i got to see that the contest up close and personal when we were essentially debating whether or not we were going to try to assassinate and i use that term carefully osama bin laden in afghanistan with a predator drone that was over flying him and surviving on him or at least we had good evidence to believe it was him we were seventy eighty percent certain we couldn't do it because at that point we had not armed the predator once nine eleven occurred we  it to armed predator and even develop other drones that could be lethal it's a technology that can be used technologies that can be used will be used more often than not but it's here with us right now and we need the rules  we need the regulations we need the precedents we need the protocols we need the international domestic law and we need to practice that goes along with what we anticipate being the future we haven't used them and not armed in a lethal capacity until after the september eleventh two thousand and one attacks and the reason for that were kind of israel sound proof of concept so sad that it really was possible to be militarily useful so the u s has used in the so called war on terror both within afghanistan to reach remote areas that the u s otherwise would not be able to project military force that's where it began and the u s took existing technologies so they took predator and reaper drones planes that were used for intelligence and surveillance and armed them with off the shelf missile technology to if they had so they basically pared hellfire missiles to reaper and predator drones and that's the lethal drone technology that the u s has today other countries have have different variants of that technology but they're basically taking off the shelf technology for remotely piloted intelligence and surveillance vehicles and putting different missile technology on them so the u s has used them primarily in the war zones in afghanistan and then also has used them outside of war zones and this is perhaps the area that's most troubling when we look at both the mor the legal concerns has used them outside of war zones in somalia in libya in in yemen and pakistan and other places  so civilian deaths are very controversial the proponents of drones say that these technologies using lethal technologies are on these remotely piloted vehicles that it is more humane and more able to discriminate and to decrease civilian deaths but that's very controversial because there's not a lot of transparency and accountability about the number of these strikes and there's also great controversy about how you count civilian deaths so the number that we have and terms of the number of deaths overall the probably the best number was given unintentionally in tw republican senator lindsey graham republican from south carolina and he revealed that there'd been forty seven hundred over forty seven hundred deaths from drone strikes the obama administration gave a much lower number in july of this past year july two thousand and sixteen and they said they'd been twenty five hundred deaths of drone strikes outside of of battlefield so outside of afghanistan and iraq would be the most likely  administration claims that very very few of those outside battlefield deaths from drones were to civilians so they claim a number of between sixty four and one hundred sixteen but almost all  external sources say that number is a fantasy and the reason for that is how you determine your targets and how you count whether someone was a combatant or not there many reports from people who were part of the program from from whistleblowers those who participated in the program that one of the main ways in which folks are targeted are through targeting the suspicious activities and not through targeting unnamed personalities strike unnamed person but through what's called signature strikes so doing reconnaissance saying look does this activity  that we're seeing add up to what we think is suspicious behavior therefore we think this is a military combatant who we could legally and morally strike more than half of the majority of the strikes have been against signature strikes us folks that we've dealt name we don't have a particular person in mind but by the few havior it seems to be suspicious they and the administration is counting on most is my region my community my country first absolutely not i think the insecurity the level of insecurity not in just a not part of the world but i think it on the globe has increased resonance being said by our use of usa the or very frightening to contemplate we have eighty six countries in the world right now who have you aby technology we have nineteen countries that have lethal u a b technology and the capability to use it we have nine countries who have used it and they include the united states the united kingdom nigeria iraq iran and another couple of countries there is not a single technology of warfare in the history of warfare which has been adopted and used by others and ultimately used against the hedge mn itself whether that hedge would be roma a syria britain or whatever empower our has used it in the past it will happen we will have it used against us that's why it's so dangerous to be setting these precedents of for example flying across borders with countries with whom you're not at war and killing people what's the top stop china from doing the same thing what's to stop russia from doing the same thing and the political regime of these u a v's around the world the number of countries that have drawn technologies is increasing every day the low number is fifty others are saying we're up to about seventy five or eighty today many countries have drone technology for a lots of purposes for border control for environmental purposes for intelligence reconnaissance surveillance for humanitarian purposes but then arming those drones kind of going along the path of the united states to taking the technology that they had developed for other purposes and giving them the lethal arm technology more and more countries are are passing that threshold so probably by the time this this video is produced the number will be even greater and there's really no  there's no limits to that number there's one hundred ninety three countries in the world today and many many more than seventy five to eighty that currently have them could get armed drones because these are widely available commercial technology there's not restrictions in the sale of these technologies so they're very easy to buy to purchase in the marketplace or to develop to add on munitions to your existing drone technology so there's really no upper limit on that and of course the very the big concern is what are the numbers of non state actors that have lethal drugs we know that all the four types of non state actors so terrorist groups and international criminal cartels the illegal non state actors and non governmental actors and multinational corporations the legal non state actors we know that all four of these types of non state actors have drones and are using drones in their in their business operations so humanitarian groups use them for surveillance added nations uses them to try to record war crimes crimes against humanity genocide to track refugee flows there's lots of humanitarian uses for this remotely piloted vehicles the commercials on google amazon they all want the same day delivery so they are all all in on developing drone technology for commercial purposes drug lords are already using drones to deliver their drug contraband so international criminal cartels are already using them we do need to develop new international law as well as new domestic law governing the use of drones we need that for non lethal drones because we're expanding the use of these new technologies across commercial sectors to humanitarian sectors across all of these then use why foresman so we need are trying to scramble to keep up with the technology to develop new laws for how these drones will be used for legal commercial humanitarian law enforcement purposes the same is true of drones used in lethal warfare contexts some would argue for a total ban on drones others would argue for a limitation on the use of drones either of those are really important ways to go you could argue for a total ban because the ways they have been currently used have been violating both law and mor l constraints or you could argue that at least there should be a radically curtailed and limited use of drones and put some new laws in place that would govern th either one of those paths would be better than what we have now which is really the wild west here is why the u s as the leader in the use of lethal drones needs to become a leader in law and international law and domestic law governing the use of drones right now the proponents of drones have been looking at it as this is only in the u s interest to expand the use of these new technologies thinking that only the united states could use these technologies for our political military or even economic game other actors can use these technologies against us and if we want to only have that the violence that could be done against us by these new technologies we need to very seriously think about what these laws  curtailing the use of lethal drugs should be and we need to be at the forefront of advancing new legal safeguards regarding the use  because we're told runs are operated by the cia they are not transparent and they are not discussed and debated in congress so one measure that the friends committee on national legislation has promoted is to have it to promote transparency to get congress to report on this and having the department of defense actually oversee this program as opposed to the central intelligence agency would be one step that could be taken for greater transparency having that level of greater transparency we believe would at least bring this program out into the open and allow for a greater scrutiny by the public a greater understanding by the public about this tool that the millet that at this point that the country is using through our intelligence operations as opposed to a military solution and you know we've seen that as as  there is there's increasing data and information about how conflicts can be resolved nonviolently and so i think thinking about how do we incorporate that knowledge into  practice into how what our public policies are is something that we believe this is essential way for us to address violent conflict and to avert the use of lethal drones as what  some people may see as a solution in fact it is not a solution it is exacerbating extremist behavior we believe i think that americans underestimate the impact that drone strikes have abroad not in terms of people who are killed  or property damage but the political and psychological impact that drone strikes have had on communities where drones have been used and the failure to disclose information to the american public when people in yemen people in pakistan are living the experience of drones creates a very discordant situation ask yemeni civilian if there was a drone strike in his or her village and they can point to the rubble ask an american and they have no idea and their own government won't disclose it so i think that alone is problematic i also think that the american public can't properly engage as a policy matter with the use of drones if the american public doesn't have information about where when and why they're being used just as a matter of good democracy to begin with the american public needs to have information about what its government is doing in order to engage with it i think one of the really tragic things in the many years post nine eleven now that we've experienced has been a narrative coming from the government that citizens sort of have to accept at face value and can't engage with that narrative is often not accurate so if the narrative is drone strikes are necessary people criminals are being killed workers are being killed people who might have committed crimes against american citizens are being killed that's information the public is fed by the government but the public has no way to challenge that has no way to know if it's accurate has no way to determine whether even if accurate it's a good use of public resources or or what the secondary impacts are of drone strikes abroad a good governance democracy perspective i think that information is essential and as a legal matter i think it's essential i think that american citizens need to know what their government is doing i think the global citizen so this is a great need to know how targeted killings are taking place how these weapons are being used so that there can be a better public conversation about them i think that the drone program just like any other national security program should reflect democratic consent to this should be a base of democratic consent for a policy like that especially a policy that is so consequential and the secrecy that surrounds the drone campaign means that there's a disconnect between what americans know and what the government's actually doing and you know i think that there are programs national security programs so the government is able to carry out only because of secrecy that was true of the interrogation programs under the bush administration litigation the obama administration released a little more information more information got out from journalists who were able to visit yemen and somalia and when more information got out the government was forced to change its policies and then it narrowed the policies at least at the margins in may of two thousand and thirteen the obama administration imposed presidential policy guidance that was intended to narrow the drone campaign in some respects regularize it make sure that civilian casualties were or at least make an effort to minimize civilian casualties and you know i don't think those changes were it but those changes were made possible by transparency can lower the threshold for the use of lethal force there's no risk of american blood being shed in most cases unless there's boots on the ground u ground this is not traditional war this is you know you're ten thousand miles away you're totally immune from any counter attack or any measures to be used against you and you're watching people often for a period of time who are at a funeral who are at a party who are walking down the street who are coming out of a house or whatever and suddenly all the private area come together as it were and you're told to pull the trigger and you not only watched it help our strike and you watch the explosion but oftentimes you monitor the aftermath the person crawling away with his leg missing the woman bleeding to dead on the alley as you watch and so forth is a different kind of warfare and frankly i wouldn't have anything to do with this kind of war  the catholic church which has really wrestled with the question of the use of force or the questions of war and peace from the very beginning right the church in its earliest time you know  heavily on the nonviolence tradition tradition flowing directly from the gospel from from jesus own example of turn the of the cheek not a passive resistance to evil but actually an active resistance to evil but one that never s was nonviolent but as the church as christianity grew and members of the church took on the responsibility to protect innocent civilians to protect from you know invasions that were coming in from the outside the church then develop a teaching on the just use of force the use of force to protect the use of force under very strict moral conditions and this was an attempt to  reconcile the commitment to love with a commitment to protect innocent human life out of that same motivation of love and so under you know seeing augustan in them and then later st thomas aquinas the catholic church developed a whole tradition of teaching on the just use of force or what is commonly called just war but i prefer to call just use of force because often just war is misinterpreted war is never a good thing it's never a sometimes it's an tolerated evil within our moral system and of course even within the just war tradition there's a commitment to always use nonviolence first that you have to exhaust every other nonviolent means of resolving a conflict first and that the use of force is always a last resort but if a city is located near a border no matter what their intent is then the citizens of that city are allowed to go out with weapons to defend themselves invaders intent was to take jewish lawyers or if they engaged in battle with the city or laid siege to it without stating any specific intention then my mum as teachers we must wage war against them so go by the brought by the way so i don't have to worry about service laws everyone everyone is in on that to defend themselves so the question is is there a right to self defense in jewish law and jewish tradition so the doesn't speak about explicitly a right to defense for a community just for individuals so in the beginning of chapter twenty two of exodus it speaks about someone invades one's house through a tunnel the owner of that house can defend himself against that person and if it says it's at night when it's not clear what the intent is then you can even take that person's life in that you know order to defend yourself so there is a there is a commandment to defend oneself for individuals but there's no broader commandment for a community to defend themselves and so because of that and the torah just took on this in the later rabbis took on this idea that well broadly speaking there is a right to self defense and but one must ascertain the intent of what they're if their intent is to takes clearly to take people's life saying you have every right to defend yourself and even are in the same position there is a consensus that all of us have same concerns well the koran tells us that we should go to law on also very clearly talks about the people with whom you are fighting and you have to you have to make sure that there is not an intended casualties one of the things that's happened in the united states especially is that the lie about warfare used to be quite clear when the congress declared war we were at war when it didn't declare we weren't but now without congress has not declared gaza you know that iraq syria you know the list goes on almost one hundred percent of the victims in targets are muslims you know the methodist church believe that war is incompatible with the teachings of jesus christ what does it mean to be a global church and if we're growing church we just don't look at c look at how the united methodist who live in us here but you also look at it and how people who are global and see it so we seeing the devastating impact of wars not just on us troops in families but also