In a New York Times op-ed published on February 21, former CIA director, Air Force general, and “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror” author Michael Hayden advocated for the continuing use of drone warfare. He urges the public and implicitly, the next U.S. president, to “embrace” this policy for the desired result of “keeping America safe.” After over a decade of the CIA’s and USAF’s unilateral use of this sinister weapons system, a well-documented record of their unintended consequences confronts us, if we have the courage to face it.
Killer drones have been and continue to be sold to the American people on the basis of lies, including these that Hayden, who has directed drone strikes and personally seen the killing of civilians, repeats in his advocacy piece.
Lie #1: That the policy of using drones to kill people in other countries is “warfare” and serves as a legitimate means to protect the United States.
It’s not, and it doesn’t. Warfare is reciprocal violence, or at least contains the possibility of defensive action (such as anti-aircraft guns) against violence such as that caused by either the Hellfire missiles or GBU-12 bombs named in Hayden’s novelistic portrayal of a pre-strike conversation between an operator and his commander. The US government uses Reaper and Predator drones, loaded with these devastating munitions, as its remotely piloted, high-tech tools in a policy of assassination in at least 7 countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
This policy was started by Bush in 2002 in Yemen and has been vastly expanded by Obama since 2009. While “warfare” is used frequently as a sort of shorthand for various military actions, often in countries that the US has never declared war on, Hayden’s use of the word in this op-ed is sloppy and misleading. Drone “warfare” would mean that other countries could use drone strikes against the United States, or US troops, either first or in retaliation – a total impossibility.
The carnage by remote control, with no way for those attacked to fight back (as with torture), generates hatred against the United States. On Democracy Now!, four whistleblowers who operated drones in the Air Force made their case that drones are “also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantánamo Bay.”
The drone killings are counterproductive to longer-term US security and to our tattered reputation internationally.