Pakistan ignored the Americans’ remarks and subsequently showed its displeasure by pulling out of tripartite talks between the U.S., Afghan, and Pakistan governments on the future of Afghanistan. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry issued the following statement: “It is evident that the fundamentals of our relations need to be revisited. Pakistan should not be taken for granted nor treated as a client state.”23
THE TALIBAN KILL A CIA DRONE TEAM AND TRY TO SET OFF A BOMB IN TIMES SQUARE
The people of the FATA, and Pakistan in general, have many myths and legends about the bangana (thunder), ghangais (buzzers), or machays (wasps), as the drones are commonly known. When the rumor spread that the CIA had placed pathrai homing beacons in Lipton tea bags, for example, many Pashtuns in the region stopped drinking tea.
One of the more enduring myths is that the wave of suicide bombings that have swept Pakistan in recent years is directly related to the drone strikes. According to this myth, if there were no drone strikes, there would be no suicide-bombing slaughter of thousands of innocent Pakistanis. Such fears have been deliberately stoked by Taliban leaders, who have threatened to launch two suicide bombings per drone strike.24
I have been able to find only a few cases of terrorist attacks that appeared to be directed in response to the drone strikes. The first was the previously mentioned case of a suicide bombing on a Pakistani military base in November 2006, just days after the infamous drone strike killing eighty-one students and militants in the Chenagai suburb of Damadola.25 Suicide bombings were still rather rare in Pakistan at that time, and the timing of the attack, so soon after the Chenagai strike, seemed to be in fulfillment of the madrassa head’s promise of revenge.
Then there was the case of the failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. On May 1, 2010, Shahzad drove an SUV packed with explosives into the middle of Times Square in New York City and set off a timer on the bomb. Several observant bystanders, however, noticed smoke coming from the truck and called the police, who then defused the bomb. A fleeing Shahzad was subsequently arrested on a plane waiting for takeoff to Dubai.
It later emerged that Shahzad, who was a Pakistani American, had been trained in a terrorist training camp in Waziristan of the very sort the CIA drones had been attacking. Shahzad claimed to have been in the region at the time of CIA drone attacks and to have known people who were killed in drone strikes.26 During his court trial Shahzad was questioned by Judge Miriam Cedarbaum. Following is an account of that questioning that shows how the drone strikes motivated him:
“You wanted to injure a lot of people,” said Cedarbaum. Shahzad said the judge needed to understand his role. “I consider myself a Muslim soldier,” he said. When Cedarbaum asked whether he considered the people in Times Square to be innocent, he said they had elected the U.S. government.
“Even children?” said Cedarbaum.
“When the drones hit, they don’t see children,” answered Shahzad. He then said, “I am part of the answer to the U.S. killing the Muslim people.”27
Shahzad also proclaimed his desire to avenge “those innocent people being hit by drones from above.”28 He subsequently responded to the question of whether he wanted to plead guilty by saying, “I want to plead guilty, and I’m going to plead guilty 100 times over. Because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims, and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking U.S., and I plead guilty to that.”29
The Pakistani Taliban subsequently claimed responsibility for Shahzad’s failed terrorist attack, their second attempted bombing outside of the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater (the first being an attempt in Spain). In a video statement the Pakistani Taliban said it was revenge for the “recent rain of drone attacks in the tribal areas.”30 A Taliban commander said of the attempted terrorist attack, “We were expecting this. They were desperately looking for revenge against America inside America.”31 An American intelligence official concurred and said, “Those [drone] attacks have made it personal for the Pakistani Taliban—so it’s no wonder they are beginning to think about how they can strike back at targets here.”32
Although Hakimullah Mehsud failed in his effort to avenge the death of his predecessor, Baitullah, on this occasion, he succeeded in another attempt: the infamous Camp Chapman bombing, an account of which reads like a story in a spy novel. (It was actually featured in the Hollywood blockbuster Zero Dark Thirty.) The Camp Chapman bombing actually has its origins in Jordan, where police had arrested a Jordanian doctor named Hamam al Balawi, who had been involved with extremist groups. The Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate turned Balawi and made him a double agent. Convinced that he was now working for them against the terrorists, the Jordanians offered him to their American allies. Their hope was that Balawi would travel to Waziristan and offer his services to al Qaeda. After being accepted, he could then reveal Ayman al Zawahiri’s location to the CIA, which could dispatch him with a drone.
Balawi began to work secretly for a CIA drone intelligence team based in Forward Operating Base Camp Chapman in the Afghan border province of Khost. There this “superstar asset” appeared to gain the trust of the CIA team handling him, so much so that he was once allowed on the base without being frisked. This lack of vigilance cost the CIA heavily on December 30, 2009. As Balawi arrived on the base, he was surrounded by CIA officers and contractors. When one of them belatedly went to pat him down, Balawi triggered a bomb hidden on his body and killed everyone around him, including the CIA station chief, a forty-five-year-old mother of three; two officers involved in the CIA Counterterrorism Center’s drone-targeting program; two contractors for Xe/Blackwater; one Jordanian intelligence officer, who was a cousin of the Jordanian king; and one other person. Virtually the entire CIA drone team at Camp Chapman was wiped out by Balawi, who was actually a triple agent still working for the terrorists. Today a photo tribute to the slain agents hangs in the CIA Counterterrorism Center’s Pakistan Afghanistan Department at Langley.33
After Balawi’s suicide, Pakistani Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, released a prerecorded videotape that featured images of him sitting next to Balawi as the suicide bomber posthumously promised to avenge the earlier drone assassination of Baitullah Mehsud. Balawi declared, “We will never forget the blood of our emir, Baitullah Mehsud. We will always demand revenge for him inside America and outside.”34 Balawi also said he was offered “millions of dollars” to “spy on mujahideen … but instead I came to them [the Taliban] … and I told them everything, and we arranged this attack so the Americans can understand that the belief of Allah. … This jihadi attack will be the first of the latest operations against the Americans and their drone teams outside the Pakistan border, after they killed the Emir of Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan Baitullah Mehsud.”35
The Camp Chapman suicide attack was the second largest loss of CIA lives after the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983, which destroyed an entire CIA team. Revenge was not, however, long in coming. After the Khost bombing, an intelligence official promised, “Last week’s attack will be avenged. Some very bad people will eventually have a very bad day.”36 In the following weeks the CIA launched an unprecedented blitz of drone strikes on the territories of Mehsud and Haqqani, who was also thought to be involved in the Camp Chapman attack. Among those killed in the retaliatory strikes was Hussein al Yemeni, a top al Qaeda leader who was involved in the Camp Chapman plot. For all the CIA’s efforts to take out both Haqqani and Mehsud, to date neither of them has been killed and the real culprits behind the Camp Chapman attack have gone unpunished.
THE EXPOSURE OF THE PAKISTANI CIA STATION CHIEF’S IDENTITY
In 2010 a Pakistani journalist named Kareem Khan from Mir Ali, North Waziristan, filed a lawsuit against the CIA station chief in Pakistan, CIA director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Khan’s suit asked for a half million dol
lars in compensation for the killing of his brother and his son in a drone strike on December 31, 2009. Khan claimed, “That drone attack killed my son, my brother and a local man. We are not terrorists, we are common citizens.”37
But that was not all. In his lawsuit Khan named the head of the CIA in Pakistan, Jonathan Banks, and blew his cover. Khan’s application to register the case stated, “Jonathan Banks is operating from the American Embassy in Islamabad, which is a clear violation of diplomatic norms and laws, as a foreign mission cannot be used for any criminal activity in a sovereign state.”38 Khan’s lawyer further stated, “Mr. Kareem maintains that Jonathan Banks is not a U.S. diplomat therefore he does not enjoy diplomatic immunity, and his involvement in the execution of his son and brother simply makes him a murderer who is to be taken to task.”39 He also called for Banks to be tried for murder and executed.
In response, the Islamabad Police Department moved to order a murder case against Banks. Within days Banks’s name was published in papers around the globe, and protestors in Pakistan were carrying placards with his name on them demanding his arrest. Banks was hurriedly smuggled out of Pakistan after he received numerous death threats.
Enraged American officials claimed that Khan, a simple Pashtun tribesman, could not have discovered the name of the CIA station chief in Pakistan if he had not been given details of his identity by the Pakistani ISI.40 As for the actual lawsuit itself, Khan has received no compensation money from the government to date, but his suit did achieve another purpose, namely, it embarrassed the CIA. The basis for Khan’s lawsuit—that he was an innocent tribesman whose loved ones were brutally killed in a drone strike—was, however, challenged when two intelligence officials told CNN that he had been housing a notorious Taliban commander named Haji Omar Khan at the time of the strike.41 Haji Omar Khan was said to have been killed in the drone strike.
THE ARREST OF THE “CREECH 14” AND OTHER ANTIDRONE PROTESTS IN THE UNITED STATES AND UK
As the drone strike campaign picked up in the final years of the Bush administration and then skyrocketed under Obama, an antidrone movement appeared in the United States. One of the most active components of this antidrone/antiwar movement was a women’s group known as Code Pink. Code Pink recruited well-known activist Cindy Sheehan, who famously camped near President George W. Bush’s home in Crawford, Texas, to protest the Iraq War following the death of her son in that conflict. Sheehan was by 2008 nationally known and began a “No Drones” bus tour in which she and other activists dressed in pink protested outside Air Force bases that were home to drone squadrons. The women also protested at CIA Headquarters in Langley and marched from there to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s house, also in Langley, calling for his arrest. Code Pink protested at the San Diego home of the General Atomics chief executive officer, James Blue, where they built a shrine to the children killed by the drones his company produced. A statement on the Code Pink website concerning the protests read,
So many civilian casualties by US drone attacks are not just war crimes but crimes against humanity. We must restore America’s image by suspending these attacks immediately. This indiscriminate method of drone killing will not improve our relationship with Pakistan or the Muslim world. It will not bring us safety or peace throughout the world, in fact it begets more harm and destruction as extremists use the death of innocent civilians as a tool to recruit more people to join the Taliban to fight against us.42
On her own website Cindy Sheehan wrote, “The primary and proven case against drone attacks is that they pose a public danger that can only be deemed as indiscriminate bombing.”43
Thirty members of Code Pink, dressed in pink shirts that said “Stop Killer Drones,” partook in an antidrone march led by Pakistani politician Imran Khan, an ex-cricketeer who has been vocal in his calls for peace with the Taliban militants and an end to the drone campaign against them. The October 2012 march of several thousand Pakistanis and Code Pink members made its way from Islamabad to South Waziristan before it was halted by the Pakistani army at the border because of Taliban security threats. There protestors (presumably not the Americans) chanted “Down with America” and “A Friend of America Is a Traitor to the Nation.”44 While in Pakistan, the members of Code Pink also delivered a protest letter condemning the drone strikes to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan; the letter was signed by, among others, actor Danny Glover, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky, and movie director Oliver Stone. One of the American drone protestors described Obama’s role as “chief executioner” at a Pakistani seminar on the issue.45
Another protest was held in October 2011 in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, which had an exhibit dedicated to drones. As many as two hundred protestors with signs that read “Drones Kill Kids” were met with pepper spray and arrests when they tried to close down the exhibit.46 A smaller protest was held outside a Raytheon Missiles System plant in Tucson, Arizona. There protesters held placards that read “We Have Guided Missiles and Misguided Men” and “Drone Attacks Inspire Hatred of the U.S.”47
Perhaps the most famous antidrone protestors, however, were the “Creech 14,” members of the antiwar group Nevada Desert Experience whose motto was “Ground the Drones Lest We Reap the Whirlwind.” The Nevada Desert Experience was opposed to the “insidious creep of robotics into warfare.” Fourteen of its members were arrested for trespassing on Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2009. Creech was the most famous base associated with the U.S. Air Force’s separate drone campaign, which was largely carried out in the Afghan and Iraqi theaters of action. The group later summed up its actions at Creech as follows: “Nonviolent resisters want the U.S. government, the Pentagon, the drone controllers and the general populace to think about the horrific death and destruction the unmanned aerial attacks are raining down on people thousands of miles away and to contemplate that these attacks do not prevent or eliminate terrorism, but instead incite more hatred, revenge and retaliation, and make more recruits for the Taliban. … Warfare is not a video game.”48 The judge in the case against the Creech 14 found them guilty of trespassing but released them for time already served after telling them to “go in peace” and to use diplomacy instead of trespassing in the future to make their point.
In April 2011 thirty-eight protestors were similarly arrested at Hancock Field near Syracuse, New York, another base from which pilots of the 174th Fighter Wing remotely flew drones in Afghanistan and Iraq. Several of the protestors covered themselves in white sheets that had been painted red to resemble blood.49 In this area protests were led by Christians who were opposed to the remote killing. One antidrone blogger in the area wrote,
To sit at a console 7,000 miles away with life and death control over people whose land you’ve never walked on is too much power for any human being. It makes killing virtual and is a virtual license to kill. It can only corrupt.
I call on every pastor and minister in the Syracuse area to begin each service with an apology to the children of South Waziristan for the terror we have inflicted in their skies.50
Another antidrone voice submitted an article to the Buffalo News that read, “Drone attacks are extrajudicial executions, with pilots acting as detective, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. There is no due process or rule of law, and the government claims the right to apply this policy to American citizens abroad.”51
Among the antidrone voices has been U.S. congressman Dennis Kucinich, who wrote in the Huffington Post, “Think of the use of drone air strikes as summary executions, extra-judicial killings justified by faceless bureaucrats using who-knows-what ‘intelligence,’ with no oversight whatsoever and you get the idea that we have slipped into a spooky new world where joystick gods manipulating robots deal death from the skies and then go home and hug their children.”52
Peter Singer, the author of a book on military robotics titled Wired for War, similarly reflected on drones in a New York Times article titled “D
o Drones Undermine Democracy?”
Now we possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war. The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter—and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media—they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.
For the first 200 years of American democracy, engaging in combat and bearing risk—both personal and political—went hand in hand. In the age of drones, that is no longer the case.53
An Economist article read, “Looking farther ahead, there are fears that UAS [unmanned aerial systems] and other robotised killing machines will so lower the political threshold for fighting that an essential element of restraint will be removed. Robert E. Lee said ‘it is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it.’ Drones might make leaders fonder of war.”54 Amnesty International similarly warned, “Anything that dehumanizes the process makes it easier to pull the trigger.”55
The antidrone sentiment was not limited to the United States and Pakistan. In October 2011 a “week of action” was called for in Britain by a group named Ground the Drones. This group led small protests at various sites in the UK linked to drones. (The U.S. military has leased several Reaper drones to the British military for use in combat in Afghanistan.) These sites included the London office of the drone manufacturer General Atomics; the Royal Air Force base at Northwood, where the drone pilots were based; Boscombe Down, the testing ground for a domestic surveillance drone used by the police and known as the Watchkeeper; and other venues.
British police also arrested twenty members of the United Ummah (ummah translates as “Islamic community”) who were protesting U.S. drone strikes outside the U.S. embassy in London. The group claimed to be protesting against “the recent spate of anti-Muslim drone strikes that have been launched by the U.S. government against innocent Muslims.”56
Predators Page 16
