The UN inquiry into the use of armed drones for targeted killing, announced yesterday by London-based UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, Ben Emmerson, is very much to be welcomed.
Undertaken at the direct request of several states, the inquiry is also in response to what Mr Emmerson called “the increasing international concern surrounding the issue of remote targeted killing through the use of UAVs.” Read more
Arguments relating to the legality of armed drones have raged since the very first Predator strike. However, over the past year, the legal arguments have emerged out of the pages of academic journals and obscure conference rooms and entered the mainstream and indeed, the courtroom. In the first of our reviews of the year we look back at what has happened in relation to legal arguments of the use of drones. Read more
A poll released this week by the US-based Pew Research Center examining international attitudes towards the US included a specific question about US drone strikes. Asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the United States conducting missile strikes from pilotless aircraft called drones to target extremists in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia?” the vast majority of respondents in twenty countries expressed clear disapproval (see table below).
Only three of the twenty countries surveyed did not disapprove of the strikes by a clear majority: India, Britain and the US itself. However there was hardly clear support in India where only 32% actually approved the strikes with almost half of respondents (47%) not answering the question, while the majority of those who expressed an opinion in the UK, also disapproved (47% disapprove vs. 44% approve). As Gabriel Carlyle writes over at the Peace News Blog, its important for anti-drone campaigners in the UK “to bump Britain’s “disapproval” rates up to those of Germany, France, Spain and others”
An important aspect of this poll, which received bare mention in mainstream press coverage, is the gender gap. As the analysis by the Pew Center itself states:
“There are [large] differences between men and women on this question throughout much of Europe, as well as in the U.S., Japan, and Brazil. In Germany, 54% of men support the strikes, compared with just 24% of women. Fully 57% of British men approve of using drones, but only 30% of women agree. Double-digit gender gaps are found in 10 nations, including a gap of 23 percentage points in the U.S.”
With regard to US support, as Micah Zenko has pointed out, US support for drone strikes seems to have fallen from 83% in February to 62% in April. I suspect that the growing opposition to civil drones flying in US airspace will ‘leak’ across and mean that US support for use of armed drones overseas may well continue to fall further.
For example, this week US Senator Rand Paul introduced a bill mandating that a warrant be sought from the courts before a drone is used for law enforcement purposes. Almost at the same time a group of twenty-six Republican and Democratic congressmen have written to President Obama demanding that he explain the legal justification for so-called ‘signature strikes’ arguing that such drone strikes generate “powerful and enduring anti-American sentiment” which could lead to further attacks on the US and US civilians.
US support for use of drones may drop even further when the US public realises that other, ‘non-approved’ nations can also use drones. While it is not yet reached the news headlines, there continues to be persistent rumours that the Syrian regime are using a drone to target artillery strikes in Homs (see this BBC article for example).
Ken McDonald, Chair of the human rights organisation Reprieve, wrote an interesting piece for the Times this week connecting the slaughter of innocents in Syria and Waziristan – all justified in the name of ‘security’ (pdf). The minority who support targeted killing by drone strikes seem to do so in the mistaken belief that by ‘taking out the bad guys’ we can increase security for all. The stark reality is just the opposite – and the sooner we win this argument, the sooner support for targeted killing and drone strikes will disappear altogether.
The US use of drones for targeted killing has rightly received a lots of media attention over the past week. Since the beginning of 2012 the US has stepped up its drone assassination programme in Yemen, while continuing to launch drone strikes in Pakistan despite repeated pleas from the Pakistan authorities to stop. Kill lists and extrajudicial killing of suspects, once seen as completely unacceptable to the global community (and to the vast majority, still does) now seems to have become almost a matter of routine for the US and its President.
Journalists as well as commentators – and now churches – have rightly been investigating and criticising this particular use of drones, and in both the US and the UK legal challenges are underway to stop further attacks and to reveal more detail about the process.
But it’s important to remember that targeted killing is not the only problem with unmanned drones.
Earlier this week I took part in an online discussion about the use of drones hosted by the Canadian think tank CIC. Author and drone expert Peter Singer and Oxford Professor of Ethics and Law, Jennifer Walsh, argued that there was no particular problem with drones per se. They argued (as most mainstream commentators do) that it’s not the development and use of remote armed technology that is the problem, but rather the fact that they are it is being used outside ‘official’ armed conflicts to undertake targeted killing. Just to be very clear, the use of drones to undertake assassinations far away from any battlefield is a very serious problem which must be investigated and challenged.
But it’s not just the fact that drones have enabled the expansion of targeted killing. The problem with drones goes deeper than that.
To put it simply, armed unmanned technology and the concept of ‘remote war’ alters the balance of options available to our political and military leaders in favour of a military response. Armed drones are making the political cost of military intervention much lower than it had previously been.
Before the advent of armed drones (and particularly since the Vietnam war) public antipathy towards risking troops lives in foreign wars has meant the balance of the options available to our leaders weighed more on the side of political rather than military intervention (with notable exceptions of course). Now however, the scales have shifted in the opposite direction and drones enable our political leaders to intervene militarily overseas by launching remote attacks at great distances with no risk to their own forces. Although some argue that it has been possible to launch attacks at great distances for many years by using cruise missiles for example, it is the ability of the drone to sit and loiter over towns and compounds for many hours and days rather than the ‘one-off shot’ of a cruise missile that makes a crucial difference.
While it is still very early in the drone wars era, the fact that the US used unmanned drones to launch attacks in six different countries during 2011 – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya – shows how much easier it now is to undertake military interventions.
On top of this, is the concern that drones may also make it much easier to launch attacks within particular theatres of war.
According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) there have been around 330 US drone strikes in Pakistan and around 40 drone strikes in Yemen. Though the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are the first ‘official’ wars in which armed drones have been used in a sustained and comprehensive way, there is as yet no public analysis of the impact of unmanned drones in these conflicts. Given that the US has ten times the number of Britain’s five armed Reaper drones in Afghanistan – and Britain’s drones have launched over 250 drone strikes – it is quite possible that there have been over 2,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan (although this is simply a guess).
Due to the secrecy surrounding the use of armed drones it is difficult at this stage to say for definite that the ‘risk free’ nature of drone is actually increasing the frequency of attacks. However an official US military report into an attack in February 2010 which resulted in the deaths of a number of Afghan civilians found that the drone pilots in Creech “had a propensity/bias for kinetic operations”.
We know that drones are loitering over particular areas, towns and compounds for hours and days at a time looking for “targets of opportunity” and this is of serious concern. Laura Arbour, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and currently chief of the International Crisis Group said about the growing use of unmanned drones recently “The most serious concern is the secrecy which surrounds these operations, added to the fact that they are mostly deployed in isolated, inaccessible areas, which makes it virtually impossible to determine whether they are used in compliance with the laws of war.”
While it is right and important that there is growing condemnation of the use of drones for targeted killing, we need also to be challenging the growing use of unmanned weapons technology itself. No doubt some will respond with the cliché that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’. And like most clichés there is a rather grim element of truth to that. And others will say also that drones are not intrinsically bad like cluster bombs or anti-personnel landmines as they can be used in other ways than for killing. Nevertheless armed drones by their nature and the way they are designed to be used, simply makes the world a more dangerous place.
When the United States and the European Union committed to cooperating more closely in the fight against terrorism in 2004, they took special care to emphasise that they would act in keeping with the rule of law and international law. Accordingly, the EU has an obligation in this engagement to examine those practices – including drone strikes – that raise serious concerns as to their compatibility with international law, and to ask the US for more information about the specifics of targeted killing.
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have reminded the European Commission of this obligation with parliamentary questions, requesting the EU to ask the US for the legal basis of this tactic. On 16 January 2012, a written declaration was issued by a group of MEPs urging the EU to commit to ensuring that states publish their criteria for combat drone operations, and in the event of unlawful killing, measures be taken against the perpetrators.
However, neither the European Commission in the form of the High Representative (who is also the Commission’s Vice President) nor the Council have thus far released any statements on this subject. This is striking, as the Council has been quite vocal on the matter on other occasions, notably on the targeted killings carried out by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
When confronted with this discrepancy, EU officials vaguely reply that the European Council has been in an ongoing debate with the US about how to forge a durable framework to combat terrorism within the rule of law since 2004. Yet, no opinions are expressed on the legality of the practice, and no statements have been made by EU officials on future developments. Apparently questions are being asked on the lack of transparency of this tactic, but no publicly known results have so far been shown.
It is not only the EU institutions that have failed to make their voice heard on the issue of drone strikes. The member states have generally followed a similar pattern. Nonetheless, while very few words have been uttered by individual countries, the positions of at least some EU member states can be gauged by their actions.
Germany, for instance, has been refusing to provide the US with intelligence that would lead to the killing of suspected terrorists since a 2010 drone attack in Pakistan killed a German citizen, who was an Islamist but no militant. The Germans have since agreed to provide the Americans with information “for intelligence purposes only” that can be used exclusively to arrest suspects, since the German government does not want to be perceived by the public opinion as being co-responsible for US targeted killings.
On the opposite end to Germany, one can perhaps put the United Kingdom. Although six British nationals having been killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan, the British government has continued to provide the US military and the CIA with support and intelligence. The Foreign Office has said in the past that it was “looking into the reports” of the killings, but so far none of these deaths have been investigated by UK authorities. The UK is itself using armed drones in Afghanistan. Just like the US, the UK releases little information about the way in which these drones are used. Read more
Since Wired announced last week that a computer virus has infected the Ground Control stations of the USAF Reaper and Predator drone fleet at Creech Air Force Base, the blogosphere as well as the general media have been awash with the story.
While many commentators have jokingly refered to the Terminator movies, the reality is that the virus isn’t that serious. While it is worrying that a so-called secure network controlling lethal weapons can become infected with a computer virus (and one that is apparently resisting attempts to delete it) it is seemingly a fairly common piece of malware that records keystrokes.
Much more serious is the ‘drone virus’ that has infected the body politic. Created in military labs by scientists looking for the quick, easy and profitable cure for the world’s security problems, the drone is now spreading virus-like around the world. Before the drone virus spread, the idea that nations could simply, publicly and illegally assassinate individuals and their families without causing outrage would have seemed incredible. Now we have been infected, the military can ‘take out’ targets of opportunity thousands of miles away before heading home for dinner with the kids. Now we have been contaminated by the drone virus, Presidents can command the killing of citizens without any charges being filed or indeed any due legal process. This is the real drone virus and we must find a way to cure ourselves.
Th press too has become infected with the drone virus. With little exception the vast majority of the media has lauded President Obama for the drone assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan in Yemen on 30September. Before any charges have been filed and without any chance to defend himself al-Awlaki was sentenced to death by US official and “senior lawyers from across the administration” following the drafting of a secret memo.
What criticism there has been in the mainstream media has focused on the fact that al-Awlaki was an American citizen (seemingly it is not so much of a problem to assassinate non-Americans) or the fact that other nations may also now think the have the right to assassinate people with drones.
Perhaps this piece, entitled ‘Drones and the Law’ from the Economist typifies the response. Mildly chastising Obama by arguing that drone assassinations should be carried out by the armed forces not the CIA – and suggesting that perhaps there could be secret court hearings to give the appearance of due process – the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan is nevertheless described as “legitimate self defence”.
A notable exception to the supportive remarks of the drone virus infected press is a piece by Andreas Whittam Smith in the Independent. Whittam Smith seems to be immune to the drone virus. In the end, he says, the killing of al-Awlaki was murder. He is right.