topic tonight of course is combat drones and the united states use of them and as i said in the publish the we're going to look into the question of the legality of them and more reality whatever however you might define morality i think we might be able to come to this and certain consensus on the us use of drones but i would really like to actually start with a little bit of history to put some context on current events a little bit and i'm one of those people that actually thinks it's beneficial to study some of our own history so i want to begin actually by turning the clock back briefly almost forty years and in  seventy four senator frank church a democrat from idaho chaired a special senate investigative committee officially in a rather long winded lee known as the senate select committee and to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities it became not surprisingly better known as simply the church committee the senate undertook what became a very extensive investigation into covert activities because several disturbing hints and some evidence of rampant illegality engaged in by various intelligence and military branches of the government had been revealed during the watergate investigations the scandal that brought richard nixon down and ultimately lead to his resignation in disgrace and the happiest nights of my life the church committee would ultimately issue fourteen reports fourteen about extensive illegal actions by covert agencies that amounted to a global secret war conducted by the us government and while many of the league illegal actions were known to the highest levels of government at the time the u congress and certainly the american people had no idea what was being done with their tax dollars and in their names most disturbing perhaps was the discovery of a covert status of covert assassination as a routine policy of us of the us government the church committee identified numerous targets and attempted victims patrice lumumba of the democratic republic of the congo rafael tru o the dominican republic the d m brothers in vietnam general rene schneider of she lay and even a plan to hire the cia to assassinate fidel castro they actually uncovered eight different assassination plots against fidel castro but this list gives you an idea it was global it really was global the uproar and profound discussed actually caused by these revelations both in congress and by the public generally led to a series of reforms and most importantly to a presidential directive issued by gerald ford a number nixon was out of there by then issued by gerald ford to outlaw assassination as a tool of u s foreign policy ford's initial directive banned political assassination later revisions by presidents jimmy carter and ronald reagan even made it clear that any assassination would be considered illegal henceforth no employee of the united states government could engage in such behavior that was what came out from the church committee investigations and unveiling this extensive global secret war mostly of assassination so let's roll the calendar for now and come back to present day a little bit keeping that in mind and let's stop off in early two thousand and four the united states war in afghanistan had already been raging for about two and a half years at this point the iraq invasion had already fallen apart after less than a year and a half and a full blown insurgency was bombing its way across that already devastated country the cia which had already been operating unmanned aeri vehicles drones in afghanistan as part of the war effort there was keen to use the technology inside of pakistan especially in those regions that directly bordered afghanistan the northwest territories was zero stand the tribal areas as they're known the only problem was that pakistan wouldn't allow it that country's leadership had no desire to see the armed conflict that was devastating its neighbor brought across the border to pakistani inspector general johnny helgerson had just been issued this is two thousand and four again however since report revealed for the first time the extensive abuses that had risen from the cia's global program of capture detention interrogation of suspected terrorists and their so called sympathizers the report showing a light on the so called black sites where the cia routinely engaged in torture and abuse of its detainees the reaction at home was start the cia was looking for a way out of the detention and interrogation business they decided that simply killing suspects secretly would be far easier and much less messy politically looking for leverage with  pakistani government and in particular was pakistan's own version of the cia the directorate for interservice is intelligence or i s i as it's known in pakistan the cia turned its attention to a pakistani taliban pakistani taliban not afghan pakistani taliban leader named neck mohammad mr muhammad was quite a burden to pakistan's government and to the i s i in particular he was extremely popular among the population of the border territories arrested in dangerous area of the country and he was most troubling of all leading successful military attacks against the pakistan national army again nothing to do with afghanistan or the united states he was trying to create an islamic state in pakistan now while not mohamed was clearly an enemy of the pakistani state he had no designs on attacking the united states or its forces in afghanistan and the us intelligence to services did not consider him to be their problem as it turned out though not muhammad did turn out to be the cia's bargaining chip the cia station chief in pakistan approached the head of i s i with a proposal the cia would take out next mohamad with a drone strike in pakistan in return for pakistani permission for the cia to use pakistan's air space for more such missions into the future a deal was struck pakistan would allow the drones to fly and kill in the tribal areas in the western part of the nation in return the cia would keep the program absolutely secret never utter a word about it pakistan for its part would deny any knowledge of the program or at times take credit for an assassination itself you know the words this wasn't going to happen they would know about it just between themselves and june eighteenth two thousand and four is not mohamed sat in the mud hut in south was ears and a missile fired from a cia drone killed him along with several others who were in the hut including two teenage boys as if that moment the united states was again in gauged in a secret what would become global war of assassination the same kind of war that had been exposed and declared immoral and illegal nearly forty years before as best as can be determined by researchers and i'll talk later about the lack of government statistics on this global war as best as can be turret determined this new global war  assassination has included well over four hundred drone strikes with somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand people killed so what are drones what are we talking about here for what it's worth  turned term drone is really a misnomer strictly speaking a drone is known as an unmanned aircraft that can fly autonomously that is without a human in control what we're talking about in this case are  d aerial vehicles or u a e vs someone is in control of this thing somewhere and they're so they're remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicles and for the purposes really of this talk the correct term is unmanned combat aerial vehicles or use c avi's or if you want to listen to retired air force colonel sally mcbride who testified at senate hearings on the drone program just last month not much of in the way of hearings but colonel mcbride testified she insisted that the proper turn term is remotely piloted aircraft cording to colonel mcbride who was herself in gauged in drone targeting programs while she was assigned to africa com that's the military central command based in africa use of the term drones plays into al propaganda campaign it's a bad word so if we don't want the terrorists to win then we should use the highly sanitized term remotely piloted aircraft i'm going to use the term drone the terrorists no doubt will be overjoyed i do want to take a moment to explain why i'm only going to talk about combat drones in this talk and not about surveillance drones because there's a lot of that that needs  dealing with too the issue of domestic surveillance by a remotely piloted drones is certainly important especially when you consider that the federal aviation administration has been put on notice by congress to prepare america's airways for up to five thousand such drones in the coming years the f a a is trying to figure out new flight paths so we can accommodate five thousand drones overhead all the time here in the united states but surveillance drones as i see it are really a civil liberties issue and it's a whole other topic it's combined with the intelligence agencies sweeping up our e mails and cameras on every street corner just remember the boston marathon bombing they got the guy because there were cameras all over boston that's where surveillance drones comes in that it is and i'm an important civil liberties issue but it's not the same thing as what we're talking about with combat trumans which i think is something that really should be considered separately combat drones involve undeclared and unending war secret assassination and the death innocence so that's what we're going to look at is just the aspect of combat drones so technology has been deployed by about seventy five countries so far around the world all of which are of the unarmed surveillance variety currently only the united states and britain which is assisting the united states in afghanistan and pakistan in its drone program only those two countries are currently using armed drones israel has developed an arm and used them during its assault on gaza in late two thousand and eight and early two thousand and nine those are the last credible reports of israel using armed drones but they do have them but united states is the only one using them right now but as the united states paves the way for ever increasing use of drones as an instrument of war it's pretty easy to see that we may have a war drone arms race coming an arms race in the field of killer drones somewhere in the near future in the case of the united states there are two main models of drone that are being used for the global assassination program the reaper and the predator these are lovely terms i think israel calls it's the sparrow nice they still all killed predator drones about twenty seven feet long wingspan of fifty five feet usually armed with two hell fire missiles which have warheads of about twenty pounds each twenty pounds of explosives and  by contrast is thirty six feet long with the wingspan of sixty six feet about the size of a little private says an airplane and you see it at local airports and stuff the reaper has a much higher payload capacity than the predator it's often armed with not only the hellfire missiles but also five hundred pound bombs and that's a lot of fire power i've actually been in the vicinity of five hundred pound bombs going off dropped from planes this was in el salvador in the hundred eighty s i was down there during that country's civil war i was out in the area where the hot fighting was going on i was there with refugees and you could hear the bombing just over the hill in fact one memorable time i was observing some kids taking classes out under the trees because there were no buildings really where these people were living and as we were walking back to the village for lunch the bombing started and it was just up the pathway in this one eight year old stopped and listened and he said five hundred pound bombs this was a kid who a grown up with war and he could identify the different music and munitions i'm going to return to the effect on on civilians beyond deaths near the end of this talk but five hundred pound bombs rake a lot of havoc i've i've seen the damage that they do on the ground it's something you don't easily forget the look these large bombs from the reaper drones are of the so called smart bomb variety only in that they are satellite guided to hit were what they're aimed at but they're by no means p precision or surgical weapons as the pentagon would have us believe a five hundred pound bomb has what's known as an effective casualty radius of about two hundred feet so in practical terms said means anyone two hundred feet from where one of these explosions goes up has a fifty percent chance of being killed so if one of these weapons was dropped on the fifty yard line of a football field for example the end zone would not be a safe place to be and finally drones can stay airborne for up to twenty four hours and have a range of hundreds of miles the small predator drones cost about twenty million dollars each the larger reaper drone  fifty four million dollars each pentagon currently has about seven thousand drones of all varieties including the surveillance drones this year's federal budget included five billion dollars for additional drone research deployment and procurement so there's a little bit on the hardware how do they work drones are remotely part operated by two person teams consisting of a pilot and in most cases these are actual trained pilots who used to fly fighter jets and other kinds of aircraft and a sensor operator whose job it is to manipulate the cameras heat sensors and other sensing devices which the drones use to track and target their victims and control centers for drones don't have to be anywhere near the scene of action indeed many of the flights are controlled by from hundreds or even thousands of miles away there are dozens of drone command and control centers worldwide s command centers with dozens more planned for the near future some of the command centers that we know about are in langley virginia where the cia is headquartered and where the cia operates two command centers and at the  air force bases near las vegas and nevada they're also commanding control centers in california arizona new mexico north and south dakota missouri ohio new york and no doubt elsewhere in the continental united states the air force alone has more than thirty three hundred or thirteen hundred drone pilots currently and they claim to be short staffed by about three hundred pilots currently according to a report in the new york times last summer quote the pentagon projects that the air force will need more than two thousand drone pilots for combat air patrols operating twenty four hours a day worldwide and quote i mean repeat that they're to need two thousand drone pilots for combat air patrols operating twenty four hours a day worldwide this is the extent of the program that washington is not even talking about there were hearings a couple weeks ago in the senate the administration didn't even send a representative to congress to talk about the drone program that same new york times report from last summer profiles a typical drone pilot who works out of the hancock field air national guard base in the suburbs of syracuse new york from his computer console in the suburbs colonel scott brenton tracks and kills human beings on the ground in afghanistan when his work day is done according to the times story brenton quote steps out of a dark room a video screens his adrenaline still s after squeezing the trigger and commutes home has fast food restaurants and convenience stores to help the kids with their homework and quote so that's kind of the rough outline of our drone program are we using it well as far as we know and again there's just a total pos of the of the official information but as far as we know the united states is actively using armed drones in afghanistan where the first combat drones were used as part of the original invasion of afghanistan after nine eleven and are expected to continue to be used after the so called u s withdrawal next year this is how we're withdrawing troops who are sending in more and more drones they're also being used in pakistan which is seen by far the highest level active of activity in yemen and in somalia where there are also islamist militant uprisings the fact that the government refuses to release much information all about the drone program makes it difficult to be certain about many aspects of the program including where they're being used it's conceivable that drone strikes have occurred elsewhere there were have been at least one rumored drone strike in the philippines for example where there's also an islamist activity but since the government rarely announces or reports on drone strikes we can never be sure the only time you're likely to hear about a particular drone strike is when a so called high value target has been killed those they like to talk about generally silence is all we get out of the pentagon and the white house regarding the program the a c l u has for years been trying to get information about the program without any success through the freedom of information act the government has been arguing over and over again in court as had the bush administration before them that it cannot confirm or deny that it drone program even exists the lawyers for the cia are going into federal court saying we can't tell you yes or no if it even exists because of that old standby of national security recently however a federal court did roll that the government can no longer use that excuse for refusing to release the information to the a c l u since even the president has talked about the program in public so the a c l u is back in court seeking more information about the program we can hope for their success to find out just how extensive this drone program is for now keeping track of dr strikes the frequency the locations the number of victims has been left to a few private groups that have dedicated themselves to trying to figure out just how extensive the program is collectively they're known as strike data aggregators lovely term but we are in the internet age strike data aggregators three mode most well known and widely quoted sources of aggregated strike data are these projects the year of the drone project by the new america foundation think tank the long war journal of blogging project at the foundation for defense of democracies and the bureau of investigative journalism a london based journalism nonprofit organization located at city university in london what the aggregate gators do is they scour and compare rep press reports and u s european and asian newspapers they do their best to confirm reports of people on the ground but in a lot of places like pakistan that's very difficult to do because isis especially to the tribal areas officially the federally administered tribal areas is really difficult there are remote and very few people outside of people who live there or even allow there whether you're pakistani or not of these the bureau of investigative journalism appears to be the most thorough and most highly regarded they're certainly the most quoted in news media and i just know their database can be found which is frequently updated at the bureau investigates dot com i suggest you check it out they have extensive information about the drone program the bureau investigates dot com so using figures from the bureau of investigative journalism i thought i'd go through some of the numbers instead of reading off numbers to you this is as close as i get to a power point islamist insurgency the al shabaab and as you see everything on here is got a low estimate not high estimate that's how most of these aggregators put it out to the best of their knowledge this is the law and this is the high and  and that's how they work so we've got total number of strikes total killed now this is one of the other things i like about the bureau of investigative journalism is that the other two organization say total militants killed and civilians the bureau doesn't make that assumption they just say this is the total number of people killed and you'll hear in a minute why that's that distinction is really important civilians killed they break out the number of kill children killed and another thing that i like about the bureau's figures is that they try to calculate the number injured which the other two don't this is really important because you know these aren't minor wounds when you are in the vicinity of a five hundred pound bomb going off so a lot of the people who are listed as injured probably at some point will wish they had died because they're going to live the rest of their lives w limbs and things like that here's yemen where there's a much more active islamist insurgency al qaeda in the arabian peninsula known as a q a p a lot more activity here just let the numbers sink in a little bit one hundred forty eight drone strikes nearly eight hundred killed nearly one hundred civilians a dozen children killed and over two hundred apparently  very seriously wounded and injured and then we get to park a stand where there's that great as use of drone strikes and you see the numbers jump even higher to nearly four hundred drone strikes thirty six hundred total deaths nearly a thousand civilians nearly two hundred children and somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred people seriously adam all up and we've got somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred drone strikes somewhere reliably around four thousand deaths nearly a thousand civilians killed couple one two hundred children those are current figures i just checked today and the bureau has increased its possible drone strikes in pakistan by one since i wrote this chart so i didn't rewrite the whole chart no the aggregators are not actually counting out ghana's stand because it's a full blown war zone and they can't get in there to do anything and there's no no newspaper reporting on that  so good question we know that one was lost in iran they came down and i think there was one other that they acknowledged losing they don't tell us just like they don't tell us how many strikes there have been or how many have been killed or wounded or civilians killed these numbers remember come from private organizations privately funded not from the u s government so those are the numbers they're pretty shocking in fact they add up to a record of a tremendous amount of death and destruction tremendous number of people maimed many of them no doubt maimed for life and keep in mind that this is mostly a secret record ferreted out again only by the dedication of some hard working forensic journalists we certainly haven't gotten these numbers from the pentagon the cia or the white house who again maintain a stony silence when it comes to drone warfare so that brings us really up to the first big question we want to try to answer tonight is this legal have all these strikes all this death come about in a legal manner in keeping with the oft repeated mantra of this country that we are a country ruled by law we're a country of laws and not a country of individuals well let's start with what might be the first logical and perhaps simplest question to ask how could this policy of targeted killing as the administration call it calls and possibly being keeping with the presidential ban on assassinations that followed the church committee hearings in one nine hundred seventy s senate investigations that i referred to at the outset of this talk so i mention gerald ford first issued laden and al qaeda were first entering the consciousness of americans president bill clinton amended these executive orders by specifically allowing covert legal force to be used against osama bin laden and his immediate circle of operational planners it was a specific exemption simply for bin laden and his inner circle it was a narrowly drawn order intended to target only bin laden and other senior members of al  not meant to be a green light for a return to the bad old days of an out of control cia attempting to assassinate or actually assess nine hundred people around the planet the executive order against assassinations was again amended by george bush in two thousand and one obviously not surprisingly in direct response to the tragedy of september eleventh of that year this alteration of the directive allowed a widening of the circle of potential targets going far beyond bin laden and his senior operatives it off there it also authorized targeted killings assassinations beyond the border of afghanistan where the us were was raging when bush signed the executive order in october two thousand  order didn't arrow the authority in one respect it required a clear chain of command with the president and only the president having the final authority to order an assassination now this is an important distinction operatives undertaking assassinations on their own memos and directives from the white house were uncovered but they were so muddled and muddied and unclear that it was really impossible to tell what was or was not being authorized requirement for a clear chain of command satisfied the cia in current days which since the seventy's had really let its operational command the branch that carries out these actions they let that entropy quite a bit with the bush executive order they felt they were covered legally and as i mentioned the beginning where detention was not working out so well for them they were happy to get back in the assassination business as long as the chain of command went to the white house and not langley virginia the main reason why bush felt empowered to issue this directive in the first place restoring assassination is a policy in the u s government even though it was still fairly limited was the authorization to use military force the a u m f passed by congress in direct response to the nine eleven attacks as a specific authorization to invade afghanistan and i don't thirty is still being used by president obama today twelve years after the fact or return to that aspect in just a moment the authorization to use military force again passed by congress on september fourteenth two thousand  gave the president authority to use quote all necessary and appropriate force against persons he determines planned authorize committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on september eleventh two thousand  quote that's what congress authorized and finally since the clinton administration presidents have claimed an inherent authority to use lethal force to kill an individual enemy of the united states in self defense authority derives they claim under article two section two of the constitution that's the article that is very clearly and simply says that the president shall be the commander in chief of the armed forces from that they claim authority to attack anyone anywhere in self defense we should mention international law as well even though countless american administrat their real indifference to international law under article fifty one of the united nations charter a state is allowed to defend itself against an imminent or continuing threat of attack that would be allowed if there was an imminent or an ongoing threat of attack so the targeted killing of a terrorist who is in the midst of carrying out an attack on our soil or against our citizens might be considered legal under international law probably would be but as i noted the u s has a rather an international law it certainly didn't stop george bush from invading iraq without any u n authorization whatsoever the united nations is in fact currently conducting an investigation into the drone program and the u s use of killer drones we don't have their findings yet the investigation is continuing and believe the report is due in june just next month that should be interesting but the un special rapporteur tour who is carrying out the investigation ben emmerson british diplomat last month visited pakistan and declared the drone strikes to be a violation of pakistan's sovereignty and therefore illegal under international law this is the first official word we've had from the united nations in addition we should recall that the founders of the united nations and those who drafted the charter could not anticipate the day that extra national organizations would be seen as come battens nor that the united states could declare that the entire globe constituted a battlefield in its war on terror so the old u n charter has a little trouble keeping up with current definitions when you have things like the global war on terror the authorization to use military force going back to that along with the amended executive orders barring assassination by employees united states as amended by clinton and bush to allow the killing of specific high level threats and article two section two of the constitution remain as the primary legal framework under which the current targeted killing by drone program operates authorization to use force the amended presidential directives and article to the constitution and the president's commander in chief so let's see how the program as it exists today and what we know about it fits into that particular legal framework first of all it must be noted that we don't have available again too much too is very much at all in the way of formal legal justification for the drone killing program as a report from the news service noted just last month what little we do know of the official thinking or official justification according to clutch he quote comes from a leaked justice department white paper a half dozen or so speeches some public comments by obama and several top lieutenants and limited open testimony before congress and quote and as i said in the most recent senate hearings on the drone program the administration declined even send fight so that's all we've gotten out of this administration for how they're legally justifying this program that's it that's the public record of policy that has led to the deaths of some four thousand but let's look at what we have what we do have and see what we can learn in an interview with c n n on september sixth of last year obama said quote it has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative it has to be a situation in which we can capture the individual before they move forward move forward on some sort of operational plot against the united states and quote that's the president's own words the implication it's got to be an imminent threat that plot moving forward there's no other way to stop it we can't capture and so under that we're justified moving on the main architect of the program john brennan who was obama's counterterrorism advisor and is now the head of the cia made a speech about the the drone program about a year ago he said quote we only authorize a particular operation against a specific individual if we have a high degree of confidence that the individual being targeted is indeed the terrorist we are pursuing and quote and in that speech brennan referred to al qaeda seventy three times the afghan taliban three times and name no other terrorist organizations even though we know that there been far other victims and in his confirmation hearings to become chief of the c held just in february brennan said quote any actions we take fully comport to our law and meet the standards that i think the american people expect of us as far as taking actions we need to protect the american people but at the same time ensuring that we do everything possible before we need to resort to lethal force and quote welp imminent threat carefully targeted no other way to start o was kind of a talking points that memo said it is illegal quote to act in self defense self defense in circumstances where there is evidence of further imminent attacks by terrorist groups even if there is no specific evidence of where such an attack will take place or of the precise nature of the attack and quote so again imminent threat we don't have to know where it's going to happen or how it's going to happen but we have evidence that somebody is plotting to do something to us imminent threat carefully selected so take a look again at the total number of victims of drone strikes and ask yourself if those numbers could comport with the idea of carefully selected targets only those only those who pose an imminent and immediate threat to the security and safety of the united states and its citizens with four thousand people killed i think the answer could not possibly be yes these there were not four thousand imminent and immediate threats to the people of this country from these these drone deaths last month's mcclatchy report that i referred to briefly included a quote from morris status he's a professor of law at howard university more significantly he's a retired former air force lawyer who actually served as chief prosecutor at the guantanamo bay terrorism trials so this is no radical  left right this is the guy who was prosecuting the terrorists at guantanamo he said quote i'm thankful that my doctors don't use their the administration's definition of eminence when looking at imminent death a head cold could be enough to pull the plug on you and quote this is one of the administration's top lawyers saying this is not imminent threat i do want to briefly address the issue of the administration's insistence that  the legal authority to assassinate american citizens but i don't want to get hung up on that issue because it really is not a separate question ministrations claims to have legal authority to carry out any of these drone strikes is the same authority used to justify the killing of u s citizens who supposedly pose an imminent threat to the united states so that's what they're saying when they have the when they claim to have the authority to kill a u s citizen and not in the united states but overseas it's this imminent threat authority that grants them the way around the due process that we thought was included in the u s constitution that was the reasoning behind the strike that killed and why are our locky a u s citizen in yemen probably the most famous the drone program has actually killed three other u s citizens all of them and in yemen and more our locky was the only one who's actually targeted the others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time as some other imminent threat was being annihilated so the claim to kill u s citizens in this manner is garnered a lot of attention especially by the publisher the stunt filibuster that senator rand paul pulled  recently last month and make no mistake about it it was a publicity stunt he's not concerned about the legality of this program but i think it deflects attention from the real issue and the real issue remains the program itself and the four thousand people that it's killed so let's not get hung up it's all the same program so let's return this question of imminent threat which is really the basis for so much has been done since nine eleven and continues to this day if we accept the idea that four thousand people could not possibly have been engaged in an act that served as an imminent threat to the united states and we have to ask ourselves the question just who is being killed in these drone strikes and the answer that question sadly is that no one knows and when i say no one knows i have to include the administration they do not know who they are killing they don't know because despite all the talk of imminent threats high level leaders and lists of known terrorists the fact is that people are being killed because they fit a certain profile the administration's not publicly admitted this but numerous newspaper reports citing insiders and others with specific knowledge of the program tell us that so called signature strikes signature strikes are an integral part of the drone program more importantly the makati news report that i've now referred to a couple of times just came out a couple months ago was based on leaked ministration documents these weren't supposed to go out these leaked documents prove that signature strikes are taking place so what's a signature strike signature strikes are carried out against those who are observed by the drone cameras by the operators back in the syracuse suburbs in other words to being gauged in certain signature behaviors and have certain signature characteristics and appearances so for example any male fifteen years or older or apparently fifteen years old or older who  carrying a gun in pakistan nearly every male adult male carries a gun in yemen the average male own story guns that's the signature of  militant or if you're walking in a group or you're somewhere near a known terrorist camp any of these constitutes any one of these constitutes enough of a signature to target that person by the same token large gatherings of men perhaps armed perhaps not meet the signature threshold for a killing it's because a signature strikes like this that the administration can make the incredible claim last year that no civilians had been killed that all the deaths were of militants if you are male and fifteen years old or older you are by definition a militant according to the administration and that's why i think it's so significant for this one group not to use that term in trying to calculate deaths we don't really know who is being killed in this manner the us has come to kill young teenage boys who are out gathering firewood and blowing up a large m village elders killing nearly fifty people in one strike those are just two examples they go on and on this is the current state of the on ending war on terror the reckless and relight list killing of thousands of people because they look like terrorists they weren't on any list of high ranking terrorists they weren't engaged in activities that present an imminent danger to the american people they just had the misfortune to be born in the wrong country at the wrong time of history so i think we have the answer to our first big question is the drone targeted killing program legal under u s and or international law and i think the answer is clearly no because it's not under the justifications that even the small justifications that the administration has provided and what had me rewriting this report has taught just this morning is that just over the weekend pakistani court has agreed with that assessment in a ruling issued just four days ago last thursday in a lawsuit against the cia brought by the family of a victim of a drone strike the push our high court declared that don't this is in pakistan the push our high court declared the drone strikes are quote criminal offenses which end quote which constitute quote a war crime and quote and are a quote blatant violation of basic human rights and quote this from the high court in pakistan the judge chief justice dosed mohammad khan also said in his ruling that drone strikes were illegal would be illegal even if senior pakistani officials secretly consent to the strikes so the wink in the nudge i talked about between the cia and i s i the beginning doesn't do a thing to change the illegality of these strikes the newly elected prime minister of pakistan just elected this week and i was sharif has consistently opposed the us drone strikes we can hope that he will follow through on his campaign promises because we know how that works out but we can hope he'll follow through on the campaign promise to end the practice once he takes office at least in pakistan armed with such a powerful high court decision our second major questions we put out in the publicity is is it moral is it the right thing to get do whatever your definition of morality is well to me the signature strikes answer that question for is quite clearly it doesn't seem to me that killing an unknown person assassinating them from thousands of feet in the air not even knowing their name their history anything about them can be morally justified by claiming a duty to protect our own innocent civilians it's reckless slaughter but let me add a couple more factors about the program on this morality where both of these issues come from an excellent report put together by members of the international human and conflict resolution clinic at stanford law school and working with the global justice clinic at new york university's school of law and they put out a report last year it's titled living under drones and it's available online at living under drones dot org and i urge you to read it it's it's a long well documented report living under drones dot org for now before you read it let me just point to a couple of their findings from several investigative trips they made to pakistan to study the drone war they went there and they talked to the people on the ground one of the few to do that and they were very careful in their documentation first and most disturbing their report euphemistically called double tap don't drone strikes a double tap comes after a drone strike it's been made on a target the drones linger in the air in the area and the operators back in the suburbs in syracuse new york are watching the cameras and they wait until the rescuers appear on the scene to try to recover any injured any who aren't dead or just the bodies of the killed and the launch another missile the rescuers are there that's the double tap this is the government term the military term double tap you're killing emergency response personnel this is really disturbing i remember back in the seventy's and eighty's when bombings of abortion clinics started as a tactic and there was one in particular bomber he was the guy that also did the  the olympics and was on the run for a couple of years he started doing this kind of tactic where he'd set a bomb into an abortion clinic set on a timer and there was a second bomb set to go off fifteen minutes later for when the ambulances arrived and it would blow up the ambulances and it was universally condemned by every person in this country as a barbaric tactic that is exactly what we're doing in pakistan right now and it's exactly what we are doing the main point of living under drones is this this is the more important part more important than the double tap the long drone war has utterly altered everyday life in western pakistan utterly altered every day life the drones are nearly always overhead somewhere you can hear him you're out in the street and you hear the drones no one can know when or if a strike will come people in the region every single one of the men women children old young live in daily fear of the drones and it's absolutely disrupted and distorted their life and their society a great number of parents no longer even send their children to school because they fear a drone strike will happen while they're on the way to school on the way home so they just keep them home funerals and weddings are pretty much being curtailed a large gathering of people signature strike they know about signature strikes so they no longer gather for weddings they no longer gather for funerals it is destroyed their society insured what this living under drones report tells his is that our country's drone policy in pakistan constitutes a campaign a prolonged and unrelenting terror on the civilian population of western pakistan that what we want as citizens to fight terror with terror i think that answers the second question beyond any doubt and so the drone war is neither legal nor moral what do we do  well certainly we need to make discussion of the drone war much more public than is today it ministration remain silent we need to demand that the administration go before congress and explain in full detail everything about the program and our congress people have to make this demand they can't sit around and hold a hearing and not have anybody who knows about the drone program declined to come there are representatives they need to go and sell how targets are selected who has the authority to order a drone strike it doesn't go to the top anymore individual cia agents have the authority to order the assassination of the lower signature strikes they need to tell us how signature strikes and double tap it can be legally justified they've gotta come clean about it we need to make that demand loud and clear beyond a broad demand for information and for debate however there is an opportunity for some concrete action we can take we can demand the congress repeal the authorization for the use of military force that remains at the heart of everything at the heart of it all the authorization to use military force which authorized the invasion of afghanistan back in two thousand and one twelve years ago continues to provide the basis for the entire ongoing and apparently never ending war on terror in whatever form it takes drone for warfare or whatever that's the authorization that bush claims that's the authorization that obama unabashedly claims to be carrying out this program laws coming up on its twelfth anniversary this fall the bush administration used to justify everything from wiretapping u s citizens to guantanamo to the grounding rounding up of arab americans by the bus load they used to justify their clearly illegal invasion of iraq which rises to the level of being the ultimate war crime a war of aggression and now the obama administration continues to use the authorization to use military force to use it to justify an illegal immoral and secret war on the people of the middle east representative barbara lee of berkeley has introduced the necessary legislation to repeal the a un if it's h r one ninety eight demand that your representative co sponsor that legislation it's time this war was repealed our country's decade plus war on terror or long war or whatever you want to call it has wreaked havoc death and destruction and far too many innocent people i believe it i also wreaking havoc in destruction on our own society the quality of our own lives our civil liberties our nominal democracy and the worst price to pay it's killing and destroying our humanity it's time to end this war thank