-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
We are so kind to ourselves. John O. Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, repeats the Obama narrative that touts the “surgical” precision and minimization of collateral damage of “targeted killing” using drones. Minimal collateral damage would be zero, however, a study by NYU School of Law and Stanford Law School puts the number of civilians killed between 474 and 881, including 176 children.
The study calls Obama’s narrative “false.”
The NYU/Stanford study also reports on Obama’s despicable use of the “double tap”:
The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims.
Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur and Professor of Human Rights Law, has said that if first responders “are indeed being intentionally targeted, there is no doubt about the law: those strikes are a war crime.”
Reaper drones carry the Hellfire II laser guided missile with a 20 pound warhead of high explosive, and two 500-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs. The GBU-12 has a blast radius of 200 meters, hardly surgical. These are the same weapons that are dropped from other platforms such as manned aircraft. Their precision is not enhanced when launched from drones.
The Hellfire missile has a Circular Error Probability (CEP), the distance from the aiming point that the missile will land 50% of the time, from 9 to 24 feet. he NYU/Stanford study cites a claim that the “double tap” may be a second strike required because the first one missed the target, although that is hardly a mitigating circumstance.
The NYU/Stanford study also notes that “the vast majority of the ‘militants’ targeted have been low-level insurgents.” The number of “high-level” targets is estimated at only 2%.
The Obama administration is using Bush-style tactics to cover up the killing of women and children. This includes over-hyping the accuracy of the weapons and redefining the term “militant” to include anyone who’s killed.
While drones can play an effective role as intelligence gathers and fire support on the battlefield, their inaccuracy makes them unsuitable for “targeted killing.” The probability of a drone strike killing women and children is so high that the drone can be reasonably considered a terror weapon and its use an act of terrorism. The media’s collusion on the Obama narrative enables the terrorism.
H/T: Glenn Greenwald, Kevin Drum, Daniel L. Byman (Brookings), TBIJ, Aviation International News, openDemocracy.
You can see the laser designator illuminating the sniper so the A-10 pilot can see it. The rounds are traveling at three times the speed of sound, so you see the target “light up” before you hear the roar of the Gatling gun.
Chain guns are attached to A–10 Warthogs and Apache helicopters. If I am pinned down in a ditch with close range incoming fire, I want a Warthog or Apache that can lay down a field of fire at close range. Something with a real human butt in the front seat, not a drone.
Did USA accept……?
Not to overdue the weapon of choice question, BUT:
Cluster bombs were to be banned. Did you accept and withdraw them from use?
Chain guns: How can they be targeted by remote control.
The travel time from Afghan to USA via satellite is long enough to make remote targeting difficult.
Doubt if the drones themselves are sufficiently agile for tactical use for the same reason. No opinion of the the aeronautic.
PS That Storch was fantastic. You’d have to tie it down to keep it from lifting in a good headwind on the tennis court.
Expanding CIA Drone Strikes Will Likely Mean More Dead Innocents
By CONOR FRIEDERSDORF
APR 19 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/expanding-cia-drone-strikes-will-likely-mean-more-dead-innocents/256106/
Excerpt:
An eye-opening report published last November in the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama Administration was permitting the CIA to kill people in Pakistan without even knowing who they were: “Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren’t always known. The bulk of CIA’s drone strikes are signature strikes.” As I noted at the time, this is the same CIA that is known to have jailed innocent people, subjecting them to harsh interrogation tactics and years of wrongful imprisonment. Despite those errors, and the CIA’s lack of transparency and accountability, the Obama Administration loosed it in Pakistan, where we’ve killed lots of innocent people. And while it’s been operating in Yemen for some time, the CIA now wants official permission to kill people whose identities it can’t confirm in that country either.
Is President Obama going to agree? “If approved, the change would probably accelerate a campaign of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen that is already on a record pace, with at least eight attacks in the past four months,” The Washington Post reports. “For President Obama, an endorsement of signature strikes would mean a significant, and potentially risky, policy shift. The administration has placed tight limits on drone operations in Yemen to avoid being drawn into an often murky regional conflict and risk turning militants with local agendas into al-Qaeda recruits.”
It’s worth pausing at that line about the “tight limits” on current drone operations in Yemen. Here’s how Jeremy Scahill, who reported on the ground there, described the reality of American policy:
“For years, the elite Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA had teams deployed inside Yemen that supported Yemeni forces and conducted unilateral operations, consisting mostly of cruise missile and drone attacks. Some of the unilateral strikes have killed their intended targets, such as the CIA attack on Awlaki. But others have killed civilians–at times, a lot of civilians. And many of these have been in Abyan and its neighboring province of Shebwa, both of which have recently seen a substantial rise of AQAP activity. President Obama’s first known authorization of a missile strike on Yemen, on December 17, 2009, killed more than forty Bedouins, many of them women and children, in the remote village of al Majala in Abyan. Another US strike, in May 2010, killed an important tribal leader and the deputy governor of Marib province, Jabir Shabwani, sparking mass anger at the United States…
“The October drone strike that killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a US citizen, and his teenage cousin shocked and enraged Yemenis of all political stripes. “I firmly believe that the [military] operations implemented by the US performed a great service for Al Qaeda, because those operations gave Al Qaeda unprecedented local sympathy,” says Jamal, the Yemeni journalist. The strikes “have recruited thousands.” Yemeni tribesmen, he says, share one common goal with Al Qaeda, “which is revenge against the Americans, because those who were killed are the sons of the tribesmen, and the tribesmen never, ever give up on revenge.” Even senior officials of the Saleh regime recognize the damage the strikes have caused.”
The NYU/Stanford study also reports on Obama’s despicable use of the “double tap”:
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Are you going to do it or not? Get out of that part of the world and stay out. Don’t give them any money. They can’t drink their oil.
Jeremy Scahill on MSNBC talking about US drones strike in Yemen
The Predator Drone, as we have seen, is the weapon of choice for destroying wedding receptions.
“The Obama administration is using Bush-style tactics to cover up the killing of women and children.”
The only nit that I could pick off the body of your post was the above notion that these are Bush-style tactics; the drones and tactics are now fully owned by O-Bomb-a and at an unprecedented level of use.
Nal’s story talks about the Hellfire being antipersonnel. That is what it is designed for. Using a 500 pound bomb is a waste of ordnance for anti-personnel unless it is the last round in the chamber and the target is about to get away. If the GBU-12 is set for airburst, it can take out a crowd, but is way too big for most anti-personnel use. The much smaller Hellfire is the preferred weapon for anti-personnel strikes.
Close air support for troops is more effective with a chain gun than bombs or missiles.
this is what we are dealing with: http://tribune.com.pk/story/444255/bilour-to-offer-bounties-for-future-blasphemers/#comment-947761
It hit me!!!!! The 500 pound bomb is not appropriate in the use which it is claimed to be employed.
That simply is a sham. The real purpose of the bomb is to terrorize the people who survive.
A 500 pound bomb, correct me if I am wrong, is effective in taking down multi-story modern buildings. It is not an anti-personell weapon as described here. If it does not deliever fragments it is worthless.
The basic law of physics says that the effect decreases as the radius squared, ie very rapidly from a concussion.
But they are effective noise-makers, thus terror machines.
Expanding on the comment by Crisis Management just above, the AGM-114 Hellfire missile is only seven inches in diameter and five feet long. It weighs about 100 pounds, most of that being rocket propellant. The warhead is 20 pounds of explosive. That is about enough to take out a truck or automobile, but not enough to knock down a building. If it flies through a window or doorway, it will take out whoever or whatever is in that room, but adjacent rooms are likely to be undamaged. It has a maximum flight speed of about 940 MPH and a range of just over 500 yards.
Ideal use of the AGM-114 Hellfire is to take out small targets, such as insurgents planting IEDs in a roadway, or vehicles. It is not useful on large targets at all–it has a very small blast radius. A 500 pound GBU-12 guided bomb is big enough to flatten the average size house, but will not take out a whole neighborhood.
Just wanted to clear up any technical questions people might have.
Crisis Management,
The blast radius is given by NAL. Maybe he can answer the question.
As to interpreting what a blast radius IS, my military
education is from pre-1962.
On consideration it would seem odd to use a concussion bomb against essentially personne. Cluster bombs would seem a better choice, and many more could be carried to attack many more targets. To put it in military-ese:
You don’t have to blow them apart, just make them bleed heavily.
Thanks for your views. On the other point, that is just my opinion, no more. Yours is as welcome as mine is.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/DroneW
This links to Medeas C-span talk. It is 1 hour 39mins.
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/27/as_obama_expands_drone_war_activists
“Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents families of civilians killed in U.S. drone strikes, was finally granted a visa to enter the U.S. this week after a long effort by the State Department to block his visit. He has just arrived in Washington, D.C., to attend the “Drone Summit: Killing and Spying by Remote Control,” organized by human rights groups to call attention to the lethal rise in the number of drone strikes under the Obama administration. Obama argues U.S. drone strikes are focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists and have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. “Either President Obama is lying to the nation, or he is too naive, to believe on the reports which CIA is presenting to [him],” responds Akbar. The summit comes as the United States pursues a radical expansion of how it carries out drone strikes inside Yemen. The so-called “signature” strike policy went into effect earlier this month, allowing the U.S. to strike without knowing the identity of targets.
We’re also joined by Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and an organizer of this weekend’s summit. “So many people who spoke out against George [W.] Bush’s extraordinary rendition and Guantánamo and indefinite detention have been very quiet when it comes to the Obama administration, who is not putting people in those same kind of conditions, instead is just taking them out and killing them,” Benjamin says. “So we need to make people speak up and say that when Obama says this [program] is on a tight leash, this is not true, this is a lie.” [includes rush transcript]”
idealist707, I’m pretty sure the effectiveness of our military technology is not the basis for why we are hated within the Muslim world, but with respect to your military question:
I believe we are talking about the GBU-12, which is essentially the old Mk-82 500lb bomb fitted with a kit that allows it to be guided, albeit unpowered, to a laser designated target. I am not sure where your blast radius information comes from because it is very difficult to get simply because of how to define it (where the bomb is used, altitude of detonation, and other factors). The lethality of this bomb is best derived from overpressure created by the concussion, and that range is certainly far less than two football fields. It is reasonable to presume that some shrapnel from the bomb, or debris from the target, will be distributed two football fields away but, unlike a grenade, this bomb is not designed to maximize maiming via fragmentation.
The use of the GBU-12 would be whenever a target is in a building because the mass and acceleration of the bomb will crash through the structure and explode likely killing all in the modest sized structure from the overpressure.
If the target is outside walking around or in a vehicle, then the right weapon choice is the Hellfire, which has a much smaller warhead.
Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (2012). OR Books. ISBN 978-1-935928-81-2 [22]
This is a book written by Medea Benjamin, a member of code pink. I saw her speak of it on C-span. Scary, Scary.
Just arriving, I’ll bypass all the comments and say thank you Nal for a measured dose of vital information. Especially for those who wonder why we are so hated in the muslim world. Every casualty has millions of brothers and sisters as they see it.
Let me ask a military question, just to then pose a possbile answer, which might make the use of the GBU clearer.
A blast radius is defined as that which the weapon employed can kill or maim to the point of later death of 90 per cent of the people within that radius.
Then imagine yourself standing 2 football field and end zones from the point of impact. You are dead, effectively so. Does this seem a reasonable weapon to use in civilian areas?
If my figures are wrong, corrections are welcome.
It’s been 55 years since I threw a standard grenade.
http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2010/01/09/pakistan-in-defence-of-drones/