In April 2011 thirty-eight protestors were similarly arrested at Hancock Field near Syracuse, New York, another base from which pilots of the 174th Fighter Wing remotely flew drones in Afghanistan and Iraq. Several of the protestors covered themselves in white sheets that had been painted red to resemble blood.49 In this area protests were led by Christians who were opposed to the remote killing. One antidrone blogger in the area wrote,
To sit at a console 7,000 miles away with life and death control over people whose land you’ve never walked on is too much power for any human being. It makes killing virtual and is a virtual license to kill. It can only corrupt.
I call on every pastor and minister in the Syracuse area to begin each service with an apology to the children of South Waziristan for the terror we have inflicted in their skies.50
Another antidrone voice submitted an article to the Buffalo News that read, “Drone attacks are extrajudicial executions, with pilots acting as detective, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. There is no due process or rule of law, and the government claims the right to apply this policy to American citizens abroad.”51
Among the antidrone voices has been U.S. congressman Dennis Kucinich, who wrote in the Huffington Post, “Think of the use of drone air strikes as summary executions, extra-judicial killings justified by faceless bureaucrats using who-knows-what ‘intelligence,’ with no oversight whatsoever and you get the idea that we have slipped into a spooky new world where joystick gods manipulating robots deal death from the skies and then go home and hug their children.”52
Peter Singer, the author of a book on military robotics titled Wired for War, similarly reflected on drones in a New York Times article titled “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?”
Now we possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war. The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter—and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media—they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.
For the first 200 years of American democracy, engaging in combat and bearing risk—both personal and political—went hand in hand. In the age of drones, that is no longer the case.53
An Economist article read, “Looking farther ahead, there are fears that UAS [unmanned aerial systems] and other robotised killing machines will so lower the political threshold for fighting that an essential element of restraint will be removed. Robert E. Lee said ‘it is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it.’ Drones might make leaders fonder of war.”54 Amnesty International similarly warned, “Anything that dehumanizes the process makes it easier to pull the trigger.”55
The antidrone sentiment was not limited to the United States and Pakistan. In October 2011 a “week of action” was called for in Britain by a group named Ground the Drones. This group led small protests at various sites in the UK linked to drones. (The U.S. military has leased several Reaper drones to the British military for use in combat in Afghanistan.) These sites included the London office of the drone manufacturer General Atomics; the Royal Air Force base at Northwood, where the drone pilots were based; Boscombe Down, the testing ground for a domestic surveillance drone used by the police and known as the Watchkeeper; and other venues.
British police also arrested twenty members of the United Ummah (ummah translates as “Islamic community”) who were protesting U.S. drone strikes outside the U.S. embassy in London. The group claimed to be protesting against “the recent spate of anti-Muslim drone strikes that have been launched by the U.S. government against innocent Muslims.”56
As the use of drones increases in both the United States, where they have been used for surveillance on the Mexican border and in an arrest in North Dakota, and the UK, news of the expanded use of drones overseas in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia has been mainstreamed by the UK and U.S. media. As a result, public awareness of the drones has increased, and this has led to mounting opposition to the world’s first “robotic” assassination campaign. (The drones are not actually autonomous robots, of course; humans still control them.) Antidrone activists, for example, appeared among the Occupy Wall Street protestors in the fall of 2011. One of them said, “The army considers human losses as collateral damage. Drone attacks are not just killing particular people but they are bombing entire villages and killing innocent civilians. It’s absolutely horrible that we even have that technology.”57
The issue that many protestors find galling is, ironically enough, the very aspect of the drones that leads to their unique precision, i.e., the fact that they are flown remotely by pilots who use cameras to closely monitor their targets. Opponents fear that the drones represent a slippery slope down the path to the “roboticization” of warfare and the rise of a sanitized video-game mentality of assassination by “kill TV.” The very remoteness of the pilots from danger, they fear, will lead to an increased reliance on drones to kill real or suspected terrorists throughout the world. Soon other countries will be turning their suspected terrorists into “bugsplats” with drones. These activists fear a future when modern states use the drones to kill their enemies across the globe without trials. One antidrone activist summed up this sentiment when he wrote, “These silent surreptitious killings seem antiseptic, somewhat like playing a video game. We do not hear about the horror and grief these executions create. It will be all too easy for the citizens of this country to sanction these kinds of extra-legal activities when they know nothing about their devastating consequences. The absence of U.S. lives lost may make it easier for us to enter wars in the future.”58
Thus the world’s first remote-control assassination/bombing campaign has led to the rise of the world’s first antidrone campaign, which shows no sign of weakening. As the U.S. military and intelligence agencies increasingly rely on drones in the war against al Qaeda in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, the opposition is bound to increase exponentially.
THE BATTLE OF THE DRONE LAWYERS
One of the most fascinating issues of the CIA’s drone campaign, which began as a targeted assassination campaign and then expanded into an all-out war, is its legality. Does the CIA have the right under both international and domestic law to kill thousands of people in a country that the United States is not officially at war with, or has it gone down a dangerous path toward legitimizing a cross-border campaign of mass extrajudicial killings?