We know that we paid people to tell us who in their town were members of a terrorist organization. Obviously, the chances of people naming those they don't like in exchange for money is fairly high, especially in poor areas. Guantanamo has had a number of these accused people. One analysis of WikiLeaks documents concludes that 80% of the Guantanamo prisoners had no connection with terrorist organizations. Now, it looks as though we are once more using bribery to identify and locate terrorists so that we can send a drone after them. We've given informants GPS tags to put on vehicles being driven by supposed terrorists so that a drone can locate the terrorists.
We've also been told that the number of civilian deaths by drone are "exceedingly rare". Well, one English organization, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, claims to have exhaustively documented
the death of 479 to 821 civilians, including 174 children, in CIA drone
strikes in Pakistan since 2004, out of a total of up to 3,113 people
killed. Their web site has a lot of figures on drone attacks around the world.
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