This week the New York Times reported that the US is planning to establish a new base for its drones in north-west Africa. While the base is to be used initially to fly unarmed surveillance drones, according to the article the US does not rule out the possibility of using the base to launch drone strikes in the future. One day after the NYT piece, Reuters reported the base would be established in Niger. According to “a senior government source” says Reuters, “the U.S. ambassador to Niger, Bisa Williams, made the request at a meeting on Monday with President Mahamadou Issoufou, who immediately accepted it.” Read more
Category: US Drone Operations
Drone strikes widening? Mystery airstrikes reported in Mali and the Philippines
This week we have seen a US drone strike in Pakistan which was reported to have killed six people (or ‘militants’ as those killed by drones are normally labelled) and a strike in Yemen which was reported to have killed three “suspected al-Qaida militants” on the outskirts of Aden. Such strikes have become almost routine, even though international condemnation is growing with both UN representatives and former US president Jimmy Carter speaking out in recent days. Read more
Drones and the ‘propensity to kinetic action’
The concern that drones make armed attacks and military intervention more likely is often rejected by the military and the drone industry, who argue that the drone pilots are able to stand above the ‘fog and friction’ of the battlefield and to make dispassionate and rational decisions about whether or not to use ‘kinetic force’.
This argument, however, has been torn to shreds by the release of a mass of papers detailing the US military investigation into a massacre of Afghan civilian on 21st February 2010. Read more
US military investigation damns drone operators
We’re reposting this short report, together with the links to further information, that we have just received today:
Centcom.mil released on 22 March 2012 a declassified 2,100-page report on slaughter of 23 Afghan non-combatants – men, women, children – in February 2010, blamed on Creech drone pilots over-enthusiastically calling in Hellfires on a 3-vehicle civilian convoy.
Minutely detailed descriptions are provided of how drones are directed from screeners at Centcom and pilots at Creech AFB using a battery of secure communications devices: IRC chat, radio, video, satellites, VOIP, telephone, not all of which are coordinated and supervised and thus lead to disaster.
Pilots of choppers which fired the Hellfire missiles claim drone operators cannot be trusted due to lack of contact with real world conditions on the ground and because mission controllers at Creech reward “Top Gun” aggressiveness. Read more
Obama admits drone strikes in Pakistan as US drone strikes Yemen
For the first time, the United States has confirmed that it is undertaking drone strikes in Pakistan.
Many may feel that this has long been an open secret as unnamed officials regularly take to the press about CIA drone strikes. However the admition by President Obama during a ‘Google online hangout’ will no doubt have legal and political implications. In september 2011 a Federal Judge dismissed an ACLU lawsuit seeking information about CIA drone strikes in Pakistan as the CIA would not confirm or deny the drone strikes took place.
Meanwhile a US drone strike killed between 12 and 15 people in Yemen overnight according to Reuters.
Drone ‘beast’ captured in Iran – others rampage in Afghanistan and Gaza
There has been intense media coverage of the downing of a US drone in Iran over the past week. Iran has previously claimed that it has shot down ‘Western drones’ (as we reported here) but they have never provided proof despite saying they would.
Initially the US denied any of their drone had been downed and then said that the drone may have been one lost in Afghanistan previously. Within days however the CIA was saying – through the usual ‘unnamed sources’ – that it was one of their drones that had crashed inside Iran.
The drone concerned is a RQ-170 Sentinel. It was dubbed the ‘Beast of Kandahar’ when the then unknown drone was first spotted by the press in 2007 and 2009. It’s existence was officially confirmed – and its name officially revealed – in late 2009. However little detail about the drone has been revealed. All that is known about the drone is that it is stealthy, jet powered and unarmed.
On December 8, Iranian TV showed video footage of the drone and claimed that they had electronically hijacked it and brought it down. This seems improbable and its far more likely the drone simply crash landed. The fact that bottom of the drone was covered and it appeared to have no landing gear also points towards a crash. When contact with a drone is lost, the drone is programmed to go into a holding pattern until contact is recovered. Perhaps the drone did this until it simply ran out of fuel. However the drone, which flies at a high altitude, would have been much more damaged if it had crashed in this manner so many questions remain. Some have questioned whether the drone displayed by Iran was in fact a fake.
In a protest letter about the incursion of the drone on to it territory, Iran has called on the United Nations to condemn the “violation of international rules by the U.S. government.”
Meanwhile other drone ‘beasts’ continue to rampage. There has been two days of violence in Gaza following an Israeli drone strike. According to the Irish Times “Gaza residents said a 42-year-old civilian was killed in an Israeli air strike on Hamas training facility. Seven members of the man’s family were wounded, including his father, wife and five of his children.”
And no doubt, US and UK drone strikes in Afghanistan continue completely unreported. Time these drone ‘beasts’ were caged too.