How Drones Changed The CIA Into A Paramilitary Organization

Reuters / Tech. Sgt. Effrain Lopez

Drones Turned the CIA Into a Paramilitary Force, and There's (Probably) No Turning Back -- Brian Anderson, Motherboard

For a long time, the Central Intelligence Agency was in the otherwise quiet business of doing what still lingers in popular consciousness as the stuff of, well, the CIA: Intelligence gathering. Data collection, sifting, and analysis. You know, wonky spy shit.

Then drones came along. The CIA gradually took to the technology, and with its own dedicated fleet of armed unmanned aircraft began carrying out more and more remote aerial attacks throughout the Middle East and Horn of Africa. What was once a decidedly non-lethal spy agency was suddenly turned on its head, hunting and killing from above to the point that it now seems the CIA is irrecoverably paramilitarized. Is there really no turning back?

Let's back up. Some 433 missile strikes have pummeled Pakistan and Yemen since the US began its hunter-killer drone campaign in earnest in 2004, according to the Long War Journal. A recent UN human rights report put the official drone death toll in Pakistan alone at over 2,200 militants and as many as 400 civilians.

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My Comment: How times have changed. In the 1970s U.S. public sentiment and Congressional reaction (the Church Hearings) resulted in the CIA getting out of the "killing business". Today .... with the exception of a few politicians and pundits .... reaction to the CIA drone program have been largely mute.