Here's the problem. Imagine you are a young man or woman in the Middle East and then your innocent mother or sister or grandmother dies from a drone strike. Who are you going to be angry with and what are you going to do about it?
Nearly 90 Percent Of People Killed In Recent Drone Strikes Were Not The Target
| Huffington Post | - |
An Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press An unmanned U.S.
Nearly 90 Percent Of People Killed In Recent Drone Strikes Were Not The Target
U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Posted: 10/15/2015 11:52 AM EDT | Edited: 5 hours ago
An
unmanned U.S. drone flies over Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan on Jan.
31, 2010. Drone strikes are "a phenomenal gamble," a source told The
Intercept.
The controversial U.S. drone strike program in the Middle
East aims to pinpoint and kill terrorist leaders, but new documents
indicate that a staggering number of these "targeted killings"
affect far more people than just their targets.
According to a new report
from The Intercept, nearly 90 percent of people killed in recent drone
strikes in Afghanistan "were not the intended targets" of the attacks.
Documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.
The report, compiled from classified documents released by a source in the intelligence community, corroborates the many news accounts of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes. U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2009.
In December 2013,
a drone strike in Yemen killed 14 people returning from a wedding.
Government officials mistook their vehicles for those of al Qaeda
militants. Parents in Pakistan have reported taking their children out of school to protect them from possible strikes.
The U.S. government has implemented targeted killings
since the Sept. 11 attacks as a counterterrorism measure and as
retribution against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Under the Obama
administration, many of these targeted killings have been carried out
using unmanned drones. Despite the high number of civilian casualties
and criticism that the program lacks transparency, President Barack
Obama has repeatedly defended the strikes.
"The terrorists we are after target civilians, and the
death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any
estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes," he said in 2013.
Protesters rally against U.S. drone strikes in Peshawar, Pakistan, on April 23, 2011.
While government officials claim the drone strikes
are accurate and rarely harm innocent civilians, strikes can kill or
injure anyone in the area, even if they are only meant to kill a
targeted individual.
“Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association,”
the source of the documents told The Intercept. When “a drone strike
kills more than one person, there is no guarantee that those persons
deserved their fate. … So it’s a phenomenal gamble.”
Read The Intercept's full series, "The Drone Papers," here.Also on HuffPost:
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