"Drone strike campaign in Yemen shows U.S. standards are elastic," says the headline in the Los Angeles Times.
A surge of U.S. drone missile strikes that has killed about 40 suspected militants in Yemen over the last three weeks may appear inconsistent with President Obama's pledge in May to use drone aircraft to target and kill only individual terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to Americans.
But isn't President Obama killing bad guys
one by one, like he promised?
Not exactly.
A late afternoon strike killed three, while the day's final attack killed three others roughly 10km to the east about five hours later. Yemeni officials said the dead were all al-Qaida-linked militants, but definitive identification was not forthcoming. In the bulk of strikes, the bodies of those killed are burned beyond recognition.
This paragraph from the Guardian deserves careful attention!
"In the bulk of strikes, the bodies of those killed are burned beyond recognition."
Burned beyond recognition!
But the President knows that all those unrecognizable hunks of burning meat were militants, because the lunk-heads of the "Slam Dunk" CIA told him!
And those militants were probably hiding some Weapons of Mass Destruction in their mobile bio-war labs, too!
The ten recent drone strikes discussed by the Guardian killed about 40 people, and Antiwar.com is also counting.
Two weeks, 12 drone strikes, and 49 people killed. That’s the late July-early August count for US attacks in Yemen, and while officials say “at least 14” of the slain were probably militants, none of them were named.
So in general we incinerate Yemenis four by four, or even as many as
seven at a time!
A suspected U.S. drone strike killed seven alleged Al Qaeda militants Wednesday in southern Yemen. Residents in the province's Markha area, who also declined to be identified, fearing retaliation, said they saw several bodies on fire in two burning cars.
"And before any strike is taken, there must be
near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured," says President Obama.
Near certainty!
Hurrah!
And we get our "near-certainty" from the same clowns who keep predicting attacks that never happen.
A recent terrorism alert prompting the closures of nearly two dozen American embassies around the Arab world was "emanating from Yemen," the U.S. said.
However, as the week progressed, signs of terror did not take the form of an attack by al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula, an increasingly powerful franchise of the feared terrorist organization, but instead, as Haykal Bafana, a Sanaa-based Yemeni lawyer, put it recently, of an "orgy of drones."