U.S. Drone Planes Have a Nearly Perfect Record of Failure

[rodeodance]

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0118-32.htm

Published on Wednesday, January 18, 2006 by Ted Rall

U.S. Drone Planes Have a Nearly Perfect Record of Failure
by Ted Rall


In the dark, pre-dawn hours of Friday, the thirteenth of January, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, the buzz of an unmanned robot plane broke the silence. Half a world and 12 and a half time zones away, someone on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters keyed a command into a computer. The digitized message, relayed through the building's circuitry and transmitted skyward, bounced along an array of aircraft and satellites before arriving at the RQ-1 Predator drone plane hovering above the Bajaur region of Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). Four AGM-114N Hellfire II missiles, each purchased by American taxpayers from Lockheed Martin at a cost of $45,000, streaked off toward the hamlet of Damadola, five miles into Pakistan.

The four missiles, each carrying enough explosives to take out an armored vehicle, slammed into three local jewelers' houses at 950 miles per hour, nearly twice the speed of a passenger jet at cruising altitude. "The houses have been razed," reported a neighbor, a member of the Pakistani parliament. "There is nothing left. Pieces of the missiles are scattered all around. Everything has been blackened in a 100-yard radius." The target of this latest assassination attempt via missile strike, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, wasn't there. At least 22 innocent civilians, including five women and five children, were killed. "They acted on wrong information," a Pakistani intelligence official said of the Americans.

The political fallout is devastating. The Pashtun tribesmen of FATA, still enraged at the militarization of an autonomous region that regular Pakistani army troops first invaded in 2004, are threatening a general uprising. As tens of thousands of people chanted "death to America" at protest marches across Pakistan, the regime of U.S. puppet dictator General Pervez Musharraf--weakened by the West's failure to provide earthquake aid in Kashmir--was pushed to the brink of collapse. After Musharraf: the first civil war in a nuclear power.

This was only the latest botched U.S. attack. Eight days earlier, another attempt to kill al-Zawahiri failed when a missile blew up a house in the Saidgi area, also in the FATA, based on another incorrect report. Eight innocent civilians died.......

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Al_CIA_DA is playing with our heads. Sending out false info is

inexpensive and aparrently effective.

[FloridaPat]

2. In keeping with the whole * tradition of botching everything.

[Vidar]

3. Nonsense--expensive and must be replaced constantly --perfect pug weapon.