American officials are apoplectic about alleged mystery drones flying over the United States. Last Thursday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy sent a letter to President Joe Biden, expressing “growing concern” about the drones and seeking federal help “to fully understand what is behind this activity.”
Tri-state area Democratic Sens. Cory Booker, Andy Kim, Chuck Schumer, and Kirsten Gillibrand sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Federal Aviation Administration head Michael Whitaker requesting a briefing on the supposed drones.
And, last week Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., initially suggested that the unidentified flying objects might hail from an “Iranian drone mothership” operating off the East Coast.
“Whether this is a foreign adversary or even just a group of drone hobbyists,” he said, “we cannot allow unidentified drones to operate freely in our airspace with no consequences and it is time we eliminate the threat they pose and shoot them down.”
After beginning in New Jersey, drone hysteria is spreading like wildfire, with sightings popping up from Massachusetts to California, prompting widespread outcry and the temporary closure of an airport in New York state and, in Ohio, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s airspace.
The widespread anxiety, especially among lawmakers, about living beneath potentially malign mystery drones is striking, given America’s proclivity for employing drones to spy on people across the world without their consent — and, in many cases, kill them. The irony is not lost on experts.
“Americans are finally seeing how uncomfortable it is to have unknown aircraft buzzing overhead.”
“After decades of the U.S. government flying armed military drones over cities and villages around the world, Americans are finally seeing how uncomfortable it is to have unknown aircraft buzzing overhead,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy. “Even when drones are not killing people, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine that having an unknown aircraft hovering above your head is not something most people are comfortable with.”
“American politicians aren’t known for walking a mile in someone else’s shoes,” he said. “Hopefully, these incidents will help them realize that monitoring people this way in other countries isn’t going to win hearts and minds.”
No Explanation
For more than two decades, the United States has been flying drones over the heads of millions of people in foreign lands — remotely watching, recording, and even killing some of them. Since its first drone strikes in Afghanistan in 2001 and Yemen in 2002, U.S. drones have killed thousands of people in those countries and others, including civilians in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
Last year, an investigation by The Intercept determined that an April 2018 drone attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. For more than six years, the family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by U.S. Africa Command, but they have never received a response.
“They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, told me last year. “No one has been held accountable.”
The entire family has been traumatized. When Luul’s nephew saw a “normal airplane” flying over their farm, he began running around, trying to hide, convinced it might kill him. The family told Luul’s son, Mohamed Shilow Muse, the truth about his mother’s death and since then, when he sees or hears a drone, they said, “he rushes under a tree to hide.”
For decades, people around the world have lived with drone-induced anxieties and resounding silence from U.S. officials. Before the U.S. military was expelled from Niger by the U.S.-trained ruling junta earlier this year, it hosted U.S. drone bases whose purpose was murky and kept secret from the Nigeriens who lived beneath the unblinking gaze of America’s eyes in the sky.
In the hard-scrabble Tadress neighborhood, on the outskirts of America’s drone outpost in the northern town of Agadez, people were apprehensive when talking about “le drone” when The Intercept visited last year. Women in the neighborhood, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, complained of the noise and the fumes coming from the base — and concern about the small aircraft that took off in the dead of night.
“No one knows what they are doing. We see the red and blue blinking lights above us.”
“We’re scared,” complained a woman in a pink hijab, who had lived in the area since before the base was built. “No one knows what they are doing. We see the red and blue blinking lights above us. We don’t know what they’re looking at.”
Maria Laminou Garba, who runs a recycling collective in Tadress that pays unemployed youth to gather recyclables, expressed similar concerns of living under an American microscope. “They are always flying overhead — often in the night or early morning,” she said last year. “It’s scary. We think they are watching us.”
The reactions are justified. In Somalia, the U.S. continues to fly surveillance missions and conduct lethal airstrikes.
In Niger, drones not only searched for militants in rural areas and neighboring countries, but also provided overwatch for the Agadez outpost and troops coming and going from the base in Tadress — putting the civilians there under their gaze.
U.S. Air Force/AFP via Getty Images
Everyone in the Village
Americans like Van Drew, of “Iranian drone mothership” fame, are learning what people around the world, including Luul and Mariam’s family, have been saying for years: The prospect of living beneath another country’s drones — especially lethal robot aircraft — is terrible. (Van Drew has walked back his “mothership” fearmongering but continues to express unease.)
A September 2012 study of civilians in Pakistan by Stanford Law’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law reported, “U.S. drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury.”
The researchers found the constant presence of drones, the fear that a strike might occur at any time, and the inability of people to protect themselves “terrorize[d] men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.”
Following a series of attacks by the U.S. — six drones strikes and one raid — that killed 36 members of two large, intermarried Yemeni families between 2013 and 2018, one family member, Abdullah Abdurabuh Obad al Taisy, told me about the psychological fallout among survivors, especially children.
“Everyone in the village is affected,” he said. “They usually can’t sleep properly because of the fear. They can’t even eat properly. Even the children are afraid to go out and play. Some of them are mentally sick right now, because of this constant feeling of fear.”
A 2015 study by the Alkarama Foundation, a human rights group, found that among Yemenis living in two villages where U.S. drones operated, post-traumatic stress disorder was “extremely prevalent,” with many suffering from constant worry and sleep disorders including nightmares or insomnia. Ninety-six percent of children interviewed said they were afraid that a drone attack might harm them, their family, or their community — with “the feeling of fear,” the study said, “further exacerbated among children when they hear sounds that resemble the buzzing of drones.”
The fear and anxiety induced by the distinctive “buzz” of drone engines is hardly confined to children. “The drones were terrifying,” wrote David Rohde, a journalist kidnapped by the Afghan Taliban in 2008 and held in the tribal areas of Pakistan. “From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”
Populations subjected to constant drone activity report “exaggerated startle responses, fleeing indoors and hiding when seeing or hearing drones, fainting, poor appetite, psychosomatic symptoms, insomnia, and startled awakening at night with hallucinations about drones,” according to a 2017 study in Current Psychology. “Civilians’ fear appears to cripple their daily activities, such as leaving their homes, working, attending social functions, and sending children to school.”
“There is a reason that privacy is regarded as a human right — because nobody wants to feel like they’re living under the Eye of Sauron.”
The psychological toll exists even when the perceived threat is merely aerial surveillance from on high.
“There is a reason that privacy is regarded as a human right — because nobody wants to feel like they’re living under the Eye of Sauron, an eye in the sky that’s monitoring things that they’re doing,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, referencing the imposing symbol of malign omniscience in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” books. “That’s something that the U.S. shouldn’t be imposing on people abroad. And it’s something that we shouldn’t tolerate in our own communities.”
The Truth Is Out There
Stanley thinks there is a good chance that many of the “drones” seen over New Jersey are conventional aircraft and, perhaps, some experimental models. The panic surrounding the sightings, however, reveals something fundamental about Americans’ anxieties.
“In my experience — working on privacy issues from internet tracking to data mining — I find aerial surveillance has a special electricity for people,” he said. “Someone tracking my financial transactions and building a profile of me is very abstract, but a flying robotic video camera hovering over my community — that’s very concrete. And it freaks people out.”
In the meantime, neither people like Luul and Mariam’s family in Somalia nor Garba, the recycling organizer in Niger, will ever get what Americans panicking over skyward objects are: reasonable assurances from the authorities that they’re perfectly safe.
Last Thursday, national security communications adviser John Kirby dismissed concerns over the drone panic.
“We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign nexus,” he said.
An FBI official reported that government investigators overlaid the locations of the reported drone sightings and found that “the density of reported sightings matches the approach pattern” of New York and New Jersey’s busiest airports. The FBI has received 5,000 tips about drones but fewer than 100 have led to legitimate leads, according to a joint statement by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA, and the Pentagon released on Monday.
After observing the unidentified flying objects alongside local police in New Jersey, Kim, the senator, initially expressed concern. After discussions with civilian experts, however, he walked back some of his worries about the “possible drones.”
“I don’t discount others may have seen actual drone activity, and not all I saw is fully explained by flight paths, but much of it was,” he announced on X, taking federal authorities to task for not adequately addressing public fears and providing detailed explanations. “Federal experts should provide information and guidance to the public including local police departments like the one that took me out to help them decipher what they are seeing.”
Kim pointed to anxieties across America that he believes are fueling the drone panic. “I think this situation in some ways reflects this moment in our country. People have a lot [of] anxiety right now about the economy, health, security etc.,” he wrote. “And too often we find that those charged with working on these issues don’t engage the public with the respect and depth needed.”
A founding member of the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus, Kim has been outspoken on U.S. drone strikes in the past. His office, however, refused to engage on the disconnect between American drone policy abroad and the drone hysteria exhibited by officials in the United States. (“We’re not going to comment at this time,” Anna Connole, Kim’s press secretary, told The Intercept.)
“Members of Congress like Andy Kim have been rightly concerned about civilian casualties, but drones aren’t just a problem when they kill civilians,” said Sperling.
“It’s just a profoundly disturbing climate to live in, when you have an unknown, unaccountable drone hovering over your head. Members of Congress should understand that monitoring people with futuristic unmanned aircraft is not a normal state of affairs for people beneath the drones. And they should apply that realization when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.”
