Meet the Little Girl Killed by a US Missile: Tracing One Tragic Story in Our Horrific Drone War

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/world/155637/meet_the_little_girl_killed_by_a_us_missile%3A_tracing_one_tragic_story_in_our_horrific_drone_war/

_640x425_310x220


Around midnight on May 21, 2010, a girl named Fatima was killed when a succession of U.S.-made Hellfire missiles, each of them five-feet long and traveling at close to 1,000 miles per hour, smashed a compound of houses in a mountain village of Mohammed Khel in North Waziristan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Wounded in the explosions which killed a half dozen men, Fatima and two other children were taken to a nearby hospital where they died a few hours later.

Behram Noor, a Pakistani journalist, went to the hospital and took a picture of Fatima shortly before her death, then went back to the scene of the explosions looking for evidence that might show who was responsible for the attack. In the rubble, he found a mechanism from a U.S.-made Hellfire missile, and gave it to Reprieve, a British organization opposed to capital punishment, which shared photographs of the material with Salon. Stafford Smith alluded to the missile fragments in an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times last fall. They have also been displayed in England.

“Forensically, it is important to show how the crime of murder happened (which is what it is here),” said Reprieve executive director Clive Stafford Smith in an email. “One almost always uses the murder weapon in a case. But perhaps more important I think this physical proof — this missile killed this child — is important to have people take it seriously.”

In the religious rhetoric used by Al-Qaida’s online allies, Fatima was a “martyr.” In an statement quoted by Long War Journal, the al-Ansara forum said the senior al-Qaida commander Mustaf abu Yazid had been killed in a “convoy of martyrs on the road with his wife and three daughters and his granddaughter, men, women and children, neighbors and loved ones.” But Fatima was not Yazid’s daughter, according to Noor who reported from the scene. She was the daughter of another man who lost two wives and three children in the barrage.

[Kolesar]

1. Stafford Smith loses credibility when he compares this to Nixon's "illegal war" in Laos and Cambodia

Stretched smilies department:

Stafford Smith says Reprieve hopes to end the drone attacks by publicizing evidence from the scene of the strikes and taking legal action.

“Not all drone use is a war crime,” he said in his email, “but what is happening in Waziristan most definitely is — as was Nixon’s illegal war in Laos and Cambodia 40 years ago — so we will be pressing to enforce the law.”

Don't miss this part:

Yazid was public in his desire to retaliate for U.S. drone strikes. He had praised the “supreme bravery” of the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees at the U.S. airbase in Khost in December 2009 to avenge the death of a Pakistani militant leader in a previous CIA drone strike.