In the name of good, the reality of evil – the US drone overseas killing innocent investigation
Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, July 21, special article: in the name of good, the reality of evil – the US drone overseas killing innocent investigation
Xinhua News Agency reporter
One second, Alia Muallem, a 9-year-old Kenyan girl, was unhurriedly tidying up her stall, excited to sell out all the flatbread in advance; the next, a "Hellfire" missile hit the house against her back.
Alia’s young life was lost in the wind.
This is a tearjerker scene in the British drone anti-terrorism film Eye in the Sky.
In recent years, in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia… countless innocent civilians have been injured and killed in drone attacks launched by the United States. The tragedies created under the banner of "counter-terrorism" have triggered waves of protests at home and abroad.
"State-sponsored terrorism"
When Muhammad al-Qawiri heard the explosion, it was too late.
In Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, one afternoon in January 2013, Ali took a friend for a drive.
Not long after, a loud bang burst into the sky above Sana’a.
At the time, Ali’s brother Kavili was chatting with relatives and friends. "When we heard the explosion, we rushed out of the house quickly. When we arrived at the explosion site, Ali’s car had been blown up and had been burning."
All eight people in the car were killed and their bodies were charred.
"It was the saddest, saddest moment of my life," Mr. Cavelli said.
Such tragedies fall from the sky one after another.
On May 21, Akhtar Mohamed Mansour, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, was killed in a US drone "targeted killing" operation in Pakistan.
Muhammad Azam, a Pakistani driver temporarily hired by Mr. Mansour, was also killed in the attack, according to media reports. Mr. Azam had seven relatives, including his wife and four children under the age of 10, as well as a blind mother and a physically handicapped brother. The family relied on him as a taxi driver to support their family.
"This is the first Eid al-Fitr after my brother’s death," Kasim, Mr. Azam’s older brother, told reporters during the Eid al-Fitr. "Everyone was visiting friends and greeting each other, but they came to my house to offer condolences and condolences. The Americans destroyed the Azam family."
People march with placards reading "drones: state-sponsored terrorism" at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, considered the command and control centre for the US military’s global drone operations.
Rosa Brooks, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said it was "frightening to me" that the US government’s assertion that it has the right to kill any life in the world at will, based on reasons and evidence that cannot be made public, was made by secret officials through a secret process.
"Precision Strike" is a lie
The US has carried out hundreds of drone strikes in at least nine countries around the world in recent years, according to figures. Drones have evolved from CIA experimental programs to the air strike force that the US relies heavily on overseas.
The US government has been touting drones as having "unusually precise strike capabilities".
The White House released data on July 1 this year, saying that between 2009 and 2015, the United States launched 473 attacks outside the three war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the majority of which were drone attacks, which resulted in only 64 to 116 civilian deaths.
Is that really the case?
Non-governmental organizations and think tanks that monitor drone attacks in the United States have questioned the White House figures, arguing that civilian deaths have "shrunk" significantly.
Jack Searle, a reporter for the London-based Investigative Press Agency, told Xinhua News Agency that the number of civilians killed by drone attacks in the United States recorded by the Investigative Press Agency was between 380 and 801, which is several times higher than the figure released by the United States government.
Leta Taylor, a researcher with the New York-based ****, led an investigation into seven US drone attacks in Yemen between 2009 and 2013. Through field visits to sites and interviews with witnesses, relatives and Yemeni officials, the group confirmed that between 57 and 59 civilians had been killed.
"The civilian death toll from these seven attacks alone is half the official US figure," Mr. Taylor told The Washington Post.
The most absurd thing about drone "precision strikes" is that the US has no clear definition of "civilian identity". When using drones to carry out so-called "signature attacks", the US military only determines the target based on some specific behavioral characteristics that may be related to terrorist activities. The specific identity of the person killed in the attack is not taken into account at all.
During Obama’s first term, about two-thirds of all US drone attacks in Pakistan were labeled "signature attacks."
One former senior American military official "defined" that in an attack, "all those in the targeted area are armed" because all those who do not exhibit the characteristics of armed personnel have left, meaning that no casualties would be identified as civilians in such an attack.
Some people say that the US’s defense of "precision strikes" is feeble, and it is a fool and deception to the world.
Killing without restraint
For the US government, drone "targeted killings" are undoubtedly more "cost-effective" than deploying large-scale ground troops. Under this preference, the lives of civilians in other countries no longer matter.
According to Colonel Tim, an active-duty navigator at Creech Air Force Base, the "pilot" sits in the base control room, eyes fixed on the screen, hands on the joystick, locks on to the target, receives commands, presses a button – and then the target disappears from the earth.
Mark McCurley, a former US Air Force drone navigator, put it bluntly: "Too many times, drones have been used as tools for unrestrained killing, not to target and destroy terrorist networks."
The US drone carries out military operations in Pakistan like "no man’s land", and does not pay any attention to Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty.
The intolerable Pakistani government’s repeated public condemnation of the American drone attacks eventually prompted the Obama administration to step in and require a briefing to senior State Department officials before the drone strikes were carried out. However, such "time windows" were very short, sometimes only half an hour. The American action was still surprisingly reckless.
The FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s "email door" affair revealed that aides to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would email some CIA briefings to her. It was surprising that the secretary of state used her personal smartphone to "consent" to the attacks "for the sake of speed and convenience."
More ironically, the report shows that most of the briefing emails sent to her by Clinton aides did not explicitly mention relevant information such as drones or the target of the attack. This raises the question of how the State Department can agree to an attack that even it knows little about? The lives and deaths of so many innocent civilians are arbitrarily determined on the small mobile phone screens of American officials.
The disguise of "human rights defenders" has been exposed
The Greek tragic poet Aeschylus said, "In war, the truth is the first to die."
International public opinion has not easily let go of the drone secret war that the US government is trying to keep out of the public eye.
On June 11 this year, thousands of people gathered at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany to protest against the large number of civilian casualties caused by the US drone attack.
The official website of the "Stop Ramstein" protest movement lists the following figures: Since 2010, more than 6,000 people have been killed by drones, and the average cost of killing a terrorist is about 40 innocent lives.
In an interview with Xinhua News Agency, Rainer Braun, a protest organizer and co-chairperson of the International Peace Bureau, a German antiwar group, said the drone war was a serious violation of human rights. It is impossible for those who operate drone attacks to accurately distinguish between civilians and terrorists. The main victims of drone attacks are innocent civilians.
In Braun’s view, "80% of drone combat operations take place in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and other countries, and this behavior violates the national sovereignty of the countries concerned."
Paul Martin, director of politics and communications at Peace Action, the nation’s largest civilian peace organization, told Xinhua News Agency that the United States was "both a jury and a judge and enforcer, with no legal consequences."
The US drone air strikes have completely torn off the clothes of the US "human rights defender", fully exposing its hegemonic behavior that wantonly tramples on the human rights and sovereignty of other countries. (Written by Reporter Ocean; Participating reporters Xu Jianmei, Yuan Shuai, Ji Wei, Zhang Qi, Chen Lin, Li Changxiang, Zhang Jianhua)
