Jeff Stein reports on a revelation from an ongoing intellectual-property suit involving software the CIA is possibly using to aim its drones, which the developer says is flawed:
The CIA has declined comment on allegations that its drones have a targeting margin of error of up to 40 feet, a malfunction that could be contributing to civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The allegations have surfaced in a complex suit over intellectual property theft in Massachusetts, in which the developer of the targeting software testified that he was surprised to hear that the CIA was willing to use untested code in the drones.
"My reaction was one of stun, amazement that they want to kill people with my software that doesn't work," Richard Zimmerman, chief technology officer for Boston-based Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), said in a sworn deposition in April.
Zimmerman said an executive from Netezza, his company's partner in the venture, had told him and other company executives that “the CIA called them on the phone, said we need to target predator drones in Afghanistan, that this is a national security matter. We need [the software] up and running immediately.”
A recent poll of residents in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas from the New America Foundation found that three-quarters of them oppose the drone strikes and that only 16 percent believe they target militants alone. A February analysis of civilian casualties from drone strikes by Peter Bergen and Kathrine Tiedemann estimated that about a third of the deaths caused by drones were civilians.
The CIA declined to comment to Stein, so it's hard to know if this is the software they're using. But it's a reminder that, while the point of "targeted killing" is ostensibly to reduce the harm to noncombatants in warfare, that doesn't mean that's necessarily happening. While a certain amount of civilian casualties may be inevitable in a zone of ongoing military combat, this raises further questions about their use elsewhere -- such as Yemen, where the administration has asserted the authority to kill an American citizen without trial, despite the absence of groups involved in the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks.
