Remote Control

Mechanically, quietly, and unfettered by any sense of mercy or conscience, the Hound hunts down and kills any enemy programmed into it. Sheer efficiency makes the Hound a potent tool in the war and it affords the safety of distance, both physical and emotional, from the real results of their actions.

The mechanical Hound is one of the most vivid images from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

"The mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the fire house. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber padded paws.

Nights when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the hound and let loose rats in the fire house areaway. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentle paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine."

A U.S. Air Force National Guard pilot flies a Predator, equipped with powerful cameras and missiles, that flies continuously over the area in and around Iraq. Here he sits in a control room in a hardened hangar at a U.S. Air Force base hundreds of miles away from the target. Most likely neither he nor his commanding officers have ever visited Bajur in Pakistan, and certainly no U.S. Senator has ever been there.

"Now, it's a regrettable situation, but what else are we supposed to do? It's like the wild, wild west out there. The Pakistani border's a real problem," said Senator Evan Bayh, noting that the "real problem" lay with the Pakistani government's inability to control that part of its country. "So, regrettably, this kind of thing is what we're left with."

Senator Trent Lott added, "I would have a problem if we didn't do it. There's no question that they're still causing the death of millions of -- or thousands of -- innocent people and directing operations in Iraq. Absolutely, we should do it."

The death toll from the 3 A.M. remote controlled air-strike included five children, five women and eight men. According to Pakistani intelligence Ayman al-Zawahiri, the "#2 al Quaeda" whom the U.S. said was the target of the attack, was not among the dead and had not been in the area.

The drone, the CIA and a botched attempt to kill bin Laden's deputy - The Observer (UK)