Two leading human rights organizations released scathing reports Tuesday on U.S. drone attacks in Yemen in Pakistan. Conclusion? Some of the attacks violate the laws of war and may, in fact, constitute war crimes given the civilian fatalities. Amnesty International published
Will I Be Next? US Drone Strikes in Pakistan, a 75-page examination of drone strikes that Amnesty says it not comprehensive but rather field research into nine of 45 reported strikes that occurred between January 2012 and August 2013 in the Northern Waziristan region of Pakistan. Among the stories it tells:
On a sunny afternoon in October 2012, 68-year-old Mamana Bibi was killed in a drone strike that appears to have been aimed directly at her. Her grandchildren recounted in painful detail to Amnesty International the moment when Mamana Bibi, who was gathering vegetables in the family fields in Ghundi Kala village, northwest Pakistan, was blasted into pieces before their eyes. Nearly a year later, Mamana Bibi’s family has yet to receive any acknowledgment that it was the US that killed her, let alone justice or compensation for her death.
Earlier, on 6 July 2012, 18 male laborers, including at least one boy, were killed in a series of US drone strikes in the remote village of Zowi Sidgi. Missiles first struck a tent in which some men had gathered for an evening meal after a hard day’s work, and then struck those who came to help the injured from the first strike. Witnesses described a macabre scene of body parts and blood, panic and terror, as US drones continued to hover overhead.
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Human Rights Watch published a 97-page report,
Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda: The Civilian Cost of US Targeted Killings in Yemen, assesses six targeted killings in Yemen, one from 2009 and the rest from 2012-2013. Among its pages is the story of Sarar:
On September 2, 2012, a Toyota Land Cruiser carrying 14 people was attacked by a warplane or drone near the provincial city of Radaa in central Yemen. The strike by a missile or a bomb killed 12 passengers, including three children and a pregnant woman. A thirteenth passenger and the driver were severely burned but survived.
The airstrike violated the laws-of-war prohibition on attacks that do not distinguish
between civilians and combatants.
Quoting unnamed Yemeni officials, local and international media initially described the
victims as AQAP “militants.” But after relatives of the victims threatened to bring their
loved ones’ burned bodies to President Hadi’s doorstep, the country’s official news agency,
Saba, called the strike an “accident” and admitted the awful truth: the 12 people killed
were civilians.All were from two adjacent villages. They included breadwinners for more
than 50 people in one of the poorest areas of Yemen.
Unnamed Yemeni government officials were quoted in local and international media
saying that the target of the attack had been traveling along the same road but in a
separate vehicle that was not hit.
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John Knefel at
Rolling Stone magazine
writes:
Both reports stress that until the legal and policy frameworks are declassified, it is impossible to assess the legality of individual strikes or the programs at large. At the center of the debate is the ambiguity over whether the U.S. is operating in a law of war context (also known as international humanitarian law) or a human rights law framework, which covers a state's obligations in peacetime and is more restrictive than the law of war.
Even within the more permissive law of war context, HRW concludes in its report that two strikes in Yemen violated the rules. One attack, in the village of Sarar in 2012, killed 12 people—including three children and a pregnant woman—in a vehicle leaving a market in central Yemen. The apparent target of the attack, a tribal leader, was not in the vehicle, and according to the report may not have been a member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. "It can still be a violation [of the law of war] even if it's a mistake," says Letta Tayler, a terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at HRW and author of the report. "They should have been more careful."
The other attack occurred in al Majalah in southern Yemen in 2009, when cruise missiles fired from a U.S. Navy ship killed at least 41 Bedouin civilians. The missiles were armed with cluster munitions, which, following the initial strike, later exploded and killed four civilians and wounded 13 others. The use of weapons that cannot discriminate between a combatant and a civilian, like cluster bombs, is a violation of the laws of war. Says Tayler, "They just showered the place with cluster bombs."
The Amnesty International report, which focuses on Pakistan, is similarly critical, if not more so. The report looks at two cases that [...] "may constitute extrajudicial executions or war crimes." The authors stress, again, that without knowing more from the U.S. government a full legal analysis of the strikes is impossible.
"The U.S. government has never publicly committed itself to investigating credible accounts of civilian casualties," says Naureen Shah, an advocacy advisor at Amnesty International USA. "If they are investigating [those accounts], why won't they tell us? And if they aren't, they're creating the appearance of indifference."
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—An update from the front:
The war in Afghanistan? Not going all that well.
The war on drugs? Um, move along please.
The war on poverty? Are we still even fighting that one?
But don't despair. There is a battlefront where there's been significant progress—the war on reality.
In case you think that the general Tea Party lunatic positions on taxes, health care, and Aqua Buddha have distracted them from the battle lines of this engagement, Southern Fried Science has compiled a series of Tea Party statements where candidates and supporters reaffirm their allegiance to non-science. Whether it's O'Donnell's fury over mice with human brains, Sharron Angle's angle on the "hoax" of global warming, or the near universal disdain on the right for evolution, the Tea Party has not surrendered one inch to research and reason.
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Tweet of the Day:
I wonder what shitballs the GOP will throw at Obamacare once the website is fully functional? "I don't like the font they use on the site!"
— @Eclectablog
Today we offered a "classic" episode of the
Kagro in the Morning show, which is radio-jargon I just made up that means "rerun." Relive the hilarity, as we pre-game the 2nd 2012 presidential candidates' debate with
Greg Dworkin &
Steve Singiser.
Armando asks if the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis will play a role. Which candidate would you rather have had with his finger on the button in 1962? Why so much media interest in the mechanics of polls, which don't count, but so little interest in the mechanics of voting rights, which do? They've arrested a GOP operative in VA for doing what Republicans pay Nathan Sproul to do every year. When are they gonna arrest this guy?
High Impact Posts. Top Comments. Overnight News Digest.