As of March 26, we're $27,100 in the red for the quarter. Donate here to support this vital work
Subscribe here and join over 13,000 subscribers to our free weekly newsletter

When will the White House tell us the whole truth about drone killings?
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)


The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers), July 1, 2016
Posted: July 11th, 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/01/drone-...

The Obama administration just released numbers suggesting ... that drone strikes in countries excluding Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have resulted in between at least 64 and 116 noncombatant deaths during his administration. The president also issued an executive order effectively directing his successor to ... publish this data going forward. The new executive order means it will be harder for the next president to kill in total secrecy. Obamas use [of drones] over the last seven years set a disastrous global precedent: using a new weapons technology as an excuse to kill in secret and without regard for international law. Todays developments are an incremental but important step away from the notion that new technology is a license for secrecy. The downside, though, is that the drone data could be completely misleading and provide a veneer of legitimacy to unlawful killings. There are reports of hundreds of unidentified people killed in apparent signature strikes, where targeting decisions were made on the basis of patterns of behavior rather than identification of a specific individual. Amnesty International and other groups have also documented so-called rescuer strikes, where the US killed or injured individuals who were trying to help the victims of an initial strike. The CIA, an agency with an extremely poor record of accountability to the public, is still conducting strikes. Its continued role is likely one reason we arent getting fuller answers to our questions about drones.

Note: Drone strikes almost always miss their intended targets and reportedly create more terrorists than they kill. Casualties of war whose identities are unknown are frequently mis-reported to be "militants". For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.


Latest News


Key News Articles from Years Past