Youth Disrupted: Effects of U.S. Drone Strikes on Children in Targeted Areas

Since the George W. Bush administration’s first use of

targeted assassinations via drone strikes, aimed at Al Qaeda and associated forces, in 2002, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reports

at least

178 innocent children (up to age 17) have died directly as a re sult of U.S. drone policy.

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TBIJ’s

analysis --

called the “best currently available public aggregate data on drone strikes”

by legal experts at Stanford and NYU who recently released the in-depth report

Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan

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,

-- finds that 176 of the 178 children killed in U.S. drones strikes were Pakistani. The two non-Pakistani children were killed in Yemen: U.S. citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, 16, and his Yemeni cousin Ahmed Abdel-Rahman al- Awlaki, 17.

Misleading claims by the U.S. Government

The minimum count of 178 child deaths is far beyond any acknowledged count of civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes by the U.S. government. John Brennan,

President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, has called civilian c

asualties as a

result of the CIA’s secretive drone policy

“exceedingly rare.”

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Brennan said in August

2011, “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.”

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Though from August 2010 through August 2011, TBIJ documented at least 101 civilians, including 13 children, were ki lled by drone strikes. Brenn an also said from August 2010 through

April 2012, the U.S. “had no information about a sin

gle civilian being

killed.”

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TBIJ found that at least 1 07 civilians, including at least 16 children, were killed by strikes in that time. Finally, in January 2012, President Obama -- acknowledging

the CIA’s drone program for the first tim

e -- said strikes do not cause large amounts of civilian casualties.

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TBIJ finds that at the time of

Obama’s

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http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/

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http://livingun derdrones.org/wp-content/up loads/2012/10/Stanford-NYU- LIVING-UNDER-DRONES.pdf

3

http://www.wi lsoncenter.org/event/the-efficacy-and -ethics-us-counterterror ism- strategy

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html

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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/04/brennan-drone- attacks.html

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