The attack was the second strike in two days, with another on Wednesday that killed 8 people. The back-to-back strikes could signal a complete end to the hiatus that occurred after American airstrikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November. The Obama administration halted drone strikes for about six weeks, and has slowly restarted them since January.

The identities of the 11 people killed in two days are not known publicly. U.S. policy is typically to refer to anyone who has been killed by drones as “terrorists,” whether they are or not.

The drone program kills large numbers of civilians and creates significant tension between the U.S. and Pakistani governments. Islamabad demanded Washington stop bombing their country immediately after the political fallout resulting from the November airstrikes on Pakistani outposts.

The Obama administration has launched hundreds of strikes in the past few years, despite the drone campaign resting on very shaky legal and moral ground. Naz Modirzadeh, Associate Director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) at Harvard University,  was interviewed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and said killing people at a rescue site may have no legal justification.

“Not to mince words here, if it is not in a situation of armed conflict, unless it falls into the very narrow area of imminent threat then it is an extra-judicial execution,” she said. “We don’t even need to get to the nuance of who’s who, and are people there for rescue or not. Because each death is illegal. Each death is a murder in that case.”

By September 30, 2015, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) like the kind used by the CIA to kill people in northwest Pakistan and the military uses for spying on targets in Africa, will go far beyond flying over solely military airspace and begin to flood domestic U.S. airspace. Currently, drones are mostly limited to war zones and the U.S.-Mexico border.

The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for commercial use of drones by 2015. The FAA has predicted that 30,000 drones could be in the nation’s skies by 2020. The bill is the result of an enormous lobbying effort from Washington insiders and the defense industry.

Allowing wider use of drone technology, especially by law enforcement and police agencies across the country, could open the flood gates for pervasive abuse of privacy, individual rights, and the rule of law. Just as the military and intelligence agencies have used drones to circumvent the law and shroud operations in secrecy, so too could it happen as a result of this bill.

“There are serious policy questions on the horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities,” said Steven Aftergood, of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, barred from speaking about foreign bombs killing people on their soil because the CIA’s drone war in Pakistan is technically classified. This, despite an open acknowledgement of the program by President Obama just last week.

The attack occurred in Spalga village where militants fighting foreign troops in Afghanistan reside. But the identities of the 8 people killed were not known or released by the government. U.S. policy is typically to refer to anyone who has been killed drones as “terrorists,” whether they are or not.

The drone program kills large numbers of civilians and creates significant tension between the U.S. and Pakistani governments. The London-based  Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recently published an important new investigation into America’s drone war in Pakistan, finding that many strikes have deliberately launched follow-up attacks, killing people “who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals.”

The Obama administration has launched hundreds of strikes in the past few years, despite the drone campaign resting on very shaky legal and moral ground. Naz Modirzadeh, Associate Director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) at Harvard University,  was interviewed by the Bureau and said killing people at a rescue site may have no legal justification.

“Not to mince words here, if it is not in a situation of armed conflict, unless it falls into the very narrow area of imminent threat then it is an extra-judicial execution,” she said. “We don’t even need to get to the nuance of who’s who, and are people there for rescue or not. Because each death is illegal. Each death is a murder in that case.”

“I want to make sure people understand actually drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” President Obama said in an hour long interview hosted by Google. “For the most part, they’ve been very precise, precision strikes against against al-Qaeda and their affiliates.”

The claim mirrors previous attempts to downplay the civilian casualties of the drone war. John Brennan, President Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor, told the public back in June that zero civilian casualties have occurred as a result of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.

This was an obvious lie, but the Bureau of Investigative Journalism helped prove it so in August by cataloguing their lengthy findings on civilian casualties in the drone war, counting hundreds of civilians by name who were killed in drone strikes, including at least 168 children. Investigative reporter Noor Behram, who had been on the ground in Pakistan tallying the dead, estimated that “for every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant.”

A Washington Post article last month explained that, although the government has dismissed “reports of collateral damage and the alleged killing of innocents” by claiming that drones “result in far fewer mistakes than less sophisticated weapons,” they have yet to provide any details to support those claims.

The Post report said that the drone war in Pakistan has resulted “in an estimated 1,350 to 2,250 deaths.” But the public simply doesn’t have a good idea of how many have been killed, because “the identities…remain classified, as does the existence of the drone program itself.”

In the same Google interview, President Obama also down-played the role of U.S. drones in Iraq, saying that “the truth is we’re not engaging in a bunch of drone attacks inside Iraq. There’s some surveillance to make sure that our embassy compound is protected.”

Both Pakistan and Iraq have publicly objected to America’s use of drones flying over their skies, saying it amounts to a violation of their sovereignty.

“We have demanded the government of Afghanistan study the case seriously and not allow such an incident to happen anymore, otherwise it will be seen as an unfriendly act,” Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said, referring to the recent American surveillance drone recovered after a crash in Iran.

A day prior to Iran’s demand, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta vowed to continue the spy operations over Iranian airspace, saying the operations were part of U.S. efforts to defend both Afghanistan and America and involve “important intelligence operations which we will continue to pursue.”

Earlier in the week, Iran had summoned an Afghan envoy to protest the U.S. drone operations, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Afghanistan doesn’t want to be involved in any “adversarial relations” between the U.S. and Iran.

In one aspect of the precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, equipment like drones are being freed up for use in other countries in the region. Four U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles will be shifted from an air field in northern Iraq to the Incirlik air base in Turkey.

According to Pentagon spokesman Captain John Kirby, the drones will be left unmanned for their use in Turkey. ”There is an agreement now to fly some of those ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) assets out of Incirlik at the request of the Turkish government,” Kirby said.

Violence has escalated in recent months between the Turkish government and the Kurdish separatist movement Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). Rights groups recently began investigating PKK claims that Ankara used chemical weapons against them, which are inherently indiscriminate and would be a violation of international law.

Aside from the drones, the Obama administration has responded positively to Turkish requests for counter-terrorism assistance. The last concentrated partnership between the US and Turkey against Kurdish rebels resulted in massive human rights abuses. The two states cooperated in major atrocities against southeastern Turkey in the 1990′s, leaving the countryside devastated with tens of thousands killed and millions displaced.

A California-based company, AeroVironment, Inc., developed the Switchblade to be fired from a small tube and can transmit wireless live color video, confirm a target, and arms itself at the operator’s demand, and shoot. The company’s website says it “is designed to provide the warfighter with a ‘magic bullet,’” that is “difficult to detect, recognize, and track even at very close range.”

The U.S. Army awarded a $4.9 million contract to AeroVironment this past June for deployment, and it is to be used very soon on an upcoming mission in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Drones are fast becoming the weapons of choice for America. In the first nine months of 2011, US-led spy drones conducted nearly 23,000 surveillance missions in Afghanistan. At nearly 85 flights a day, that figure is almost double the daily amount from only two years earlier. The unmanned aerial vehicles are also used in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq and are being sold to various governments all around the world.

Part of the heralded appeal of the Switchblade and of drone vehicles generally is that they are precision vehicles that reduce the potential for collateral damage. But notably, two US soldiers were recently killed by a mistaken drone attack in a case of friendly fire.

Over the years, the drone war along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has killed literally hundreds of civilians, including at least 168 children. Investigative journalist Noor Behram, on the ground in Pakistan for years counting civilian casualties from drones, estimated that for every 10 to 15 civilians, drone attacks kill one militant.

Ominously, military drone technology is increasing for domestic use as well. Expecting budget cuts, the defense industry has begun to shift the sale of the high tech drones from the Pentagon to local police departments.

Republican Presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry in a debate this week urged for the use of Predator drones along the US border with Mexico. “You use Predator drones that are being trained right up here at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada,” Perry said, “to use that real-time information to give those boots on the ground that information, and they can instantly move to those areas. And that is the way to shut that border down, to secure that border.”

The use of drones has dangerously permitted the government to disregard the sovereign borders of other countries and skirt their legal obligations to inform the American people of their aggressive actions abroad. Drones have eased the process of making war, and it doesn’t bode well for targeted countries, or for the US.

It was only a few weeks ago that reports were first released about the Obama administration’s new construction of “a constellation of secret drone bases,” as they were described by the Washington Post, installed with the specific intention to broaden the drone war in the Arabian Peninsula and northeast Africa, especially in Yemen and Somalia.

The attack killed two American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, and set a precedent for presidential orders to assassinate Americans without being officially charged or provided lawful due process. But another precedent was set: the attack was the first indication that the newly constructed drone bases are operational.

The assassinations were extralegal on civil rights grounds, but the operational use of the new drone bases sets an additional ominous legal precedent for the use of lethal force. The war zone, in which anyone determined to be an enemy can be killed without question at the order of the President, has officially expanded to Yemen and Somalia in a more literal way than ever before.

“We have agreed in principle [on the delivery of Predators]. Negotiations will continue,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday. Erdogan also said that the number of vehicles and whether the drones would be purchased or leased had yet to be determined in the talks.

Turkish Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz also told reporters on Saturday that the drones would be received by the US and given directly to the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) to fight against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the country’s southeast. Violent skirmishes between the PKK and TSK have taken place in the past few months.

The US is particularly involved in the latest fighting given its ongoing occupation of Iraq. On Monday Turkish warplanes again bombed suspected bases of the PKK in northern Iraq, followed by cross border artillery attacks.

Military assistance to Turkey to help fight the PKK is not without precedent. In the Clinton administration, arms sales to Turkey hit an all time high just as some of the worst atrocities were committed by the government in the crackdown on separatists.

This deal is also happening in the context of a dangerous proliferation of drone technology for use in state warfare and questions about the legality of the unmanned vehicles in war and in policing. Civilians have borne the brunt of the effects of America’s drone wars and similar results are predictable in the case of Turkey.

The use of drones is “a Supreme Court case waiting to happen,” wrote Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, quoting an unnamed U.S. federal district court judge. The U.S. Defense Department operates more than 7,000 aerial drones and 12,000 unmanned ground systems, Singer wrote, and now police departments in Miami, Utah, and elsewhere have sought licenses to operate surveillance drones.

Dangerously, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have already tried to draw a distinction between engaging in war and utilizing deadly drones. They have argued that the use of drones in the various countries aforementioned is actually a police action, instead of an act of military aggression.

Singer writes that the U.S. Air Force says that its unmanned spy planes, if targeted by enemy radar, have the same right to retaliate as manned airplanes. But ascribing a right to self-defense to drones could lead to legal disputes and international crises, he wrote, “as well as a huge (and probably unintentional) first step for the cause of robots’ rights.”

“Using a submarine to attack shipping, for example, was once science fiction,” Singer wrote. “When it became reality, the dispute over ‘fair use’ of such technology” drew the U.S. into World War I after its ships were sunk by German submarines.