The drone phenomenon is bound to increase the number of civilian dead in any empirical adventures by the technologically-advanced but tribal “west” on several fronts: shooting or bombing people from the air will never be accurate, it is not a face-to-face encounter as on the battlefield and so is in fact a casual judge, jury and execution in one; and as the perpetrator is seated at a console on the other side of the planet, he or she feels no remorse nor danger.
The attack on the 17th March caused fury - as with all previous airborne attacks, the victims were random: most of the dead were tribal elders and police attending an open-air meeting.
“We are a people who wait 100 years to exact revenge. We never forgive our enemy,” the surviving Pakistani elders stated.
General Hayden denied the attacks were state-authorised assassinations. He said the US was at war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and was simply acting in self-defence.
When Peter Taylor (BBC Two's The Secret War on Terror) pointed out that legally the war was in Afghanistan not Pakistan, he said that was not how the American administration looked at it.
“No they're not assassinations. This is a war, this is action against opposing armed enemy force. This is an inherent right of America to self-defence.”
If you think you have heard this line before, of course: it’s a macrocosmic version of the Israeli justification for bombing Palestinian villages.
Another link to Palestine is the Israeli arms industry, knocking out and exporting, among other things, drones. The European Union has given Israel direct funding for research in a programme called FP7; this has been getting channelled into military projects. In the end, the EU has been subsidising the manufacture of arms including drones, some of which it or its allies will then have bought.
The RAF is already using Predator drones, described as UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) carrying Hellfire missiles or Paveway bombs, in Afghanistan.
What fun, boys!
The ECCP Briefing Paper - March 2011
The Israeli military and security industry
The Israeli military and security industry plays a pivotal role in the violent oppression of the Palestinians. The domestic industry provides a large proportion/majority of the weapons and equipment used by the Israeli military against Palestinians and the materials and systems for the construction and operation of Israel's illegal Apartheid Wall and settlements. Further still, the manufacture and export of weapons and other military equipment is crucial to the Israeli economy and its ability to continue its violations of international law. Israeli defence and security companies promote their products on the basis that they are "tested" in real world situations: the Palestinians are the guinea pigs in this testing laboratory. The violence experienced by Palestinians has become a source of profit; profit which itself surely motivates further violence. As former Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Arens explained, "Israel's largest comparative advantage is in military products, because these demand advanced technology on one hand and military experience on the other…no country in the world is as dependent on arms sales as Israel. The Jaffa orange is fast being edged out of the public consciousness by the Uzi submachine gun as Israel's major export. Israel is the largest per capita arms exporter in the world".
Those who trade arms with Israel or cooperate with its military and security industry support Israel's continued violence against Palestinians and give a green light to continued Israeli violations of international law.
Israel and the Seventh Framework Program for Research
With a budget of €50.5bn, the Seventh Framework Program for Research (FP7) is the European Union's main research funding and collaboration vehicle and is due to run until 2013. As part of the benefits ascribed to Israel as part of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, Israeli research entities are equally eligible for research funding as those based in EU member states. The EU is Israel's second biggest source of public research funding after the Israel Science Foundation. All full participants in FP7, including Israel, make a contribution to FP7 based on their gross domestic product.
Jill Evans, Plaid Cymru MEP for Welsh Region, told us lobbyists in Brussels that Israeli UAVs (drones) are tested from an airfield at Aberporth on the Welsh coast near Cardigan, one of which crashed on the airfield a few days ago. She said that the Israeli company making the drones receives financial support from the Welsh government. The Welsh firm at the site is very small with about six employees, so it is not a significant local employer, but size in this case hardly matters: the connection is there.
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