On March 17, 2011, four Hellfire missiles, fired from a U.S. drone, slammed into a bus depot in the town of Datta Khel in Pakistan's Waziristan border region. An estimated 42 people were killed. It was just another day in America's so-called war on terror. To most Americans the strike was likely only a one-line blip on the evening news, if they even heard about it at all.
But what really happened that day? Who were those 42 people who were killed, and what were they doing? And what effect did the strike have? Did it make us safer? These are the questions raised, and answered, in a must-watch new video just released by Robert Greenwald's Brave New Foundation.
The attack was what has come to be called a "signature strike." This is when the CIA or the military makes the decision to fire based not on who the targets are but on whether they are exhibiting suspicious patterns of behavior thought to be "signatures" of terrorists (as seen on video from the drone). Given that the CIA is killing people it's never identified based on their behavior, one would assume a certain rigor has gone into defining the criteria for the kinds of behavior that get one killed.
So what's a signature behavior? "The definition is a male between the ages of 20 and 40," former ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter told the Daily Beast's Tara McKelvey. "My feeling is one man's combatant is another man's -- well, a chump who went to a meeting." The New York Times quoted a senior State Department official as saying that when the CIA sees "three guys doing jumping jacks," the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp.
That day in Datta Khel, the signature behavior was a meeting, or "jirga," which is an assembly of tribal elders who convene to settle a local dispute. In this case, a conflict over a chromite mine was being resolved. And, in fact, the elders had informed the Pakistani army about the meeting 10 days in advance. "So this was an open, public event that pretty much everyone in the community and surrounding area knew about," says Stanford law professor James Cavallaro in the video.
Pretty much everyone in the community and surrounding area. But not U.S. intelligence. Or the head of the CIA. Or the president. Or the guy in Virginia or Nevada or some other undisclosed location pressing the button on the drone controller.
And so, almost all the tribal elders of the area were killed by the drone missiles. Akbar Ahmed is a retired Pakistani ambassador to the UK and now a professor at American University. "It's feeding into the sense that no one is safe, nowhere is safe, nothing is safe," he says in the video. "Even a jirga, the most cherished, the most treasured institution of the tribal areas. So we cannot even sit down and resolve an issue -- that is not safe anymore." As professor Cavallaro put it, "the loss of 40 leaders on a single day is devastating for that community."
And far from building stability in places like Pakistan, something the administration talks a lot about, in fact the strike actually removed, in one fell swoop, the most stabilizing forces in an entire community.
Jalal Manzar Khail was at his nearby home that day and remembers the attack, which also claimed four of his cousins. Khail's six-year-old son was later afraid -- not unreasonably -- to sleep in their house. "We cannot go home," Khail recounts his son saying. "We have to spend the night in the tree." Khail adds, "Convey my message to Americans: The CIA and America have to stop ... they're just creating more enemies and this will last for hundreds of years."
Khail's message is not uncommon. "At the end of almost every interview I did," Greenwald told me, "the person would say, 'Please tell President Obama I am not a terrorist and he should stop killing my family.'"
There was a time when President Obama might have been more receptive to that message. In the book Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, Daniel Klaidman recounts another drone strike just days after President Obama had been inaugurated. Among those killed were a pro-government tribal elder and two of his children. Obama "was not a happy man," an official told Klaidman.
The concept of the signature strike was then explained to him. "Mr. President," said CIA deputy director Steve Kappes, "we can see that there are a lot of military-age males down there, men associated with terrorist activity, but we don't always know who they are." Obama responded, "That's not good enough for me."
It would appear that he has since warmed to the concept. It's unknown how many have died -- combatants or civilians -- in signature strikes, since the administration still doesn't acknowledge that they happen. In February, Robert Gibbs told MSNBC's Chris Hayes that when Gibbs became Obama's press secretary he was told not to acknowledge the drone program at all. "You're not even to discuss that it exists," Gibbs remembers being told.
Of course, since then, given how increasingly ludicrous -- and insulting to the country -- this stance appeared, the administration has acknowledged the drone strikes, though not much more. But estimated numbers have been compiled by other sources. As Klaidman points out, by the time Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize 11 months into his presidency, he'd already ordered more drone strikes than George W. Bush had in his entire presidency. By the end of 2012, he'd ordered six times as many strikes in Pakistan as Bush had. One study, conducted by professors from Stanford (including Cavallaro) and NYU, found that from 2004 to 2012, between 474 and 881 civilians were killed in Pakistan drone strikes. This includes 176 children -- the subject of another Greenwald video, which I encourage you to watch. For fiscal year 2013, the administration has requested $26.16 billion for the drone program -- at least that's the portion that we know about.
In a speech in May at the National Defense University, President Obama gave what was billed as a major national security address meant to clarify his policy on drones, surveillance, and Guantanamo. It seemed to signal a transition in his approach. "With a decade of experience to draw from," he said in the hour-long address, "now is the time to ask ourselves hard questions -- about the nature of today's threats, and how we should confront them." In parts of the speech he even made a good case against the use of drones:
"... force alone cannot make us safe. We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root; and in the absence of a strategy that reduces the well-spring of extremism, a perpetual war -- through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments -- will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways."
He also admitted that "U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties." This was a far cry from the claim made in 2011 by John Brennan, at the time the president's chief counter-terrorism adviser, that "there hasn't been a single collateral death" from the strikes. He later amended this to say there's been no "credible evidence of collateral deaths." This ridiculous claim was demolished in an article in Foreign Policy by Micah Zenko, who concluded that Brennan either doesn't get the same briefings given to other administration officials or he doesn't have Internet access. Or "he was lying." In any case, it didn't stop his confirmation as director of the CIA.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
