Americas Drone Bug Splats Campaign: Moral, Effective? Vote Today

American drone operators and the Pentagon call victims of drones Bugsplats. (Image Credit: Tom Hayden)

Today, Reprieve founder and director Clive Stafford Smith will be arguing against the above statement as part of an Intelligence Squared panel debate.

Part of the debate will undoubtedly cover what the Pentagon has officially termed Bugsplats, people killed with drones.

Bug splats is what American drone operators, sitting in safety thousands of miles away, call drone attack causalties in Pakistan or Yemen.

Why bug splats?

“Because that’s what a human body zapped by a drone looks like on those Americans’ video screens. Thousands of those splats were in fact innocent bystanders unfortunate enough to be nearby the ‘target,’” explains Stafford Smith.

“We call this warfare but it isn’t: it’s assassination,” he says. “Drones allow political and military leaders, unhampered by public or legal scrutiny, to eliminate anyone they want killed. But moral and legal arguments aside, what do drones actually achieve?

Counterporductive or is there a better way?

Stafford Smith says drone strikes are counterproductive.

“A drone strike is a sure way to inflame a community against the West and throw it into the arms of the local militants. In sum, drones are not just illegal and immoral. They are counterproductive. That’s the cry we hear as we learn more about America’s drone programme. 

“But do the gentle souls who condemn drones have a better strategy for dealing with the militants operating within the borders of states that want rid of them? In this kind of situation where you’re not fighting a regular army, targeting enemy ringleaders is an imperative.

“And drones, it turns out, are more effective than troops in hunting down the bad guys and cause far fewer civilian deaths than conventional warfare. In many cases they are actually welcomed by the local population who are only too happy to see the militants come under attack.

“Thanks to drones, jihadis now know there is nowhere to hide. No one is saying they are pretty: violence and death are always abominable. But in an imperfect and often violent world, the use of drones is moral and effective.”

Tickets to this evening’s event sold out extraordinarily quickly, but Intelligence Squared will live-stream the debate from their Versus YouTube channel.

The stream goes live at 7pm GMT this evening and can be watched at http://www.youtube.com/versusdebates.

Those visitng the page before 7 P.M. can cast a vote in favor or against the argument before the debate.

“If you want to do this (which would be great!), you’ll need to be logged in to a Gmail or Google+ account,” Reprieve says.

Click here for more information about the debate.

Click here to read more about Reprieve’s drones work.

If the Pentagon thinks of drone caualties as Bug Splats, does that make any other member of the human family no more than a bug in the eyes of the war machine?