In a
just-released, richly documented report, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, on behalf of the
Sunday Times, documents that this is exactly what the U.S. is doing — and worse:
The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.
The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed
that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a "targeted, focused effort"
that "has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties". . . .
A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that
at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had
gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in
deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.
Although the drone attacks were started under the Bush administration in 2004, they have been stepped up enormously under Obama.
There have been 260 attacks by unmanned Predators or Reapers in
Pakistan by Obama’s administration – averaging one every four days.
As
I indicated, there have been scattered, mostly buried indications in
the American media that drones have been targeting and killing rescuers.
As the Bureau put it: "Between May 2009 and June 2011, at least fifteen
attacks on rescuers were reported by credible news media, including
the
New York Times,
CNN,
Associated Press,
ABC News and
Al Jazeera." Killing civilians attending the funerals of drone victims is also well-documented by the Bureau’s new report:
Other
tactics are also raising concerns. On June 23 2009 the CIA killed
Khwaz Wali Mehsud, a mid-ranking Pakistan Taliban commander. They
planned to use his body as bait to hook a larger fish – Baitullah
Mehsud, then the notorious leader of the Pakistan Taliban.
"A plan was quickly hatched to strike Baitullah Mehsud when he
attended the man’s funeral," according to Washington Post national
security correspondent Joby Warrick, in his recent book The Triple Agent. "True, the commander… happened to be very much alive as the plan took shape. But he would not be for long."
The CIA duly killed Khwaz Wali Mehsud in a drone strike that killed at least five others. . . .
Up to 5,000 people attended Khwaz Wali Mehsud’s funeral that
afternoon, including not only Taliban fighters but many civilians. US drones struck again, killing up to 83 people. As many as 45 were civilians, among them reportedly ten children and four tribal leaders.
The Bureau quotes
several experts stating the obvious: that targeting rescuers and funeral attendees is patently illegal and almost certainly constitutes war crimes:
Clive
Stafford-Smith, the lawyer who heads the Anglo-US legal charity
Reprieve, believes that such strikes "are like attacking the Red Cross
on the battlefield. It’s not legitimate to attack anyone who is not a
combatant."
Christof Heyns, a South African law professor who is United Nations
Special Rapporteur on Extra- judicial Executions, agrees. "Allegations
of repeat strikes coming back after half an hour when medical personnel
are on the ground are very worrying", he said. 'To target civilians
would be crimes of war." Heyns is calling for an investigation into the
Bureau’s findings.
What makes this even more striking
is how conservative — almost to the point of inaccuracy — is the
Bureau’s methodology and reporting. Its last news-making report, issued
last July, was
designed to prove (and
unquestionably did prove) that top Obama counter-Terrorism adviser John
Brennan lied when he said this about drone strikes in Pakistan: "in the
last year, 'there
hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop." The
Bureau’s July, 2011 report concluded
that Brennan’s claim was patently false: "a detailed examination by the
Bureau of 116 CIA 'secret’ drone strikes in Pakistan since August 2010
has uncovered at least 10 individual attacks in which 45 or more
civilians appear to have died." As I
noted at the time — and again when I
interviewed Chris Woods of the Bureau — their methodology virtually guarantees significant
under-counting of civilian deaths (and, indeed, their July, 2011, count was much lower than
other credible reports)
because they only count someone as a "civilian" when they can
absolutely prove beyond any doubt that the person who died by a drone
strike was one. The difficulty of reporting and obtaining verifiable
information in Waziristan ensures that some civilian deaths will not be
susceptible to that high level of documentary proof, and thus will go
un-counted by the Bureau’s methodolgy.
The point is that the
Bureau is extremely scrupulous, perhaps to a fault, in the claims it
makes about civilian drone fatalities. Its findings here about
deliberate targeting of rescuers and funeral attendees are supported by
ample verified witness testimony, field research and public reports, all of which the Bureau
has documented in full.
As Woods said by email: "We have been working for months with field
researchers in Waziristan to independently verify the original reports.
In 12 cases we are able to confirm that rescuers and mourners were
indeed attacked."
As the report notes, it’s particularly remarkable that these findings come on the heels of President Obama’s
recent boasting
about the efficacy of drones and his specific claim that the policy has
"not caused a huge number of civilian casualties", adding that it was
"important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very
tight leash." Compare that claim to the Bureau’s almost certainly
under-stated conclusion that it has "found that since Obama took office
three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly
reported as killed including more than 60 children." And targeting
rescuers and funeral attendees of your victims is quite the opposite of
keeping the drone program on a "very tight leash." As Samiullah Khan,
one of the Bureau’s field researchers put it:
In a war
situation no one is allowed to attack the Red Cross. Rescuers are like
that. You are not allowed to attack rescuers. You know, the number of
Taliban is increasing in Waziristan day by day, because innocents and
rescuers are being killed day by day.
Strictly
speaking, the legality of attacking rescuers may be ambiguous because,
as the Bureau put it: "It is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions to
attack rescuers wearing emblems of the Red Cross or Red Crescent. But
what if rescuers wear no emblems, or if civilians are mixed in with
militants, as the Bureau’s investigation into drone attacks in
Waziristan has repeatedly found?" But there’s nothing ambiguous about
the morality of that, or of attacking funerals (recall the worst part of
the
Baghdad attack video released by WikiLeaks:
that the Apache helicopter first fired on the group containing Reuters
journalists, then fired again on the people who arrived to help
wounded). Whatever else is true, it seems highly likely that Barack
Obama is the first Nobel Peace laureate who, after receiving his award,
presided over the deliberate targeting of rescuers and funeral mourners
of his victims.
UPDATE: Perhaps
this is where the idea came from to attack rescuers:
Or perhaps it came from
here:
The
widow of a Birmingham, Alabama, police officer denounced confessed
bomber Eric Rudolph as a "monster" Monday after a federal judge
sentenced him to life in prison for the 1998 blast that killed her
husband.
U.S. District Judge Lynwood Smith in Birmingham sentenced Rudolph to
two consecutive life terms without parole in connection with the January
1998 bombing of the New Woman All Women clinic, which performs
abortions. . . .
In the later Atlanta area blasts, Rudolph targeted federal
agents by placing second bombs nearby set to detonate after police
arrived to investigate the first explosion.
In January 1997, a bomb exploded at the Northside Family Planning
Services clinic in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs. A second bomb
went off an hour later, injuring seven people.
A month later, four people were wounded in an explosion at Atlanta’s Otherside Lounge. Police found a second bomb and defused it before it went off.
Or perhaps it’s from here: a
2007 Homeland Security report on Terrorism, explaining that this is a hallmark of Hamas terror attacks:
When
describing Hamas, Homeland Security even christened such attacks with a
name: "the double tap." Whatever else is true, this conduct is
something the FBI, DHS, the DOJ and federal courts have all formally
denounced as Terrorism.
UPDATE II: This
week, from February 6-11, I’ll be speaking at numerous events around
the country regarding the state of civil liberties. I’ll be in New York,
Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio and — to deliver the keynote address to the
ACLU in Idaho’s annual dinner — in Boise, Idaho. All events are open to
the public.
Event information is here.
UPDATE III:
AP reported last week
that "Nobel Peace Prize officials were facing a formal inquiry over
accusations they have drifted away from the prize’s original selection
criteria by choosing such winners as President Barack Obama."
Specifically:
The investigation comes after
persistent complaints by a Norwegian peace researcher that the original
purpose of the prize was to diminish the role of military power in
international relations.
If the Stockholm County
Administrative Board, which supervises foundations in Sweden’s capital,
finds that prize founder Alfred Nobel’s will is not being honored, it
has the authority to suspend award decisions going back three years —
though that would be unlikely and unprecedented, said Mikael Wiman, a
legal expert working for the county. . . .
Fredrik Heffermehl, a prominent
researcher and critic of the selection process, told The Associated
Press on Wednesday that "Nobel called it a prize for the champions of
peace."
"And it’s indisputable that he had
in mind the peace movement, i.e. the active development of
international law and institutions, a new global order where nations
safely can drop national armaments," he said . . .
"Do you see Obama as a promoter of abolishing the military as a tool of international affairs?" Heffermehl asked rhetorically.
That is indeed a rhetorical question.
