From WillyT To America... Bury My Heart At Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib...

[WillyT]

U.S. drones targeting rescuers and mourners
BY GLENN GREENWALD - Salon
2/5/12

<snip>

On December 30 of last year, ABC News reported on a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Khan, who was killed with his 12-year-old cousin when a car in which he was riding was hit with a missile fired by a U.S. drone. As I noted at the time, the report contained this extraordinary passage buried in the middle:

Asked for documentation of Tariq and Waheed’s deaths, Akbar did not provide pictures of the missile strike scene. Virtually none exist, since drones often target people who show up at the scene of an attack.

What made that sentence so amazing was that it basically amounts to a report that the U.S. first kills people with drones, then fires on the rescuers and others who arrive at the scene where the new corpses and injured victims lie.

In a just-released, richly documented report, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, on behalf of the Sunday Times, documents that this is exactly what the U.S. is doing — and worse:

The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.

The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a “targeted, focused effort” that “has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties”. . . .

A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.

Although the drone attacks were started under the Bush administration in 2004, they have been stepped up enormously under Obama.

There have been 260 attacks by unmanned Predators or Reapers in Pakistan by Obama’s administration – averaging one every four days.

<snip>

More: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/05/u_s_drones_targeting_rescuers_and_mourners/singleton/

************************************************************

The Report: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terror-drones-cia-tactics-in-pakistan-include-targeting-rescuers-and-funerals/

[polly7]

1. I can't describe how much I hate these drones.

This will always be the image I associate with them ....... a 4 year old girl, burned beyond recognition and found in the trash.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2077753/She-lucky-Girl-left-horrific-burns-U-S-drone-attack-receive-surgery.html#ixzz1lqRDQVoD - Graphic burn photos.



'Bugsplat'

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/201111278839153400.html

"In Islamabad I took part in a jirga - the traditional Pashtun forum for public discussion and dispute settlement - where tribal elders and villagers from the Pakistan tribal areas (FATA) came to meet with us to explain their personal experiences of US drone attacks. Sitting just two rows behind me was a 16-year-old boy named Tariq Aziz. Listening to story upon story of the extrajudicial murder of innocent civilians and children, the heartache for loved ones lost and the constant terror instilled by the now familiar roar of drones overhead, I could not have imagined that Tariq and his family would soon suffer the same fate.

Three days later Tariq was killed along with his 12-year-old cousin Waheed when their car was targeted by a Hellfire missile as they headed home to Norak, a village in Waziristan near the Afghan border.

Drones are described not only as the future of warfare, but as risk-free war. But Tariq's death - and the hundreds of other civilian deaths recorded in a recent Bureau of Investigative Journalism study - demonstrate that this PlayStation warfare is only risk-free for operators of these remote-controlled killers. From the safety of an office building in Langley, Virginia, CIA operatives play games with Pakistanis' lives."


http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/01/09/do-real-men-fly-drones

"Drones are the perfect way to fight a war, so long as you are not a child of some prehistoric tribe scuttling for a hiding place on a lunar-pocked piece of scorched earth as Hellfire missiles rain down from a flying death tube thousands of feet above. Even if you are a sworn militant, fighting America with the latest AK-47 or rocket-launcher technology, the unmanned aircraft spewing preemptive strikes upon you, and upon your neighbor’s wedding party, is only a proxy for your enemy. If by some unlikely trick shot, the attacking aerial vehicle is brought to ground, no foreign combatant dies. The drone’s pilot, enjoying air-conditioned comfort while seated in an ergonomic chair, might miss a bite in the pastrami sandwich that conceivably distracted him while his Predator or Reaper or Sky Warrior drone plummeted. The pilot will suffer nothing beyond a lackluster peer review."


http://childvictimsofwar.org.uk/the-weapons/drones/

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/11/more-than-160-children-killed-in-us-strikes/

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. I'm sure the perpetrators of murder by drone will face trial and punishment..won't they?

Or, is "just following orders" still in vogue for murderers and those that command them?