Just 2% are militant leaders



Steve Watson

Infowars.com

Oct 18, 2012





Pakistan’s interior minister Rehman Malik stated Wednesday that up to 8 out of 10 people killed in US drone strikes inside his country are completely innocent civilians.

Repeating a plea he made to the US a fortnight ago to allow Pakistani authorities to oversee drone activity, Malik told reporters that only 20 percent of those killed in drone attacks were militants.

“2,300 people were killed in 336 strikes carried out by United States in Waziristan,” Malik claimed, citing Pakistani estimated figures. He added that 96 of the drone strikes were cross border attacks were launched by the US from Afghanistan.

It is believed that hundreds of children have been killed in the drone attacks.

A major study released last month by Stanford and New York University, titled ‘Living Under Drones’, found that just 2 percent of those killed in drone attacks in Pakistan were high ranking militants.

The study concluded that the Obama drone policy “terrorizes men, women, and children” in Pakistan, and serves only to engender hatred of the US among everyday Pakistani people, and makes terrorist attacks on the US more likely.

The study also noted that Obama administration officials have regularly issued highly misleading public statements regarding drone strikes.

“Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged.” researchers noted, adding that the mainstream media should cease referring to “militant” deaths when covering drones strikes, because the Obama administration counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.

The researchers, in association with The Pakistani human rights group Foundation for Fundamental Rights spent close to a year in Pakistan interviewing over 130 survivors and witnesses of drone attacks.

The Obama administration has been heavily criticized for blocking the release of information relating to its overseas drone assassination programme, and will not even officially acknowledge that it exists, despite countless public references to the programme and the proven existence of an official “kill list”.

It is common knowledge that the Obama administration has exponentially increased the use of drone missile attacks in countries such as Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

The president has referred to the programme several times in public, as have officials such as counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan.

Earlier this year, the New York Times ran a major piece on the programme, revealing that the White House has asserted the right to carry out state-sponsored assassination anywhere in the world without having to provide any evidence or go through any legal process.

The administration merely has to state that the target is a terrorist and it doesn’t matter whether they are an American citizen or not, as we saw in the case of American-born Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, who were both killed last year.

In December of last year, Obama administration lawyers reaffirmed their backing for state sponsored assassination, claiming that “U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets” and do not have the right to any legal protection against being marked for summary execution.

During a CBS 60 Minutes interview in January, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta revealed that Obama himself personally approves the policy to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial on a case by case basis.

Perhaps the real reason that the administration wants the details of the programme kept under wraps is that, as reported by Propublica recently, the programme is potentially much bigger in scope than anyone had previously thought.

The administration’s figures do not add up, they are chock full of contradictions and discrepancies, and there can be little doubt that there have been many many more civilian deaths as a result of drone attacks than have been publicly acknowledged.

Experts, including UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns, as well as Pakistan’s UN ambassador in Geneva, Zamir Akram, have described the drone assassination programme as a violation of the international legal system, saying that some attacks may constitute war crimes.

Akram, who noted that US drone strikes had killed more than 1,000 civilians in Pakistan, also said “We find the use of drones to be totally counterproductive in terms of succeeding in the ‘war against terror’. It leads to greater levels of terror rather than reducing them.

Many also contend that the attacks infringe the national sovereignty of Pakistan and constitute an act of war.

In 2010, a report by Washington think tank The New America Foundation found that 32% of the more than 1,200 people killed since 2004 in Pakistan, or around 1 in 3, were innocent bystanders rather than dangerous terrorists.

While the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has stated that the Pakistani government is actively facilitating the attacks by providing bases from which to launch the drones, Pakistani authorities have consistently voiced opposition to cross border missile strikes, which have been ongoing for years, but have accelerated since day one of Obama’s presidency. During Obama’s first year in office, there were 53 reported drone missile attacks; more than were carried out during the entirety of George W. Bush’s two four year terms in office.

Reports from 2009, drawn up by Pakistani authorities, indicated that close to 700 civilians had already perished, with just 14 wanted Al Qaeda leaders killed in the attacks.

The ACLU estimates that US drone strikes have killed as many as 4,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2002. Of those, a significant proportion were civilians.

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

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