Seeing Everything, Missing the Obvious

One thing is clear: the pilots are not just killing "bad guys" and they know it because, as Black points out, they see everything that happens before, during, and after a drone strike.

Indeed, the only detailed transcript of an actual Air Force drone surveillance mission and targeted killing to be publicly released illustrates this all too well. The logs recorded idle chatter on February 21, 2010, between drone operators at Creech Air Force base in Nevada coordinating with video analysts at Air Force special operations headquarters in Okaloosa, Florida, and with Air Force pilots in a rural part of Daikondi province in central Afghanistan. On that day, three vehicles were seen traveling in a pre-dawn convoy carrying about a dozen people each. Laboring under the mistaken belief that the group were "insurgents" out to kill some nearby US soldiers on a mission, the drone team decided to attack.

Controller: "We believe we may have a high-level Taliban commander."

Camera operator: "Yeah, they called a possible weapon on the military-age male mounted in the back of the truck."

Intelligence coordinator: "Screener said at least one child near SUV."

Controller: "Bullshit! Where? I don't think they have kids out this hour. I know they're shady, but come on!"

Camera operator "A sweet [expletive]! Geez! Lead vehicle on the run and bring the helos in!"

Moments later, Kiowa helicopter pilots descended and fired Hellfire missiles at the vehicle.

Controller: "Take a look at this one. It was hit pretty good. It's a little toasty! That truck is so dead!"

Within 20 minutes, after the survivors of the attack had surrendered, the transcript recorded the sinking feelings of the drone pilots as they spotted women and children in the convoy and could not find any visual evidence of weapons.

A subsequent on-the-ground investigation established that not one of the people killed was anything other than an ordinary villager. "Technology can occasionally give you a false sense of security that you can see everything, that you can hear everything, that you know everything," Air Force Major General James Poss, who oversaw an investigation into the incident, later told the Los Angeles Times.

Of course, Obama administration officials claim that such incidents are rare. In June 2011, when CIA Director John Brennan was still the White House counterterrorism adviser, he addressed the issue of civilian deaths in drone strikes and made this bold claim: "Nearly for the past year, there hasn't been a single collateral death, because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we've been able to develop."

His claim and similar official ones like it are, politely put, hyperbolic. "You Never Die Twice," a new report by Jennifer Gibson of Reprieve, a British-based human rights organization, settles the question quickly by showing that some men on the White House "kill list" of terror suspects to be taken out have "'died' as many as seven times."

Gibson adds, "We found 41 names of men who seemed to have achieved the impossible. This raises a stark question. With each failed attempt to assassinate a man on the kill list, who filled the body bag in his place?" In fact, Reprieve discovered that, in going after those 41 "targets" numerous times, an estimated 1,147 people were killed in Pakistan by drones. Typical was the present leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In two strikes against "him" over the years, according to Reprieve, 76 children and 29 adults have died, but not al-Zawahiri.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/drone-pilots-are-quitting-record-numbers