Source:
CBS News(CBS) Hina Shamsi is a senior advisor to the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at the NYU School of Law
There was a lot of uproar last week about a secret CIA assassination plan that was apparently never implemented, but remarkably little discussion of CIA operations that have killed hundreds of people in Pakistan in the last year alone.
These killings, in which the United States targets drone strikes at specific individuals, are deeply controversial: innocent civilians have allegedly died and the legality of the killings is unclear. Just as Abu Ghraib became the face of U.S. interrogation policy in Iraq, so the specter of hundreds of dead civilians threatens U.S. counter-terrorism efforts in Pakistan.Yet there has been no real domestic public debate or meaningful congressional oversight over targeted killings, even though their strategic and policy consequences are hotly contested. CIA Director Leon Panetta, for example, gave a speech in May 2009 in which he said that "
operations have been very effective because they have been very precise in terms of the targeting and it involved a minimum of collateral damage."
But a month later, David Kilcullen, a former senior counterinsurgency advisor to the Army told Congress that, "Since 2006, we've killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes. In the same time period, we've killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. . . . nd they've given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists."
more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/07/21/opinion/main5176876.shtml
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