“We were all laboring under the illusion that U.S. Pakistani ‘friends’ had reluctantly agreed to allow drone attacks on their soil in exchange for bucket loads of cash in foreign aid. Now we find out that U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan were permitted only if the U.S. also killed an Islamist militant leader whose forces were focusing their attacks on the Pakistani government. In June 2004, in the first targeted assassination in Pakistan using a Predator drone, the Bush administration killed Nek Muhammad. A damning report by the CIA inspector general on abuses in CIA secret prisons had spurred the CIA to change from capturing terrorism suspects to gain valuable information to simply assassinating them.”
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=3598