Are U.S. drones terrorising civilians?

A new report reveals the programme is counter-productive and causing great harm to civilians and US national security.    The US' official line is that its drone strikes are precise and successful in their mission to attack those deemed to be a threat to the US. Barack Obama, the US president, said: "Actually drone attacks have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part they have been very precise, precision strikes against the al-Qaeda…" But a new report Living under drones released by human rights researchers at Stanford and New York universities says the US' official narrative is simply false, and that many civilians have been killed and injured. "We interviewed 130 people in Pakistan including 70 with direct experience with drones… What we found most surprising were these undocumented effects on everyday life holding entire communities in a state of real terror." - Omar Shakir, Living under drones researcher Due to the remoteness of attack locations and government secrecy, exact figures are hard to come by. But the report judged the most credible figures to be from 474 to 881 civilians killed by drones between June 2004 and September 2012, in Pakistan alone. It also points out that the number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties stands at two per cent.