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Disadvantages of Using of Drone Planes. 

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In the dark, pre-dawn hours of Friday, the thirteenth of January 2006, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, the buzz of an unmanned drone plane broke the silence. 

Half a world and 12 and a half time zones away, someone on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters keyed a command into a computer. 

The digitized message, relayed through the building’s circuitry and transmitted skyward, bounced along an array of aircraft and satellites before arriving at the RQ-1 Predator drone planes hovering above the Bajaur region of Pakistan’s Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). 

Four AGM-114N Hellfire II missiles, each purchased by American taxpayers from Lockheed Martin at a cost of $45,000, streaked off toward the hamlet of Damadola, five miles into Pakistan. 

The four missiles, each carrying enough explosives to take out an armored vehicle, slammed into three local jewelers’ houses at 950 miles per hour, nearly twice the speed of a passenger jet at cruising altitude. 

The target of this latest assassination attempt via missile strike, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, wasn’t there and at least 22 innocent civilians, including five women and five children, were killed. 

A Pakistani intelligence official said the Americans acted on wrong information. 

The political fallout is devastating as the Pashtun tribesmen of FATA, still enraged at the militarization of an autonomous region that regular Pakistani army troops first invaded in 2004, threatened a general uprising. 

While tens of thousands of people chanted “death to America” at protest marches across Pakistan, the regime of U.S. puppet dictator General Pervez Musharraf weakened by the West’s failure to provide earthquake aid in Kashmir–was pushed to the brink of collapse. 

This was only the latest botched U.S. attack. Eight days earlier, another attempt to kill al-Zawahiri failed when a missile blew up a house in the Saidgi area, also in the FATA, based on another incorrect report and eight innocent civilians died.

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Life isn’t Expendable

If insanity is repeating an action in expectation of different results, the assassination-by-joystick squad at Langley is clearly nuts.

How many must die before they notice that precision airstrikes are anything but? 

In the wake of 9/11 the Pentagon went crazy over unmanned drone planes. “These systems… park over the bad guys, watch them continually, never give them a break”, said Dyke Weatherington, UAV chief in Donald Rumsfeld’s office, in 2002. 

On February 4, 2002 a Predator fired a Hellfire missile at three men, including one nicknamed “Tall Man” who was mistaken by CIA operators for the 6’5′ Osama bin Laden, near Zhawar Kili in Afghanistan’s Paktia province. 

Rumsfeld claimed that the people who have the responsibility for making judgements of that nature, that, indeed, they were Al Qaeda.

They were not and the victims were desperately poor civilians gathering scrap metal from exploded missiles to sell for food for which the U.S. has not apologized. 

On May 6, 2002 a Predator fired a missile at a convoy of cars in Kunar province in an attempt to assassinate Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hektmatyar because he opposes puppet ruler Hamid Karzai. 

Hekmatyar wasn’t there. At least ten civilians were blown to bits and Hektmatyar, understandably perturbed, has since declared himself and his militia our mortal enemies. No apology there either. 

And, if things couldn’t have gotten worse, the massacre in Pakistan occurred. 

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Common Sense isn’t Common

Mishaps are unavoidable due to the Predator’s design limitations. Image resolution is too fuzzy to make out much of anything at 10,000 feet up but if they fly the drone lower than that it becomes vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. 

Assassinations by unmanned aircraft seem doomed to failure out of thousands of sorties, the Defense Department can only point to a single success, the alleged Hellfire killing of Al Qaeda’s supposed ‘number five guy’ in Pakistan last year.

But it’s not just drone planes. Attempted assassination bombings attempted by flesh-and-blood pilots haven’t fared better. 

Incompetence and poor intelligence are not exclusive to us. Though brutal, the 9/11 attacks fell far short of their planners’ immediate goals. 

Tens of thousands would have died at the World Trade Center had the hijackers known that New Yorkers start work at nine.

And even if one of the two Washington-bound planes had struck the White House, Bush was in Florida at the time.

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