This report is the result of nine months of research by the International Human Rights
and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School (Stanford Clinic) and the Global
Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law (NYU Clinic):
“In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the U. S. safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts.” This narrative is false.
First, while civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.
Second, US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury.
Third, publicly available evidence that the strikes have made the US safer overall is ambiguous at best.
Fourth, current US targeted killings and drone strike practices undermine respect for the rule of law and international legal protections and may set dangerous precedents.”
http://www.livingunderdrones.org/
The two bombs at the Boston Marathon killed three and injured nearly 200 people. The bombs were deliberately fabricated to spread shrapnel in order to cause maximum injuries. The deaths and maiming of innocents shocked our entire nation and prompted a massive law enforcement effort to find and arrest those responsible. Those exploding bombs that killed and maimed is called an act of terror.
When US Drone unleash their missiles on targeted “plotters” and inadvertently kill and injure nearby innocent adults and children it is called “collateral damage”. It is mainly ignored by the U. S. media and, in turn, by the public. The surviving families of the dead and injured in those faraway countries call the U. S. drone attacks an act of terror.
U. S. CIA Drone attacks target gatherings such as weddings and funerals in order to “take out” a person suspected of planning something. Eye witness reports have shown evidence that at least 50 civilians have been killed in rapid follow-up strikes when rescuers had gone to help victims. When an explosion in the midst of a wedding party or among the mourners at a funeral kills and injures innocents, are those victims somehow less valuable than our victims in Boston? Are these targeted killings acts of terror?
“Our government has decided that instead of detaining members of al-Qaida (at Guantánamo) they are going to kill them using unmanned armed drones. An estimated 4,000 people have been killed by U. S, drones in approximately 420 “targeted killings” operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Niger, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, and Somalia since the first drone strike was conducted under the Bush Administration. These estimated numbers of deaths include 176 children.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-ch...-humanity-committed-by-barack-h-obama/5320570
“The White House, together with the Pentagon and the CIA, reportedly maintains a "kill list" with potential drone targets. President Barack Obama reportedly approves every name that is added to the list after looking over biographies of the suspected terrorists that one official referred to as "baseball cards." According to the Justice Department white paper, the U.S. does not need evidence of a specific attack to consider an alleged terrorist an "imminent" threat worthy of a targeted strike.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/22/aclu-drones_n_2926785.html
“The MQ-9 Reaper drone can carry up to 14 AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles. The MQ-1 Predator can carry 2 Hellfires. Each missile carries a warhead: the AGM-114M Hellfire II warhead is the Blast fragmentation/incendiary type, and the AGM-114N Hellfire II carries the Metal augmented charge (MAC) (Thermobaric) warhead. This thermobaric weapon, which includes the type known as a "fuel-air bomb", is an explosive weapon that produces a blast wave of a significantly longer duration than those produced by condensed explosives. This is useful in military applications where its longer duration increases the numbers of casualties and causes more damage to structures.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_augmented_charge
“The CIA and the military are carrying out an illegal “targeted killing” program in which people far from any battlefield are determined to be enemies of the state and killed without charge or trial. The executive branch has, in effect, claimed the unchecked authority to put the names of citizens and others on “kill lists” on the basis of a secret determination, based on secret evidence, that a person meets a secret definition of the enemy. The targeted killing program operates with virtually no oversight outside the executive branch, and essential details about the program remain secret, including what criteria are used to put people on CIA and military kill lists or how much evidence is required.”
http://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/drones
The U. S. government is relying on two arguments to justify its drone policy under international law:
1. That the US remained in a state of war with al-Qaida and its affiliates, or
2. That those individuals targeted in countries such as Pakistan were planning imminent attacks against US interests. This procedure allows the U. S. to assign the roles of Judge, Jury, Prosecutor, and Executioner to a select group, with no opportunity for the exercise of any of the rights of the accused suspected plotter.
“The legal justification for drone strikes has become so stretched that critics fear it could now encourage other countries to claim they were acting within international law if they deployed similar technology. Hina Shamsi, a director at the American Civil Liberties Union, warned that the issue of legal reciprocity was not just a hypothetical concern: "The use of this technology is spreading and we have to think about what we would say if other countries used drones for targeted killing programmes. The drone strikes are counterproductive because they gave rise to a desire, particularly among young men, to seek revenge for the drone strikes, thus radicalizing a new generation that hate the United States. Retired Navy Commander Leah Bolger, past president of Veterans for Peace, explains, “The combat drone program is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, none of whom received any sort of due process; were citizens of a country with which we are not at war; and were murdered, not as a result of military action, but by a civilian agency – the CIA.”
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/pre...ywhere-washington-march-against-us-drone-warf
The height of hypocrisy is reached every day that US media do not even mention that our own government is murdering innocents in countries around the world and yet, when an American child is murdered our media and our nation can focus on nothing else. Is an American innocent person in Boston any more valuable than an innocent person in Pakistan?
