Website – Drones – Batch 2 of information to post on the Drones page

Dennis, the following materials came from previous newsletters:

The short articles below came from Olympia FOR newsletters from mid-2012 to early 2013:

Drones and U.S. Foreign Policy Lead to Domestic Mass Shootings

by Glen Anderson

Every time a mass murder occurs in the U.S., politicians, news media, and ordinary Americans express shock and bewilderment.

Obama expressed sorrow about 20 American children shot in Connecticut but has shown no concern for the thousands of persons – including 178 innocent children – the U.S. killed in drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen.

Obama vastly escalated Bush’s use of drones (unmanned airplanes controlled remotely from bases in the U.S.). The CIA identifies people who seem suspicious and assassinate them from the air, without any trial, without any due process whatsoever. Many of them were completely innocent.

In deciding whom to target for killing, the CIA defines a “militant” as simply “any military-age male in a strike zone.”

Most drone attacks are called “signature strikes,” in which a drone operator thousands of miles away target unknown individuals based merely on perceived patterns of behavior.

The U.S.’s drone war is blatantly illegal under international law.

It is a foreign policy equivalent of some states’ “Stand Your Ground” laws, which allow a person to kill another person if he feels fear, even without any real evidence or any due process.

The U.S. has slaughtered countless children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries.

The U.S. is the only modern Western democracy that often uses the death penalty.

The government sets a terrible example – a murderous climate that allows troubled people to use guns to vent their fears and frustrations.

Murders and mass shootings will continue until the government renounces killing.

Obama’s Murderous Drone War

by Larry Kerschner

We, as a nation, have always killed people. But, until recently, no president has waged war by killing enemies one by one, targeting them individually for execution, without benefit of any legal due process. President Obama is the first president to make the killing of targeted individuals a significant focus of U.S. military operations. He has personally authorized kill teams comprised of both soldiers from Special Forces and civilians from the CIA.

More than any other president he has made assassination rather than the capture of individuals the option of first resort, and has killed them both with drones and with nighttime raids. The Obama administration tries to explain that they are being careful, scrupulous of our laws, and determined to avoid the loss of collateral, innocent lives while, at the same time, claiming the right to execute anyone including American citizens at the President's whim. When waging war on individuals, the distinction between war and murder quickly becomes unclear.

When President Bush left office in January 2009, the US had carried out around 50 drone strikes. In the past, almost four years, President Obama has reportedly carried out almost 300 attacks in Pakistan alone.

According to international law, in order for the U.S. government to legally target civilian terror suspects abroad it has to define a terrorist group as one engaging in armed conflict, and the use of force must be a “military necessity.” There must be no reasonable alternative to killing, such as capture, and to warrant death the target must be “directly participating in hostilities.” The use of force has to be considered “proportionate” to the threat. Finally, the foreign nation in which such targeted killing takes place has to give its permission. None of these conditions apply in most of these situations where innocent people have, almost indiscriminately, been killed.

Obama, in your name, has killed individuals in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and is planning to expand the presence of U.S. Special Forces in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. On his third day in office, Obama sent attack drones into Pakistan hitting the residence of a pro-government tribal leader six miles outside the town of Wana, in South Waziristan. The blast killed the tribal leader’s entire family, including three children. Under Obama, we have killed over 2000 non-combatant civilians, including over 200 children, in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

This increased use of drones has also given the arms merchants another way of turning blood into gold. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the military contractor that manufactures the Predator drone and its more heavily armed counterpart, the Reaper, can barely keep up with the government’s demand.

This targeted killing of children with no risk from a distance, certainly makes you proud to be an American. To learn more, Google “Living Under Drones,” a recent report published by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School.

Larry Kerschner is very active with the FOR and Veterans for Peace. He recently visited Afghanistan.

CCR and ACLU sue CIA and military officials for killing people with drones: In mid-July the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court, Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta. The suit sues senior CIA and military officials, and argues that the killings of three American citizens by their own government in drone strikes in Yemen last year violate the U.S. Constitution and international law. On September 30, 2011, U.S. drone strikes killed Anwar Al-Aulaqi, who had been placed on government “kill lists” over a year before, along with Samir Khan. Two weeks later, on October 14, U.S. drone strikes killed Anwar Al-Aulaqi’s son, 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, as he was eating dinner with his teenage cousin at an open-air restaurant. The lawsuit seeks accountability for those killed, and also challenges the government’s claimed power to target and kill individuals, including U.S. citizens, without due process and far from any field of armed conflict. It challenges the Executive Branch’s unconstitutional and dangerous assumption of the role of judge, jury and executioner. Under the Obama administration, U.S. targeted killings have escalated and expanded. Strikes have been carried out in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and the Philippines. Thousands of people have been killed, including many hundreds of civilians. A single strike in Yemen on December 17, 2009, killed 41 civilians, including 21 children, and led to popular protest. In Pakistan alone, the Obama administration with less than four years in office has already reportedly launched six times as many strikes as the Bush administration, which held office for eight years. Info:

Obama’s escalation using drones to kill suspects with no trial and no due process whatsoever: If a government suspects a person of having committed a crime, the government should arrest that person and conduct a fair trial with full due process – and impose punishment only after the person has been found guilty. The U.S. government – especially under Obama – has eliminated all of the steps between suspecting a person and killing him (and any innocent people who happen to be nearby)! Obama’s administration (especially the CIA) collects “intelligence” and – based on where the person appears to be going and what he appears to be doing – targets the person for assassination without any trial or due process. A US military employee at a military base thousands of miles away in the US targets that person and kills him with a remote-controlled unmanned “drone” aircraft. Was the person the US killed guilty or innocent? We’ll never know! But we do know that many innocent people nearby are killed, and we do know that the US’s reckless disregard is antagonizing many people in other countries. The US does this in countries where we have not declared war because Obama is carrying on the Bush-Cheney doctrine of a worldwide “war on terror” without bothering to declare war on any particular countries. What would Americans think of some other country (e.g., Russia or North Korea or Iran) were to assassinate Americans in that way within the US? Such arrogance and utter indifference to human life and human rights is not OK. Many people are urging President Obama and our US House and Senate members to oppose killing people with drone strikes overall, and especially those “signature” drone strikes based only upon behavioral profiling in Yemen and Pakistan. Info & petition:

Publish the names of all victims of drone attacks: To date, in Pakistan, we have been able to identify 170 named persons (alleged “militants”) killed by the CIA in more than 300 drone strikes. Among them were senior figures of the Taliban and al Qaeda. These strikes have severely affected Pakistan’s tribal areas. The recently released bin Laden papers talk of people exhausted by the constant threat of bombardment. A U.S. government official recently boasted that not a single noncombatant had been killed by the drones, but this is far from true. The US records but does not announce the names of noncombatant bystanders. This presents a misleading and one-sided picture of the situation. The fact is that many noncombatants are also being killed along with “militants.” The US’s refusal to publish their names obscures the truth and makes the shedding of innocent blood more acceptable.