Chamblee54

Democracy Now has a story today about American techno murder. The short version: “Late last month, a group of Pakistanis met in Islamabad to discuss the impact of U.S. drone strikes in their communities. One of the attendees was a boy named Tariq Aziz, who had volunteered to learn photography to begin documenting drone strikes near his home. Within 72 hours of the meeting, Tariq Aziz himself was killed in a U.S. drone strike. He was 16 years old. His 12-year-old cousin was also killed.” (The late Mr. Aziz is probably no relation to the former Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, who is also named Tariq Aziz.)
The undeclared war against neutral Pakistan has gone on for some time now. Since we are technically not at war with Pakistan, we cannot deploy ground troops. The chore of murdering those who have been labeled “terrorists” has been assigned to unmanned vehicles, known as “drones”. No American pilot is at risk in these planes. Given the state of anti aircraft defenses in Pakistan, it is arguable that a manned aircraft would face very little risk.
There is something … unfair … about the wealthiest, most technically advanced nation on the planet killing illiterate peasants on the other side of the planet by remote control. It makes dumping napalm out of a B52 look dignified. It is not an even contest. The fact is that many of the admitted militants are leftovers from the American struggle against the Soviet Union. We created these armies, and now that they no longer suit our purposes, we try to kill them.
Drone strikes are also extremely expensive. The jet fuel, the high tech “smart bombs”, and the spare parts for the drones cost a bunch of money. At a time when the USA is broke, and politicians are clamoring to cut spending, it just does not make sense to spend megabucks murdering Muslims.
A few comments were made about drones on June 29, 2011. The story is : JOHN BRENNAN, DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER FOR COUNTERTERRORISM AND HOMELAND SECURITY, DELIVERS REMARKS AT THE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED INTERNATIONAL STUDIES ON AL QAIDA. Mr. Brennan’s lips were moving when he said “In fact, I can say that the types of operations that the U.S. has been involved in, and within the counterterrorism realm, that nearly, for the past year, there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”
Others disagree. There is also the matter of people snitching on people they have a dispute with. Once the US “intelligence” gets the word that someone is a “militant”, there is no way to confirm this. The word of the snitch is taken without question. Which brings us back to the case of Tariq Aziz. Was he targeted for death? He had volunteered to work on documenting the damage from drone strikes. Could he have been labeled a militant, and murdered on purpose? Or was it a “terrible mistake”? Or, maybe his twelve year old cousin, Waheed Khan, was the target of the raid.
PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Exactly, Juan. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism , where I work, has created a database of everybody that has been killed since these drone strikes began a number of years ago under Bush. Eighty-five percent of them have taken place under Barack Obama. And we have used the most conservative counting methodology that we can. We only record a death if it is confirmed by multiple sources. So if it’s reported by AP and then re-reported by the New York Times, we don’t count it. It has to be reported by multiple sources. And using that methodology, we have counted over 2,300 people that have been killed, and as many as 3,000. And when we have found an individual below the age of 18—a child, in other words—we have identified them separately. And we have documented at least 175 children, together with the number of women that have been killed in these strikes, that have been casualties of this secret war in Afghanistan. So, Waheed Khan, age 12, and Tariq Aziz, age 16, were the 174th and 175th documented child casualties in this war.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress.