There is something so deeply immoral about drones. We didn’t kill those civilians, the drones did! As if they had a life of their own, and we had nothing to do with it:
Leaked internal data produced by Pakistani officials documenting drone strikes on the ground reveal a high civilian death toll, countering US claims that the targeted assassination campaign results in “exceedingly rare” fatalities.
A 12-page report, titled ‘Details of Attacks by NATO Forces/Predators in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas)’ describes 75 CIA drone attacks between 2006 and 2009, with death tolls compiled by officials in the turbulent border regions for internal use by the government. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism – a UK news website – says it obtained three identical copies of the classified document from various sources in Pakistan.
The numbers show a death toll of 746 people, 147 of whom were confirmed as civilians. Of those civilian deaths, 94 are children. Statistically, it means at least one in five victims of US precision strikes was a civilian, and more than 12 per cent were minors.
These are not the facts that Dianne Feinstein fed us. Was she lying to us? Or is she that uninformed on the topic? Intelligence Committee—-really???
Pakistan claims that 80% of the casualties were combatants. Against whom? They are counting every male of military age in Waziristan as an enemy. It is pretty clear that no one in Waziristan ever harbored Bin Laden. The same cannot be said for the purveyors of this report with any degree of confidence. Drone warfare is no more accurate than the picture we have of the enemy. Most of the dead here lived in Pakistan on September 11th. Why are we at war in Pakistan? If we try to drone everyone that hates us, we cannot ramp up production fast enough to keep up with the fall out. Our war in this part of the world has long since overrun its justification.