Obama's War

From .... 'Buyer's Remorse : How Obama Let Progressives Down' By Bill Press
          Simon and Schuster .. Copyright 2016

Despite Obama's pledge to lead "the most transparent administration in history" --and despite congressional pressure to issue an annual update -- the Obama administration has steadfastly refused to divulge the number of people killed each year by drones, their identities, the number of civilian casualties, or the legal rationale behind each strike.

  So estimates vary. In a 2013 study the United Nations reported 2,200 killed in Pakistan by drone strikes, including 400 civilians. On January 23, 2014, the fifth anniversary of the first drone strike under
President Obama, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that at least 2,400 people had been killed by drones under Obama. In Pakistan alone, they concluded, between 416 and 951 civilians had been killed, including 168 to 200 children. Amnesty International in its 2013 report, estimated 900 civilians had been killed by drones.

  In one set of documents obtained by Jeremy Scahill for The Intercept, the Pentagon itself acknowledged a significant percentage of innocent civilians killed. According to those Pentagon papers, in "Operation Haymaker," a special operation in northeastern Afghanistan between January 2012 and February 2013, air strikes killed more than 200 people of whom only 35 were intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents nearly 90% of those
killed were not the intended targets.

  Again, no precise numbers are available from the Pentagon but one expert, Larry Lewis of the Center for Naval Analysis, estimates that U.S. led drone strikes in Afghanistan are ten times more likely to cause civilian deaths than are strikes by traditionally piloted aircraft. Former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai cited continued civilian killings by U.S drones as one of his reasons for refusing to sign a 10 year security agreement between his country and the United States, once all American combat troops left Afghanistan in the summer of 2014.

  Today we still don't know how many drones are deployed by the CIA, where they are used, who their targets are, or how many actual terrorist or civilian deaths they're responsible for. And the CIA has many ways of making sure we'll never know, such as classifying all men of military age as "enemy fighters" So defined, any males killed in a drone strike, even innocent bystanders, were by definition "combatants", not civilians, and therefore legitimate targets. In short "black sites" have been replaced by "black drones".

  In October 2013, members of Congress, for the first and only time heard from a family of civilian victims of drone attacks at a special congressional hearing convened by Florida congressman Alan Grayson. Only five members of Congress -- Grayson, Jan Schakowsky, Rick Nolan, Rush Holt, and John Conyers, all Democrats - showed up. They heard powerful testimony from a Pakistani schoolteacher, whose mother was killed by a drone as she gathered okra in a field with two grandchildren.

  "Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day," Rafiq ur Rehman told the stunned panel through a translator. "Some media outlets reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mothers house. Others reported that the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a field, not a house. All of them reported that three, four, five militants were killed" Instead he said only one person was killed that day: "Not a militant, but my mother."

  Rehman testified that just one of dozens of people in his own tribe killed by drones over the years, including many women and children. Even the translator broke down and wept as Rehman expressed his difficulties, as a teacher, dealing with his mother's death: "My job is to educate," He explained. "But how do I teach something like this? How do I explain what I myself do not understand? How can I in good faith assure the children that the drone will not come back and kill them too, if I do not understand why it killed my mother and injured my children?"

  Asked what he wanted from the United States, Rehman had one simple request: "In the end I would just like to ask the American public to treat us as equals. Make sure that your government gives us the same status of a human with basic rights as hey do heir own citizens. We do not kill our cattle the way the US is killing humans in Waziristan with drones."

 The Obama administration refused to send a representative to the congressional hearing. In response to Rehman's testimony, a Pentagon spokesman would say only that the drone campaign is conducted "consistent with all applicable domestic and international law." Yet the administration has cited no law, outside an exceedingly broad interpretation of the post September 11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that would justify the use of killer drones. Nor has the administration commented on what would be our response if any other country employed drones to kill its perceived
enemies in a third country.

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   "Bill Press makes the case ... read this book." ---- Senator Bernie Sanders