Pakistan Drones .... Blood on Obama's hands?

The US drone strike operation in Pakistan is classified. However what is known is that Obama personally reviews targets and authorizes strikes.

The consensus view inside the Washington Beltway Bubble is that using drones to remotely kill terrorists is popular among both Liberals and Conservatives. For Conservatives fewer terrorists are alive with fewer US military lives at risk; for Liberals, it proves Obama is a “strong and decisive” leader. The rationale by extrapolation: outside of Washington everyone else in America is in favor of the policy as well.

But the rest of America doesn’t have access to the information they need to make an informed judgment. The program has classified status and the news media choose not to embarrass the Obama administration by asking probing questions.

When questions do arise about whether or not the drone assassination policy is in fact counterproductive to US national security interests now and in the future, the administration offers only vague responses in return.

White House policy expert John Brennan claims civilian deaths as a result of the drone strikes have been "exceedingly rare". Intimating that the strikes are surgical and only the “bad guys” are getting whacked.

Really…?

We’re talking pounds of explosives packed in a warhead traveling at supersonic velocity and remotely controlled by someone in a darkened cubicle thousands of miles away against groups of people on the ground. Hardly equivalent to the surgical precision of a sniper’s bullet. There must in fact be collateral damage by the choice of the missile weapons platform. But we are to be re-assured and subsequently pacified into believing it is “exceedingly rare”.

Now comes word from Stanford and NYU law schools that only 2% of those killed in drone attacks are high level targets – nearly some 900 other fatalities have been civilians and of those 176 were children.

What’s exceedingly rare is the number of high value terrorists being killed that underpin the justification for using the drones in the first place.

Columbia Law School has also produced a report saying that there is credible evidence that the US is employing a “double tap” tactic in these strikes in which civilians are targeted. After the initial strike when rescuers and emergency personnel respond the US launches a second strike killing those individuals, in the belief, that anyone in proximity must be allied with, if not terrorists, themselves.

It’s important to note that whatever the legality of drone attacks, international law makes a distinction about the targeting and attacking of civilian emergency rescue operations – it’s a “war crime”!

Americans often wonder how it is that much of the rest of the world in conflict areas have come to hate us. This US drone attack policy is perhaps a perfect example - where the US government acts in the name of its citizens and then spends considerable resources to keep what it has done in secret from them; while the rest of the world is fully aware of the truth.

Today and on the Obama watch 74 percent of the population in Pakistan now believes the US is its enemy. Is it any wonder why, when an American President orders the trigger to be pulled thousands of miles away and as collateral damage, Pakistan’s children die?

Does it take any real stretch of the imagination to guess where America’s next wave of terrorism is being incubated today?

I imagine the nominating committee for the Nobel Peace Prize feel like duped assholes….

http://livingunderdrones.org/report-introduction/