The Guardian: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

[Maedhros]

155. What "legitimate war" have we declared?

These things might be acceptable when they occur in a free fire zone, with two armed forces in close proximity engaged in a fire fight. Under those conditions, it's hard to separate the combatants from one another and from civilians owing to the fog of war.

But drone strikes don't happen in the context of a battle, and there is no fog of war. They occur in small villages and encampments far from any battlefield, as the inhabitants go about their daily routines. And no - just because we send a drone there and blow up somebody doesn't make the village a battlefield - unless you buy the Bush Administration lie that the entire world is a battlefield by default.

You assume that some kind of military action is necessary. It is not. Our military response to the "terrorist threat" is drastically out-of-proportion relative to the actual threat posed by the people we are targeting. The "terrorists" are poorly-armed, poorly-trained tribal insurgents unable to project force beyond their local region. How are these people going to threaten the United States? As is so often pointed out, a U.S. citizen is much more likely to be struck by lightning that to be injured in a "terrorist" attack. Do we really need to spend so many hundreds of billions of dollars killing people like this? No we don't.