RT News TV - John Pilger TV - Noam Chomsky - Time magazine - CIA Confidential TV - International Herald Tribute & Tahir Khan - Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars 2013 - The Atlantic online & Conor Friedersdorf - Peter Taylor TV - Clive Stafford Smith - Homegrown: The Counter-Terror Dilemma TV - Morgan Freeman TV - Dean Andrew - Attack of the Drones 2012 - Abby Martin TV - Panorama TV - National Bird 2016 - Horizon TV - Spy Craft TV - Jonathan Turley - JoyCamp - Andrew Bacevich -
13,072 confirmed US drone strikes in Afghanistan 2004-2002. RT news headline 27 December 2021
Drones have killed, according to the Pakistani authorities ... seven hundred civilians since the inauguration of Obama. John Pilger, interview July 2009, Democracy Now!
A drone strike is a terror weapon, we don’t talk about it that way. It is; just imagine you are walking down the street and you don’t know whether in five minutes there is going to be an explosion across the street from some place up in the sky that you can’t see. Somebody will be killed, and whoever is around will be killed, maybe you’ll be injured if you’re there. That is a terror weapon. It terrorizes villages, regions, huge areas. It’s the most massive terror campaign going on by a long shot. Noam Chomsky
A Federal Aviation Administration analysis of the impact of commercial drones proposes a world in which the remote-controlled devices become a common sight.
Small drones could take to the skies in droves, if the government adopts proposals widely favorable to commercial use of remote-controlled aircraft. Time magazine article 15 February 2015, ‘New Rules Would Let Drones Rule the Sky’
America’s secret war is being waged by the CIA. In the dangerous badlands of Pakistan a super-elite team is hunting down terrorist masterminds. But as the enemy goes deep underground, CIA launches a controversial cutting-edge weapon. CIA Confidential: Inside the Drone War s1e3, PBS 2017
Unmanned armed aeroplanes called drones mounting bomb attacks from ten miles high. ibid.
Estimates of the civilian death toll of the CIA drone war vary widely. ibid.
Drone attacks also inflame an anti-US sentiment. ibid.
US drones traumatizing tribal children. International Herald Tribune article Tahir Khan December 2012
‘Getting into the drone program was weird; the introduction was like – this is what we do, we kill people and break things, that is what our job is.’ Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars, Brandon Bryant, 2013
‘October 28th 2011 Pakistan: Thousands of Pakistani came to support a giant rally on Sunday. The protest against the United States’ drone attacks in Pakistan.’ ibid. report
‘The car was completely destroyed and the bodies of Tariq and his cousin were badly burned.’ ibid. Muhib Ullah, Tariq’s cousin
They’ve killed maybe 3,000-4,000 people in targeted killings and they’ve captured a handful. ibid. Scott Shane, The New York Times
Tariq Aziz was one of almost 300 children killed. Why are these children being killed? ibid. Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell, Notre Dame International Law
A Pakistani court has declared US drone attacks in the country a war crime. ibid. news report
We don’t feel that our government should be killing people without trial, without conviction. ibid. British protest
The notion that the Obama Administration has carried out drone strikes only when there is ‘near-certainty of no collateral damage’ is easily disproved propaganda. America hasn’t killed a handful of innocents or a few dozen in the last eight years. Credible, independent attempts to determine how many civilians the Obama administration has killed arrived at numbers in the hundreds or low thousands. And there is good reason to believe that they undercount the civilians killed.
Why the disparity between what American officials claim and what others report? The New York Times provided a first clue back in 2012, when it reported that the US ‘in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent’. The same sort of dishonest standard was described last last year when a whistleblower provided The Intercept with a cache of documents detailing the US military’s drone killings in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The Atlantic online report report Conor Friedersdorf 14th March 2016, ‘The Obama Administration’s Drone-Strike Dissembling’
America first deployed its new secret weapon under George W but now Obama decided to ratchet up the use of these pilotless aircraft. Peter Taylor, The Secret War on Terror I, BBC 2011
President Obama has authorised more than a hundred and sixty drone strikes ... But there’s a down-side to drone attacks: hundreds of civilians have been killed. ibid.
Who does get killed? Are these people Taliban people or al Qaeda or random civilians who had nothing to do with it? It would be naive to believe the propaganda that says that firing these fantastic weapons is killing the right people. Clive Stafford-Smith, director Reprieve
I have drawn the inescapable conclusion that you can’t participate in something like that [drone strike] without being corrupted. Homegrown: The Counter-Terror Dilemma, Sky Atlantic 2018, drone operator
Drones might be the biggest distrupters yet making war possible at merely the push of a button. The Story of Us with Morgan Freeman s1e4: The Fight for Peace, National Geographic 2017
Relying on several different sources that are checked and cross-checked means there is a strong corroboration which leaves little room for single-stream failure. Air Commodore Dean Andrew, re drone killing
Drones are no longer even slightly science fiction … Military applications are a big part of what got us our modern drones. Attack of the Drones: Is War Becoming a Video Game? 2012
There’s simply not enough time for a remote human operator to react to changes … Drones fighting drones seems the most realistic scenario. ibid.
Bigger is slower to react in almost every way. ibid.
You are vulnerable to some master programmer with a narcissistic God-complex. ibid.
They also have many limitations: the first is power. ibid.
‘The US to Allow Export of Armed Military Drones’. Abby Martin, Breaking the Set, Huff Post online, RT February 2015
Any country receiving our gift-wrapped drone must promise that they won’t use the technology for unlawful surveillance or against its own people. ibid.
The mystery of the Gatwick drone attack: 140,000 passengers delayed, 1,000 flights cancelled or diverted … Four months on, no-one has been caught. Panorama: The Gatwick Drone Attack, BBC 2019
And you’d literally just kind of hover over their area. Sometimes you’d watch them for days … And you wait till he walks on to a field to meet with friends for something and you blow him up. National Bird, opening commentary, Netflix 2016
This is global. This is getting information anywhere at any time. Shooting people from anywhere at any time. And it’s not just one person sitting there with a little remote control, a little joystick … It’s like borders don’t matter any more. ibid. Lisa
Why are we seeing so many civilians dying? ibid. Heather
Heather is one of the first analysts to publicly criticize the secret US drone program. The same day her op-ed is published on The Guardian website, she doubts her decision. ibid. caption
I lost part of my humanity working in the drone program. ibid. Lisa
The families were bombed by US forces on February 21 2010. An official military investigation concludes that a Predator drone crew operating out of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada was largely responsible for the attack. A radio traffic transcript documents their failures. ibid. captions
The survivors lost 23 family members in the attack, including children. ibid.
There’s a technology revolution going on in our skies. Drones are smarter, faster, cheaper and much more widespread than ever before. They are destined to transform all our lives in many possible ways. Horizon: Britain’s Next Air Disaster? Drones, BBC 2019
There are also more aeroplane flights so the skies are getting more crowded. ibid.
I’m worried that this drone incident at Gatwick has exposed this weakness in our airport security defences … A clear template for drone attacks has now been set. ibid.