The wreckage of a car destroyed by a U.S. drone strike in Azan, Yemen, February 2013. (photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)
Testing
Obama's Transparency Pledge, Groups Send List of Drone Strikes to Investigate
By Ryan Devereaux and Cora
Currier, The Intercept
08 October 16
A coalition
of human rights groups is calling on the Obama administration to make good on
an executive order issued
this summer that requires the United States to investigate when civilians are
harmed in lethal operations abroad, including drone strikes.
In a letter sent to the
White House on Thursday, the groups pressed for investigations into several
specific attacks that occurred on the president’s watch. The letter calls for
public acknowledgement as well as “prompt, thorough, effective, independent,
impartial and transparent investigations” into 10 incidents over the last seven
years. A dozen groups signed on, including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch,
Amnesty International, and the Center for Civilians in Conflict.
The
letter also calls for the methodology of those investigations to be made
public, to include “only those redactions necessary to protect information that
is properly classified” and to offer clear explanations for any discrepancies
that might arise between the government’s conclusions and those reached by
outside parties, including NGOs and journalists.
The
executive order that Obama signed requires the government to investigate
allegations of civilian casualties caused by U.S. operations, then take
responsibility when they occur and provide compensation to the family members
of victims.
That
order was released alongside a report detailing
the government’s estimate of civilians killed in airstrikes outside
conventional war zones — part of an effort by the Obama administration to
present itself, after years of virtually blanket secrecy in these matters of
life and death, as setting a tone of transparency for its successors.
In a
recent interview with New
York magazine, Obama reflected on the dangers of
institutionalizing a regime of secretive borderless warfare executed primarily
by drones, and claimed that his administration had done much to rein in
“institutional comfort and inertia with what looks like a pretty antiseptic way
of disposing of enemies.” He insisted that the decision to pull back the
program somewhat “had less to do with what the left or Human Rights
Watch or Amnesty International or other organizations were
saying and had more to do with me looking at sort of the way in which the
number of drone strikes was going up.” But he nonetheless credited “having
these nonprofits continue to question and protest” as an influence on reform.
Despite
the talk of transparency, the administration still hasn’t responded to many
specific, well-documented instances of civilian harm. While estimates vary widely
on the total number of civilians killed in Obama-era airstrikes outside
conventional war zones — from several hundred to more than 1,000, according the
Bureau of Investigative Journalism — the White House has acknowledged just two
civilian deaths by name over seven years: those of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto,
an American and Italian, respectively, who were kidnapped by militants and then
mistakenly killed by a CIA drone strike in Pakistan.
“We
understand that since that date the U.S. government has agreed to pay
compensation to the family of Giovanni Lo Porto,” the rights groups wrote.
“These are welcome initiatives that should be followed in a systematic fashion,
which the executive order commits to doing.”
The 10
specific incidents listed in the letter all occurred in two countries — Yemen
and Pakistan — and, in total, are alleged to have killed roughly 137
civilians. Most of the operations cited have been widely reported, either by
human rights organizations, journalists, or both. While most are suspected to
be the result of U.S. drone strikes, one of the attacks, launched on December
9, 2009, was the result of a cruise missile strike fired from a U.S. warship.
That attack allegedly killed 14 militants and 41 civilians, including 21 women
and children.
In
July, shortly after the executive order was issued, Amnesty International
invoked it in asking the CIA to respond to the death of Mamana Bibi, an elderly woman, in a strike in
Pakistan. The CIA never responded.
Asked
about the letter, a spokesperson for the National Security Council said, “We
are not in a position to speak to specific operations.”
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment