N.A.S.
by Sean Begin
After years of slogging through a seemingly endless ground war, it had to have been a most tempting proposition.
Instead of endangering American soldiers fighting Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups in the Middle East, use a remote-controlled aerial death machine, or drone.
For President Obama, who viewed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of his predecessor as costly, both financially and in American lives, it seemed a simple choice to authorize more and more drone strikes on suspected targets in the Middle East.
But the program, which has long been kept under tight wraps by the Obama administration, has had its leaks and it’s become more and more apparent that Obama and those operating the drone program have no clue, at all, what they are doing.
Last week, Obama stood before cameras and reporters and acknowledged that a January drone strike had killed two hostages being held by Qaeda in Pakistan, including one American., Warren Weinstein.
According to reporting in The New York Times, officials were aware something had gone wrong when six bodies were dragged from the wreckage of the drone strike instead of the four they had suspected of being there. Those two extra bodies were Weinstein, who had been held hostage since 2011, and Italian Giovanni Lo Porto, held since 2012. Both men were aid workers.
Weinstein wasn’t the first American killed by drone strikes, but he was the first not directly associated (or suspected to be associated with) Al-Qaeda. One of those American deaths, Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011, was a direct target.
The Times reported that an average of three separate counts of American drone strikes have listed 3,852 people killed in 522 such actions, with 476 of them civilians.
The problem here is obvious. Why is our president authorizing covert drone strikes without absolute assurance the people being targeted aren’t civilians? Obama claimed in a 2013 speech that no strike is undertaken without “near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.”
Yet, 476 people have lost their lives in an effort to “end terrorism.” And there’s some suggestion that these drone strikes have done nothing but increase the number of people angry with the U.S., and add more people to the growing number of extremists in the Middle East.
The idea of drone strikes is, admittedly, very tempting. To be able to covertly spy on “the enemy” and administer a quick, precise strike, without endangering the lives of soldiers, seems the perfect solution to the intractable wars of President George W. Bush’s administration.
But President Obama and his cabinet have failed in their responsibility to protect human life in their wild use of the drone program. In fact, the type of strike that killed Weinstein and Lo Porto in January was supposed to have ended when American operations in Afghanistan ended in 2014.
But American officials were anonymously quoted in the Times’ piece as saying that the measure was not enforced, and that the CIA continued to carry out “signature strikes,” in which the targets are not directly identified as any extremist on American watch lists, but rather people who exhibit behavior that may ally themselves with known Qaeda threats.
It’s time, as President Obama winds down his lame-duck term that he and his administration take a hard look at the viability of a program that has proven to be as precise killing foreign threats as using fire to destroy a termite invasion underneath your floorboards.
Yes, the threat to your comfortable living has been eliminated, but at how high a cost?