The Human Cost of Secret U.S. Drone Strikes in Yemen
For more than a decade now, the United States has been using armed drones to secretly kill suspected terrorists in Yemen. The public knows very little about these attacks. Neither the U.S. nor the Yemeni government has systematically disclosed who was killed and why, or whether civilians were among those killed.
Now, working with the Open Society Justice Initiative, researchers from the Yemeni nongovernmental organization Mwatana Organization for Human Rights have spent two years visiting the sites where some of these attacks took place. Their findings are detailed in a new report, Death by Drone: Civilian Harm Caused by U.S. Targeted Killings in Yemen, which gives the world a look at the reality of a counterterrorism strategy that the Obama administration has hailed as a model program.
The findings raise serious concerns over the lawfulness of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. It also provides credible evidence that U.S. strikes continued to kill civilians even after President Obama said in a May 2013 speech that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” This raises serious questions about the extent to which the United States is complying with its own policy guidelines.
As Yemen sinks further into instability, the report seeks to ensure that the civilian victims of these strikes are not forgotten to new and future crises. And as the United States implements a new drone export policy purporting to be part of a broader effort to shape international standards on drone use, the report warns of the dangers associated with promoting the U.S. model of drone use.
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http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/human-cost-secret-us-drone-strikes-yemen