CIA Drones and Shadow Wars

Danger Room, a great blog for anyone curious about what the military is actually up to these days (as well as what cool things they want to be doing tomorrow), has a post up about the rules of engagement, if you will , for drone operators in the CIA.

Once the standard for targeted killing was top-level leadership in al-Qaeda or one of its allies. That’s long gone, especially as the number of people targeted at once has grown.

This is the new standard, according to a blockbuster piece in the Wall Street Journal: “men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren’t always known.” The CIA is now killing people without knowing who they are, on suspicion of association with terrorist groups. The article does not define the standards are for “suspicion” and “association.”

This, and I think its fair to extrapolate this policy onto similar drone war zones like Somalia and Yemen, is a policy just waiting for a massive international backlash. Clearly this is going to end up killing a lot of civilians. The UN has already thrown up red flags about civilian deaths in the American wars. How long till this issue becomes the next Abu Ghraib?


The US seems to have blinders on when we go to war with ideologies. I suppose it comes with the territory; waging a war against an ideology tends to breed ideologues. But can we really not learn our lesson with this? After propping up brutal Latin American dictators in the name of capitalism, torturing militants in the name of democracy, and imprisoning a generation of African American men in the name of law and order, do we not see that sometimes we go too far?


Aside from the intrinsic wrongness of killing innocent people, this is exactly the thing than breeds the violent anti-American sentiment we're fighting against. I'm sure the CIA finds it much more economical today to skimp on the ground work of figuring out who we're killing, but in the long run it costs a whole lot more.