Nightmare drones: nouveaux jeux sans frontieres

Guardian on drone-stike sites in West Pakistan:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/17/us-drone-strikes-pakistan-waziristan

A local journalist goes from one drone hit village to another, detailing damage. A dangerous business because people taking pictures and asking questions may be suspected of helping CIA prepare next strike. What he finds suggests civilian casualties much higher than official accounts admit. An own goal for war-on-terror as local populations rage at US etc.
Obvious, really.
Less obvious but just as dangerous, this form of warfare is relatively cheap for those with the know-how, and leapfrogs old legal and geographical boundaries. Drones are now used by US, Israeli and more recently UK forces for surveillance and or missile strikes, not only in the acknowledged war-zones of Iraq and Afghanistan but Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and Gaza - wherever conventional forces cannot reach, or would rather not be seen to reach.
UK Watchkeeper drones are adapted from Israeli Hermes drones as perfected over Gaza. The UK version has been tested at Aberporth not far from us.
Drones can fly at 10,000 feet, for hours, days or nights, unseen and unheard from the ground, watching, reporting back to base or waiting to get a target in sights. US Predator drones, as seen on a CNN documentary (check Youtube), are controlled by more or less human 'pilots'at playstation consoles in a desert base, Arizona perhaps. The risk-free piloting is one reason why drones are relatively cheap: training pilots costs as much as making planes, and in conventional airwars too many get lost in crashes and combat stress.
One reason for my recent picket of Barclays is that the bank is a lead investor in the Israeli company, Elbit Systems, that makes the drones now adapted for UK use.
The former US President and WW2 supreme commander General Dwight Eisenhower one warned against what he called the 'military-industrial complex' intruding on politics and public life. Now the complex that threatens us is more complex still: military-industrial-political-financial, with funders often deciding what gets off the ground. And its global, no longer confined to one superpower.
The current light being shed on Murdoch's Newscorp web gives us a glimpse of what must also be happening between military, intelligence, political, industrial and financial power centres across continents, picking, mixing and making what suits themselves at our expense.
A recent New York Times report described experimental drones modelled on dragon-flies, and no bigger than insects, able to settle on a window ledge. With poison stings? No more need for human agents with umbrella tips...
One problem in this new form of airwar is the cost and complexity of decoding such a mass of detailed information. Imagine a continual feed from hundreds of spies in the sky, having to monitor so many monitors, fit and analyse the images.
One thing the roving reporter in Pakistan notes is the difficulty of putting together the casualties, not in the image, but in the flesh, on the ground, in what's left of walls, trees etc.