Brian Williams - Predators

The preceding casualty list indicates that the basic thrust of Brennan’s statement—namely, that the CIA was making every effort to avoid civilian casualties in the FATA—was true, although the deputy adviser was obviously exaggerating when he said there hadn’t been a “single collateral death.” For his part, President Obama said, “I want to make sure that people understand that actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise, precision strikes against al-Qaida and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it has been applied.” 79Obama rejected the notion that “we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy nilly.” Stressing the pinpoint nature of the strikes, he said, “This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases.” 80

In December 2009 the New York Times published an article based on an interview with a U.S. government official that stated,

Assessments of the drone campaign have relied largely on sketchy reports in the Pakistani press, and some have estimated several hundred civilian casualties. Saying that such numbers are wrong, one government official agreed to speak about the program on the condition of anonymity. About 80 missile attacks from drones in less than two years have killed “more than 400” enemy fighters, the official said, offering a number lower than most estimates but in the same range. His account of collateral damage, however, was strikingly lower than many unofficial counts: “We believe the number of civilian casualties is just over 20, and those were people who were either at the side of major terrorists or were at facilities used by terrorists.” 81

The CIA itself finally entered the fray when one of its spokemen made the following statement: “While the C.I.A. does not comment on reports of Predator operations, the tools we use in the fight against Al Qaeda and its violent allies are exceptionally accurate, precise and effective. Press reports suggesting that hundreds of Pakistani civilians have somehow been killed as a result of alleged or supposed U.S. activities are—to state what should be obvious under any circumstances—flat-out false.” 82

A 2011 article published for Bloomberg supported the CIA statement and reported that the number of civilian deaths resulting from drone strikes had plummeted. According to this article, titled “U.S. Said to Reduce Civilian Deaths after Increasing CIA Pakistan Strikes,”

The Central Intelligence Agency, while increasing the frequency of drone strikes in Pakistan, has reduced civilian casualties, a U.S. official and independent analysts said. The 75 strikes launched in the ungoverned tribal region since the drone program accelerated in mid-August have killed several hundred militants without causing any deaths among civilian non-combatants, said the U.S. official, who, lacking authorization to discuss the program, requested anonymity. Analysts who monitor developments in the region said figures based on press reports show a decline in unintended deaths, although verifying exact figures may be impossible. “The drone strikes do appear to be becoming less lethal for civilians as time goes on,” said Bill Roggio, editor of The Long War Journal . 83

As this article states, some independent scholars, such as Roggio, backed up the government’s claims to small numbers of civilian casualties. Georgetown professor Christine Fair even went so far as to declare on television, “Actually the drones are not killing innocent civilians. Many of those reports are coming from deeply unreliable and dubious Pakistani press reports, which no one takes credibly on any other issue except for some reason on this issue. There’ve actually been a number of surveys on the ground, in FATA. The residents of FATA generally welcome the drone strikes because they know actually who’s being killed. They’re very much aware of who’s being killed and who’s not.” 84

Like John Brennan and the unnamed government official quoted in the Bloomberg article, Fair exaggerated to make her point. No one outside of the government could realistically argue that the drones didn’t kill any civilians; my own study shows forty civilians were killed in the year 2009 alone. But the greater point—that the drones were not clumsily killing mass numbers of civilians—is supported by the data in the preceding casualty list.

The media reports on which the casualty list is based are the products of journalists’ interviews with civilians, Taliban, and local officials from the targeted areas. But the journalists, even the Pakistani reporters, rarely gain access to the actual targeted strike zones. The Taliban distrust even Pakistani journalists who are generally opposed to the strikes on their country. Therefore, scholars trying to assess the number of slain civilians in the strikes perforce have to rely on secondary media accounts from Western and Pakistani journalists who have access to local civilian, government, and Taliban sources. (The Taliban seem to be remarkably forthcoming in discussing the deaths of their comrades.)

One widely quoted study based on the available media reports demonstrates that the drones kill predominantly noncivilians. Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann at the New America Foundation carried out a case-by-case, sourced study of drone strike fatalities that concluded,

We’ve been able to discern some surprising trends. A frequent criticism of the drones program is that the strikes kill too many civilians…. But even as the number of reported strikes has skyrocketed—with one every three days in 2010, compared with one a week last year and one every 11 days in 2008—the percentage of non-militants killed by the attacks has plummeted…. If the true nonmilitant fatality rate were more widely known in Pakistan, the program might be less unpopular there. Those targeted in the strikes, after all, are thought to have carried out or planned attacks not only in Afghanistan and the West, but also in Pakistan, where more than 4,000 people have been killed in militant attacks since the Red Mosque incident in July 2007. 85

These authors further wrote, “Our study shows that the 265 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, including 52 in 2011, from 2004 to the present have killed approximately between 1,628 and 2,561 individuals, of whom around 1,335 to 2,090 were described as militants in reliable press accounts. Thus, the true non-militant fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 20 percent. In 2010, it was more like five percent.” 86By 2012 the civilian death rate had fallen even further, and Bergen boldly wrote, “Today, for the first time, the estimated civilian death rate is at or close to zero.” 87

This independent study’s conclusion that the drones were killing civilians at a rate of roughly 5 percent in 2010 seems to speak to the drones’ unprecedented precision. The obvious question, if such findings are accurate, is, How are the drones so precise at killing terrorists and militants? Part of their success can of course be explained by the drone pilots’ ability, while flying remotely from Langley, Creech Airbase in Nevada, or elsewhere, to follow their targets up close for many hours using high-resolution cameras. For the first time in history, unseen drones can patiently wait for targets to gather in a compound, automobile, or training camp; watch to see if civilians are in the area; and then fire when the moment is most opportune. One account compared the drones to “mini-satellites that can monitor a suspected terrorist compound for weeks, watching where the people go and with whom they interact, to help confirm that the right people are being singled out for attack.” 88A New York Times article on the drones similarly reported,