Military "mistakes"

Ted Rall
U.S. Drone Planes Have a Nearly Perfect Record of Failure

NEW YORK--In the dark, pre-dawn hours of Friday, the thirteenth of
January, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, the buzz of an unmanned
robot plane broke the silence. Half a world and 12 and a half time
zones away, someone on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters keyed a
command into a computer. The digitized message, relayed through the
building's circuitry and transmitted skyward, bounced along an array
of aircraft and satellites before arriving at the RQ-1 Predator drone
plane hovering above the Bajaur region of Pakistan's Federally
Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). Four AGM-114N Hellfire II missiles,
each purchased by American taxpayers from Lockheed Martin at a cost of
$45,000, streaked off toward the hamlet of Damadola, five miles into
Pakistan.

The four missiles, each carrying enough explosives to take out an
armored vehicle, slammed into three local jewelers' houses at 950
miles per hour, nearly twice the speed of a passenger jet at cruising
altitude. "The houses have been razed," reported a neighbor, a member
of the Pakistani parliament. "There is nothing left. Pieces of the
missiles are scattered all around. Everything has been blackened in a
100-yard radius." The target of this latest assassination attempt via
missile strike, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, wasn't
there. At least 22 innocent civilians, including five women and five
children, were killed. "They acted on wrong information," a Pakistani
intelligence official said of the Americans.

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The political fallout is devastating. The Pashtun tribesmen of FATA,
still enraged at the militarization of an autonomous region that
regular Pakistani army troops first invaded in 2004, are threatening a
general uprising. As tens of thousands of people chanted "death to
America" at protest marches across Pakistan, the regime of U.S. puppet
dictator General Pervez Musharraf--weakened by the West's failure to
provide earthquake aid in Kashmir--was pushed to the brink of
collapse. After Musharraf: the first civil war in a nuclear power.

This was only the latest botched U.S. attack. Eight days earlier,
another attempt to kill al-Zawahiri failed when a missile blew up a
house in the Saidgi area, also in the FATA, based on another incorrect
report. Eight innocent civilians died.

If insanity is repeating an action in expectation of different
results, the assassination-by-joystick squad at Langley is clearly
nuts. How many must die before they notice that precision airstrikes
are anything but?

In the wake of 9/11 the Pentagon went gaga over unmanned aerial
vehicles. "These systems...park over the bad guys, watch them
continually, never give them a break," said Dyke Weatherington, UAV
chief in Donald Rumsfeld's office, in 2002. "The other aspect is that
we're doing that without putting service members at risk." But history
belies Rumsfeld's assurance that the Predator-Hellfire program has a
"darned good record."

On February 4, 2002 a Predator fired a Hellfire missile at three men,
including one nicknamed "Tall Man" who was mistaken by CIA operators
for the 6'5" Osama bin Laden, near Zhawar Kili in Afghanistan's Paktia
province. "The people who have the responsibility for making those
judgments made the judgments that, in fact, they were Al Qaeda," said
Rumsfeld. They were not. The victims were desperately poor civilians
gathering scrap metal from exploded missiles to sell for food. The
U.S. has not apologized.

On May 6, 2002 a Predator fired a missile at a convoy of cars in Kunar
province in an attempt to assassinate Afghan warlord Gulbuddin
Hektmatyar because he opposes puppet ruler Hamid Karzai. Hekmatyar
wasn't there. At least ten civilians were blown to bits. Hektmatyar,
understandably perturbed, has since declared himself and his militia
our mortal enemies. No apology there either.

And now the massacre in Pakistan.

Mishaps are unavoidable due to the Predator's design limitations.
Image resolution is too fuzzy to make out much of anything at 10,000
feet up. Fly the drone lower than that and it becomes vulnerable to
anti-aircraft fire. Assassinations by unmanned aircraft seem doomed to
failure--out of thousands of sorties, the Defense Department can only
point to a single success, the alleged Hellfire killing of Al Qaeda's
supposed "number five guy" in Pakistan last year. But it's not just
drone planes. Attempted assassination bombings attempted by
flesh-and-blood pilots haven't fared better.

Ronald Reagan ordered an airstrike on Libyan leader Moammar Khadafi's
home in Tripoli. Khadafi survived, but his baby daughter and 37 others
were killed. In 1998 Bill Clinton ordered Tomahawk cruise missiles
fired at Osama bin Laden's training camp in Afghanistan and a
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Bin Laden wasn't there, but dozens of
others died; the Sudanese facility turned out to be an innocuous
aspirin factory. At the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq George W.
Bush ordered 40 cruise missiles fired at a Baghdad restaurant where
Saddam Hussein was reported to be eating dinner. He wasn't. No
Baathist officials died. Fourteen members of two Christian families,
mostly women and children, did.

Incompetence and poor intelligence are not exclusive to us. Though
brutal, the 9/11 attacks fell far short of their planners' immediate
goals. Tens of thousands would have died at the World Trade Center had
the hijackers known that New Yorkers start work at nine. And even if
one of the two Washington-bound planes had struck the White House,
Bush was in Florida at the time.

Targeted killing by aerial bombardment, whether it's carried out by
pilots, hijackers or computer-guided drones, is an inherently flawed
concept--too easy to contemplate, too hard to carry out, and too
ham-fisted to execute without also killing civilians. Intelligence is
faulty, guidance systems fail, imagery is fuzzy. When the target of an
assassination is present, small bombs can't ensure success and big
bombs invariably result in "collateral damage." Technology hasn't
changed everything. You can't know what's going on on the ground from
the air.

Civilized nations should band together to renounce and outlaw these
sloppy and obscene aerial assassination attempts, which send the
terrifying message that killing civilians is acceptable in the pursuit
of justice. But if the international community can't go that far, they
can at least ban the use of unmanned vehicles like the Predator.
Murder by mistake is bad enough when a human being can be held
accountable.