Police employ Predator drone spy planes on home front

"A Predator drone spy plane helped police make arrests after a North Dakota…" (Lake Region Law Enforcement Center)

Πηγή: LAT
By Brian Bennett

Dec 10 2011

Unmanned aircraft from an Air Force base in North Dakota help local police with surveillance, raising questions that trouble privacy advocates.

Reporting from Washington — Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.

"We don't use [drones] on every call out," said Bill Macki, head of the police SWAT team in Grand Forks. "If we have something in town like an apartment complex, we don't call them."

The drones belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which operates eight Predators on the country's northern and southwestern borders to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers. The previously unreported use of its drones to assist local, state and federal law enforcement has occurred without any public acknowledgment or debate.

Congress first authorized Customs and Border Protection to buy unarmed Predators in 2005. Officials in charge of the fleet cite broad authority to work with police from budget requests to Congress that cite "interior law enforcement support" as part of their mission.

In an interview, Michael C. Kostelnik, a retired Air Force general who heads the office that supervises the drones, said Predators are flown "in many areas around the country, not only for federal operators, but also for state and local law enforcement and emergency responders in times of crisis."

But former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), who sat on the House homeland security intelligence subcommittee at the time and served as its chairwoman from 2007 until early this year, said no one ever discussed using Predators to help local police serve warrants or do other basic work.

Using Predators for routine law enforcement without public debate or clear legal authority is a mistake, Harman said.

"There is no question that this could become something that people will regret," said Harman, who resigned from the House in February and now heads the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank.

In 2008 and 2010, Harman helped beat back efforts by Homeland Security officials to use imagery from military satellites to help domestic terrorism investigations. Congress blocked the proposal on grounds it would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from taking a police role on U.S. soil.

Proponents say the high-resolution cameras, heat sensors and sophisticated radar on the border protection drones can help track criminal activity in the United States, just as the CIA uses Predators and other drones to spy on militants in Pakistan, nuclear sites in Iran and other targets around the globe.

For decades, U.S. courts have allowed law enforcement to conduct aerial surveillance without a warrant. They have ruled that what a person does in the open, even behind a backyard fence, can be seen from a passing airplane and is not protected by privacy laws.

Advocates say Predators are simply more effective than other planes. Flying out of earshot and out of sight, a Predator B can watch a target for 20 hours nonstop, far longer than any police helicopter or manned aircraft.

"I am for the use of drones," said Howard Safir, former head of operations for the U.S. Marshals Service and former New York City police commissioner. He said drones could help police in manhunts, hostage situations and other difficult cases.

But privacy advocates say drones help police snoop on citizens in ways that push current law to the breaking point.

"Any time you have a tool like that in the hands of law enforcement that makes it easier to do surveillance, they will do more of it," said Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.

"This could be a time when people are uncomfortable, and they want to place limits on that technology," he said. "It could make us question the doctrine that you do not have privacy in public."

In North Dakota, Janke learned about the Predators last spring after local law enforcement was invited to a briefing on how two Customs and Border Protection drones based at the Grand Forks air base could assist police. He immediately saw advantages.

"We don't have to go in guns blazing," the sheriff said in a telephone interview. "We can take our time and methodically plan out what our approach should be."

Macki, head of the regional SWAT team, decided drones were ideal for spotting suspects in the vast prairie, where grassy plains stretch to the horizon except for trees planted to stem erosion from the winds.

"Anything where we need an advantage, we try to give them a call," said Macki, who declined to specify how often or where he has used the Predators. "We are very fortunate to have them in our area willing to assist us."

The first known use was June 23 after Janke drove up to the Brossart farm with a search warrant for cattle that supposedly had strayed from a neighboring ranch. The sheriff says he was ordered off the property at gunpoint.

The six adult Brossarts allegedly belonged to the Sovereign Citizen Movement, an antigovernment group that the FBI considers extremist and violent. The family had repeated run-ins with local police, including the arrest of two family members earlier that day arising from their clash with a deputy over the cattle.

Janke requested help from the drone unit, explaining that an armed standoff was underway. A Predator was flying back from a routine 10-hour patrol along the Canadian border from North Dakota to Montana. It carried extra fuel, so a pilot sitting in a trailer in Grand Forks turned the aircraft south to fly over the farm, about 60 miles from the border.

For four hours, the Predator circled 10,000 feet above the farm. Parked on a nearby road, Janke and the other officers watched live drone video and thermal images of Alex, Thomas and Jacob Brossart — and their mother, Susan — on a hand-held device with a 4-inch screen.

The glowing green images showed people carrying what appeared to be long rifles moving behind farm equipment and other barriers. The sheriff feared they were preparing an ambush, and he decided to withdraw until daybreak. The Predator flew back to its hangar.

At 7 a.m. the next day, the Predator launched again and flew back to the farm. The drone crew was determined to help avoid a bloody confrontation. No one wanted another Ruby Ridge, the 1992 shootout between the FBI and a family in rural Idaho that killed a 14-year-old boy, a woman and a deputy U.S. marshal.

This time, Janke watched the live Predator feed from his office computer, using a password-protected government website called Big Pipe.

Around 10 a.m., the video showed the three Brossart brothers riding all-terrain vehicles toward a decommissioned Minuteman ballistic missile site at the edge of their property. The sensor operator in Grand Forks switched to thermal mode, and the image indicated the three men were unarmed.

Janke signaled the SWAT team to move in and make the arrests. No shots were fired.

A search of the property turned up four rifles, two shotguns, assorted bows and arrows and a samurai sword, according to court records. Police also found the six missing cows, valued at $6,000.

Rodney Brossart, his daughter Abby and his three sons face a total of 11 felony charges, including bail jumping and terrorizing a sheriff, as well as a misdemeanor count against Rodney involving the stray cattle. All have been released on bail. Calls to Rodney Brossart were not returned Saturday. The family is believed to be living on the farm.

The price of becoming addicted to drones

Πηγή: Washington Post
By David Ignatius
Sep. 21 2011


What “rules of war” should apply to Predator drones, the eerily efficient weapons that cruise the skies and target adversaries with the precision of a sharpshooter’s bullet? It’s an urgent question — not simply for the United States, which is expanding its use of drones, but for dozens of other nations that may soon use them to target their own “bad guys.”

Although drones have been controversial abroad, there has been relatively little public debate about them in America. That’s partly because U.S. officials usually won’t discuss their operations, which are highly classified. But officials affirm privately that they have been highly effective against al-Qaeda’s leadership in the tribal areas of Pakistan — and that they are being used in Yemen and Somalia in an escalating campaign against al-Qaeda affiliates there.

These weapons, which project power without risking “boots on the ground,” can become addictive. According to a report last year by a U.N. special rapporteur, more than 40 countries now have drone technology, and nations seeking to arm drones with missiles include Israel, Russia, Turkey, China, India, Iran, Britain and France.

“We have to be extremely careful and prudent about how we use this technology. It’s very efficacious in killing terrorists, but there are significant risks of blowback from its widespread use that could harm our counterterrorism efforts,” argues Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who served in the George W. Bush administration’s Justice Department.

A drone debate, of sorts, took place behind the scenes in preparation for a speech last Friday by John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser. He argued that U.S. legal authority to use force against al-Qaeda wasn’t “restricted solely to ‘hot’ battlefields like Afghanistan” but could be expanded to other theaters “without doing a separate self-defense analysis each time.”

On the eve of Brennan’s speech, the New York Times reported a split within the Obama administration. The Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, was said to have urged broad targeting against groups anywhere that are aligned with al-Qaeda, while the State Department’s legal adviser,Harold Koh, reportedly recommended a more limited rule that, outside Afghanistan and Pakistan, would authorize targeting only individuals actually plotting to strike America.

These disagreements were resolved by Brennan’s speech, which took a hard-line view. Brennan conceded that some key allies, though “converging” toward U.S. legal arguments, “take a different view of the geographic scope of the conflict, limiting it only to the ‘hot’ battlefields.”

Here’s the real question, according to current and former officials: As the United States steps up Predator attacks over Yemen and Somalia, should it adopt the same “signature” targeting it uses over Pakistan? Under this approach, the drones can strike al-Qaeda training camps and fighters not on the list of specific targets compiled by the CIA. The signature approach is more aggressive, but it risks creating what terrorism analyst David Kilcullen calls “accidental guerrillas” — and thereby widening the war.

To understand the debate, some background is useful. The CIA’s legal authority (it conducts attacks over Pakistan and will probably have similar responsibility in Yemen and Somalia) dates to a lethal covert-action “finding” signed days after Sept. 11, 2001. The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center compiles a list of approved targets, usually numbering less than several dozen, based on intelligence that they pose a serious, continuing threat to the United States. That list is reviewed every six months, and names come on and off.

Legal review is done by the CIA’s general counsel, who in turn consults with the White House counsel. Signature targeting was added in 2008, using the same 2001 presidential finding, which was renewed by President Obama in 2009. The rules call for notifying the National Security Council (including the attorney general) if a U.S. person is a target. Such a broader review apparently took place when Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen in Yemen who is a seniorofficial in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was added.

Here’s the real problem with drones. They may indeed reduce collateral damage, as their proponents argue, because of their precision and surveillance. And America’s growing use of them against al-Qaeda may be legal under international law that allows self-defense. But what is legal isn’t always wise.

A world where drones are constantly buzzing overhead — waiting to zap those deemed threats under a cloaked and controversial process — risks being, even more, a world of lawlessness and chaos. Drones have been America’s best weapon against al-Qaeda, but one to use sparingly — against people U.S. intelligence knows are seeking to kill others.

Russia’s Predator Drone Goofily Crashes and Explodes

Πηγή: Gizmodo
BY SAM BIDDLE

Sep. 21 2011

First China tried to clone the Predator, and it went kablooey in the woods. Now new footage shows that Russia's Predator counterpart met an equally unflattering fate: a wobbly takeoff followed by a very messy explosion.

Flightglobal explains this crash is likely the reason Russia, a giant, sophisticated military power, oddly doesn't have any UAV chips on the table at all—after a failure this spectacular in 2010, it was back to the drawing board. But I'm sure the drawing board has been busy; with countries like the US feeding an increasing amount of its killing-people-activity through armed drones, no major military is going to want to sit on the ground and gaze up, pouting. Little tip to Russia: try a better name than the "Stork" next time. Y'know, just might inspire a little extra engineering confidence.

How The CIA Became ‘One Hell of a Killing Machine’

Πηγή: Gizmodo
By Spencer Ackerman
Sep 2, 2011



 No one views the CIA as anything resembling impotent. The drone strikes it operates are the most important counterterrorism tool the Obama administration uses, battering a Pakistan so intensely, in 2010 they struck an average of once every three days.

Osama bin Laden is dead as the result of a military operation the CIA commanded, highlighting the unprecedented coordination between CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). In the words of the head of CIA's Counterterrorism Center, its central nervous system for counterterrorism: "We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now."

9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean judged Tenet's admission "one of the most appalling comments we heard." But as it turned out, Tenet's timetable was prescient. A remarkable Washington Post story explores the rejuvenated CIA, which one veteran calls "one hell of a killing machine."

CIA's fleet of 30 Predators and Reapers - the Post gives the total - get the most attention, and understandably so. But it's easy to forget that the drones are a lagging indicator. Every intelligence operation, even the ones that go wrong and kill civilians, is the result of the CIA's cultivation of a network of spies it didn't possess back during Tenet's testimony. Drone strikes need spotters; the CIA has them in a group of Pashtun informants who cross the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with news of militant activity.

It's never been publicly acknowledged. But without that network, it's impossible to understand the massive and sustained rise in drone strikes. The Post reports that the program "has killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians since 2001." That's not really the whole story. The vast majority of those kills have come since 2008, according to data collected by the New America Foundation, with only 112 estimated deaths maximum occurring between 2004 and 2007. Last year, the drones killed as many as 993 people; the body count is as high as 453 so far in 2011.

Why? Two reasons. First, President George W. Bush relaxed secret restrictions on special operations and intelligence activities in Pakistan. And second, the spy network that Tenet didn't have came to fruition. Waziristan tribesmen described getting money to plant homing beacons for drones in the houses of targeted militants. al-Qaida and Pakistani Taliban mouthpieces started sounding paranoid about infrared devices powered by 9-volt batteries and tattletale chips planted in SIM cards. Unlike earlier in the decade, the CIA had data about where the terrorists were and their "patterns of life" - or, at least, data about people it thought were terrorists.



Touring the Counterterrorism Center's Pakistan-Afghanistan Department - note the listed order of those countries - the Post observes, "Every paid informant is given a unique crypt' that starts with a two-letter digraph designating spies who are paid sources of the CTC." It's replicating that bureau's work with an "equivalent department for Yemen and Somalia," the major centers of the U.S.' expanding shadow wars - which have already featured drone strikes.

Then comes the tight collaboration with JSOC. So-called "Omega" or "Cross Matrix" teams comprised of CIA and JSOC operators travel Afghanistan and Iraq in civilian clothes and cars. Mostly they meet with their local sources of information. But on "at least five occasions," the Post reports, they've tested their ability to sneak into Pakistan undetected to execute raids - "early rehearsals" of the bin Laden hit.

They're also not so into apprehending terrorists. While the CIA still maintains secret prisons like the one Danger Room pal Jeremy Scahill exposed in Somalia, President Obama ordered most of the "black sites" closed in 2009. As former JSOC commander William McRaven recently testified, there aren't any long-term detention facilities for terrorists anymore, leading to improvised solutions like the brigs of U.S. warships. When the CIA's Pashtun snitches get used for attacking terrorists, they're "‘more kill-capture' than capture-kill," the Post reports.

That raises the biggest question of all surrounding the new post-9/11 CIA. If it's acting like a military organization, shouldn't it have the (relative) transparency and accountability of a military organization? Most members of Congress don't have the security clearances necessary to know anything at all about CIA operations, preempting effective oversight. Congress is basically reliant on the CIA to check its own work, content to believe the CIA director when he says that the drones kill terrorists, not innocent people. Meanwhile, the Post reports that CIA proxies have "used more indiscriminate means, including land mines, to disrupt insurgent networks."

Two analysts who've closely studied the drone program, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, recently argued in Foreign Affairs that the military should take over the drones in order to introduce accountability into their operations. It wouldn't impact the drone operations at all: Air Force pilots fly them for the CIA, the Post confirms. But it would bring the shadow wars at least marginally out of the shadows.

At the same time, the 2011-era CIA is the direct descendent of the CIA that existed on April 14, 2004. It was a moment of abject humiliation for the agency, called to account for 9/11 even after warning the Bush White House in the spring and summer of 2001 that it was perceiving an imminent, unspecified terrorist attack. The 9/11 Commission accurately channelled a sense of outrage around the country over the fact that the CIA lacked - to strip it of euphemism - a killing machine. Now the agency has built one. Will new director David Petraeus be willing to give it up?

Allies guided rebel ‘pincer’ assault on Tripoli

Πηγή: The Washington Post
By Karen DeYoung and Greg Miller,
August 22 2011

NATO and its allies helped Libya’s rebels mount an aggressive “pincer” strategy in recent weeks, providing intelligence, advice and stepped-up airstrikes that helped push Moammar Gaddafi’s forces toward collapse in Tripoli, NATO and U.S. officials said Monday.

The strategy included coordinated rebel advances in recent days from three directions: Misurata and Brega to the east, the refinery city of Zawiyah to the west, and the strategic southern approach to Tripoli at Gharyan. Retreating government troops allowed the rebel advance and provided clear targets for NATO airstrikes, the officials said.




As Gaddafi’s forces took up positions to defend the capital, “the targeting shifted toward Tripoli over the last four or five days. . . and the target set [in the capital] became larger,” said a senior NATO official, one of several alliance and U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military and intelligence matters.

NATO said airstrikes had hit 22 targets in and around Tripoli on Saturday, with additional strikes Sunday. Most were carried out by NATO and allied aircraft, aided by six armed U.S. Predator drones and satellite imagery on the location and capabilities of government forces.

“We have a good operational picture of where forces are arrayed on the battlefield,” Marine Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

Once the rebels began arriving in force, government troops in much of the capital melted away. The rebels have reached “a clear tipping point in Tripoli, rather than a prolonged stalemate,” a senior European diplomat said.

“We are finishing quicker than I think many people were beginning to fear” we would, said the diplomat, referring to rising unease in NATO capitals this summer as the conflict began to drag into its sixth month.

Even as rebels seized control of large swaths of Tripoli, U.S. officials said it was unclear how long the fighting in the capital would continue and they expressed concern that loyalists could employ terror tactics in a final urban battle.

“There is still some fighting in the capital, but for the most part, the Libyan regime forces seem to have just not engaged,” a U.S. intelligence official said. “The challenge now is that you’ve got a city of 2 million, and we’re into urban warfare.”

The remaining questions, officials said, were Gaddafi’s location and the extent to which he retains the ability to control or communicate with his troops.

British, French and Qatari Special Forces have been operating on the ground in Libya for some time and helped the rebels develop and coordinate the pincer strategy, officials said. At the same time, CIA operatives inside the country — along with intercepted communications between Libyan government officials — provided a deeper understanding of how badly Gaddafi’s command structure had crumbled, according to U.S. officials.

The collapse could be traced to “two things,” a high-ranking U.S. military official said. “One was the knowledge that we had on the disintegration of the command structure of the Gaddafi forces.”

The rebels were emboldened by that information, officials said, gaining confidence that the war was turning in their direction.

“The second thing, in the lead-up into Tripoli, we really provided a lot of imagery on the locations of the Gaddafi forces,” the official said. “So as the rebels were getting into their positions when they came around the south and up into the west side of Tripoli, we had a good sense of where [Gaddafi’s] forces were at.”

That intelligence flow had been obstructed for most of the early months of the conflict, officials said, in part because of restrictions on the amount of information that could be given to NATO allies.

But the administration reached a decision about six weeks ago that enabled the sharing of more sensitive materials with NATO, including imagery and signals intercepts that could be provided to British and French Special Operations troops on the ground in addition to pilots in the air.

Although U.S. military officials were not in direct contact with rebel forces, the NATO allies and “particularly the Qataris” on the ground worked closely with the rebels’ military and political command “to help them think this one through and also provide them with the capabilities,” the NATO official said.

NATO, whose United Nations mandate is limited to the protection of Libyan civilians, has been anxious not to be seen acting as the rebel air force in a coordinated strategy. But the NATO official acknowledged that “the effect of what we were doing was not dissimilar. What we saw was sort of the collapse of the regime and its capability to direct its forces.”

The United States and its allies have also been keeping “a close eye on Libya’s chemical weapons stockpiles” since the conflict began, another U.S. official said. “Especially during this tumultuous time, maintaining vigilance on this issue is a priority.” The official noted that Gaddafi had previously destroyed many of his most dangerous weapons, and “much of what remains is outdated or difficult to make operational.”

But “we’re obviously now getting to the point of the ‘day after,’ ” the European diplomat said. While the collapse of order in Iraq after the U.S. invasion there “is in the back of everybody’s mind,” considerable stabilization planning has been done, he said.

A previously scheduled meeting Monday and Tuesday in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, among representatives of Libya’s opposition Transitional National Council and the allies has turned its attention to post-conflict security, including how to maintain a “viable police presence” and turn “some of the more ragtag” elements of the rebels into a proper security force, the diplomat said.

France has called for a meeting of the international contact group for Libya, consisting of a larger group of interested nations, to be held next week. Originally scheduled for mid-September, it “was going to be a run-of-the-mill meeting” until the events of last weekend, the European diplomat said.

Staff writer Craig Whitlock contributed to this report.

Fighting back against the CIA drone war

Human rights lawyers and activists in the UK and Pakistan are on a quest for justice and transparency. 

Πηγή: Al Jazeera
By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad 

Last Modified: 30 Jul 2011 11:16



US Predator drones have played a large role in the CIA's extrajudicial killing program in Pakistan, where some 2,500 people in Pakistan, mostly civilians, have been killed by US forces since June 2004 [EPA]

They call it "bug splat", the splotch of blood, bones, and viscera that marks the site of a successful drone strike. To those manning the consoles in Nevada, it signifies "suspected militants" who have just been "neutralised"; to those on the ground, in most cases, it represents a family that has been shattered, a home destroyed.

Since June 18, 2004, when the CIA began its policy of extrajudicial killings in Pakistan, it has left nearly 250 such stains on Pakistani soil, daubed with the remains of more than 2,500 individuals, mostly civilians. More recently, it has taken to decorating other parts of the world.

Since the Pakistani government and its shadowy intelligence agencies have been complicit in the killings, the CIA has been able to do all this with complete impunity. Major human rights organisations in thrall to the Obama Administration have given it a pass. So have the media, who uncritically accept officials' claims about the accuracy of their lethal toys.

Two recent developments might change all this.

The unlawful combatant


On July 18, 2011, three Pakistani tribesmen, Kareem Khan, Sadaullah, and Maezol Khan, filed a formal complaint against John A Rizzo, the CIA's former acting General Counsel, at a police station in Islamabad. Until his retirement on June 25, 2009, Rizzo served as legal counsel to the program whose victims have included Kareem Khan's son and brother, Maezol Khan's seven-year-old son, and three family members of Sadaullah (who also lost both legs and an eye in the attack).

In an interview with Newsweek's Tara McKelvey, Rizzo bragged that he was responsible for signing off on the "hit list" for "lethal operations". The targets were "blown to bits" in "businesslike" operations, he said. By his own admission, he is implicated in "murder". Indeed, he boasted: "How many law professors have signed off on a death warrant?" And that is not the full extent of Rizzo's derring-do: he claims he was also "up to my eyeballs" in Bush's program of torture in black sites in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The detailed First Information Report (FIR) that barrister Mirza Shahzad Akbar prepared on behalf of the tribesmen was filed at the Secretariat Police Station in Islamabad, whose territorial jurisdiction includes the residence of Rizzo's leading co-conspirator Jonathan Banks, the CIA station chief who has since fled Pakistan. As a party to a conspiracy to commit murder in Pakistan, Akbar believes that Rizzo is subject to the country's penal code.

Clive Stafford Smith, the celebrated human rights lawyer best known as George W Bush's nemesis over Guantanamo, is leading the campaign to secure an international arrest warrant for Rizzo. Asked about the question of jurisdiction, Smith told me that that "there is no issue of jurisdiction - these are a series of crimes, including murder … committed on Pakistani soil against Pakistani citizens". The CIA, he says, is "waging war against Pakistan". He insists that "there is no question that [Rizzo] is liable for the crimes he is committing. The only issue is whether he will face the music or be kept hidden by the authorities".

Smith, who heads the legal charity Reprieve, is a practical man, uninterested in mere symbolic gestures. Earlier, he successfully sued the Bush administration for access to prisoners at Guantanomo and has so far secured the release of 65 of them. He is confident that once the Islamabad police issues a warrant, Interpol will have no choice but to pursue the case. Furthermore, he notes, depending on the success of this test case, they will broaden it to also include drone operators.

The US position so far is to either claim that it is engaged in legitimate self-defence, or to make the policy more palatable by downplaying its human cost. Neither argument is tenable.

The laws of war do not prohibit the killing of civilians unless it is deliberate, disproportionate or indiscriminate. However, Akbar and Smith reject the applicability of these laws to CIA's drone war. "The US has to follow the laws of war," Smith recently told the Guardian. But "the issue here is that this is not a war" - there is no declared state of conflict between the US and Pakistan. Moreover, Gary Solis of Georgetown University, an expert in the laws of war, told Newsweek that "the CIA who pilot unmanned aerial vehicles are civilians directly engaged in hostilities, an act that makes them 'unlawful combatants' and possibly subject to prosecution".

Murder by numbers

The US government has made bold claims for the extraordinary accuracy of its wonder-weapons. In a press conference earlier this year, US president Barack Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan insisted that "nearly for the past year there hasn't been a single collateral death" in the CIA's drone war.

This would be remarkable indeed if it weren't demonstrably false. A major investigation by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has shown that in just ten CIA drone attacks since August last year there were a minimum of 45 individuals killed who were confirmed civilians. These include women, children, policemen, students and rescuers among others. TBIJ has also identified an additional 15 attacks in which 65 more civilians might have been killed.

Unlike the New America Foundation or the neoconservative Long War Journal - the two most frequently cited, and least reliable, sources on drone casualties - TBIJ's investigation does not rely on official claims or the media reports that exclusively rely on them. Chris Woods, the journalist who led the TBIJ investigation, told me earlier this month that, besides reviewing thousands of media reports about the attacks - including those written days, weeks, or even months after the initial incident - the Bureau has worked with journalists, researchers, and the lawyers representing the civilians killed in the attacks. The Bureau has also employed its own researchers in Waziristan to corroborate the evidence it has gathered.

However, as the Bureau notes, its figures for civilian casualties are a "conservative estimate". It has only included those in its list whose civilian status it can confirm through multiple sources. The actual figures are likely much higher. But given the restrictions on travel to the region, a more comprehensive assessment of the war's human cost remains impossible.

The respected Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai told me that it is no longer possible for journalists from outside to travel to the tribal region and, as a result, most of the reporting comes from a handful of stringers based in Miranshah and Mir Ali.

Confined to the environs of the region's two main cities, even the journalists based in FATA have to call up the military's press office for information on all strikes that occur beyond those limits. The kind of courage exhibited by 39-year-old Noor Behram, who photographed the aftermath of 27 drone attacks in North and South Waziristan between November 29, 2008, and June 15, 2011, is rare. The photos are currently on display at London's Beaconsfield gallery. Unsurprisingly, the picture that emerges does not quite jibe with the CIA's claims. "For every ten to 15 people killed," he told the Guardian, "maybe they get one militant".

The CIA claims that of the nearly 2,500 Pakistanis killed in the drone attacks, 35 were "high value targets" - that is, people it actually intended to kill. The rest it claims were mostly "suspected militants". The world of think-tankery is even more linguistically challenged - in the New America Foundation's database there is no category for "civilian" - there are only "militants" and "others". Until now we had only the CIA and the ISI's word for the presumed guilt of those killed. Given the history of both organisations there is ample ground for scepticism, but in the light of the Bureau's investigation, the public would be wise to treat all future victims of the drone war as civilians unless proven otherwise.

But even where guilt is established, the killings would still constitute extra-judicial murder since no declared state of hostilities exists between the US and Pakistan. Things have come a long way since July 2001, when following Israel's "targeted killing" of Palestinians, the then US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk declared: "The United States government is very clearly on record as against targeted assassinations ... They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that."

Under Obama, extrajudicial killings have been adopted as a less complicated alternative to detention. Earlier in the year, Newsweek quoted one of Obama's legal svengalis - American University's Kenneth Anderson, author of an essay on the subject that was read widely by Obama White House officials - as saying: "Since the US political and legal situation has made aggressive interrogation a questionable activity anyway, there is less reason to seek to capture rather than kill."

"And if one intends to kill, the incentive is to do so from a standoff position because it removes potentially messy questions of surrender."

Deferred reckoning

So far, the drones policy has been an unmitigated disaster. The handful of Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders killed have been replaced by a more ruthless leadership which has progressively expanded its operational ambit into the Pakistani mainland. To the extent that "militants" are killed, they are mostly foot soldiers whose death has no discernible impact on the outcome of the insurgency; indeed, it merely helps deepen resentment and broaden the militants' support base. The CIA practice of bombing funerals and rescuers has ensured that even those who might otherwise disdain the Taliban identify with them as common victims of a uniquely barbarous adversary. Unable to strike back at the US, the Taliban instead revenge themselves on Pakistani soldiers and civilians in attacks that are no less brutal.

Two years ago, when I spoke to Yusufzai amid one of the most ferocious wave of terrorist attacks on Peshawar, he remained optimistic that, once the US withdrew from Afghanistan the militancy would recede. Events of the past two years have tempered his optimism. Last week when I spoke to him again, he told me that conditions have deteriorated so much that Pakistan will have to live with the consequences of America's reckless war long after it has withdrawn. The drone attacks are merely compounding the mess.

Campaigners in Britain and Pakistan are determined to bring transparency to Obama's secretive war and justice to its victims. Barrister Akbar told me in an email that with his team of researchers, he is "working to dig out information beyond the news reports, trying to find out the identities of individuals killed in drone strikes". He is now representing a growing number of individuals who have lost family members to the CIA drones, and many more are coming forward.

"This is only the start of a long, long, peaceful battle to stop this kind of 'murder by videogame'," says Smith. "What we most need are allies willing to work with us, and help provide truthful information about what is really happening on the ground in Pakistan's border regions."