Warfare Technology Media Articles

Thousands of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the companys involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes. The letter, which is circulating inside Google and has garnered more than 3,100 signatures, reflects a culture clash ... that is likely to intensify as cutting-edge artificial intelligence is increasingly employed for military purposes. We believe that Google should not be in the business of war, says the letter, addressed to Sundar Pichai, the companys chief executive. It asks that Google pull out of Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program, and announce a policy that it will not ever build warfare technology. That kind of idealistic stance ... is distinctly foreign to Washingtons massive defense industry and certainly to the Pentagon, where the defense secretary, Jim Mattis, has often said a central goal is to increase the lethality of the United States military. Some of Googles top executives have significant Pentagon connections. Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Google and still a member of the executive board of Alphabet, Googles parent company, serves on a Pentagon advisory body, the Defense Innovation Board, as does a Google vice president, Milo Medin. Project Maven ... began last year as a pilot program to find ways to speed up the military application of the latest A.I. technology.

Note: The use of artificial intelligence technology for drone strike targeting is one of many ways warfare is being automated. Strong warnings against combining artificial intelligence with war have recently been issued by America's second-highest ranking military officer, tech mogul Elon Musk, and many of the world's most recognizable scientists. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

Drone pilots have been quitting the U.S. Air Force in record numbers. They cite a combination of low-class status in the military, overwork and psychological trauma. But a widely publicized new memoir about Americas covert drone war fails to mention the outflow increases, as one internal Air Force memo calls it. Drone Warrior: An Elite Soldiers Inside Account of the Hunt for Americas Most Dangerous Enemies chronicles the nearly 10 years that Brett Velicovich, a former special operations member, spent using drones to help special forces find and track terrorists. Conveniently, it also puts a hard sell on a program whose ranks the military is struggling to keep full. The book is, at best, a tale of hyper-masculine bravado and, at worst, a piece of military propaganda designed to ease doubts about the drone program and increase recruitment. Velicovich exaggerates the accuracy of the technology, neglecting to mention how often it fails or that such failures have killed an untold number of civilians. For instance, the CIA killed 76 children and 29 adults in its attempts to take out Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda, who reportedly is still alive. The film rights to Drone Warrior were bought over a year ago, with much fanfare, by Paramount Pictures. This development is predictable. The U.S. military and Hollywood have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. But there is something particularly unseemly about Hollywoods enthusiasm for bringing Velicovichs version of drone warfare to the big screen.

Note: Documents obtained by a crowdfunded investigative journalism project show that US military and intelligence agencies have influenced over 1,800 movies and television shows. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption and the manipulation of mass media.

As the United States and its allies continue their bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, many more noncombatants are perishing than they seem prepared to admit. Airwars, the organization I lead, at present estimates that at least 1,500 civilians have been killed by the United States-led coalition. Similar or higher tallies are reported by other monitoring groups, like Iraq Body Count and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. But coalition officials have publicly admitted just 55 deaths. It may just be a matter of looking. Our policy is not to go out and seek allegations of civilian casualties, a senior official from United States Central Command, or Centcom, which oversees the bombing campaign, told me recently when I asked about the discrepancy between reports of noncombatant deaths and official investigations. It took about 15 months into the war for any admission of civilian deaths in Iraq - despite thousands of airstrikes and more than 130 reported incidents. An average of 173 days still passes between a civilian casualty in Iraq or Syria and any public admission of responsibility. The Pentagon is not alone in its accounting failures. Russia still denies the more than 2,000 deaths it has most likely caused in Syria, while all 12 of the United States coalition partners insist they have killed only bad guys. This then is a systemic problem, one that suggests militaries are at present unfit - or unwilling - to count the dead accurately from above.

Note: The above was written by Chris Woods, author of Sudden Justice: Americas Secret Drone Wars. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

As a witness to the removal of fallen U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Army Chaplain Christopher John Antal cant recall a time when that solemn ceremony wasnt conducted without the presence of drones passing along the horizon. On April 12, Antal resigned his commission as an officer in the Army because of his conscientious objection to the United States drone policy. In a letter addressed to ... Barack Obama, Antal wrote, The executive branch continues to claim the right to kill anyone, anywhere on Earth, at any time, for secret reasons, based on secret evidence, in a secret process, undertaken by unidentified officials. I refuse to support this policy of unaccountable killing. In doing so, he joined other previous members of the armed forces who have addressed Obama to criticize his drone strike policy, including four former members of the Air Force who penned a letter in November of 2015 warning the president that the strikes served as a recruitment tool similar to Guantanamo Bay. Antals resignation concluded nearly eight years of service as an Army chaplain. He publicly voiced [his concerns about the targeted killings] in a Veterans Day sermon Nov. 11, 2012, when he gave a lyrical sermon criticizing drones on his base in Afghanistan and posted it online. Antal ... was called into the office of a general who told him to take down the sermon. He told me that my message did not support the mission, Antal said. He worried that his views about drones could land him in a military prison if did not leave his post.

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.

The world's first race for drones controlled by people's thoughts involved 16 pilots flying drones over a course of just 10 yards in an indoor basketball court. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI (brain-computer interface) instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said [PhD student] Chris Crawford. Mind-controlled technology already is helping paralyzed people move limbs or robotic prosthetics. The technology ... works by using an EEG headset that has been calibrated to identify the electrical activity associated with particular thoughts in each wearer's brain. Programmers write code to translate these ... signals into commands that computers send to the drones. Professor Juan Gilbert, whose computer science students organized the race, [wants] to know how mind-controlled devices could expand and change the way we play, work and live. But as the technology moves toward wider adoption, ethical, legal and privacy questions remain unresolved. The US Defence Department - which uses drones to kill suspected terrorists ... from vast distances - is looking for military brain-control applications. A 2014 Defence Department grant supports the Unmanned Systems Laboratory ... where researchers have developed a system enabling a single person with no prior training to fly multiple drones simultaneously through mind control.

Note: Read an article which dives deep into the use of neuroscience as a weapon. And since drone strikes almost always miss their intended targets and reportedly create more terrorists than they kill, is it really a good idea to make drone fleets easier for the military to deploy?

In 2009, not long after his historic election and seven years after the first U.S. drone strike, President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, however, deadly U.S. drone strikes have increased sharply, as have doubts about the programs reliability and effectiveness. The latest criticism comes from Drone, a new documentary about the CIAs covert drone war. To help promote the film and inveigh against the agencys drone program ... four former operators - Stephen Lewis, Michael Haas, Cian Westmoreland and Brandon Bryant - appeared at a press conference. Speaking out can lead to veiled threats and prosecution. Which is why for years Bryant was the only drone veteran who openly rebuked the drone war. But his persistence and his appearance in the film, the other three say, inspired them to come forward. On multiple occasions, the men say they complained to their superiors about their concerns to no avail. Drone strikes kill far more civilians than the government admits. These deaths, they argue, wind up helping militant groups recruit new members and hurt the U.S.s long-term security. By distancing soldiers from the battlefield, the operators suggest the people carrying out strikes may become even more desensitized to killing than their counterparts on the front lines. On some occasions, Haas says operators referred to children as fun-sized terrorists or TITS, terrorists in training.

Note: A human rights attorney has stated the four former Air Force drone operators-turned-whistleblowers mentioned above have had their credit cards and bank accounts frozen. How many more have not spoken out against these abuses for fear of retaliation like this? Read more about the major failings of US drone attacks. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

Retired Army Gen. Mike Flynn, a top intelligence official in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, says in a forthcoming interview ... that the drone war is creating more terrorists than it is killing. He also asserts that the U.S. invasion of Iraq helped create the Islamic State. Flynn, who in 2014 was forced out as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has in recent months become an outspoken critic of the Obama administrations Middle East strategy. The former three star general ... describes the present approach of drone warfare as a failed strategy. What we have is this continued investment in conflict, the retired general says. The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just fuels the conflict. In 2010, [Flynn] published a controversial report on intelligence operations in Afghanistan, stating in part that the military could not answer fundamental questions about the country and its people despite nearly a decade of engagement there. Earlier this year, Flynn commended the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture saying that torture had eroded American values and that in time, the U.S. will look back on it, and it wont be a pretty picture.

Note: Drone strikes almost always miss their intended targets. 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 news articles about military corruption.

The Obama administration is again allowing the CIA to use drone strikes to secretly kill people that the spy agency does not know the identities of in multiple countries - despite repeated statements to the contrary. Apparently the drone operators didn't even know at the time who they were aiming at - only that they thought the target was possibly a terrorist hideout. It's what's known as a "signature" strike. Signature strikes has led to scores of civilians being killed over the past decade, including two completely innocent hostages ... one of whom was a US citizen ... less than two months ago. It's a way of killing that's been roundly condemned by human rights organizations and that some members of Congress have tried to outlaw. Here's how the New York Times described it: "The joke was that when the CIA sees "three guys doing jumping jacks," the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers but they might also be farmers." It has become increasingly clear that the "rules" are virtually meaningless. As is typical with the US government's extrajudicial killing policy, there was no public debate about any of the changes to the supposed rules, or even announcement that they ever changed - only an unofficial leak to a journalist after the latest killing. Beyond the enormous human rights consequences related to such a dangerous policy, these types of strikes backfire on the United States, sowing hatred in the populations of bombed countries and breeding sympathy for al-Qaida where there was none before.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on terrorism from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our War Information Center.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that many of those in charge of the CIAs torture program the same people whose names were explicitly redacted from the Senates torture report in order to avert accountability have ascended to the agencys powerful senior ranks and now run the CIA drone program. Rather than being fired and prosecuted, they have been rewarded with promotions. The longtime Counterterrorism Center chief who just stepped down, Michael DAndrea, was previously in charge of the notorious CIA prison known as the Salt Pit, where prisoners were regularly tortured and some died. His replacement, Chris Wood, was also central to the interrogation program, according to the Times. The only reason we know DAndrea and Woods names is because the New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet commendably decided to publish them. The CIA asked them not to. Adding to the disturbing nature of the CIAs ability to kill people in complete secrecy, the agency apparently now has a carte blanche to conduct drone strikes on its own. President Obama doesnt individually approve them anymore he lets the CIA unilaterally decide to kill people. The Obama administration has promised more transparency around drone strikes, yet at the same time, wont even acknowledge that the controversial drone strike its apologizing for even happened - just because such admission might force courts to hold the government accountable for its actions.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the intelligence community.

About once a month, staff members of the congressional intelligence committees drive across the Potomac River to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., and watch ... footage of drone strikes. The screenings have provided a veneer of congressional oversight. The C.I.A.s killing missions are ... unlikely to change significantly despite President Obamas announcement on Thursday that a drone strike accidentally killed two innocent hostages, an American and an Italian. Michael DAndrea ... was chief of operations during the birth of the agencys detention and interrogation program and then, as head of the C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center, became an architect of the targeted killing program. He presided over the growth of C.I.A. drone operations and hundreds of strikes. Mr. DAndrea was a forceful advocate for the drone program. He was particularly effective in winning the support of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who was chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee until January. The confidence Ms. Feinstein and other Democrats express about the drone program ... stands in sharp contrast to the criticism among lawmakers of the now defunct C.I.A. program to capture and interrogate Qaeda suspects in secret prisons. When Ms. Feinstein was asked in a meeting with reporters in 2013 why she was so sure she was getting the truth about the drone program while she accused the C.I.A. of lying to her about torture, she seemed surprised. Thats a good question, actually.

Note: The CIA has been aware that drone strikes are ineffective since at least 2009. If drones help terrorists, almost always miss their intended targets, and may be used to target people in the US in the future, what are the real reasons for the US government's drone program?

Theyre called lethal autonomous weapons, or LAWs, and their military mission would be to seek out, identify and kill a human target independent of human control. Representatives of 60 nations ... met in Geneva during the third week of April in an attempt to define the level of artificial intelligence needed for an international definition of robotic autonomy. The Panel of Experts, under the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), will meet again next year to continue the discussion. None of the industrial nations admits having a LAW, but theres really no way to confirm the nonexistence of a weapon that would be classified as secret. The U.S. Department of Defense has had a directive in place for three years that outlines the chain of command that would approve their deployment on a case-by-case basis. Its called Directive 3000.09. On April 15, the third day of the panel meeting, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus ... announced the creation of a new office for unmanned warfare systems. According to Stuart Russell, who addressed the panel, Devices in the 1-gram range might be able to selectively kill a chosen human target on contact using a shaped explosive charge. Im not sure what countermeasures one might try against a swarm of 5-gram robots. There will be ... a LAWs arms race."

Note: Current surveillance drones can be hacked, hijacked, and redirected while flying in some cases. Under human guidance, current killer drones almost always miss their intended targets. What will happen when tiny lethal flying robots begin operating without being controlled by human decision makers?

Its been over two years since President Obama promised new transparency and accountability rules when it comes to drone strikes. Virtually no progress has been made. The criteria for who gets added to the unaccountable kill list is still shrouded in secrecy even when the US government is targeting its own citizens. We know because a Texas-born man named Mohanad Mahmoud Al Farekh recently captured overseas was arraigned in federal court this week. It turns out, as the Times reported, that in 2013 his government debated whether he should be killed by a drone strike in Pakistan. The CIA and military were reportedly pushing hard to send drones to kill Al Farekh, but the Justice Department didnt think there was enough evidence. An important new report released by the Open Society Justice Initiative this week also shows that - despite the Obama administrations internal requirements for drone strikes that supposedly require a near certainty that civilians wont get killed - the government quite often just disregards its own rules, which has led to the death of dozens of civilians in Yemen in the past two years. Though without Open Societys study, the public would have no clue, since the Obama administration still steadfastly refuses to officially release any information on drone strikes in Yemen. The administration has said for years it prefers capturing to killing but the data indicates that they practice the opposite.

Note: The CIA has been aware that drone strikes are ineffective since at least 2009. If drones help terrorists, almost always miss their intended targets, and may be used to target people in the US in the future, what are the real reasons for the US government's drone program?

Drone strikes and "targeted killings" of terror targets by the United States can be counterproductive and bolster the support of extremist groups, the CIA has admitted in a secret report released by WikiLeaks. The document, by the intelligence agency's Directorate of Intelligence, said that despite the effectiveness of "high value targeting" (HVT), air strikes and special forces operations had a negative impact by boosting the popular support of terror organisations. The CIA report is dated 2009 and talks of operations conducted in countries such as Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen. Operations against terror targets "may increase support for the insurgents, particularly if these strikes enhance insurgent leaders' lore, if non-combatants are killed in the attacks, if legitimate or semi-legitimate politicians aligned with the insurgents are targeted, or if the government is already seen as overly repressive or violent," the report said. "Senior Taliban leaders' use of sanctuary in Pakistan has also complicated the HVT effort," it reveals. "Moreover, the Taliban has a high overall ability to replace lost leaders ... especially at the middle levels." It speaks of drone strikes also having limited effect in Iraq. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, US drone strikes have killed between 2,400 and 3,888 people in Pakistan in the years 2004 to 2014 and between 371 and 541 people in Yemen in the years 2002 to 2014.

Note: This report proves that the CIA has been aware that drone strikes are ineffective since at least 2009. If drones help terrorists, almost always miss their intended targets, and may be used to target people in the US in the future, what are the real reasons for the US government's drone program?

The US Navy has announced that a new laser weapon it tested earlier this year was a success. A video of the laser weapon system (Laws), released by the Office of Naval Research, shows the laser being deployed aboard USS Ponce in September in the Persian Gulf. It shows the weapon being used against two test targets, including a speedboat which bursts into flames. Other targets were located at sea and in the air, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones. Rear Adm. Matthew L. Klunder, chief of naval research, said in a statement on Wednesday that the powerful Laws system will play a vital role in the future of naval combat operations. The prototype weapon in the video cost $40 million to produce, dealt with a tough pace, adverse weather conditions including a sandstorm, and destroyed targets with near-instantaneous lethality. Officials claim the weapon is capable of destroying its targets with pin-point accuracy. The captain of the USS Ponce could use it against a real threat if required. Operated using a video game controller, the system hit targets mounted aboard small boats speeding towards the ship. In a separate test, the laser targeted and shot a drone out of the sky.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our War Information Center.

A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls targeted killing they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November. Reprieve [focused on] cases in which specific people were targeted by drones multiple times. Their data, shared with the Guardian, raises questions about the accuracy of US intelligence. The analysis is a partial estimate. Drone strikes ... are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them. There is nothing precise about intelligence that results in the deaths of 28 unknown people, including women and children, for every bad guy the US goes after, said Reprieves Jennifer Gibson. The data cohort is only a fraction of those killed by US drones. Neither Reprieve nor the Guardian examined ... the so-called signature strikes that attack people based on a pattern of behavior considered suspicious, rather than intelligence tying their targets to terrorist activity. An analytically conservative Council on Foreign Relations tally assesses that 500 drone strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan have killed 3,674 people. Like all weapons, drones will inevitably miss their targets. But the secrecy surrounding them obscures how often misses occur and the reasons for them.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources, including this NPR article that reports on the possibility of future drone strikes taking place within the US.

It has been more than two years since The New York Times revealed that Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties of his drone strikes which in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent. The paper noted that this counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths, and even quoted CIA officials as deeply troubled by this decision. After the Times article, most large western media outlets continued to describe completely unknown victims of U.S. drone attacks as militants even though they (a) had no idea who those victims were or what they had done and (b) were well-aware by that point that the term had been re-defined by the Obama administration. Like the U.S. drone program itself, this deceitful media practice continues unabated. The U.S. government itself let alone the media outlets calling them militants often has no idea who has been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan. The Intercept previously reported that targeting decisions can even be made on the basis of nothing more than metadata analysis and tracking of SIM cards in mobile phones. Just last month, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that fewer than 4% of the people killed have been identified by available records as named members of al Qaeda.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about military corruption and high level manipulation of mass media from reliable sources.

Toward the end of a May 27 article in The Times about President Obamas speech in which, among other things, he mentioned setting new standards for ordering drone strikes against non-Americans, there was this rather disturbing paragraph: Even as he set new standards, a debate broke out about what they actually meant and what would actually change. For now, officials said, signature strikes targeting groups of unidentified armed men presumed to be extremists will continue in the Pakistani tribal areas. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, those two sentences seem to contradict the entire tenor of Mr. Obamas speech, and of a letter to Congress from Attorney General Eric Holder. Both men seemed to be saying that the administration would stop using unmanned drones to kill targets merely suspected, due to their location or their actions, of a link to Al Qaeda or another terrorist organization. Those strikes have resulted in untold civilian casualties that have poisoned Americas relationship with Yemen and Pakistan. Mr. Obama talked at some length about civilian casualties, and also said that the need to use drone strikes against forces that are massing to support attacks on coalition forces will disappear once American forces withdraw from Afghanistan at the end of 2014. But so what to make of that paragraph in the May 27 article? I asked the White House. What I got in response was part of a background briefing given after the presidents speech that repeated the language about how the need for signature strikes will fade.

Note: Drone strikes often 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 government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

The Government has secretly ramped up a controversial programme that strips people of their British citizenship on national security grounds with two of the men subsequently killed by American drone attacks. Since 2010, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, has revoked the passports of 16 individuals, many of whom are alleged to have had links to militant or terrorist groups. Critics of the programme warn that it allows ministers to wash their hands of British nationals suspected of terrorism who could be subject to torture and illegal detention abroad. They add that it also allows those stripped of their citizenship to be killed or rendered without any onus on the British Government to intervene. At least five of those deprived of their UK nationality ... were born in Britain, and one man had lived in the country for almost 50 years. Those affected have their passports cancelled, and lose their right to enter the UK making it very difficult to appeal. The leading human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce said the present situation smacked of mediaeval exile, just as cruel and just as arbitrary. Ian Macdonald QC, the president of the Immigration Law Practitioners Association, described the citizenship orders as sinister. Its not open government; its closed, and it needs to be exposed. Government officials act when people are out of the country on two occasions while on holiday before cancelling passports and revoking citizenships.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on crimes committed in wars of aggression, click here.

U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have killed far more people than the United States has acknowledged, have traumatized innocent residents and largely been ineffective, according to a new study released [on September 25]. The study by Stanford Law School and New York University's School of Law calls for a re-evaluation of the practice, saying the number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low -- about 2%. In contrast to more conservative U.S. statements, the Stanford/NYU report -- titled "Living Under Drones" -- offers starker figures published by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent organization based at City University in London. Based on interviews with witnesses, victims and experts, the report accuses the CIA of "double-striking" a target, moments after the initial hit, thereby killing first responders. It also highlights harm "beyond death and physical injury," publishing accounts of psychological trauma experienced by people living in Pakistan's tribal northwest region, who it says hear drones hover 24 hours a day. "Before this we were all very happy," the report quotes an anonymous resident as saying. "But after these drones attacks a lot of people are victims and have lost members of their family. A lot of them, they have mental illnesses." People have to live with the fear that a strike could come down on them at any moment of the day or night, leaving behind dead whose "bodies are shattered to pieces," and survivors who must be desperately sped to a hospital.

Note: Visit the Living Under Drones website here. For a Democracy Now! report on the results of this study click here. For more analysis click here and here.

The US government has long maintained, reasonably enough, that a defining tactic of terrorism is to launch a follow-up attack aimed at those who go to the scene of the original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead. Yet ... this has become one of the favorite tactics of the very same US government. Attacking rescuers (and arguably worse, bombing funerals of America's drone victims) is now a tactic routinely used by the US in Pakistan. In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that "the CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals." Specifically: "at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims." The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings ... Christof Heyns, said that if "there have been secondary drone strikes on rescuers who are helping (the injured) after an initial drone attack, those further attacks are a war crime." There is no doubt that there have been. The frequency with which the US uses this tactic is reflected by this December 2011 report ... on the drone killing of 16-year-old Tariq Khan and his 12-year-old cousin Waheed, just days after the older boy attended a meeting to protest US drones: "[Witnesses] did not provide pictures of the missile strike scene. Virtually none exist, since drones often target people who show up at the scene."

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 government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

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