Dave Their
June 3, 2010
Aol.news
A United Nations investigator has called on the U.S. to end deadly drone attacks, blaming the unmanned strikes for several hundred civilian deaths.
In a 29-page report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council, special representative Philip Alston argues that the distance from combat inherent in drone warfare allows for a dangerous desensitization to killing that could be equated with video games.
“Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield, and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a ‘Playstation’ mentality to killing,” he said in the report.
A U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field in southern Afghanistan on Jan. 31. Drone attacks are a crucial part of U.S. military strategy, but the United Nations blames them in hundreds of civilian deaths.
The CIA and U.S. military have made extensive use of heavily armed unmanned drones in recent months, which military officials argue give them the ability to carry out missions in sensitive areas without risking American lives.
This is far from the first time that predator drones have been compared to video games. In February, author P.W. Singer in his book “Wired for War” told the story of a 19-year-old high school dropout who found himself suddenly operating predator drones due to his skill with video games.
In the U.N. report, Alston questions whether soldiers like the one mentioned in the book would have the same respect for the laws of war as those tested under actual combat.
According to Singer, however, drone operators are far from passive manipulators of video game controllers.
“In the beginning we feared that drones may make the operators not really care about what they’re doing. But the opposite has turned out to be true. They may almost care too much,” he said in an interview with Spiegel Online. “We’re seeing higher levels of combat stress among remote units than among some units in Afghanistan. We found significantly increased fatigue, emotional exhaustion and burnout.”
Even though they’re on the other side of the world, Singer says, drone operators actually get a much better look at their targets than traditional bombers, which he argues could contribute to the psychological stress.
Alston also argues that CIA killings outside of combat zones violate international law, saying that “outside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal.”
Drone attacks have become a crucial part of U.S. military strategy, however, and it seems unlikely that the report will have much effect on policy, especially after Monday’s successful attack on a top al-Qaida leader, Mustafa Abu al-Yazif. An anonymous U.S. official told The New York Times that drone attacks were “effective, exact and essential” for fighting militants.
