Even though some Pakistanis had challenged the inflated, sourceless Pakistani media “statistics” on civilian deaths, the false numbers were subsequently used to galvanize opinion against the drones in America as well. In May 2009 David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum published an opinion piece in the New York Times that legitimized the sourceless, exaggerated Pakistani media claims: “Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent—hardly ‘precision.’”158 Kilcullen, who was an influential adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, then went before the House Armed Services Committee and further legitimized the sourceless statistics: “I realize that [the drones] do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership. Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism.”159
As the wildly inflated, sourceless claims of the drones’ civilian-to-militant kill ratio traveled from the Pakistani media to U.S. politicians, it became an article of faith in many circles that the CIA drones hunted not Taliban and al Qaeda, but innocent Pakistani civilians. Typical of this viewpoint was Maulvana Sami Ulhaq of the Pakistani Jamiat e Ulema e Islam (the Community of Islamic Scholars, an extremist Pakistani Islamist party), who announced at a conference in Lahore that the U.S. drone attacks kill “dozens of innocent people daily.”160 Muhammad Ahmed of the popular Buzz Pakistan website similarly wrote, “USA did more than 100 drone attacks in Pakistan in the past 3 years, if you read news about these drone attack you will see that in these drone attack only 1% terrorists was killed and other 99% people who died in these attack was innocent civilians of Pakistan. 75% of them were 10 to 15 year old teenagers.”161 The Pakistan Observer similarly reported, “The US drones or the predator planes which have been on the killing spree in Pakistan’s northern belt since August 2008 and have so far killed over fourteen hundreds people with the big majority as the innocent civilians (as admitted by the international watch dogs).”162 A similar finding was made by Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, a Pakistani who runs a website called Pakistani Body Count.163 His site, the only Pakistani site with sourcing, found that twelve hundred Pakistani civilians had been killed for forty terrorists. Usmani, however, came to this stunning conclusion by labeling all Taliban killed by drones as “civilians.”164 This even though the Pakistani government itself has recognized the members of Pakistani Taliban groups, who have killed thousands of Pakistani civilians, as terrorists. One Pakistani organization went even further than Usmani and claimed that 957 civilians had been killed in drone strikes in the year 2010 alone.165
Once again, these unfounded claims were not limited to Pakistan. A widely cited American article on civilian drone deaths by Daniel Byman of the Brookings Institution (without any sourcing or database to support his findings) claimed, “Critics correctly find many problems with this program, most of all the number of civilian casualties the strikes have incurred. Sourcing on civilian deaths is weak and the numbers are often exaggerated, but more than 600 civilians are likely to have died from the attacks. That number suggests that for every militant killed, 10 or so civilians also died.”166
Among other Westerners who joined the antidrone frenzy was antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan (to be discussed in a later chapter), who raised the number of civilian deaths even higher: “The drone bombings… are killing at least a hundred or more innocent civilians for every so-called terrorist that they get. We think that this is morally reprehensible.”167 Likening drones to land mines and cluster bombs, one of Britain’s most senior judges opined, “Unmanned drones that fall on a house full of civilians is a weapon the international community should decide should not be used.”168 Ted Rall, a writer for Commondreams.org, similarly wrote in an article titled “US Drone Planes Have a Nearly Perfect Record of Failure,” “Civilized nations should band together to renounce and outlaw these sloppy and obscene aerial assassination attempts, which send the terrifying message that killing civilians is acceptable in the pursuit of justice.”169 A U.S.-based website that was used to rally protestors to a march against drone strikes at CIA Headquarters in Langley claimed, “The primary and proven case against drone attacks is that they pose a public danger that can only be deemed as indiscriminate bombing.”170
It is easy to find antidrone comments from politicians, journalists, lawyers, bloggers, and activists who focus on the supposed mayhem being wreaked by drones on “thousands” of innocent Pakistani men, women, and children. The notion that robotic drones fly over Pakistani houses indiscriminately unleashing bombs on civilians has become familiar fodder for antiwar voices, as much a part of their discourse as CIA black sites, rendition, water boarding, and the Guantánamo Bay detention center.
There are many myths related to the drone campaign, but the greatest seems to be the notion that drones “invade” Pakistan and hover over the country’s civilians, slaughtering them indiscriminately while avoiding striking their actual terrorist targets with their state-of-the-art technology. An exploration of some of the other stories related to the drones found in the subsequent chapter will help shed some light on the CIA’s murky assassination campaign and expose some of the other myths related to it.
8
Spies, Lawyers, Terrorists, and Secret Bases
This is quite an awesome power, the power to label somebody as an enemy [then] wipe them out without judicial process of any kind.
Many stories associated with the CIA’s extraordinary drone assassination campaign in Pakistan shed light on this murky war. Following are only a few of them that bring to life some of the more interesting episodes.
THE SHAMSI AIR BASE EXPOSURE
One of the earliest myths about the drone campaign was that the CIA drones were flying from bases in Afghanistan to carry out their deadly missions. The Pakistani media and politicians frequently made references to “intrusions” or “violations” of Pakistani airspace by “Afghan-based” drones. In actuality, the majority of drones were flying from a remote airfield in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province, known as Shamsi, that had been given to the Americans after 9/11. This remote airstrip, which is 350 miles south of Waziristan, had originally been built by Arab sheikhs from the gulf states who used to fly to the region to hunt local birds. Its remoteness, proximity to the FATA, and distance from Taliban insurgents made it a perfect location for launching drone strikes with the Pakistanis’ “don’t ask, don’t tell” agreement.
Although many in Pakistan suspected that the government was covertly supporting the drone strikes “from Afghanistan,” even as it publicly condemned them, there seemed to be little official evidence of this until early 2009. The Pakistani government’s double game was finally exposed on February 12, 2009, when Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, dropped a bombshell in a conference when she said, “As I understand it, these [drones] are flown out of a Pakistani base.”1