Drone Debate Over Casualties Overlooks Cost to Those Who Survive

[mia]

Source: PRI's The World

John Brennan, the chief architect of the US drone program, faces a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday for his nomination as the CIA’s new director. The Congressional hearing will be one of the few times Americans will hear a high level official publicly acknowledge and address the military and CIA’s joint drone program. It operates in countries like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen where the US is not at officially at war, but has conducted hundreds of attacks using drones in covert operations.

Down a dimly lit corridor, in the only burn-unit hospital in Yemen lie the severely burned bodies of Sultan Ahmed Mohammed and Nacer Mabkhout al-Sabooly. They’re conscious, but barely able to speak out loud. Sultan, tells me his name and mutters just one sentence before closing his eyes.

“The plane struck me,” he said.

I met the two last September. They were victims of an attack that officially never happened. At the hospital, Abdelrahman Barman, an attorney who runs the Yemeni human-rights organization Hood, that advocates for the rights of drone victims, explained to me how this mini-bus driver and his cousin from a rural town in Central Yemen ended up barely conscious in a hospital in Sanaa....






Read more: http://www.theworld.org/2013/02/drone-debate-over-casualties-overlooks-cost-to-those-who-survive/


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I heard this on the radio on the way home tonight. I wonder if the U.S. behind drone strikes everywhere.

[eridani]

1. What We Don't Know About Drones

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/15922-what-we-dont-know-about-drones

The best and most painstaking attempts to get at the truth of the drone war-like one by the New America foundation-acknowledge the difficulty of the enterprise. The New America study found that between 2004 and 2010, the U.S. carried out a hundred and fourteen strikes, which the study's authors estimated killed between eight hundred and thirty and twelve hundred and ten people. Of those, the study found, between five hundred and fifty and eight hundred and fifty-roughly two-thirds-were probably militants. Included in the dead were many militant leaders. That means that roughly a third of the dead-several hundred-were probably civilians. That's a lot of bodies. These may be the best estimates we have, but they are still approximations.

[dotymed]

2. America is only creating MANY more enemies

across the world with these attacks. World citizens used to think of "us" as a land of laws, now for many years, we have just been the biggest bully on the block. Can't you remember when "w" was president and doing this (on a much smaller scale) we were disgusted with what America had become. Now it's not "w" and it is fine???
Either way the MIC is ecstatic...killing innocents (or anyone) is very profitable. PROFITS....

[blkmusclmachine]

3. US, goin' rogue.