Shocking Truth About Drones Kept from American Public
August 16,
2013 AFP
• Huge number of those killed are women,
children, elderly
By Richard Walker
The shocking
truth about America’s use of remote-controlled “drone” airplanes is that at
least one in five of all those killed by strikes in Pakistan have been women,
children and the elderly. The same may be true of the expanded drone strikes in
Yemen and Somalia.
The recent publication by the Bureau of
Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) of a classified Pakistan military investigation
into drone strikes between 2006 and 2009 opened a disturbing window into the
awful civilian deaths in the Bush-Obama secret drone war. It also exposed the
under-reporting of civilian casualties and the reluctance of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA)
and the Pakistani authorities to come clean about the numbers and identities of
all those killed.
It
highlighted the deliberate confusion created after a Hellfire missile from a
Predator drone hit a religious school in the Bajaur Agency in 2006, killing,
according to tribal elders, 80 children. Pakistan at first took “credit” for
the strike and had the media reporting the victims were militants. But when
photographs emerged of the massacre, the Pakistani government quickly reversed
course. It then laid the strike at the door of the CIA.
_______________________________________________________
For those
who have been trying to force the Obama administration to reveal its targeting
rules in the drone campaign, the claim by TBIJ that almost one-third of the
approximately 3,500 killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004 were
civilians should not come as a shock.
One of
the recurring features of this war in and beyond Pakistan has been the
sustained efforts of the CIA to hide the civilian death toll. The Agency has been
aided in its effort by the mainstream media, which has blindly accepted the
familiar claim that militants were the targets and victims of drone strikes
with occasional civilian deaths caused by “collateral damage,” meaning
presumably shrapnel.
The strategy
to hide the truth was condemned in a report
entitled “Living Under Drone Strikes” by the Stanford Law School and New York
University School of Law. They had this to say:
Journalists
and media outlets should cease the common practice of referring simply to
‘militant’ deaths, without further explanation. All reporting of government
accounts of ‘militant’ deaths should include acknowledgment that the U.S.
government counts all adult males killed by strikes as ‘militants,’ absent
exonerating evidence. Media accounts relying on anonymous government sources
should also highlight the fact of their single-source information and of the
past record of false government reports.
The
number of “high-level” targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is
extremely low—estimated at just 2%. Furthermore, evidence suggests that U.S.
strikes have facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and
motivated further violent attacks.
TBIJ recently
launched a campaign
to draw more attention to the drone war by vowing to compile and publish a list
of names of all those killed by drones, including militants. As of now, it
says, 2,000 people killed by drones in Pakistan remain anonymous, something it
hopes to reverse.
There is
little talk of prosecuting those who pulled the trigger, but a European
diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous, told this newspaper that could change
soon.
“There
are those within diplomatic circles in Europe and elsewhere who feel financial
compensation to the families of drone victims is not enough. As time passes,
you may well see moves to bring cases before the court in The Hague. The
killing of 80 children in a drone strike would not be dismissed as fiction if
they were American children,” the source pointed out.
Richard Walker is the pen name of a former N.Y.
news producer.
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at: http://americanfreepress.net/?p=12348#sthash.VnelK51V.dpuf
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