The United Nations Wants the CIA To Stop Killing People With Remote Controls

While President Obama may think the use of predator drones is comedic gold — witness his turn as stand-up comedian a few weeks back where he threatened to use them on the Jonas Brothers if they ever wanted to date Sasha or Malia — not everyone is quite as amused by the fact that the CIA continues to kill people with remote controls. Chief among the critics is Philip Alston, the New York University Law School professor who doubles as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions.

Turns out that when Alston isn't meeting with victims of and eyewitnesses to torture or government brutality, he's busy authoring a report suggesting that the CIA's use of unmanned aerial vehicles (ARVs, or drones, which are weapons controlled remotely that patrol a particular area) is quite probably a violation of international law. Alston is set to release a report this coming Thursday pushing for international rules to govern the use of drones.

Rule #1, according to Alston: The CIA should not be in the business of operating U.S. drones, since the body has no accountability, hides their international operations behind a veil of secrecy, and doesn't engage local communities in places like Yemen or Pakistan (where drones fly through the air like tumbleweed) whenever a drone blows something up, whether that something be a terrorist, a cafe, a hospital full of sick people, or a street corner where two kids were playing catch.

Instead, Alston is likely to call on the U.S. to transfer drone operations over to the Defense Department, where Alston believes at least some measure of accountability is in place.

"With the Defense Department you've got maybe not perfect but quite abundant accountability as demonstrated by what happens when a bombing goes wrong in Afghanistan," Alston said, according to UP. "The whole process that follows is very open. Whereas if the CIA is doing it, by definition they are not going to answer questions, not provide any information, and not do any follow-up that we know about."

Alston isn't the only college professor taking a hard look at the issue of drones and how drones fit into the overall prism of international humanitarian law. Mary Ellen O'Connell, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, is more than certain that so long as the CIA is operating drones, the U.S. is unequivocally violating international law. Pakistan is her first case study.

"In Pakistan the United States is sending wave after wave of unmanned drones to attack far from any battlefield. The persons operating the drones are CIA personnel and private contractors," writes O'Connell. "The CIA does not train in the law of armed conflict. The CIA is not part of the military chain of command, key to organization and discipline of the fighting forces of this nation. The drone strikes are killing as many as 50 unintended targets for each intended one."

Now that is a legal problem, isn't it? People with no background in humanitarian law or the laws of war are being given a remote control, and told to blow up things that might be linked to terrorist networks. They succeed one time out of every 50 tries, meaning that 49 innocent or unaffiliated targets get blown up for every successful drone launch.

In batting average terms, that would be .02 percent, which might indeed qualify you as the worst baseball player on the face of the planet. Forget the minor leagues; that's not even good enough for Tee-Ball.

But the CIA continues to be charged with executing the U.S.'s drone program in Pakistan and Yemen, even if the U.S. has yet to ever publicly acknowledge the existence of such a drone program. (Perhaps we're taking cues from Israel's inability to recognize its nuclear weapons program?) In December 2009, as President Obama announced an increase in troops for Afghanistan, he also announced an increase in drone operations at the CIA to buckle down on Pakistan.

Alston's report to the UN Human Rights Council this Thursday, meanwhile, couldn't come at a more opportune time. Alston notes that right now, only three countries in the world operate drones — the U.S., Russia and Israel. But like every weapons program, from nuclear weapons to cluster bombs, other countries are salivating at the chance to use drones for military purposes.

"We've got to look at rules for the future, which will govern all countries," Alston told an Australian radio station.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons