The U.S. government has been using unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), or lethal drones, to dispatch terrorist suspects with impunity for most of the twenty-first century. Committees of analysts and bureaucrats determine, based on HUMINT (human intelligence, or tips from bribed informants) and SIGINT (signals intelligence, or drone video footage and cellphone data), that a person in a land far away poses a threat to U.S. interests. It matters not that there are no soldiers on the ground for him to kill, nor that he is unarmed, nor that he is surrounded by obviously innocent family members and neighbors. It matters not that he may not even possess a passport and is too poor to make it to American shores. The decision is made to place the person on a secret “kill list” (whether or not his name is known by his eventual killers) because the suspect’s apprehension is said to be infeasible, and he has been deemed to pose an imminent, albeit not immediate, threat.

An order is transmitted to a team of drone and laser operators sequestered in a hermetically sealed bunker located in a remote place far from what will be the site of bombing. A missile is launched; the suspect is annihilated; the site where he was residing is severely damaged, if not cratered; and other persons in the vicinity are killed, maimed, and left bereft. At the conclusion of this chain of events, government spokespersons confidently pronounce that they have carried out yet another “righteous strike,” protecting good people in the homeland from evil terrorists abroad. But if terrorism is the arbitrary threat of death against innocent people, then every civilian living in the vicinity of U.S. drone strikes, everyone forced to endure the humming of UCAVs above their head, has been terrorized.

Thousands of alleged terrorist suspects have been killed outside areas of active hostilities, in countries with which the United States is not officially at war, including Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and beyond. This shocking paradigm of state-perpetrated serial killing has become so perfunctorily accepted by now that U.S. citizens barely registered the atrocity of August 29, 2021, when President Joe Biden’s administration massacred ten innocent persons in Kabul, Afghanistan, based on intelligence that a “bad guy” was driving a white Toyota Corolla. Zemari Ahmadi drove around town on his last day of life, visiting family and colleagues, and carrying bottles of water and laptops in his car, all of which was interpreted by those viewing the films of his movements (and looking to “get some!”) as evidence that he was about to carry out a major attack on Kabul airport. Two days earlier, the suspect had not even been on the U.S. military’s radar, nor listed as a person of interest by any U.S. agency.