American freedom fighters at work on an unmanned,
child-killing drone
Report claims just one in fifty victims of 'surgical' US strikes in
Pakistan are known militants. Jerome Taylor reports on a deadly new strategy
Late in the evening on 6 June this
year an unmanned drone was flying high above the Pakistani village of Datta
Khel in north Waziristan.
The buzz emitted by America's
fleet of Predators and Reapers are a familiar sound for the inhabitants of the
dusty hamlet, which lies next to a riverbed close to Pakistan's border with
Afghanistan and is a stronghold for the Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur.
As the drone circled it let off
the first of its Hellfire missiles, slamming into a small house and reducing it
to rubble. When residents rushed to the scene of the attack to see if they
could help they were struck again.
According to reports at the time, three local rescuers were killed by
a second missile whilst a further strike killed another three people five
minutes later. In all, somewhere between 17 and 24 people are thought to have
been killed in the attack.
The Datta Khel assault was just one of the more than 345 strikes
that have hit Pakistan's tribal areas in the past eight years but it reveals an
increasingly common tactic now being used in America's covert drone wars - the
"double-tap" strike.
More and more, while the overall
frequency of strikes has fallen since a Nato attack in 2011 killed 24 Pakistani
soldiers and strained US-Pakistan relations, initial strikes are now followed up by further missiles in a tactic
which lawyers and campaigners say is killing an even greater number of
civilians.
The tactic has cast such a shadow
of fear over strike zones that rescuers often wait for hours before daring to
visit the scene of an attack.
"These strikes are becoming
much more common," Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents
victims of drone strikes, told The Independent. "In the past it used to be
a one-off, every now and then. Now almost every other attack is a double tap.
There is no justification for it."
The expansive use of "double-tap"
drone strikes is just one of a number of more recent phenomena in the covert
war run by the US against violent Islamists that has been documented in a new
report by legal experts at Stanford and New York University.
The product of nine months' research
and more than 130 interviews, it is one of the most exhaustive attempts by
academics to understand - and evaluate - Washington's drone wars. And their
verdict is damning.
Throughout the 146-page report, which is released today, the authors
condemn drone strikes for their ineffectiveness.
Despite assurances the attacks are
"surgical", researchers found
barely 2 per cent of their victims are known militants and that the idea that
the strikes make the world a safer place for the US is "ambiguous at best."
Researchers added that traumatic
effects of the strikes go far beyond fatalities, psychologically battering a population which lives under the daily
threat of annihilation from the air, and ruining the local economy.
They conclude by calling on Washington
completely to reassess its drone-strike programme or risk alienating the very
people they hope to win over. They also observe that the strikes set worrying
precedents for extra-judicial killings at a time when many nations are building
up their unmanned weapon arsenals.
The Obama administration is unlikely to heed their demands given the
zeal with which America has expanded its drone programme over the past two
years. Reapers and Predators are now
active over the skies of Somalia and Yemen as well as Pakistan and - less
covertly - Afghanistan.
But campaigners like Mr Akbar hope
the Stanford/New York University research may start to make an impact on the
American public.
"It's an important piece of
work," he said. "No one in the US wants to listen to a Pakistani
lawyer saying these strikes are wrong. But they might listen to American
academics."
Reprieve, the charity which is
trying to challenge drone strikes in the British, Pakistani and American
courts, said the report detailed how the fallout from the extra-judicial
strikes must be measured in terms of more than deaths and injuries alone.
"An entire region is being terrorised by the constant threat of
death from the skies,"said
Reprieve's director, Clive Stafford Smith.
"Their way of life is collapsing: kids are too terrified to go to
school, adults are afraid to attend weddings, funerals, business meeting or
anything that involves gathering in groups."
Some of the most harrowing personal testimonies involve those who have
witnessed "double-tap" strikes.
Researchers said people in
Waziristan - the tribal area where most of the strikes take place - are
"acutely aware of reports of the practice of follow-up strikes", and
explained that the secondary strikes have discouraged ordinary civilians from
coming to one another's rescue.
One interviewee, describing a strike on his in-laws' home, said a
follow-up missile killed would-be rescuers. "Other people came to check
what had happened; they were looking for the children in the beds and then a
second drone strike hit those people."
A father of four, who lost one of
his legs in a drone strike, admitted: "We and other people are so scared
of drone attacks now that when there is a drone strike, for two or three hours
nobody goes close to [the location of the strike]. We don't know who [the
victims] are, whether they are young or old, because we try to be safe."
Rev 13:12- And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him,
and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast,
whose deadly wound was healed.
Rev
13:13- And he doeth great wonders, so
that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,
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