"Living under drones"
That's the title of a recently released report on the use of drones in warfare by researchers and Stanford and NYU.
The key points from the report's executive summary:
- While civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.
- US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accountedfor harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury.
- Publicly available evidence that the strikes have made the US safer overall is ambiguous at best.
- Current US targeted killings and drone strike practices undermine respect for the rule of law and international legal protections and may set dangerous precedents.
On the subject of civilian casualties, it's previously been revealed that men killed by drones are presumed to be combantants (which might explain why a high percentage of collateral deaths are amongst women and children), but I think that this is something that this report attempts to correct for. (It does at least note this issue in a footnote, but I haven't had a chance to read much more than the executive summary in any detail and my keyword searching suggested that I might have to dig into some of the report's sources in some detail to try to find this out). The issue of psychological harm to bystanders also seems quite living given drones hovering over areas of Pakistan basically 24/7.
See also the NYT debate piece Do Drone Attacks Do More Harm Than Good?.