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Unflinching death from above

Predators, they’re called. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - drones - brimming with missiles and implements for the skewering of vehicles and human beings alike. These swift and menacing machines remove the pilot from the equation – the soldier in control is tucked away with a joystick in his palm and his eyes fixed on blurry computer screens.

Mors Ab Alto. Unflinching death from above.

In December 2013, a wedding convoy travelling through central Yemen was blown apart by a drone attack. The remains of 12 men were strewn across the rocky valley. It’s unclear whether any of these men were militants or civilians.

“Whatever we do, they will never look at us as human beings,” a mother of one of the victims told al-Jazeera. “We end up with wounds they cannot see."

Just a month earlier, a convoy of five al-Qaeda fighters, including an Egyptian, an Australian and a New Zealander, was blasted from a desert road in eastern Yemen. Although apparently affiliated with militant activities, the two Antipodeans have been described as “collateral damage.”

These attacks illustrate two things. Firstly, just how little information filters out to the public who have an unwavering right to know what governments are up to. And secondly, just how unreliable the United States’ use of armed drones can be.

We know that the New Zealander was born here, and has family living here. He is known only as ‘Muslim bin John’ – his real identity hasn’t been released. The accusation floats about that he had attended some sort of “terrorist training camp” and he was a “junior member” of al-Qaeda. Yet we know nothing else: whether he had plotted or perpetrated any kind of attack on the local police, or the armed forces, or brave Yemenis attempting to resist oppression in any way possible, or whether he was planning to bring his knowledge back to the land of the infidel, or why he was even travelling with the actual targets of the strike.

We don’t know if he breached any kind of law.

It’s a messy and oblique affair, and our government seems to neither know nor care about the circumstances.

Both John Key and Steven Joyce’s reactions have been incredibly callous and cold, throwing in a few platitudes for the dead man’s family as if to compensate for the emotional disengagement, but distancing themselves utterly – as if it were somebody else’s war, or somebody else’s problem.

"If this person wasn't hanging out with al Qaeda terrorists,” the Prime Minister said, “and didn't have links to terrorism themselves. If they weren't in training camps in Yemen, they wouldn't have been hit in a drone strike.”

But it is his problem. Why was the Prime Minister not informed prior to the attack? Why was he only told very late last year that one of his own citizens has been murdered without due process?

And why is he not publicly asking these remarkably important questions? If the United States, even inadvertently, kills a citizen from another country (a Western nation, at that) then a responsible head of state would request an explanation and expect a grovelling apology for such capricious abuse of international law.

A slightly more personal and subjective question ought to be asked, too: how does the Prime Minister feel about touring a Hawaii golf course with Barack Obama, laughing as they went, knowing all along that every Tuesday, Obama personally signs off a list of people to ‘take out’?

A foreign power has killed one of our citizens and regardless of whether he was involved in terrorism or not, and our rulers seem completely at ease with it.

‘Well,” our government seems to say, ‘at least we got that one out of the way.”

Because of this open indifference, and because of a callous policy on the part of the United States, the potential for drone warfare to be an effective tool in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism has been undermined.

The means by which the United States gathers information on suspected militants is so confused and muddy that it seems inevitable that bystanders will be caught up in the killing. ‘Collateral damage’ (as the beloved phrase goes) becomes part of the machinery in drone warfare and not a regrettable exception.

According to The Intercept by way of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) relies not on proactive, boots-on-the-ground ‘human’ intelligence but on the unreliable collection of data from mobile phones and other devices by the NSA.

“Once the bomb lands or a night raid happens, you know that phone is there,” an unidentified drone operator told The Intercept. “But we don’t know who’s behind it, who’s holding it.”

“We’re not going after people – we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”

This inaccurate electronic surveillance may have even played a role in the killing of the Australian and New Zealand citizens. Of the four Americans the Obama Administration has admitted to killing, only one of them was a targeted strike. The rest were, once again, ‘collateral damage’.

Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan are not declared battlefields, yet strikes have killed hundreds of apparently innocent people. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at least one civilian will be killed in each drone strike. And yet JSOC has been banned from operations in Yemen after the wedding party travesty mentioned above, leaving the entirely unaccountable CIA to do the dirty work – the typically thick veil falling once again over an already obscured agency.

Ostensibly, the United States’ war against terror, however slandered and however willfully sadistic, is a noble campaign: a battle between a nation with an exemplary Constitution and its allies against depraved suicide-murderers and sharia-bringers.

Yet the United States - for all its power, military might, and supposed rationality – has thrown away its chance at operating a successful campaign. The parallels between Obama’s hit lists and the Kissinger/Nixon cabal that flattened vast tracts of Cambodian jungle during the Indochina campaign are frightful. Both secret orders are and were fuelled by an endless supply of American machismo, running drunk on the idea that if the President simply destroys everything, it will bring a swift end to bloodshed elsewhere.

As it was in Vietnam, so it is now. Each time a civilian is disintegrated in a rocky valley or machine-gunned by balaclava-clad special operations soldiers in Yemen or Pakistan or the crumbling states of North Africa, the fight is extended just a little longer.

Until a vague degree of transparency and honour is introduced to the conflict, until that much-touted rationality is front-and-centre, the United States will forever be struggling away in a war they cannot ever win.

And they do need to win. Just not by these callous means.

Follow James on Twitter: @James_ARobins