U.S. Unmanned Drone attacks within Pakistan record high: Threat to civilians

In 2009 there were 53 CIA-administered drone attacks. This year so far there have been nearly 75. The estimated death toll from strikes for last year, that is 2009, was 709. In less than nine months in 2010 there has been close to 650. Investigative journalists estimate if the annual, and surely if September's monthly, rate continues, 2010 will be the deadliest year to date just as last month, September, is already the deadliest month.

During the first year of the Obama administration, there were 51 drone attacks, compared to 45 drone attacks during the full two terms (8 years) of President George W. Bush's presidency, according to "The Year of the Drone," a report by the Washington-based New America Foundation released March this year.

The report also cites a 32 percent civilian fatality rate in drone attacks since 2004.

"Drones are currently killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It should be noted that the United States is not at war with any of those countries, which should mean that in a sane world the killing is illegal under both international law and the U.S. Constitution," states Philip Girald, a former CIA officer and fellow of the American Conservative Defense Alliance.

Rick Rozoff writing to OpEdNews, a widely read internet blog, said this September has seen the largest amount of American unmanned aerial vehicle - drone - attacks in Pakistan and the most deaths resulting from them of any month in the nine-year war waged by the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies in Afghanistan and, though insufficiently acknowledged, increasingly in Pakistan.

He further says the New America Foundation reports the deaths of 4-6 people identified as militants on September 20 in North Waziristan and Wikipedia reports a total of 19 killed in two attacks in the agency on the same day, but Pakistan's Daily Times revealed that "At least 28 people were killed in three US led drone strikes in the remote areas of South and North Waziristan" on that day. The additional numbers in the Pakistani version alone push this month's death toll - 122 by adding the Wikipedia numbers - to only one short of the previous monthly high of 132 from January 2010.

Wikipedia, the insurgent internet blog, calculates from 2004 to now document 167 drone attacks and 1,753 deaths. 72 or more strikes this year, then, account for over 43 percent of the total in a six-year period, notwithstanding the lull following this summer's flooding. The 2010 death count to date constitutes 37 percent of all fatalities since 2004.

The approximately 1,800 people killed in Pakistan by drone attacks are invariably referred to in the Western press as armed militants belonging to outfits affiliated with al-Qaeda, members of Pakistani Taliban and allied formations like the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan of Baitullah Mehsud (killed with his wife and in-laws in a drone strike in August of 2009), Lashkar al-Zil and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and veteran Afghan Mujahedin organizations such as the Haqqani network and Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, ethnic Arab fighters, and members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and the Turkistan Islamic Party (al-Hizb al-Islami al-Turkistani), the last claiming to be fighting for the liberation of what it calls East Turkistan - that is, China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Citing Pakistani government sources, Pakistan’s Dawn News reported this January that in 2009 the U.S. launched 44 Predator drone attacks in Pakistan which killed 708 people. Contrary to how the victims were routinely characterized in the American and most of the world press, of the nearly four dozen attacks "only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians."

As a result, "For each Al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities," said Dawn News.
US Justification

U.S. lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV or drones), comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war, is the authoritative opinion of the Obama administration’s Chief Legal Counsel attached to Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

The domestic and international outcry in opposition to the Drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - started during the previous Bush administration in 2002 and increasingly used by the current Obama administration – is for the collateral damage.

But Obama administration’s Chief Legal Counsel Harold Hongju Koh doesn’t touch the issue of civilian deaths: he is justifying the drone attacks and, in a major policy address on behalf of the administration and U.S. State Department on March 25 before the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law in Washington, DC, he declared that “U.S. targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war.”

In his own words Mr. Koh “serves as a conscience for the U.S. Government with regard to international law. The Legal Adviser, along with many others in policy as well as legal positions, offers opinions on both the wisdom and morality of proposed international actions.”
He further says that “the role Legal Adviser plays is defender of the United States interests in the many international fora.”
Opposition.

"Drones are currently killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It should be noted that the United States is not at war with any of those countries, which should mean that in a sane world the killing is illegal under both international law and the U.S. Constitution," states Philip Girald, a former CIA officer and fellow of the American Conservative Defense Alliance.

Girald's observation is seconded by Mary Ellen O'Connell, a professor at Notre Dame Law School. In a research paper titled "Unlawful Killing with Combat Drones," professor O'Connell writes: "The CIA's intention in using drones is to target and kill individual leaders of al-Qaida or Taliban militant groups. Drones have rarely, if ever, killed just the intended target. By October 2009, the ratio has been about 20 leaders killed for 750 to 1,000 unintended victims – meaning innocent civilians.
“Targeted killings pose a rapidly growing challenge to the international rule of law. They are increasingly used in circumstances which violate the relevant rules of international law. The international community needs to be more forceful in demanding accountability,” said Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions.

In a 29-page report to the United Nations Human Rights Council presented early June, the official, Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions, called on the United States to exercise greater restraint in its use of drones in places like Pakistan and Yemen, outside the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I’m particularly concerned that the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe,” Mr. Alston said in an accompanying statement. “But this strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.”

The US State Department chief legal counsel Harold Koh declared “A state that is engaged in an armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force,” he said. “Our procedures and practices for identifying lawful targets are extremely robust, and advanced technologies have helped to make our targeting even more precise.”

The Alston report however said that a targeted killing outside of an armed conflict “is almost never likely to be legal.” In particular, it rejected “pre-emptive self-defense” as a justification for killing terrorism suspects far from combat zones.
“This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defense goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the U.N. Charter,” Mr. Alston said. “If invoked by other states, in pursuit of those they deem to be terrorists and to have attacked them, it would cause chaos.”

Among the issues addressed in Alston’s report are: the legality of targeted killings under the laws of war, international human rights law, and the law applicable when States invoke their right to self-defense; the definition and scope of armed conflicts in which the laws of war apply; the definition of who may be targeted and killed, when, and by whom, in the context of armed conflict; the rules governing the amount of force that may be used; the legality of drone killings in particular, and the international law requirements of transparency and accountability.

The report noted: “Reported targeted killings by the CIA have given rise to a debate over whether it is a violation of IHL for such killings to be committed by State agents who are not members of its armed forces. Some commentators have argued that CIA personnel who conduct targeted drone killings are committing war crimes because they, unlike the military, are “unlawful combatants”, and unable to participate in hostilities. This argument is not supported by IHL. As a threshold mattmatter, the argument assumes that targeted killings by the CIA is committed in the context of armed conflict, which may not be the case.

Outside of armed conflict, killings by the CIA would constitute extrajudicial executions assuming that they do not comply with human rights law. If so, they must be investigated and prosecuted both by the US and the State in which the wrongful killing occurred.”

Asian Tribune