Drones, drones, everywhere drones. For a few weeks, clusters of drones of unknown provenance were recently seen flying in the skies above New Jersey. Local, state, and federal authorities claimed that they did not know whose drones they were. The expression “baseless conspiracy theory” saw an uptick in usage once again as some in the media scoffed at the proliferating hypotheses about what was going on. Incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump, opined that the machines should be shot down, but the Joe Biden administration did not agree, lending significant support to the simplest hypothesis of them all: that the drones have been used by the government itself for whatever its purposes may be. Having once recognized this very real possibility, Trump cryptically intoned, “Something strange is going on. For some reason, they don’t want to tell the people.”
State officials, spurred by their constituents, got to work attempting to find ways to halt the drones overhead, suggesting that, if the executive branch would not itself prevent certain unnameable rogue government departments from violating the Posse Comitatus Act, then at least by asserting the sub-federal authority enjoyed by states, it would be possible to stop whoever was behind whatever the operation may have been. New Jersey is not Nordstream, which U.S. citizens were quite willing to forget about and pretend never happened, despite in all likelihood having paid for the terrorist act of sabotage.
On December 19, 2024, the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) issued a one-month ban on the flying of UAVs over swaths of New Jersey, declaring the areas to be “national defense airspace,” and oddly claiming that “deadly force” could be deployed in response to violations of the ban. It is unclear what the use of “deadly force” against inanimate machines might mean, but it ominously suggests that the persons behind the drones might be subject to summary execution. Or perhaps the reference to “deadly force” was just part of a cover story composed in order to dispel the most plausible available hypothesis, undoubtedly made even more popular by Trump’s pronouncement that, “The government knows what is happening.” Having himself been the object of attempted assassinations by figures with rather bizarre back stories and curious connections, Trump understandably canceled a planned trip to New Jersey. The terrifying truth is that, with the advent of clusters of weaponized drones the size of insects, there really is nowhere and no way to hide from a determined killer with access to the latest and greatest lethal technologies developed by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—fully funded by U.S. taxpayers).
Regardless of who may have launched the mysterious drones, the implication for U.S. citizens is that at long last they have been subjected to the specter of insecurity and danger posed by the hovering overhead of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which may or may not bear lethal payloads, and which may or may not be monitoring the movements of specific targets, whose names may or may not be found on government “kill don’t capture” lists.
Millions of persons, in a variety of places throughout the Middle East and Africa, have been subjected to this unsettling experience for most of the twenty-first century, as the U.S. government has acted with blithe impunity to spy on and then execute suspected terrorists without warning, much less indictment or trial, along with any hapless persons who happened to have been located near the targets. Thousands of the alleged terrorist suspects sniped by remote control were living in civil society, outside areas of active hostilities, at the time of their deaths.
Many of the names of the people destroyed in drone strikes throughout the Global War on Terror were not known by their killers. And yet the suspects, identified as such on the basis of circumstantial evidence, were deemed sufficiently dangerous to the people of the United States to warrant erasing them from the face of the Earth. In a Barack Obama administration White Paper, the peculiar legal rationale drafted by Attorney General Eric Holder in defending the government’s decision to execute even U.S. citizens located abroad, such as Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, was revealed to be that such targets allegedly posed imminent, though not necessarily immediate, threats.
The criterion of “imminent danger” is so broad and so vague as to permit the targeting of anyone anywhere, because every able-bodied person is potentially capable of harboring potentially dangerous ideas which could possibly be acted on sometime in the future. The inherent tyranny of a government which grants itself the prerogative to kill anyone it wants anywhere it wants and for any reason which it regards as sufficient should be obvious to the citizens of a democratic republic. Unfortunately, through a vigorous pro-war propaganda program promoting military intervention wherever and whenever possible, most of the populace has been hoodwinked into accepting what is tantamount to the monarchic or divine right of kings conferred upon democratically elected leaders and their appointees by themselves.
Among critical thinkers such as Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), the summary execution of U.S. citizens abroad raised the question whether the government would be using lethal drones to execute suspects such as Anwar al-Awlaki if they happened to be located in the homeland. In 2013, Senator Paul pressed this question in a thirteen-hour filibuster against the confirmation of incoming CIA director John Brennan. Eventually, Attorney General Eric Holder was forced to acknowledge that the federal government does not in fact possess the authority to kill citizens in the homeland without indictment or trial who are not directly engaged in the physical endangerment of others. Such persons must be captured and allowed to stand trial for whatever their alleged crimes are claimed by the government to be. Here is Holder’s verbatim reply to Senator Paul:
“Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil? The answer is no.”
The wording of Holder’s response was disconcerting in that it failed to explain why Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman were executed in Yemen, given that neither of them was actively endangering anyone, whether foreigners or U.S. citizens, at the time of the missile strikes. They certainly were not “engaged in combat on American soil.” Why, then, was Anwar al-Awlaki killed rather than captured and made to stand trial in a U.S. court of law? That capture was “infeasible” is absurd, given that the elder Al-Awlaki had already been in a Yemeni prison, from which he was released, at the U.S. government’s request, and then hunted down and killed.1more details about the case of Anwar al-Awlaki and the plight of people living under drones throughout the twenty-first century can be found in We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age.
Drones of unknown provenance were also sighted recently in the skies above Ramstein Air Force base in Germany, which for years has been a hub of logistics and analysis for missile strikes launched from Predator and Reaper drones. Understandably, Ramstein employees have been troubled by the machines hovering above their heads, given that, if nothing else, they do know that they are not being controlled by themselves. They certainly do not know what the human intention behind such drones could be. Have they been used for surveillance, to collect intelligence in preparation for a larger attack? No one at Ramstein appears to know.
Americans already learned, on September 11, 2001, that seemingly innocuous flying objects, such as commercial passenger aircraft, can be repurposed into deadly weapons. Somehow, however, the implementation of a nonstop drone killing machine has not been recognized by the citizens paying for it as a profound source of terror to the residents of other countries living under drones. People in the United States have largely failed to appreciate the degree to which the very same type of terror instilled in the populace on 9/11, which persisted for months thereafter, has been directly caused by the U.S. government through its persistent use of lethal drones throughout the Middle East and Africa.
In communities thought to be rich in terrorist targets, such as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, NGOs reported that the children living there expressed their marked preference for cloudy days, as no drones were present when the skies above were overcast. Having seen the potential for death and destruction which the machines buzzing through blue skies posed, the children felt much safer to go out and play on days when, because of the cloud cover, lethal drones were not being deployed.
The horror story underway in Gaza strip, with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu killing many thousands of persons in pursuit of a much smaller number of Hamas members responsible for attacks against Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023, has involved a particularly intense dose of the uncertainty which some communities in New Jersey have now experienced. Since drones hovering above New Jersey have not yet been used to kill anyone—at least as far as we know—it is not nearly so terrifying for the people on the ground as is the experience of the Palestinians in Gaza or the people of Lebanon, who are acutely aware that the Israelis will not hesitate to launch missile strikes on schools, mosques, hospitals, and refugee camps. Indeed, the Israeli government has gone so far as to kill some of the very hostages serving as the pretext for what has become its retaliatory rampage.
Uncertainty is inherently stressful, but the knowledge that flying objects of unknown provenance may be used to kill people in the future is arguably even worse. Now that, thanks to Benjamin Netanyahu, most everyone is finally aware of the capacity of drones to wreak death and destruction, it is difficult to understand why anyone would support causing this sort of psychic anguish in their fellow human beings. Sadly, we know from easy to galvanize support for bombing campaigns that many U.S. citizens are not bothered in the least by the hypocrisy involved in decrying the flying of potentially menacing drones above their own heads while cheering it on in other lands.
The very same extrajudicial use of lethal force against persons labeled enemies by their killers was adopted by Al Qaeda when it plotted to destroy U.S. citizens thought to be complicit in their government’s war crimes abroad. It involved no mean measure of irony, then, when the U.S. government itself opted to execute suspected terrorists without indictment or trial in emulation of the very members of Al Qaeda whose crimes served as the pretext for what became the seemingly interminable Global War on Terror. The difference between the two cases is that a nation state has stable institutions and processes and procedures in place which make it possible to capture and hold accountable suspects rather than dispatching them and decreeing, not demonstrating, them to be guilty of their alleged crimes.
Most Westerners never recognized the similarity between what Al Qaeda did on September 11, 2001, and what the U.S. government subsequently proceeded to do because the Pentagon has largely controlled the narrative surrounding its killing missions. The psychological effects of the drone campaigns on the people on the ground have been altogether ignored, and sanguine post-strike reports have led citizens in the West to believe that many terrorists and hardly any civilians were slaughtered in pursuit of Al Qaeda.
Very few of the U.S. government’s versions of its post-strike stories have been challenged by the mainstream media, even though the same named targets were reported by the press as killed on different occasions, implying that someone else must have been killed in their stead in all but one of the reported cases. (This finding was shared by The Guardian in 2014 based on data collected by the NGO Reprieve.) Now that the U.S. government has ended its mission in Afghanistan, we have even stronger grounds than before for believing that many of the people incinerated by drone-delivered missiles throughout the Global War on Terror were not in fact terrorists.
Indeed, the case of Zemari Ahmadi should have decisively demonstrated to any doubters that the U.S. government reflexively claims another victory in its war on terror whenever it launches a missile from a drone with people at its receiving end. The initial Pentagon pronouncement that its drone strike in Kabul on August 29, 2021, was “righteous” had to be retracted when it emerged through independent investigations on the ground that, in fact, the target had been employed by a California-based NGO (unbelievably enough) and had never been on anyone’s hit list, not as a possible al-Qaeda associate, nor even as a person of interest, until the very day when he was killed. The alleged “proof” that the target was a dangerous terrorist plotting an attack on Kabul airport consisted in the fact that he drove a white Toyota Corolla and was running errands around town on the day of his assassination.
Given the recent mysterious drone sightings above Ramstein Air Force base in Germany, it seems fair to say that the hens have come home to roost—or, if you prefer: we reap what we sow—for it was none other than the U.S. government which paved the way for the acquisition of UAVs by many governments, which then predictably spread throughout the world. It was the U.S. government itself which unilaterally decreed that the weaponized drones could be used to kill anyone anywhere identified as a threat to national security from behind closed doors by small groups of anonymous analysts, for reasons never disclosed to the citizens who have been paying for all of the carnage.
New Jersey is obviously not a war zone. Through a twisted use of rebranding and redefinition, however, the U.S. government has for years maintained that targets located outside areas of active hostilities are fair game for elimination, even when they pose no direct danger to anyone at the time of their deaths, and even though their killers, drone operators and analysts often located thousands of miles away from the victims, are never in any sense endangered by them.
Given what happened to the Al-Awlakis, we have rational grounds for wondering whether there may be suspicious persons, thought to be concocting terrorist plots, located in New Jersey. Whether the unknown drones were being run by the U.S. government or someone else, they certainly instilled fear in people on the ground. One thing is clear: because the U.S. government has assumed such a sweeping license to kill with impunity, U.S. leaders will be unable effectively to protest when other nations and groups assert their own right to emulate the drone killers and insist that the persons on their own hit lists are fair game for targeting.
All that it takes is for someone somewhere in a position of self-proclaimed political authority to decree them to be posing an “imminent” threat, to claim that they may possibly be plotting future potential terrorist attacks and that it is “infeasible” to capture him. According to the barbaric precedent set by the United States, no jurisprudence is needed, nor publicly accessible evidence, provided only that the persons targeted are not located in the homeland of the officials who wish to eliminate them. Well, except in the case of Israel, where Palestinians have been executed without indictment or trial for decades.
It is arguable, in fact, that one of the reasons why U.S. leaders have been so hesitant to stand up to Prime Minister Netanyahu as he massacres thousands of obviously innocent people is that he is essentially doing what the U.S. government has done since the beginning of the Global War on Terror. By regarding Gaza strip as a quasi-state distinct from Israel, it may seem perfectly acceptable for the government to treat the Gazans just as the people of FATA were treated by the U.S. government.
Any person in New Jersey who lamented the roving above their own heads of the unknown drones should, in consistency, oppose the same practice abroad. But, alas, the perennial “American exceptionalism” propaganda trope has been so successfully insinuated into the psyche of the populace, that they do not see this abject contradiction as problematic at all. All things being equal, we should treat people the same. The American exceptionalist, however, prides himself on insisting that his government has a special burden to bear.
The price to be paid for safeguarding “democracy and liberty” is accepted by many to be the lives of non-Americans who happen to inhabit areas regarded as fair game for bombing by U.S. military and political elites. The very same sort of “exceptionalism” logic is assumed by the Israel First crowd, who see no problem whatsoever with slaughtering thousands of entirely innocent children, if that is what the government claims must be done in order to expunge Hamas from the land. The most zealous supporters of Netanyahu appear to believe that because Jews were subjected to the horror of the Holocaust, this implies that everything is permitted to the Israelis. Extremists have claimed that all Palestinians are supporters of Hamas, which defies any ordinary conception of what constitutes support, and truly stretches credulity when children who do not even know what or who Hamas is are lumped into the category of “fair game” for bombing.
Yet even what appear to be otherwise reasonable people can be seen brushing to one side as only so much regrettable “collateral damage” the corpses scattered among the rubble after missile strikes in densely populated neighborhoods and other sites traditionally regarded as “off limits.” Among those who acknowledge that children can in no way be said to support Hamas, being ignorant of what it is and what it has done, the rationalization persists that even the highly indiscriminate bombing of mosques, hospitals, schools, refugee camps, etc., is permissible because “the evil enemy” (albeit a relatively small proportion of the population) is using civilians as shields. From this it is said to follow that bombing places thought to harbor Hamas members is obviously permissible, no matter how many other people will be destroyed in the process.
If terrorism is the arbitrary threat of death against innocent persons, then the hovering above the heads of anyone, whether in the United States or abroad, of potentially deleterious flying objects already known to be adaptable into killing machines, should be banned. In fact, according to the logic of the drone warriors themselves, their very own implements of homicide should be fair game for targeting, since they obviously pose imminent threats to the people over whose heads they fly. Pro-liberty folk may balk at the suggestion that potentially deleterious objects such as unmanned aircraft should be banned from the skies, but it is important to recognize that this case differs significantly from that of the concealed carry of firearms for reasons of self-defense.
Drones in the skies above are potentially menacing to everyone. Anyone could be killed with the push of a button by some anonymous person somewhere who has decided that his target should die. Drones permitted to run amok in this way would permit a massive expansion of killing with impunity by not only members of organized (non-governmental) crime but also alleged vigilante killers such as Luigi Mangioni, or whoever it was who apparently assessed that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved to die and then proceeded to murder him.
