Bureau reporter meets 16-year-old three days before US drone kills him
Tariq Aziz's young cousin, Aswar Ullah, was killed by a missile fired from an American drone in April, 2010 while riding a motorcycle. When asked by an Islamabad attorney to learn photography to chronicle the death, maiming, and destruction caused by drone strikes in the region where he lived in Pakistan, Waziristan, Tariq bravely did so.
Three days after Aziz attended a seminar discussing the drone massacres in Pakistan and the need to record the aftermath, which has been downplayed by the American military and news media, Tariq Aziz and his 12 year old cousin, Waheed Khan, became targets of an American drone strike and were killed.
Tariq Aziz's story from TBIJ on Vimeo.
C.I.A. Is Disputed on Civilian Toll in Drone Strikes
John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, announced with regard to US drone strikes:
“there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”
Brennan reworded his response to the NY Times reporter:
Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq, and we will continue to do our best to keep it that way
The "credible evidence" that Tariq Aziz could have documented by photographing drone attack sites will now never be "found" by the U.S. government since he himself has become yet another drone victim that the U.S. government will not acknowledge.