My Take | Life imitates art over United States drone strikes

I have been a fan of Homeland, the American hit TV series about the CIA's efforts to take out al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups. It turns out the series is more factually accurate than many of us assumed it to be. I come to this realisation after reading a recent analysis by Reprieve, a British legal non-profit group, about the mass but unintended killings committed by the American drone assassination programme.

Take the first episode of the current season four, titled The Drone Queen. It has our heroine, the brilliantly intense but bipolar CIA station chief Carrie Mathison, ordering a drone strike in Pakistan against a high-value target.

Spoiler alert: she thinks Haissam Haqqani, a character who resembles real-life al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, was killed in the strike. He survived but the drone attack killed 40 civilians, including many children. That number of casualties is not far off the mark in real life.

Americans have been telling the world that the drone attacks are surgical, despite occasional "collateral damages". But according to Reprieve, every drone strike against a specific target results in the death of an average of 28 unidentified people.

The Obama administration has conducted strikes against 41 terror suspects in Yemen and Pakistan in which as many as 1,147 other unnamed individuals have been killed. In a case of life imitating art, the CIA has ordered repeated strikes against al-Zawahiri, which led to the deaths of 76 children and 29 adults, all of them bystanders. And like the fictional Haqqani, al-Zawahiri is still alive today.

The numbers killed are only in Yemen and Pakistan. We must assume the total civilian casualties would be much higher if Reprieve had been able to document those killed by drones in other countries such as Somalia. If he weren't American, Obama could be prosecuted for committing war crimes, along with the leaders of Yemen and Pakistan who have allowed the American drone assassination programme to operate in their countries and kill their citizens. But in the real world, the hegemon decides who are the good and bad guys.