There Are Scarily Few Answers About Drones

John Oliver’s been looking for information about the unmanned death robots, such as what exactly an “imminent threat means or how many people are killed during any given drone strike. So far, “hard facts” have been hard to come by, and in the “Last Week Tonight” host’s words, it’s “completely fucking terrifying.”

But as harrowing as it is to think about the obscurity surrounding drone protocol from the safety of our homes, in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan, the horrors are far more vivid. It’s even gotten to the point, Oliver explains, that a clear sky now represents sudden death to children in several nations as they grapple with the constant panic they feel at the thought that they or their loved ones could be killed by an invisible machine at any moment.

“I no longer love blue skies,” says one 13-year-old Pakistani boy. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray and for a short period of time, the mental tension and fear eases.”

Although Oliver wasn’t able to find almost any answers in the week he and his team were digging, he’s not alone. Even the U.S. government knows far too little about its drone program, though that hasn’t stopped the Obama administration from using the robots eight times more often than President George W. Bush did to kill humans seemingly at random. And no matter how many jokes Obama cracks to desensitize us to these fuzzy facts, the truth is taking lives of often innocent people without flinching or thinking about the consequences is no laughing matter. It’s truly terrifying because, as the adjective implies, what our government is inflicting on entire countries halfway across the world is terrorism.

—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata