Drone Attacks: The Latest Aspect of Growing US "Shadow Warfare"

[The Northerner]

Although President Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser says caution is exercised when making drone attacks, official U.S. announcements often state that suspects are killed. This very word betrays the fact that every drone attack is a crime because it is illegal in any civilized society to kill suspects. The killings are murder, pure and simple.

...

Presidential adviser John Brennan told a group of academicians at the Woodrow Wilson Center, “We only authorize a strike if we have a high degree of confidence that innocent civilians will not be injured or killed, except in the rarest of circumstances,” Charlie Savage of The New York Times reports in the April 30th edition.

But Brennan acknowledged “instances when — despite the extraordinary precautions we take — civilians have been accidentally injured, or worse, killed in these strikes. It is exceedingly rare, but it has happened. When it does, it pains us and we regret it deeply, as we do any time innocents are killed in war.”

Exceedingly rare? As Juan Cole of the University of Michigan observed in “The Nation” magazine, the Britain-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism(BIJ) found “not only are civilians routinely killed by U.S. drone strikes in northern Pakistan” but “often people rushing to the scene of a strike to help the wounded are killed by a second launch.” Presumably, some of these victims may include medical personnel and relatives.

Read more: http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/drone-attacks-the-latest-aspect-of-growing-us-shadow-warfare/article18583.html


Where is the mass outrage in society and in Congress concerning the numerous civilian deaths that have occurred not only in Pakistan but Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, the Philippines, etc. when military drones are sent to slaughter suspected "militants" based on suspicion and without trial?