Expanding CIA Drone Strikes Will Likely Mean More Dead Innocents

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/expanding-cia-drone-strikes-will-likely-mean-more-dead-innocents/256106/

An eye-opening report published last November in the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama Administration was permitting the CIA to kill people in Pakistan without even knowing who they were: "Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren't always known. The bulk of CIA's drone strikes are signature strikes." As I noted at the time, this is the same CIA that is known to have jailed innocent people, subjecting them to harsh interrogation tactics and years of wrongful imprisonment. Despite those errors, and the CIA's lack of transparency and accountability, the Obama Administration loosed it in Pakistan, where we've killed lots of innocent people. And while it's been operating in Yemen for some time, the CIA now wants official permission to kill people whose identities it can't confirm in that country either.

Is President Obama going to agree? "If approved, the change would probably accelerate a campaign of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen that is already on a record pace, with at least eight attacks in the past four months," The Washington Post reports. "For President Obama, an endorsement of signature strikes would mean a significant, and potentially risky, policy shift. The administration has placed tight limits on drone operations in Yemen to avoid being drawn into an often murky regional conflict and risk turning militants with local agendas into al-Qaeda recruits."

It's worth pausing at that line about the "tight limits" on current drone operations in Yemen. Here's how Jeremy Scahill, who reported on the ground there, described the reality of American policy:

'For years, the elite Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA had teams deployed inside Yemen that supported Yemeni forces and conducted unilateral operations, consisting mostly of cruise missile and drone attacks. Some of the unilateral strikes have killed their intended targets, such as the CIA attack on Awlaki. But others have killed civilians--at times, a lot of civilians. And many of these have been in Abyan and its neighboring province of Shebwa, both of which have recently seen a substantial rise of AQAP activity. President Obama's first known authorization of a missile strike on Yemen, on December 17, 2009, killed more than forty Bedouins, many of them women and children, in the remote village of al Majala in Abyan. Another US strike, in May 2010, killed an important tribal leader and the deputy governor of Marib province, Jabir Shabwani, sparking mass anger at the United States...

The October drone strike that killed Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a US citizen, and his teenage cousin shocked and enraged Yemenis of all political stripes. "I firmly believe that the [military] operations implemented by the US performed a great service for Al Qaeda, because those operations gave Al Qaeda unprecedented local sympathy," says Jamal, the Yemeni journalist. The strikes "have recruited thousands." Yemeni tribesmen, he says, share one common goal with Al Qaeda, "which is revenge against the Americans, because those who were killed are the sons of the tribesmen, and the tribesmen never, ever give up on revenge." Even senior officials of the Saleh regime recognize the damage the strikes have caused.'

[RC]

1. Hard at work making sure that there are terrorists to continue the War on Terror against.

By what authority are we basically allowed to just pick a country and start killing people just because, or on a maybe? Or possibly only on a what if?

That appears to be what we are doing.

[The Northerner]

2. +1 What if other militaries targeted the US population and used the same excuse to

slaughter numerous innocent civilians and suspects on a near-daily basis?