In Wisconsin, they comprise 3.1 percent of voters, down from 3.7 percent in 2008. Even if Obama won an additional 10 percent of the Latino electorate in these states over what he did against McCain, the increase would be smaller than his margin of victory in 2008 in every case.
That leaves Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, where the Latino vote appears to be large enough to be decisive in a close race. The good news for Obama is that many of those states could make the difference between winning and losing the White House. The bad news is that the outlook is distinctly less favorable to a more decisive Latino role than 2008.
As Frey has noted:
Minorities mattered in 2008 for three reasons: first, their relative sizes compared with whites increased in each state; second, their enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate was greater than in 2004; and third, white support for the Republican candidate (John McCain) waned in comparison to the previous election.
None of those factors appear to hold true in Florida. Latinos comprise about 15 percent of the state’s voters, unchanged from 2008. While a Gallup swing state poll earlier this month found Democrats are more enthusiastic about the president than Republicans are about Romney, they are also less enthusiastic about Obama’s candidacy now than they were in 2008, especially minority voters. As Real Clear Politics has noted:
Enthusiasm among non-white voters is down from 74 percent at this point in 2008 (vs. 58 percent for whites) to 48 percent today (the same goes for whites). And, indeed, in 2010, African-American turnout reverted to the mean. If this occurs in 2012, Democrats will need a massive surge in the minority population elsewhere to make up for this regression.
The most likely place for this to occur is within the Latino community. That population grew smartly over the 2000s. But — much less remarked upon — the Latino electorate did not. Indeed, since 2004, it has been almost perfectly flat, and it contributed only marginally to the decline of the white vote from 2004 to 2008.
Only in the three swing states of the Southwest — New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado — does the Latino vote seem big enough to be decisive. In New Mexico, Latinos are 38 percent of the electorate, down slightly from 2008. In Nevada, Latinos are now 17.3 percent of all voters, up from 13.3 percent from four years ago. And in Colorado, Latinos are now 12.1 percent of all voters, up from 11.3 percent in 2008. Only in these states does the combination of the size and growth of the Latino electorate and Obama’s edge on Romney appear capable of giving him a margin of victory he might otherwise lack. In the rest of the swing states, he’s going to need something else.
Stung by mounting hostility from the left and right, America’s drone industry is fighting back.
“We’re going to do a much better job of educating people about unmanned aviation, the good and the bad,” said Michael Toscano, president of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the industry’s trade group in Washington. “We’re working on drafting the right message and how to get it out there.”
The P.R. blitz comes after drones suffered a round of negative attention last week. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called for a ban on drones in U.S. airspace, and two other conservative commentators endorsed the idea of shooting down unmanned aircraft flown by U.S. law enforcement agencies. (Opposition to the U.S. government’s deployment of unmanned vehicles had previously come from left-liberal groups concerned about civilian casualties in the drone war in Pakistan and potential threats to civil liberties at home.) The nation also witnessed drone “scares”: An unidentified flying object nearly collided with a plane over Denver, and rumors circulated of a surveillance drone flying near the NATO summit in Illinois.
After issuing a statement denouncing Krauthammer’s remarks as “irresponsible” and “dangerous,” Toscano said the AUVSI would go on the offensive against critics. While the strategy is still being shaped, Toscano made it sound like something straight out of a crisis-management textbook — or Orwell. The AUVSI wants to bombard the American public with positive images and messages about drones in an effort to reverse the growing perception of the aircraft as a threat to privacy and safety.
“You have to keep repeating the good words,” Toscano explained. “People who don’t know what they’re talking about say these are spy planes or killer drones. They’re not.” He criticized Salon and other news organizations for using the term “drones,” saying “remotely piloted vehicles” is more accurate.
He said the AUVSI has hired a public relations firm to develop a media campaign to counter media coverage that he faults for emphasizing “sensationalism and the scare factor.” The campaign, which may include newspapers and print advertising, will seek to emphasize the benefits of a “revolutionary technology.” The use of unmanned aviation to inspect the damage at the Fukushima nuclear power plant and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are the types of story that the media campaign will highlight.
Toscano, formerly the manager of the Pentagon’s robotics program, said the campaign will focus on safety and public benefits.
“We need to get people to understand that with UAV [unmanned aviation vehicles] there is always a person in the loop and on the loop [meaning monitoring the aircraft's activities]. These systems don’t go in the air without being safe and reliable,” he said. (The FAA, however, has not yet issued rules for unmanned aviation systems in U.S. airspace.” Before this industry can really take off, we need rules from the FAA on how to safely operate alongside manned aircraft,” Toscano told Salon in a separate interview earlier this month.)
Toscano’s defense wasn’t limited, however, to domestic drone uses. He also stood behind the use of drones in foreign battlefields. ”If you want to say we shouldn’t be involved in those wars, that’s fine. But if our military has already been committed to do this and we are putting men and women in harm’s way, I want to do it with the least amount of risk to them. That means using unmanned vehicles. If you did it the old-fashioned way, you would have more risk to our people and more collateral damage.”
Toscano attributed criticism of drones to fear.
“Change scares people. There’s this natural reaction when you have revolutionary-type change, and that’s what these unmanned systems represent. But they’re not as scary as people say. They are an extension of the eyes, ears and hands of a person who knows how to do their job. If you can give them an unmanned system, they will do their job better.”
Domestic drones do not pose a new threat to privacy, he said, insisting that existing laws provide sufficient protection.
“We have so many more technologies that are eroding our ideas of privacy. If you have a cellphone and it’s on, somebody can follow you. If you send an email, somebody can read that email. The threat of unmanned vehicles is no different than that of helicopters,” he said. “If you use an unmanned vehicle to spy on someone and you don’t have a search warrant, it’s going to be thrown out [of court] or you’ll be prosecuted for violating the law.”
Toscano acknowledged the downside of the technology, but compared possible negatives about drones to automobiles. “Car crashes kill 35,000 people a year,” he said, “but we don’t talk about banning cars. We need to be honest about the costs and the benefits.”
Toscano said he didn’t know how much the media campaign would cost, saying AUVSI members would have to decide how much they want to spend. “This is like motherhood and apple pie for them,” he said. “They concur we need to act. We can’t stick our heads in the sand.”
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the activist group Code Pink and organizer of last month’s drone summit in Washington, said the industry’s problem lies in the origins of drone technology in overseas war zones.
“There is a strong association in people’s minds with drones and killing, even though the majority are used for surveillance. It’s ingrained in people’s psychology. The industry is going to have to work hard to distinguish between spying drones, killing drones and humanitarian drones.
“They want to present this as the technology that fights forest fires and finds your lost grandfather who has Alzheimer’s, and not as the technology that can be used to read a license plate from 40,000 feet,” she said. While not objecting to humanitarian uses of drones, Benjamin said she does hope to foster “a negative image” of unmanned aviation.
“Seeing the militarization of our police forces, there’s real reason for concern,” she argued. “This technology can be used not only to spy on us but can be used for crowd control and control of protests. It can be used to profile communities — to spy on Muslims, for example, or on the black community, or on people involved in dissent. It could be used to kill people. If we don’t do something about it, all of those things could happen.”
Benjamin welcomed criticism from the right and said she was hoping to make connections with conservatives worried about drones.
“The industry is obviously extremely powerful,” Benjamin went on. “They’ve been able to write the legislation and get their lackeys in Congress to push it through and get the president to sign it. But they are going to have to work harder and harder as we ramp up our efforts to educate the public.”
Missy Cummings, a professor of aerospace engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the recent controversies about drones mark a new phase in public thinking.
“We’ve just reached a tipping point and now people are starting to think about and talk about these issues,” she said. “That’s a good thing.”
The near collision of a corporate jet and what was described as “a large remote controlled aircraft” in Colorado highlights the challenges facing aviation authorities as they seek to fulfill a congressional mandate to open U.S. airspace to drones.
As reported by a Denver TV station this week, the pilot of a Cessna flying at 8,000 feet over Denver told air traffic controllers he had just seen an unidentified object pass by.
“A remote controlled aircraft, or what?” a nervous-sounding pilot said in conversation captured by LiveATC.net, a website that monitors air traffic control traffic. “Something just went by the other way … About 20 to 30 seconds ago. It was like a large remote-controlled aircraft.”
The station’s aviation analyst said the object could have been one of three things: “A military or law enforcement drone, a remote controlled aircraft, or a large bird.”
An FAA spokesman in Washington said, “We reviewed radar and audio communications but found no unidentified targets in the area where the Citation pilot was flying, and no other pilot reported seeing an unidentified aircraft.”
The only entity known to have permission to fly drones anywhere in the vicinity is University of Colorado’s Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, which has FAA authorization to fly drones over 59 separate 20 x 20-mile areas 50 miles east of Denver, according to a school website. (I have asked a university spokesperson for comment and will update this story as soon as I hear back.)
This week, the FAA announced procedures to streamline the process through which government agencies, including local law enforcement, can receive licenses to operate unmanned aircraft at altitudes no higher than 400 feet. By mid 2015, the FAA must complete plans to open U.S. airspace to commercial and civil drones.
Update: A University of Colorado spokesperson told me that the school had no drones in the air on Monday and only flies unmanned vehicles in FAA approved airspace.
The Obama administration claims that it is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants while focusing on those with criminal records. But new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows that the number of deportation orders has declined dramatically since last summer and non-criminals comprise a growing percentage of those expelled from the country.
That wasn’t supposed to happen under a policy of “prosecutorial discretion” announced by ICE director John Morton last June. The goal of the policy, announced with much fanfare in the Spanish language media, was to spare “longtime lawful residents” from deportation and to focus on criminals.
Since then, the adminstration has deported many fewer non-criminal aliens. But non-criminals remain the vast majority of those deported. And those with no criminal record now actually comprise a slightly larger percentage of those forced to leave the country than they did before Morton’s announcement.
In the three months before the policy was announced last summer ICE filed for deportation proceedings against 61,192 people of whom 15 percent had criminal records. In the first three months of 2012, ICE sought 37,659 deportations orders, 14 percent of which involved people with criminal records.
“The agency continues to be headed in the opposite direction of its stated goals,” said Susan Long, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which collected the data from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act request.
The goal of prosecutorial discretion, Long said in a conference call with reporters, “was to target and bring before the court those with more serious criminal history. As yet we’re not seeing any change. They have not turned the ship around.”
The administration implemented prosecutorial discretion in response to complaints that young people with no criminal records continue to face deportation. But the new data will come as no surprise to student groups such as United We Dream, National Immigrant Youth Alliance and DreamActivist, which continue to highlight the cases of law-abiding young people facing deportation.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., has championed the case of a South Carolina man, Gabino Sánchez, a married father of two, who was arrested for driving without a license last year and now faces deportation.
“Gabino Sánchez has lived and worked and raised a family here for more than a decade and it is not in anyone’s interest to have him deported,” Rep. Gutierrez told Fox News Latino on Tuesday after a deportation hearing in North Carolina. ”I do not understand why ICE has not followed President Obama’s guidelines and decided to move on from this case to go after someone else, someone who is a threat to his community or a serious criminal.”
In response to the TRAC findings, Gutierrez said, “The president should make sure the Department of Homeland Security is actually following its own rules and he should proclaim proudly and loudly that he will not deport another DREAMer or anyone else who fits the prosecutorial discretion criteria.”
Opposition to the use of drones in domestic airspace is spreading from the Code Pink left to the Fox News right. While conservatives laud the use of drones against suspected militants overseas, the sudden and vehement criticism of domestic drones this week by three right-wing commentators suggests that Congress’s rush to open up U.S. airspace to unmanned aviation vehicles now faces an unusual left-right chorus of critics.
Admitting that he was “going ACLU,” conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called Monday for a total ban on the use of drones in U.S. airspace. As reported by RealClearPolitics, Dr. K said:
I don’t want regulations, I don’t want restrictions, I want a ban on this. Drones are instruments of war. The Founders had a great aversion to any instruments of war, the use of the military inside even the United States. It didn’t like standing armies, it has all kinds of statutes of using the army in the country.”
A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys but not in America. I don’t want to see it hovering over anybody’s home. Yes, you can say we have satellites, we’ve got Google Street View and London has a camera on every street corner but that’s not an excuse to cave in on everything else and accept a society where you’re always under — being watched by the government. This is not what we want,” Krauthammer said on the panel portion of FOX News’ “Special Report.”
In fact,Krauthammer has outdone the ACLU, which has invoked a “nightmare scenario” of drones without calling for an outright ban. Krauthammer even predicted that some Americans may try to shoot down a surveillance drone, while adding he did not want to encourage the idea.
On Tuesday, Fox News contributor Anthony Napolitano seconded Krauthammer’s prediction, minus his scruples. “The first American patriot that shoots down one of these drones that comes too close to his children in his backyard will be an American hero,” Napolitano said, much to the consternation of anti-vigilantes at Media Matters. Conservative impresario Matt Drudge also wondered about the legality of shooting down drones, tweeting Tuesday, “Question for The New Age: If one shoots down a fed/police drone while it’s invading one’s privacy, does that make one a terrorist?”
Later on Tuesday, CNN’s resident conservative Jack Cafferty worried that, “as more and more of these unmanned aircraft pop up over U.S. soil, they may be used to spy on Americans.”
There is an Air Force document that says if unmanned drones accidentally capture surveillance footage of Americans, they can keep the information for up to 90 days and analyze it. Where is that in the Constitution?
The U.S. military and the government aren’t supposed to conduct surveillance of Americans on U.S. soil without their consent, but if they accidentally capture you on video, that’s OK.
While political unity can be heartwarming, the differences between liberal and conservative critics are not negligible, reflecting very different cultural and ideological impulses. While conservatives fantasize about shooting down drones, liberals dream their moral arguments can control the skies. But it is striking that these conservative critics, while supporting the drone wars overseas, do not see security benefits at home. Like liberals, they see mostly an incipient civil liberties threat.
Whether a coalition of the libertarian left and libertarian right can influence U.S. domestic drone policy remains to be seen. A similar coalition has opposed the Patriot Act for a decade without visible effect.
Al-Qaida commander Mustafa Abu Yazid; debris from a Hellfire missile; and Fatima, shortly before her death. 
(Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong) 
(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon) 
(Credit: 9news.com) 
A man in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, stands next to the border fence as two U.S. law enforcement officers look on from the U.S. side of the fence. (Credit: AP/Raymundo Ruiz) 
Charles Krauthammer, drone critic 