Did You Know?

1. The first recorded use of attack drones occurred on July 15, 1849 when the Habsburg Austrian Empire launched 200 pilotless balloons armed with bombs against the revolution-minded citizens of Venice. 

2. According to a July 18, 2013 survey, 61% of Americans supported drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Support spanned the political divide, including Republicans (69%), independents (60%), and Democrats (59%). 

3. The first targeted drone strike by the United States occurred on Feb. 4, 2002 in Afghanistan when a CIA Predator drone fired on a group they believed included Osama bin Laden. The targets, all killed, were civilians gathering scrap metal. 

4. The most common drone used for attack purposes, General Atomics' MQ-9 Reaper, has a range of 3,682 miles, an operational altitude of 50,000 ft, and a maximum flight time of 27 hours. 

5. Civilians accounted for 8-17% of all deaths from US drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

http://drones.procon.org/

The number of US drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 - 2013Source: Bill Roggio and Alexander Mayer, "Charting the Data for US Airstrikes in Pakistan, 2004 - 2013," longwarjournal.org, Nov. 29, 2013

Videos:

PRO: Barack Obama: 'drone strikes have saved lives'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Upd96OSBPk

CON: America's Secret Drone Warhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUbQD_mCY-8

PRO: Barack Obama, JD, 44th President of the United States of America, said in his May 23, 2013 speech at National Defense University, available at whitehouse.gov:

"[T]he United States has taken lethal, targeted action against al Qaeda and its associated forces, including with remotely piloted aircraft commonly referred to as drones...

To begin with, our actions are effective. Don't take my word for it. In the intelligence gathered at bin Laden's compound, we found that he wrote, 'We could lose the reserves to enemy’s air strikes.  We cannot fight air strikes with explosives...' Dozens of highly skilled al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers and operatives have been taken off the battlefield. Plots have been disrupted that would have targeted international aviation, U.S. transit systems, European cities and our troops in Afghanistan. Simply put, these strikes have saved lives...

Beyond the Afghan theater, we only target al Qaeda and its associated forces. And even then, the use of drones is heavily constrained.  America does not take strikes when we have the ability to capture individual terrorists; our preference is always to detain, interrogate, and prosecute. America cannot take strikes wherever we choose; our actions are bound by consultations with partners, and respect for state sovereignty.

Remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes. So doing nothing is not an option."

May 23, 2013 - Barack Obama, JD  

CON: Glenn Greenwald, JD, Investigative Journalist at First Look Media, wrote in his Apr. 19, 2012 article "America's Drone Sickness," posted on CNN:

"There are many evils in the world, but extinguishing people’s lives with targeted, extra-judicial killings, when you don't even know their names, based on 'patterns' of behavior judged from thousands of miles away, definitely ranks high on the list...

Initially, it's critical to note how removed all of these questions are from democratic debate or accountability, thanks to the Obama administration's insistence that even the basic question of whether the CIA has a drone program is too secret to permit it to publicly acknowledge, even though everyone knows it exists — especially in the countries where it routinely kills people...

They have placed the policy beyond the rule of law — by insisting that it's too secret for courts to examine — and shielded it completely from democratic debate...

In late 2009, an Obama-approved attack with Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs killed dozens of innocent Yemenis, including 21 children. In May, 2010, a U.S. drone attack killed a popular Deputy Governor of a Yemeni province. In October of last year, two weeks after Obama successfully ordered the death of U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki, a U.S. drone strike killed his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman... It's not hard to imagine what ordinary Yemenis think of the U.S., and whether they'd be more sympathetic to Al Qaeda’s message after all of this."

Apr. 19, 2012 - Glenn Greenwald, JD 

http://drones.procon.org/