{UAH} WHEN YOU ALLOW ALLAN BARIGYE A FORUM BULLY TO BE A FREE RANGE YOU END UP WITH TRUMP IN COURTS THAN BARRACK OBAMA -> Part one

Drones may predate Obama, but his resolute use of them is unmatched

Alice Ross

Civilians have been killed and officials warn it will ‘weaken the rule of law’, yet the president’s actions indicate drone warfare won’t be going away anytime soon

Wed 18 Nov 2015 17.47 GMT

The first drone strike took place within weeks of the September 11 attacks, but the unmanned aerial weapons system came of age under Barack Obama.

It was Obama who stepped up the most controversial use of drones, using them beyond internationally recognised war zones to conduct hundreds of strikes in the lawless regions of Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.

Unlike conventional aircraft, drones can linger for hours above their targets, watching and hoovering up data such as cellphone signals. This makes them uniquely well-suited for pursuing suspected senior terrorists – “high-value targets”, in military jargon – or providing surveillance on suspect sites or groups.

Obama and his team seized on these capabilities: in 2009, his first year in the White House, Obama carried out more such strikes in Pakistan than Bush had during his entire presidency. The following year, strikes hit Pakistan’s tribal regions at a rate of more than two a week.

Concrete details on all aspects of these secretive campaigns, waged by the CIA and Joint Special Operaitons Command (JSOC), are elusive – Obama himself did not even mention drone strikes publicly until 2012. But independent monitoring groups such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the New America Foundation estimate that the US has conducted almost 400 such strikes since Obama entered the White House.

This is not an arm’s-length project for the president. Senior officials have described on condition of anonymity how Obama, who holds the 2009 Nobel peace prize, personally signs off on the “kill list” and is often briefed on individual strikes.

These strikes have claimed high-profile scalps; figures such as Nassir al-Wuhayshi, leader of al-Qaida’s Yemeni affiliate, who died in a drone strike in June. Meanwhile, letters from Osama bin Laden reveal the considerable disruption caused by the persistent presence of drones to al-Qaida’s senior leadership in Pakistan.

But the strikes have provoked sustained criticism from international lawyers and civil rights groups, who question the administration’s claim that after 9/11 the US is legally justified in targeting al-Qaida and its “affiliates”, wherever they may be. Christof Heyns, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing, said in 2012 that the practice threatened to “weaken the rule of law”.

The strikes have also been dogged by claims of civilian casualties. The administration has sought to play these down: John Brennan, at the time Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser and now the head of the CIA, portrayed drones as an “exceptionally precise and surgical” weapon causing next to no collateral damage.

The New America Foundation estimates that at least 342 civilians have died, while the Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts the figure at 488 or more. Well-documented disasters such as the 2013 bombing of a wedding convoy in Yemen have led Human Rights Watch and others to call for the US to launch official investigations into particular strikes. No such investigations have been published.

Worryingly, the drone pilots who spoke with the Guardian say they often had little idea who was being killed – a view echoed by CIA documents leaked to McClatchy, which found hundreds of the dead recorded simply as “other”.

The controversy of the “secret” drone wars has distracted attention from the situation where the vast majority of drone strikes are conducted alongside traditional forces in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here too unmanned aircraft have helped to shape the conflict, supporting troops on the ground and pinpointing targets for other aircraft to attack as well as conducting strikes of their own.

As the US struggles to extricate itself from its long and unpopular ground war in Afghanistan, Obama is increasingly relying on aerial warfare. The Pentagon announced this summer that it is increasing its drone fleet by 50% to help meet the “steady demand signal” from across the globe. Meanwhile in Iraq and Syria, the US is conducting its fight against Isis almost exclusively from above, using drones and conventional aircraft to launch more than 8,000 airstrikes in the past year.

Speaking at the G20 meeting on Syria in Geneva on Monday, the president angrily rejected renewed calls for boots on the ground. “It is not just my view, but the view of my closest military and civilian advisers, that that would be a mistake.”

Instead, he vowed an “intensification” of the current activity. Aerial warfare is set to remain the cornerstone of Obama’s military strategy.

Alice Ross formerly led the drones team at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

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