Leaked report shows high civilian death toll from CIA drone strikes

[kpete]

Source: Salon

Leaked report shows high civilian death toll from CIA drone strikes
The report describes 147 civilian deaths, much higher than the U.S. administration has admitted to
BY CHRIS WOODS

A secret document obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveals for the first time the Pakistan government’s internal assessment of dozens of drone strikes, and shows scores of civilian casualties.

The United States has consistently claimed only a tiny number of non-combatants have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan – despite research by the Bureau and others suggesting that over 400 civilians may have died in the nine-year campaign.

The internal document shows Pakistani officials too found that CIA drone strikes were killing a significant number of civilians – and have been aware of those deaths for many years.

Of 746 people listed as killed in the drone strikes outlined in the document, at least 147 of the dead are clearly stated to be civilian victims, 94 of those are said to be children.

Read more: http://www.salon.com/2013/07/22/leaked_report_shows_high_civilian_death_toll_from_cia_drone_strikes/

[deurbano]

1. Obviously, the solution is to track down that leaker and charge him/her with espionage.

(Also, charge the journalists with something... ) This revelation could damage our security!

[L0oniX]

6. First we must decide if it's a leaker or a traitor or spy. I suggest the gov start using "Depends"

to provide that extra security to prevent those embarrassing leaks.

[wordpix]

35. nice one, my thoughts exactly although not the image that came to mind

Snowden was my image

[Dreamer Tatum]

8. We're slaughtering innocents and all people can muster is snark.

Wow.

[valerief]

9. The poster was echoing the actual concern of our government. Covering their ass. nt

[deurbano]

10. I hope you aren't referring to me. Snark is not all I can muster.

I'm outraged about the slaughter... and outraged at what I can only assume (given recent history) the response to the revelations will be. (The "problem" won't be the slaughter; the problem will be the leaking of the confirmation of the slaughter.) My outrage about the drone attacks is longstanding, and this revelation just puts a number to that travesty.

I don't believe in spying on innocent people (and not just in our own country... and not just on our citizens... since I think everyone else has the right to privacy, too). I am even more appalled, disgusted, ashamed as an American, revolted (etc.) by the drone program.

[truedelphi]

38. Thank you for all your statements.

We all worked our butts off in Summer and Fall of 2008. And we now know we have someone in the Oval Office who spends Tuesday afternoons approving the "kill" list for the drone strikes.

But he is a different party member than Dubya before him, so whatever is done is A-okay with many here.

Meanwhile the money we need for our fire districts, schools, and crumbling infra-structure is all going off to the military and surveillance sector of society.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[Chef Eric]

3. Forget the death toll! The important thing is the leak!

Perhaps if we endlessly debate the character of the people who are responsible for this leak, then we won't have to worry our pretty little heads over those dead civilians.

[xocet]

4. K & R n/t

[L0oniX]

5. Another leaker with a stripper girl friend, who dropped out of school and had a sex change.

This is just asking for more hair fires from the "attack the leaker" gang. Ya got to wonder why they want to keep secrets ...er uhm ...no ...I don't wonder why.

[go west young man]

7. It's time to stop this madness.

It hurts our image abroad. It's against what we stand for. If we need to take out a terrorist lets do it like brave soldiers instead of like automatons who could care less if an innocent child dies. I imagined we were better than that but time has proven we are not. Sad days. Ninety four innocent children blown to bits by robots. It's absolutely shameful. I would also like to see the United Nations step up and do something instead of letting the US trample over everything they are supposed to stand for.

[ronnie624]

14. Better yet,

let's regard terrorism as it truly is--a crime--and cooperate with everyone else in the world to stop it, instead of declaring open ended, unilateral 'wars on terror'.

We can't do that, though, because gone would be our fig leaf for global strategic and economic domination.

[Lugal Zaggesi]

16. Our "image abroad" ?

Sorry to burst your happy propaganda bubble, but this is exactly what the USA has "stood for" for over a century, to acquire and maintain it's position of wealth and power. The big difference now is US authorities can't control the information that interested US citizens get so easily, because of the Internet and digital cameras and videos.

e.g. Philippine–American War - 1899-1902 (after 1902, the "insurgents" were declared "brigands", so the "war" was over) - hundreds of thousands of dead women and children

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_kramer?currentPage=all

Within the first year of the war, news of atrocities by U.S. forces—the torching of villages, the killing of prisoners—began to appear in American newspapers. Although the U.S. military censored outgoing cables, stories crossed the Pacific through the mail, which wasn’t censored. Soldiers, in their letters home, wrote about extreme violence against Filipinos, alongside complaints about the weather, the food, and their officers; and some of these letters were published in home-town newspapers. A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the “water cure.” “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”

Still, the subject of what was called, with a late-Victorian delicacy, “cruelties” by U.S. troops arose a few days into the hearings...

During his court-martial, Waller testified that he had been under orders from the volatile, aging Brigadier General Jacob Smith (“Hell-Roaring Jake,” to his comrades) to transform the island into a “howling wilderness,” to “kill and burn” to the greatest degree possible—“The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me”—and to shoot anyone “capable of bearing arms.” According to Waller, when he asked Smith what this last stipulation meant in practical terms, Smith had clarified that he thought that ten-year-old Filipino boys were capable of bearing arms.

More generally, some people, while conceding that American soldiers had engaged in “cruelties,” insisted that the behavior reflected the barbaric sensibilities of the Filipinos. “I think I know why these things have happened,” Lodge offered in a Senate speech in May. They had “grown out of the conditions of warfare, of the war that was waged by the Filipinos themselves, a semicivilized people, with all the tendencies and characteristics of Asiatics, with the Asiatic indifference to life, with the Asiatic treachery and the Asiatic cruelty...

[cheapdate]

11. In contrast, I think it's fair to consider the US bombing in Cambodia and Laos

during the Vietnam War. American B52s dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs over Laos and eastern Cambodia. The objective was to deny sanctuary and support for the People's Army of Vietnam across these porous borders.

The scale of death and destruction absolutely dwarfs the present drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries in the region. The US bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia may have resulted in as many as 600,000 or more civilian deaths, although the actual number of deaths is unknowable. The effects of the bombings persisted for decades and continued to kill people for many years.

The present drone strikes are several orders of magnitude less destructive than wide-scale bombing or ground invasion. Like in Vietnam, the US is fighting an enemy in Afghanistan that gains support and sanctuary across borders.

Within the morality of war, it may be argued that drone strikes are a far less destructive way of accomplishing the same military objectives.

[Maedhros]

13. The fault in your logic

is that the United States must do one or the other - carpet bomb or drone strike - and that somehow we are more enlightened for choosing the latter. It is a false choice.

We do not need to be bombing ANYONE in Pakistan. Or Yemen. Or anywhere else. None of the people we are killing present any kind of existential threat to the United States. We're firing missiles at local tribesmen who are involved in insurgencies within countries at which the United States is not at war.

[ronnie624]

15. Good post.

But that poster is mistaken in his/her belief that the the US has given up large-scale military actions that result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the wholesale destruction of countries. The invasion of Iraq illustrates this, conclusively.

[cheapdate]

25. I have no such belief.

Iraq, as you say, is unequivocal evidence to the contrary.

[cheapdate]

24. I didn't say that those were the only alternatives.

I only said that between those two alternatives, one is far more destructive than the other. There are obviously other choices that could be made, including, as you suggest, doing little or nothing to prevent opposition fighters from operating across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, or withdrawing from the area entirely.

[matthews]

19. Damn! I envy you your talent on being able to find justification for the murder

of innocent children by simply throwing around numbers. That would sure simplify my life if I was that talented at splitting hairs.

And what, pray tell, is our 'objective'?

And when do you know when you've killed enough people? From the air. By people sitting in the safety and comfort of their own little room. Thousands of miles away. With no actual idea of who they are really killing.

How does this work???

[cheapdate]

26. The US objective, as I understand it,

is firstly to destroy or eliminate the forces that attacked the United States in 2001. And secondly, to take steps to ensure that Afghanistan will not be used again as a sanctuary for Al Qaeda, or as a base of operations from which to organize and carry out another attack against the United States.

The observation that drone strikes are far less destructive than massive aerial bombardment is not in any way a "justification for the murder of innocent children". It's simply an observation, the truth of which is self-apparent.

[matthews]

28. It's not apparent to anybody with a sense of morality and a belief that

the murder of innocents is wrong.

We should pull out of the Middle East. We're a washed up Empire. We got our asses kicked out of Iraq and we're getting them beat in Afghanistan.

What are you people looking for, a country we can whip? Will that make you finally make you war supporters happy?

[cheapdate]

32. Let me make sure I've got this straight.

You're saying that it's hard to determine the truth or falseness of the proposition that 50,000 pounds of munitions dropped from a B52 bomber is orders of magnitude more destructive than a 100 pound missile fired from a drone if someone believes killing innocent people is morally wrong.

Is that correct?

To answer your other questions, no and no.

[matthews]

33. Where did you ever get the idea that I'm for dropping bombs on people

at all, regardless of the mode of transportation?

You need to tell your imagination to take a break and quit allowing yourself to decide what other people are saying. You're not very good at it. At all.

[cheapdate]

36. I'm very curious to know which statement of mine

suggested to you that I believe that you are in favor of "dropping bombs on people"? I'd really like to learn more about the chain of reasoning that you followed, because I'm truly stumped.

Meanwhile, my earlier question to you is still an open one. How does having a morality that opposes taking innocent life make it difficult to decide whether drones or B52s are more destructive?

(on edit : and by the way, I didn't "decide" what you meant. I asked if you would clarify or confirm a confusing statement, which you haven't.)

[matthews]

39. You can't figure it out?

"Meanwhile, my earlier question to you is still an open one. How does having a morality that opposes taking innocent life make it difficult to decide whether drones or B52s are more destructive? "

There is no reason or justification to be dropping anything on ANYONE.

End of conversation.

[cheapdate]

40. I agree.

You've shown no ability or inclination to either critique my argument or defend your own in any forthright or rational manner. Your first reply to me claimed that I was offering a "justification for the murder of innocent children" -- and your arguments since then have been equally as outrageous.

This was hardly a real conversation. Good that it's ended.

[Peace Patriot]

23. Just give them time. The U.S. war on Southeast Asia started "small."

When they have enough "drones" and develop them more, they will become the weapon of choice for control of the planet and are even more indiscriminate than soldiers or pilots. Death by remote control, at a cool, far distant, safe location--so like a video game. Death with no warning, no trial, no accountability, and absolutely no ability to run, hide or fight back. You think the MIC is going to be "selective"?

It's the next genocide waiting to happen.

[cheapdate]

27. Drones as a military tool are here to stay.

I don't think there's any question about that. How we use them is a matter of much debate. As an instrument of genocide, conventional bombs, missiles, and other armaments are much better tools. A single cruise missile carries much more destructive power than a drone.

[jberryhill]

29. Who in Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki could "fight back"

I think there were some civilians in those cities.

[azurnoir]

12. something occurred to me yesterday

If Malala Yousafzai had been wounded by a drone strike rather than an Islamist she would not be considered a heroine, she'd just be more nameless, faceless collateral

[matthews]

20. That is a brilliant response. And the absolute truth. nt

[NealK]

17. K&R

[indepat]

18. Is the killing of 94 children just a small price our nation willingly pays to wipe terra off the

face of the earth? The US regrets the wasting of others' children, but such is a sacrifice that others must willingly pay as the price of liberty.

[DreamGypsy]

30. We 'happily' allow many more children to die violently in the United States...

...than are 'accidentally' killed by our drone strikes in Pakistan.

The summary report by the Pakistani government – obtained from three independent sources – covers the period January 13 2006 to October 24 2009, so a little less than four years. That's fewer than 25 Pakistani children per year that the U.S. is willing to sacrifice for our 'security'.

Contrast that with the 130 children (ages 0-12) that we have allowed to be killed by guns in the United States in a little more than 7 months since the Newtown shootings. (see Slate How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?) in order to achieve ... uh, something.

The Pakistanis should be grateful that the NRA is not in charge of the U.S. 'war on terror'. We haven't learned to look in the mirror.

Do I need to add this or just these

[indepat]

34. That 130 children killed by guns in the United States since the Newtown shootings is a price the

government of, by, and for the people gladly and willingly pays to assure no deranged person's right to bear arms is infringed, all the while big brother willingly and knowingly eviscerates many of the other rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, ostensibly to keep us safe from terra, but in my opinion, primarily to keep big brother informed of the amount of mounting dissent over its own chicanerous or illegal/unconstitutional activities. Just an educated guess and hopefully wrong.

[Doctor_J]

21. Ah, you bleeding hearts

not even 20% of the deaths were innocents - out of every 5 killed, only one was a farmer, shopkeeper, physician, teacher, or child.

At least.

Anyway, I bet by the time they set the drones loose on us, they'll be much more accurate.

[Civilization2]

22. sickening warmongering murder,. no justification exists for atrocities like these.

Is this the democratic will of the people?

[dtom67]

31. acts like this insure that the war on terror will never end.....

[FiveGoodMen]

37. "It's not wrong when WE do it!"

US leaders should be ashamed.

[L0oniX]

41. 94 dead children ...your tax dollar at work! Can you say "complicit"?