As reported in The New Yorker in Oct last year -

"The U.S. government runs two drone programs.

The military's version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets enemies of U.S. troops stationed there. As such, it is an extension of conventional warfare.

The C.I.A.'s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in countries where U.S. troops are not based.
It was initiated by the Bush Administration and, according to Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, Obama has left in place virtually all the key personnel.
The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed."

The covert programme has been challenged on many legal counts discussed elsewhere in the thread-

Additionally, social critics, such as Mary Dudziak, a professor at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law, argue that the Predator strategy has a larger political cost.
As she puts it, "Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on . . . endless war."

THE PROBLEM OF DEFINING 'TARGETS'

Even if, as some lawyers have argued, America's drone program in Pakistan meets basic legal tests.......

They are nevertheless troubled, as the U.S. government keeps broadening the definition of 'acceptable high-value targets'

From the New Yorker article again -

""But, given that many of the targeted Pakistani Taliban figures were obscure in U.S. counterterrorism circles, some critics have wondered whether they were legitimate targets for a Predator strike.
"These strikes are killing a lot of low-level militants, which raises the question of whether they are going beyond the authorization to kill leaders," Peter Bergen told me.

Roger Cressey, the former National Security Council official, who remains a strong supporter of the drone program, says,
"The debate is that we've been doing this so long we're now bombing low-level guys who don't deserve a Hellfire missile up their ass." (In his view, "Not every target has to be a rock star.") "

Defining who is and who is not too tangential for the U.S. to kill can be difficult. John Radsan, a former lawyer in the C.I.A.'s office of general counsel, who is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, in St. Paul, Minnesota, says,

"You can't target someone just because he visited an Al Qaeda Web site. But you also don't want to wait until they're about to detonate a bomb. It's a sliding scale."

Equally fraught is the question of how many civilian deaths can be justified. "If it's Osama bin Laden in a house with a four-year-old, most people will say go ahead," Radsan says. "But if it's three or four children? Some say that's too many. And if he's in a school? Many say don't do it."
Such judgment calls are being made daily by the C.I.A., which, Radsan points out, "doesn't have much experience with killing. Traditionally, the agency that does that is the Department of Defense."

THE DRONES ARE ONLY AS GOOD AS THE INTELLIGENCE ABOUT WHERE SUSPECTED AL QAEDA TARGETS WILL BE

"if you use these tools wrong, you can lose the moral high ground, which is going to hurt you.

Inevitably, some of the intelligence is going to be wrong, so you're always rolling the dice. That's the reality of real-time intelligence."

"The development of the Predator, in the early nineteen-nineties, was supposed to help eliminate such mistakes.
The drones can hover above a target for up to forty hours before refuelling, and the precise video footage makes it much easier to identify targets.

But the strikes are only as accurate as the intelligence that goes into them.

Tips from informants on the ground are subject to error, as is the interpretation of video images. Not long before September 11, 2001, for instance, several U.S. counterterrorism officials became certain that a drone had captured footage of bin Laden in a locale he was known to frequent in Afghanistan. The video showed a tall man in robes, surrounded by armed bodyguards in a diamond formation. At that point, drones were unarmed, and were used only for surveillance. "The optics were not great, but it was him," Henry Crumpton, then the C.I.A.'s top covert-operations officer for the region, told Time. But two other former C.I.A. officers, who also saw the footage, have doubts. "It's like an urban legend," one of them told me. "They just jumped to conclusions. You couldn't see his face. It could have been Joe Schmo. Believe me, no tall man with a beard is safe anywhere in Southwest Asia." In February, 2002, along the mountainous eastern border of Afghanistan, a Predator reportedly followed and killed three suspicious Afghans, including a tall man in robes who was thought to be bin Laden. The victims turned out to be innocent villagers, gathering scrap metal.


In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the local informants, who also serve as confirming witnesses for the air strikes, are notoriously unreliable.

A former C.I.A. officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th told me that an Afghan source had once sworn to him that one of Al Qaeda's top leaders was being treated in a nearby clinic. The former officer said that he could barely hold off an air strike after he passed on the tip to his superiors. "They scrambled together an élite team," he recalled. "We caught hell from headquarters. They said 'Why aren't you moving on it?' when we insisted on checking it out first."
It turned out to be an intentionally false lead.

"Sometimes you're dealing with tribal chiefs," the former officer said. "Often, they say an enemy of theirs is Al Qaeda because they just want to get rid of somebody.

Or they made crap up because they wanted to prove they were valuable, so that they could make money. You couldn't take their word."

The consequences of bad ground intelligence can be tragic.

In September, a NATO air strike in Afghanistan killed between seventy and a hundred and twenty-five people, many of them civilians, who were taking fuel from two stranded oil trucks; they had been mistaken for Taliban insurgents. (The incident is being investigated by NATO.)
According to a reporter for the Guardian, the bomb strike, by an F-15E fighter plane, left such a tangle of body parts that village elders resorted to handing out pieces of unidentifiable corpses to the grieving families, so that they could have something to bury. One Afghan villager told the newspaper, "I took a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son."


David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency warfare expert who has advised General David Petraeus in Iraq, has said that the propaganda costs of drone attacks have been disastrously high


"Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased."

extracts from The Predator War
What are the risks of the C.I.A.'s covert drone program?