An unlawful combatant is defined as “a civilian or military personnel who directly engages in armed conflict in violation of the laws of war.” Whether members of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups were “unlawful combatants” was a major point of debate during the George W. Bush Adminstration, and continues to be to this day. If someone is an unlawful combatant, they have fewer protections under the Geneva Conventions, leading to stuff like this

“This guy with an AK-47 could’ve shot our multi-million dollar state-of-the-art machine, we HAD to kill him!!!”

Hey U.S. Government, did you ever think that naming your drones things like Predator and Reaper may contribute a bit to the perception of drones as thoughtless killing machines?

The U.S. Government is extremely hesitant to admit that it has killed any innocent civilians in drone strikes – “collateral damage” in military parlance (a lovely term to describe innocent human beings getting blown to bits). To his credit, Attorney General Eric Holder actually did admit recently that 3 U.S. citizens have been inadvertently killed in drone strikes. But he also tried to squirrel out responsibility for other innocent civilians' deaths with the claim that they were part of Al Qaeda’s “associated forces”

There is zero evidence that the U.S. is using drones to deploy chemical or biological weapons in Pakistan – but that hasn’t stopped wild claims from springing up about just that

The re-naming of military terms to take something that sounds aggressive and violent and turn it into something that sounds neutral and peaceful is a classic tool of U.S. Government propaganda.

The best example of this: when the Department of War (sometimes called the War Office) was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949

One major fear of drones is that they are unmanned, meaning some computer algorithm might just decide to kill someone with no human involvement. The government wants you to know, “NO! It’s not a robot killing these people, it’s a human being in Nevada with a remote control!” Phew, because we were afraid of this:

But as long as this bro with a remote control is involved, everything’s totally chill!

You thought media manipulation by the U.S. government ended with the Cold War? Think again – as this document and the secret DOD program that paid military analysts to spout pro-Pentagon propaganda on cable news networks show, the dark underworld of government propaganda is alive and kicking

One way to counter anti-drone “propagandists” is to treat them as terrorists themselves. Just days before this document was leaked, Yemeni anti-drone activist Baraa Shiban was detained and questioned by British authorities under the Terrorism Act.

On Monday night I was held and questioned at an airport because of my work investigating western counter-terrorism abuses in Yemen. But this did not happen in Sanaa or at the hands of some tyrannical regime. It happened at Gatwick.

This is the US Government’s fear: that drones become so reviled that they are essentially “off the table” in the way chemical or nuclear weapons are.

These are the military threats to drones – ways in which the enemy can physically combat drones. But the rest of this document is concerned with the media threat to drones