Obama Has Killed More
People with Drones than Died On 9/11
By Washingtons Blog
January 06, 2015 "ICH"
- "Washingtons
Blog- Law school
teacher Marjorie Cohn – president of the
National Lawyers Guild –
writes:
Obama has killed more
people with drones than died on 9/11.
Many of those killed were civilians, and
only a tiny percentage of the dead were
al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders.
She’s right …
The Council on Foreign
Relations estimates that U.S. drone strikes
outside of Iraq and Afghanistan have killed
3,674 people.
The Bureau of
Investigative Journalism reports that up to
4,404 people have been
killed – just in Pakistan and Yemen alone –
between 2004 and 2014.
While it’s hard to
estimate how many additional people
have been killed by drone in Iraq and
Afghanistan, a December 2012 report by the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism found
that US and UK forces had carried out
over 1,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan
over the previous five years. Given that
numerous people are often killed
by each drone strike, it is
reasonable to assume that several thousand
people have been killed by drone in that
country.
And many Iraqis have also
been killed by drones … long before ISIS
even appeared on the scene. So –
altogether – the number of people killed by
drone is probably well above five
thousand.
In contrast,
under 3,000 people were
killed on 9/11.
But aren’t drone strikes
targeted attacks on terrorists
… unlike 9/11, which was an attack on
civilians?
Unfortunately, no …
The West is intentionally
targeting
farmers, small-time drug dealers and very
low-level Taliban members with drone
assassination.
And the process for
deciding who to put on the “kill list”
is flawed. People are often targeted
by the metadata on their phones, a process
which a former top NSA official called the
drone assassination program “undisciplined
slaughter.”
And people are targeted
for insanely loose reasons. As the New York
Times
reported in 2012:
Mr. Obama had approved
not only “personality” strikes aimed at
named, high-value terrorists, but
“signature” strikes that targeted
training camps and suspicious compounds
in areas controlled by militants.
But some State Department
officials have complained to the White
House that the criteria used by the
C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist
“signature” were too lax. The joke was
that when the C.I.A. sees “three
guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency
thinks it is a terrorist training camp,
said one senior official. Men loading a
truck with fertilizer could be
bombmakers — but they might also be
farmers, skeptics argued.
And then there are “double
taps” … where the family members, friends or
neighbors who try to rescue someone hit by a
drone missile are
themselves targeted for
assassination.
And – even when the West
is actually targeting high-level terrorists
– there is massive slaughter of innocent
civilians as “collateral damage”. For
example, American University Professor Jeff
Bachman
reports:
Strikes focused on the
Kill List “killed on average 28
other people before they actually
succeeded in killing their target.”
The Costs of War Project –
a nonpartisan, nonprofit, scholarly
initiative based at Brown University’s
Watson Institute for International Studies –
notes:
In Iraq, over 70
percent of those who died of direct war
violence have been civilians.
(Civilians
usually suffer the most casualties.)
No wonder people all over
the world are
overwhelmingly opposed to drone strikes.
Indeed, even the
CIA admits that the drone program might
be counter-productive in fighting terrorism.
And the architect of
America’s drone assassination program says
it’s gone too far …
creating terrorists rather than
eliminating them.
Postscript: Drone attacks
are also a
war crime (more
here and
here).
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