Brian Williams - Predators

Gilani’s fears that the drone strikes might drive the tribes into the arms of the terrorists were not overblown. On several occasions the Taliban or enraged Pasthun tribesmen have retaliated for air strikes, most notably the Chenagai strike, with suicide bombings. One account of this sort of trend reads, “My neighbor was so furious when a drone killed his mother, two sisters and his 7-year-old brother last September that he filled his car with explosives and rammed it into a Pakistani army convoy. He had to avenge the death of his loved ones.” 34A Pashtun from the region similarly argued that the killing of innocent people was driving anti-Americanism to new highs. According to Mohammad Kamran Khan, “I recently visited North Waziristan during Eid. People were angry with me for the large number of civilians killed in these attacks. They were angry with the Pakistan government and our armed forces for not doing anything to put a halt to these attacks. Also, their hatred towards America was at an all-time high.” 35

A member of the Pakistani parliament said, “The lava of anger and hatred is flowing in the tribal areas. Clearly, the drone attack strategy is not winning people over. It is only increasing hatred against the US and now more people are taking up arms.” 36

The same trend of increased support for terrorists following collateral damage death from drone attacks has been observed in Yemen. One Yemeni businessman said, “The attacks are making people say ‘we believe Al Qaeda is on the right side.’” Another Yemeni whose nephew was killed as a bystander in a drone strike stated, “The Americans are targeting the sons of the Awlak. I would fight even the devil to exact revenge for my nephew.” 37A third Yemeni said, “Dear Obama, when a US drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda.” 38After a drone strike in Yemen wounded seven civilians, an outraged Yemeni said, “Our lives are valueless in the eyes of our government, and that is why civilians are being killed without a crime.” 39

An anguished survivor of another drone strike, which killed a group of Yemeni civilians, including a mother, her seven-year-old daughter, and a twelve-year-old boy, stated, “Their bodies were burning. How could this happen? None of us were Al Qaeda.” 40Another survivor of the strike said, “I would try to take my revenge. I would even hijack an army pickup, drive it back to my village and hold the soldiers in it hostages. I would fight along al-Qaeda’s side against whoever was behind this attack.” Yet another said, “Our entire village is angry at the government and the Americans…. If the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.” And finally, a Yemeni who lost a family member in the strike added, “If there’s no compensation from the government, we will accept the compensation from al-Qaeda. If I am sure the Americans are the ones who killed my brother, I will join al-Qaeda and fight against America.” Summing up such emotions, a Yemeni source said, “Every time the American attacks increase, they increase the rage of the Yemeni people, especially in al-Qaeda-controlled areas. The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders, but they are also turning them into heroes.” 41

The fallibility of the CIA’s humint and techint and its potentially fatal results are best demonstrated by the case of two U.S. servicemen, Navy Corpsman Benjamin Rast and Marine Staff Sgt. Jeremy Smith, who were mistakenly killed by a drone in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan. Rast and Smith were misidentified as “Taliban” by a drone flown from Nevada and killed in a salvo of missiles. 42If the drone operators could not identify fellow Americans on a battlefield in Afghanistan, then there is a high probability they could similarly mistake other armed men in the remote FATA (a region where arms are prevalent) for Taliban.

A similar incident took place in Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan, when drone pilots noticed three trucks, which they mistook for a Taliban convoy, and attacked them with missiles. Unfortunately, the trucks were packed with civilians, and as many as twenty-three noncombatants were incinerated in an instant by drone Hellfires. A U.S. general who investigated the attack on the civilians found that “information that the convoy was anything other than an attacking force was ignored or downplayed” by the overly eager Predator crew whose reporting was “inaccurate and unprofessional.” 43In fact, the drone operators followed the civilian convoy of trucks for three and half hours analyzing its pattern-of-life movement before firing on it and massacring its members. It was only after the strike that drone pilots noticed terrified women survivors waving clothing to surrender to their airborne attackers as they carried babies from the convoy’s wreckage. 44It is likely that in both of these instances of misidentification trigger-happy drone operators gave into the urge to use their technology to mistakenly kill fellow Americans and unarmed Afghan civilians without full humint support. It can be theorized that the same thing has happened in Pakistan as well.

Several other drone errors have cost innocent people their lives. There is, for example, the case of Jabr al Shabwani, a deputy provincial governor in Yemen who met with a local al Qaeda leader to arrange a truce in October 2010. During the meeting a drone fired its missiles into the gathering, killing the popular Shabwani, five of his bodyguards, and the al Qaeda leader. According to Reuters, “The killing so angered Shabwani’s tribesmen that in the subsequent weeks they fought heavily with government security forces, twice attacking a major oil pipeline in Maarib.” 45Once again a drone strike proved to be a recruiter for anti-American militancy.

Another strike that demonstrates that the drones are only as good as their ground intelligence took place in Turkey. On November 22, 2011, the United States flew its last Predator and Reaper drones out of Iraq but transferred four of them to Turkey (smaller surveillance drones were, however, kept in Iraq to protect the massive U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad). At the time the Turkish government announced that it would be in charge of the four Predator drones’ operations in their country. It was assumed that the drones, which were based at Incirlik Air Base in southeastern Turkey, would be used to monitor the Iraqi-Turkish border. Specifically, they would monitor the infiltration of Kurdish guerrillas coming into Turkey from Iraq to fight for independence against Turkish troops.

On December 29, 2011, one of the drones spotted what appeared to be a group of Kurdish insurgents sneaking across the border from Iraq to Turkey. 46It then transmitted their location to Turkish F-16 fighter jets, which bombed the group approximately fifteen minutes later. At least thirty-five were killed in the strike. But it later became known that far from being Kurdish guerrillas, the men who were attacked were simply Kurdish smugglers sneaking into Turkey with cigarettes and fuel. Restless Kurds throughout Turkey staged mass protests over the killing of the smugglers, and the case once again proved that for all the technology at their fingertips, the drone pilots were not infallible. It was the largest Kurdish civilian death toll in a single strike in Turkey’s three-decade-long war with the Kurdish insurgents.

Sky News reported the aftermath of the errant strike as follows: “Television images showed a line of corpses covered by blankets on a barren hillside, with a crowd of people gathered around—some with their heads in their hands and crying. People loaded the bodies onto donkeys which were led down the hill to be loaded into vehicles and taken to hospital in the mainly Kurdish southeast of the country. Security sources said the people killed had been carrying canisters of diesel on mules and that their bodies were found on the Iraqi side of the border.” A local mayor said, “We have 30 corpses, all of them are burned. The state knew that these people were smuggling in the region. This kind of incident is unacceptable. They were hit from the air.” 47To compound matters, most of those who were killed in the strike were Kurdish teenagers whose fathers belonged to a clan that actually fought for the Turkish government against the Kurdish insurgents. 48This fact suggests that the decision to carry out the deadly strike on the Kurdish smugglers was made without the benefit of any supporting ground humint whatsoever.