Death From Above
In the dark, pre-dawn hours of Friday, the thirteenth of January, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, the buzz of an unmanned robot plane broke the silence. Half a world and 12 and a half time zones away, someone on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters keyed a command into a computer. The digitized message, relayed through the building’s circuitry and transmitted skyward, bounced along an array of aircraft and satellites before arriving at the RQ-1 Predator drone plane hovering above the Bajaur region of Pakistan’s Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). Four AGM-114N Hellfire II missiles, each purchased by American taxpayers from Lockheed Martin at a cost of $45,000, streaked off toward the hamlet of Damadola, five miles into Pakistan.
The four missiles, each carrying enough explosives to take out an armored vehicle, slammed into three local jewelers’ houses at 950 miles per hour, nearly twice the speed of a passenger jet at cruising altitude. “The houses have been razed,” reported a neighbor, a member of the Pakistani parliament. “There is nothing left. Pieces of the missiles are scattered all around. Everything has been blackened in a 100-yard radius.” The target of this latest assassination attempt via missile strike, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, wasn’t there. At least 22 innocent civilians, including five women and five children, were killed. “They acted on wrong information,” a Pakistani intelligence official said of the Americans.</i>
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