Michael V. Hayden, a central figure in the U.S. war on terror, spoke at Stevens recently. Hayden directed the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009.
In his new book Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, Hayden advocates “playing to the edge,” which apparently means skirting the boundaries of legal and ethical rules. He defends counter-terrorism programs such as warrantless surveillance, enhanced interrogation (also called torture) and drone strikes. In a recent New York Times essay on drones, Hayden writes:
“The [drone] program is not perfect. No military program is. But here is the bottom line: It works… Unmanned aerial vehicles carrying precision weapons and guided by powerful intelligence offer a proportional and discriminating response when response is necessary. Civilians have died, but in my firm opinion, the death toll from terrorist attacks would have been much higher if we had not taken action.”
First, here are some data on civilian deaths. Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, has compiled data on drone strikes from several independent sources. He estimates that U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia have killed 3,875 people, including 470 civilians.
Zenko conjectures that Hayden, while director of the CIA, “personally authorized an estimated 48 drone strikes, which killed 532 people, 144 of whom were civilians. At 27 percent, this is more than twice the 12 percent of estimated civilian deaths from all of the U.S. drone strikes conducted through January 2016.”
Zenko’s estimates—which exclude data on strikes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Libya–are based on reports by nonprofit groups such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which in turn are based on reports from human-rights groups, government officials, media and other sources. The estimates are almost certainly too low, because not all attacks and casualties come to light.
A 2012 report by scholars at Stanford and New York University on drone strikes in Pakistan rejects the claim that drones are “a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the U.S. safer.” Based on “more than 130 interviews with victims, witnesses, and experts, and review of thousands of pages of documentation and media reporting,” the report concluded:
*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-accounted- for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury.
*Serious concerns about the efficacy and counter-productive nature of drone strikes have been raised. The number of “high-level” targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low—estimated at just 2%. Furthermore, evidence suggests that US strikes have facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and motivated further violent attacks… Drone strikes have also soured many Pakistanis on cooperation with the US and undermined US-Pakistani relations.
*current US targeted killings and drone strike practices undermine respect for the rule of law and international legal protections and may set dangerous precedents… As drone manufacturers and officials successfully reduce export control barriers, and as more countries develop lethal drone technologies, these risks increase.
During the Q&A after his talk, I asked Hayden whether armed drone strikes might do more harm than good, as the Stanford/NYU study suggested. He replied that critics have overstated casualties from drone strikes, and that he has seen no evidence correlating U.S. attacks to increases in Muslim militancy and violence. But he acknowledged that drones should be used sparingly, “with a dial, not a switch.”
If I had been allowed a follow-up question, it would have been this: Shouldn’t the U.S. set a higher moral example for the rest of the world than “playing to the edge”?
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from one on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”
