The U.S. government has been using unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), or lethal drones, to dispatch terrorist suspects with impunity for most of the twenty-first century. Committees of analysts and bureaucrats determine, based on HUMINT (human intelligence, or tips from bribed informants) and SIGINT (signals intelligence, or drone video footage and cellphone data), that a person in a land far away poses a threat to U.S. interests. It matters not that there are no soldiers on the ground for him to kill, nor that he is unarmed, nor that he is surrounded by obviously innocent family members and neighbors. It matters not that he may not even possess a passport and is too poor to make it to American shores. The decision is made to place the person on a secret “kill list” (whether or not his name is known by his eventual killers) because the suspect’s apprehension is said to be infeasible, and he has been deemed to pose an imminent, albeit not immediate, threat.

An order is transmitted to a team of drone and laser operators sequestered in a hermetically sealed bunker located in a remote place far from what will be the site of bombing. A missile is launched; the suspect is annihilated; the site where he was residing is severely damaged, if not cratered; and other persons in the vicinity are killed, maimed, and left bereft. At the conclusion of this chain of events, government spokespersons confidently pronounce that they have carried out yet another “righteous strike,” protecting good people in the homeland from evil terrorists abroad. But if terrorism is the arbitrary threat of death against innocent people, then every civilian living in the vicinity of U.S. drone strikes, everyone forced to endure the humming of UCAVs above their head, has been terrorized.

Thousands of alleged terrorist suspects have been killed outside areas of active hostilities, in countries with which the United States is not officially at war, including Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and beyond. This shocking paradigm of state-perpetrated serial killing has become so perfunctorily accepted by now that U.S. citizens barely registered the atrocity of August 29, 2021, when President Joe Biden’s administration massacred ten innocent persons in Kabul, Afghanistan, based on intelligence that a “bad guy” was driving a white Toyota Corolla. Zemari Ahmadi drove around town on his last day of life, visiting family and colleagues, and carrying bottles of water and laptops in his car, all of which was interpreted by those viewing the films of his movements (and looking to “get some!”) as evidence that he was about to carry out a major attack on Kabul airport. Two days earlier, the suspect had not even been on the U.S. military’s radar, nor listed as a person of interest by any U.S. agency.

“Mistakes were made!” but no one was held accountable. Pentagon officials, when presented with unassailable evidence that they had killed an NGO worker and nine other innocent persons, including seven children, concluded on the basis of their internal investigation that procedures were correctly followed by the personnel involved. In other words, incinerating suspects on the basis of purely circumstantial evidence is perfectly acceptable, according to the military, acting on behalf of the U.S. government, under authorization of the commander-in-chief, the U.S. president.

It would be nice to be able to believe that the August 2021 catastrophe in Kabul was a one-off, or at least rare, but we know from the Collateral Murder video shared with the world by Wikileaks that the U.S. military also regards the targeting of persons depicted in blurry film footage as carrying things (in that case, tripods and cameras) which look like they might be weapons, as a perfectly acceptable basis for ending their lives. The Pentagon’s investigation of the slaying of Reuters journalists in New Baghdad, Iraq, on July 12, 2007, predictably concluded that the soldiers who fired on the victims from an Apache helicopter hovering above had done nothing wrong, having followed proper protocol before terminating with extreme prejudice yet another group of entirely innocent persons.

The list of similar such incidents, usually involving the deployment of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), or lethal drones, to obliterate wedding parties, funeral processions, community jirgas, “suspicious” groups assembled for unknown reasons, a grandmother picking okra in her family’s field, etc., is too long to review here. All involved the slaughter of innocent people on the basis of purely circumstantial evidence.

Fast forward to 2025, when the Trump administration is in the process of arresting and spiriting away persons suspected of supporting Hamas in Israel. In the eyes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump, it suffices for foreign student protesters such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk to criticize what is being done to the people of Gaza in order to be convicted of sympathizing with Hamas terrorists. Given the history of the Global War on Terror, and specifically the U.S. drone program, we should be very wary of what may happen next.

From “sympathy” to “association” is a short step down a slippery slope, as U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki learned when he came to be branded “evil” by President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism advisor and drone killing czar, John Brennan, and the decision was taken in one of the terrible Terror Tuesday meetings to execute the suspect in 2011 without indictment, much less trial. No matter that Al-Awlaki had himself spoken out eloquently against the crimes of September 11, 2001:

“My worry is that because of this conflict, the views of Osama bin Laden will become appealing to some of the population of the Muslim world. Never in the past were there any demonstrations raising the picture of Osama bin Laden—it has just happened now. So Osama bin Laden, who was considered to be an extremist, radical in his views, could end up becoming mainstream. That’s a very frightening thing, so the U.S. needs to be very careful and not have itself perceived as an enemy of Islam.” [Al Awlaki made this statement in an interview with National Geographic News on September 28, 2001.]

In an interview on October 31, 2001, by Ray Suarez for PBS, Anwar al-Awlaki further elaborated his criticism of the U.S. government and stressed his opposition (at that time) to violent retaliation:

“Our position needs to be reiterated, and needs to be very clear. The fact that the U.S. has administered the death and homicide of over 1 million civilians in Iraq, the fact that the U.S. is supporting the deaths and killing of thousands of Palestinians, does not justify the killing of one U.S. civilian in New York City or Washington, DC.”

According to the Obama administration, however, moderate Muslim cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki was radicalized between 2001 and 2011, having transmogrified into an operational leader of Al-Qaeda who posed an existential threat to the United States of America and, therefore, needed to be eternally silenced. That the primary goal in executing al-Awlaki was to suppress his critiques of U.S. foreign policy can be inferred from the fact that he was not allowed to stand trial in a U.S. court but rather assassinated, just as in the case of Osama bin Laden, who, too, might have been arrested but was instead killed.

After summarily executing U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, John Brennan undertook an assiduous campaign to erase from the internet all of the cleric’s extant words, including the texts cited above. No evidence of Al-Awlaki’s direct participation in any terrorist act was ever presented to the U.S. citizens who paid for his ruin. When FOIA documents on the case were finally released, all evidential bases for the execution had been blacked out on grounds of national security. Instead, the petitioners were told, in effect, “Trust us, we know what we’re doing.”

The case of Anwar al-Awlaki poses something of a Charybdis and Scylla for the administrators of the Global War on Terror. Assume, for the sake of argument, that they were right, and Al-Awlaki had been radicalized into an operational leader of Al Qaeda in the Peninsula. In that case, the radicalization of a formerly moderate Muslim cleric came about as a direct causal result of the U.S. government’s own disastrous and draconian policies, which led to the deaths and misery of millions of innocent people. We know that this happened to Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian doctor who perpetrated a suicide attack on Camp Chapman on December 30, 2009, because he left behind a videotape clearly explaining that he was retaliating against the U.S. government’s indiscriminate killing of innocent persons through the use of lethal drones.

The other possibility is that Anwar al-Awlaki remained an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy and became a vocal advocate of jihad as a “last resort” but never himself took part in any terrorist plot. If, in fact, al-Awlaki never participated directly in any terrorist act, then the U.S. government’s decision to silence him bears similarities to its persecution of antiwar critic and publisher Julian Assange, who was effectively discredited and muted for more than a decade.

That the range and frequency of terrorist acts and the radicalization of formerly nonviolent persons increased dramatically throughout the world as a direct result of the U.S. interventions and occupations is not to be mentioned and blithely ignored by officials such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who continue to sing the praises of lethality, as though homicide were some sort of silver bullet solution to conflict. But long before the August 29, 2021, drone strike which revealed to the world the sort of evidential basis taken to warrant the state execution of suspects located abroad, the very fact that Al Qaeda had spored and spread throughout the Middle East and Africa should have been a red flag for the citizens paying for the drone program, signaling that something was seriously awry. That, in fact, the U.S. government has no idea what it is doing.

The rebels seeking to establish a caliphate in Syria (remember the prisoners burned alive in cages?) were armed by the Obama administration, and likely assisted by the Biden administration in effecting the 2024 coup which removed President Bashar al-Assad from power. In this way, the long-coveted radical jihadist caliphate was not only established but upgraded from faction to nation state, all thanks to the provision of U.S. foreign aid.

Having effectively engineered the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which ousted a Russia-friendly president, the U.S. government proceeded to furnish hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to fuel the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, even while knowing that a nonnuclear power could never prevail against a nuclear power. Either the dispute would end at the negotiation table, or in a nuclear war involving much of the rest of the world as well. It was obvious from the very beginning that, even if every single able-bodied person in Ukraine were sent to the front lines to die, even if every single Russian soldier were expended as well, eventually there would be only a pile of conventional weapons on one side, and a nuclear arsenal on the other. As President Trump finally explained the situation to President Zelensky on February 28, 2025, in a rare but welcome moment of lucidity: “You don’t have the cards.”

Unfortunately, Trump’s campaign promise to end wars and make peace has been cast into serious doubt by his insistence on continuing to bomb the Houthis in Yemen, yet another country where the strife has been exacerbated by not only the provision of U.S. military aid, but also the use of weaponized drones to reduce suspects to dust since the dawning of the Drone Age. It was on November 3, 2002, that the George W. Bush administration used a drone to launch a missile on a vehicle driving down a rode in Yemen, leaving behind a pile of ashes and a mangled chassis. In the aftermath of that paradigm-shifting use of remote-control technology to kill suspects located outside any war zone, officials confidently pronounced that six terrorists had been eliminated from the face of the earth. The media and the populace, still reeling from what had happened on September 11, 2001, applauded the action, giving the government the green light to do even more. The rest is history.

Illegal assassination was most effectively rebranded as laudable “targeted killing” and “smart war” by President Obama, who holds the dubious distinction of having made intentional, premeditated homicide one of the proverbial “options on the table” in contending with refractory characters, provided only that the leader orders a missile strike launched from a drone rather than hiring a hitman. In 2016, President Trump inherited this capacity from Obama and proceeded to rain missiles all over the Middle East, going even so far as to boast on January 3, 2020, that the night before he had premeditatedly and quite intentionally ended the life of an Iranian general, Quasim Soleimani, who was located in Iraq at the time.

Unbeknownst to many people in the West, the blood bath in Israel did not begin on October 7, 2023, anymore than September 11, 2001, marked the beginning of strife in Iraq. Nonetheless, having been given the green light by the U.S. government, in addition to mounds of additional missiles, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proceeded to expand his war on the suffering people of Gaza to Lebanon, where he claimed that evil terrorists were also located, thus granting him the license to kill them along with anyone else who happened to be around at the time.

Hamas terrorists have been said to be hiding in all of the civilian structures bombed by Israel: schools, mosques, refugee camps, hospitals, and many residential neighborhoods. That the hostages serving as the alleged pretext for the military campaign have been sequestered in those very same places has not deterred Netanyahu in the least. There is indeed no limit to what can be characterized by state-perpetrators of mass homicide as “righteous strikes,” nor the toll of collateral damage, so long as analysts have assessed that “terrorists” (who are in fact suspects) are embedded there.

And now, nearly a quarter century after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the battle has finally been brought back to U.S. shores, with Trump administration officials siding with Netanyahu by incarcerating and deporting persons interpreted as Hamas sympathizers. Such individuals have dared to express horror at images of patients burned alive in hospitals and piles of mutilated children’s corpses dispersed among the rubble created as Netanyahu continues to raze Gaza in preparation for its sale as real estate, unbelievably enough, to developer Donald Trump. (Remind me again: Why do they hate us?)

Monarchic habits die hard, and since the dawning of the Drone Age, the U.S. government has claimed that a person deemed to be guilty on the basis of circumstantial evidence to which only the killers are privy may be summarily executed in the name of national defense. Citizens have already been executed in this way while located abroad. Moreover, the precedent for the use of robotic technology to eliminate citizens located on U.S. soil was arguably established by the case of Micah Johnson. Throughout the twenty-first century, the domain of what is said to be permissible state killing has steadily expanded under the faulty assumption that lethality is the best means of resolving conflict.

In reality, the paradigm of drone warfare so enthusiastically embraced by self-styled patriots who delusively regard themselves as “smart warriors” is empirically indistinguishable from the means of a tyrant incapable of defending his policies through the use of words. Instead of halting what critics regard as his objectionable practices or persuading those who disagree, the tyrant decrees: Off with their heads! None of this bodes well for the future of free people and republican societies, and we should not be surprised in the least to learn of cases where nonviolent persons, whether citizens or noncitizen residents, who express sympathy with the suffering people of Gaza are presumed guilty of associating with terrorists and “taken out” as well.