Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Benjamin Medea

Author:Benjamin, Medea [Benjamin, Medea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2013-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

US drone attacks have also claimed innocent victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Like in Pakistan, their stories are usually buried along with their bodies. Even the drone killing of an American teenager elicited little discussion.

Sixteen-year-old Abdurahman Anwar al-Awlaki was born in Denver, but left for Yemen with his family in 2002. The teenager’s Facebook page showed him as a typical, smiling teenager with glasses who liked rap, hip-hop, and swimming.31 Not so typical, however, was his father, Anwar al-Awlaki, one of Al Qaeda’s prominent propagandists.

The Awlaki family moved from the United States to Yemen in 2002. Abdurahman lived with his mother in the capital Sanaa. According to his mother, the teenager ran away from home in October 2011 to try to find his father. A week later, he was killed in a drone attack.

If the killing of a sixteen-year-old American fails to spark any substantial debate in the American media regarding the blatantly extra-judicial nature of drone attacks, then certainly the killing of poor Yemenis or Somalis is not going to cause a stir.

The United States is not the only country killing by remote control. A report published in the Washington Post in December 2011 detailed the Israeli military’s use of drone aircraft over the Gaza strip, where millions of Palestinians live in crowded quarters. The misery of their existence is exacerbated by the fear—and buzzing—of being constantly watched and suddenly targeted by unmanned aircraft.32

In 2009, Human Rights Watch relayed numerous reports of drones hitting civilians during the 2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza. In one case, a mother was sitting on the roof while her small son Mu’mim rode a bicycle. Suddenly there was a powerful explosion. When Nahla Allaw managed to see through the dust and smoke, she looked at her son in horror. “His legs were crushed, his chest had tiny holes in it, and blood poured from them. I carried him, crying. He was breathing his last breath. I talked to him, saying, ‘It’s alright my dear.’” 33

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights reported that missiles fired by the drones have led to 825 deaths, with a large percentage of those killed being civilians who perished because they were mistakenly targeted or because of the shower of shrapnel from the strikes themselves. With the American public lulled by the rhetoric that calls killing terrorists a necessity for national security and ignores the cries of victims rendered silent by the chokehold of local complicity and imperial might, the drone war represents one of the greatest travesties of justice in our age. Not only does it execute American citizens and innocent civilians with impunity, it renders hundreds of thousands of others maimed psychologically, left homeless and without a livelihood.

For Americans, these unaccounted-for acts of aggression represent an erosion of democracy. Declarations of war are no longer determined by elected officials acting on behalf of the American people, but by unknown, anonymous contractors and government assassins who kill with regularity but face no requirement of responding to

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