Fallout reaches the ivory tower
ON HOT battlefields and in coolly targeted killings, America has regularly used armed drones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and elsewhere for a decade and a half. In discussing drone strikes, it is easy to fall into abstraction. Take a speech by Harold Koh to the Oxford Union in 2013, after he'd left his position as the State Department's top lawyer: “Because drone technology is highly precise, if properly controlled, it could be more lawful and more consistent with human rights and humanitarian law than the alternatives.”
High precision sounds nice—and drone strikes are indeed more precise than the bombing technologies they have displaced. But they can still miss their target. An attack near the village of Datta Khel in North Wazirstan in 2010, for example, accidentally killed 42 people. "Body parts were scattered for hundreds of yards, and had to be collected up in sacks," writes Chris Woods, a former BBC Panorama producer and investigative journalist, in his excellent new book, "Sudden Justice: America's Secret Drone Wars”. Mr Woods offers plenty of other examples of the innocent victims of drone attacks, and highlights the many ways drone pilots and sensor operators, who control Predator and Reaper drones from bases in the United States, struggle to do their jobs well and ethically.
As the State Department’s legal advisor, Mr Koh was one of the principle government lawyers responsible for crafting legal theories that reconciled American policy with international law. He was reportedly responsible for reviewing the evidence implicating Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, in al-Qaeda plots, paving the way for an American drone strike that killed him and at least four other senior operatives in Yemen in 2011.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/04/drone-strikes-and-international-law
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