After Balawi’s suicide, Pakistani Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, released a prerecorded videotape that featured images of him sitting next to Balawi as the suicide bomber posthumously promised to avenge the earlier drone assassination of Baitullah Mehsud. Balawi declared, “We will never forget the blood of our emir, Baitullah Mehsud. We will always demand revenge for him inside America and outside.”34 Balawi also said he was offered “millions of dollars” to “spy on mujahideen… but instead I came to them [the Taliban]… and I told them everything, and we arranged this attack so the Americans can understand that the belief of Allah…. This jihadi attack will be the first of the latest operations against the Americans and their drone teams outside the Pakistan border, after they killed the Emir of Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan Baitullah Mehsud.”35
The Camp Chapman suicide attack was the second largest loss of CIA lives after the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983, which destroyed an entire CIA team. Revenge was not, however, long in coming. After the Khost bombing, an intelligence official promised, “Last week’s attack will be avenged. Some very bad people will eventually have a very bad day.”36 In the following weeks the CIA launched an unprecedented blitz of drone strikes on the territories of Mehsud and Haqqani, who was also thought to be involved in the Camp Chapman attack. Among those killed in the retaliatory strikes was Hussein al Yemeni, a top al Qaeda leader who was involved in the Camp Chapman plot. For all the CIA’s efforts to take out both Haqqani and Mehsud, to date neither of them has been killed and the real culprits behind the Camp Chapman attack have gone unpunished.
THE EXPOSURE OF THE PAKISTANI CIA STATION CHIEF’S IDENTITY
In 2010 a Pakistani journalist named Kareem Khan from Mir Ali, North Waziristan, filed a lawsuit against the CIA station chief in Pakistan, CIA director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Khan’s suit asked for a half million dollars in compensation for the killing of his brother and his son in a drone strike on December 31, 2009. Khan claimed, “That drone attack killed my son, my brother and a local man. We are not terrorists, we are common citizens.”37
But that was not all. In his lawsuit Khan named the head of the CIA in Pakistan, Jonathan Banks, and blew his cover. Khan’s application to register the case stated, “Jonathan Banks is operating from the American Embassy in Islamabad, which is a clear violation of diplomatic norms and laws, as a foreign mission cannot be used for any criminal activity in a sovereign state.”38 Khan’s lawyer further stated, “Mr. Kareem maintains that Jonathan Banks is not a U.S. diplomat therefore he does not enjoy diplomatic immunity, and his involvement in the execution of his son and brother simply makes him a murderer who is to be taken to task.”39 He also called for Banks to be tried for murder and executed.
In response, the Islamabad Police Department moved to order a murder case against Banks. Within days Banks’s name was published in papers around the globe, and protestors in Pakistan were carrying placards with his name on them demanding his arrest. Banks was hurriedly smuggled out of Pakistan after he received numerous death threats.
Enraged American officials claimed that Khan, a simple Pashtun tribesman, could not have discovered the name of the CIA station chief in Pakistan if he had not been given details of his identity by the Pakistani ISI.40 As for the actual lawsuit itself, Khan has received no compensation money from the government to date, but his suit did achieve another purpose, namely, it embarrassed the CIA. The basis for Khan’s lawsuit—that he was an innocent tribesman whose loved ones were brutally killed in a drone strike—was, however, challenged when two intelligence officials told CNN that he had been housing a notorious Taliban commander named Haji Omar Khan at the time of the strike.41 Haji Omar Khan was said to have been killed in the drone strike.
THE ARREST OF THE “CREECH 14” AND OTHER ANTIDRONE PROTESTS IN THE UNITED STATES AND UK
As the drone strike campaign picked up in the final years of the Bush administration and then skyrocketed under Obama, an antidrone movement appeared in the United States. One of the most active components of this antidrone/antiwar movement was a women’s group known as Code Pink. Code Pink recruited well-known activist Cindy Sheehan, who famously camped near President George W. Bush’s home in Crawford, Texas, to protest the Iraq War following the death of her son in that conflict. Sheehan was by 2008 nationally known and began a “No Drones” bus tour in which she and other activists dressed in pink protested outside Air Force bases that were home to drone squadrons. The women also protested at CIA Headquarters in Langley and marched from there to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s house, also in Langley, calling for his arrest. Code Pink protested at the San Diego home of the General Atomics chief executive officer, James Blue, where they built a shrine to the children killed by the drones his company produced. A statement on the Code Pink website concerning the protests read,
So many civilian casualties by US drone attacks are not just war crimes but crimes against humanity. We must restore America’s image by suspending these attacks immediately. This indiscriminate method of drone killing will not improve our relationship with Pakistan or the Muslim world. It will not bring us safety or peace throughout the world, in fact it begets more harm and destruction as extremists use the death of innocent civilians as a tool to recruit more people to join the Taliban to fight against us.42
On her own website Cindy Sheehan wrote, “The primary and proven case against drone attacks is that they pose a public danger that can only be deemed as indiscriminate bombing.”43
Thirty members of Code Pink, dressed in pink shirts that said “Stop Killer Drones,” partook in an antidrone march led by Pakistani politician Imran Khan, an ex-cricketeer who has been vocal in his calls for peace with the Taliban militants and an end to the drone campaign against them. The October 2012 march of several thousand Pakistanis and Code Pink members made its way from Islamabad to South Waziristan before it was halted by the Pakistani army at the border because of Taliban security threats. There protestors (presumably not the Americans) chanted “Down with America” and “A Friend of America Is a Traitor to the Nation.”44 While in Pakistan, the members of Code Pink also delivered a protest letter condemning the drone strikes to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan; the letter was signed by, among others, actor Danny Glover, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky, and movie director Oliver Stone. One of the American drone protestors described Obama’s role as “chief executioner” at a Pakistani seminar on the issue.45
Another protest was held in October 2011 in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, which had an exhibit dedicated to drones. As many as two hundred protestors with signs that read “Drones Kill Kids” were met with pepper spray and arrests when they tried to close down the exhibit.46 A smaller protest was held outside a Raytheon Missiles System plant in Tucson, Arizona. There protesters held placards that read “We Have Guided Missiles and Misguided Men” and “Drone Attacks Inspire Hatred of the U.S.”47
Perhaps the most famous antidrone protestors, however, were the “Creech 14,” members of the antiwar group Nevada Desert Experience whose motto was “Ground the Drones Lest We Reap the Whirlwind.” The Nevada Desert Experience was opposed to the “insidious creep of robotics into warfare.” Fourteen of its members were arrested for trespassing on Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2009. Creech was the most famous base associated with the U.S. Air Force’s separate drone campaign, which was largely carried out in the Afghan and Iraqi theaters of action. The group later summed up its actions at Creech as follows: “Nonviolent resisters want the U.S. government, the Pentagon, the drone controllers and the general populace to think about the horrific death and destruction the unmanned aerial attacks are raining down on people thousands of miles away and to contemplate that these attacks do not prevent or eliminate terrorism, but instead incite more hatred, revenge and retaliation, and make more recruits for the Taliban…. Warfare is not a video game.”48 The judge in the case against the Creech 14 found them guilty of trespassing but released them for time already served after telling them to “go in peace” and to use diplomacy instead of trespassing in the future to make their point.