Drone strikes: 10x more likely to kill innocents than jet fire
Study: US drone strikes more likely to kill civilians than US jet fire
Drone strikes — billed by President Barack Obama as tactically surgical and less deadly to civilians than conventional air power — are 10 times more likely to cause innocent casualties than bombs or missiles unleashed from U.S. jets, according to a new study based on classified military documents.
The report’s author, Lawrence Lewis, a researcher at the federally funded Center for Naval Analyses who possesses a top-security clearance, dissected secret data on U.S. air attacks in Afghanistan from mid-2010 to mid-2011 — the peak of unmanned drone use during the war, executed under the command of former Gen. David Petraeus.
After reviewing casualty statistics from that 12-month span, Lewis published a related article in the military journal Prism, criticizing Pentagon leaders for giving drone operators “limited training” on how to minimize civilian harm. He also called for the Defense Department to investigate the impact on civilians inflicted by U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan. (On Wednesday, a U.S. drone strike killed at least 17 people in Pakistan’s volatile North Waziristan tribal region.)
“Already, criticism over U.S. clandestine (drone) operations is putting the administration on the defensive and growing louder as local populations, particularly in Pakistan, join in protesting the use of (drones),” Lewis wrote in the journal article, co-authored by Sarah Holewinksi, who heads the private, Washington, D.C.,-based Center for Civilians in Conflict. “... The U.S. government should undertake a review of the potentially negative impact of (drone) strikes, both in counterterrorism efforts and with regard to civilian harm,” Lewis wrote.
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http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/02/19254842-study-us-drone-strikes-more-likely-to-kill-civilians-than-us-jet-fire?lite
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