Peter Lemkin Wrote:

Quote:...'if we banish our fear of 'robots running amok'

While the robots [drones] can run amok, I'm MUCH, M U C H more concerned of those who control them running amok....as they already have!

Drone War Exposed the complete picture of CIA strikes in Pakistan

CIA drone strikes have led to far more deaths in Pakistan than previously understood, according to extensive new research published by the Bureau. Some 175 children are among at least 2,347 people reported killed in US attacks since 2004. There are credible reports of at least 392 civilians among the dead.
In a surprise move, a counter-terrorism official has also released US government estimates of the numbers killed. These state that an estimated 2,050 people have been killed in drone strikes to mid-August of whom all but an estimated 50 are combatants.
Reassessment
The Bureau's fundamental reassessment of the covert US campaign involved a complete re-examination of all that is known about each US drone strike.
The Obama administration must explain the legal basis for drone strikes in Pakistan to avoid the perception that it acts with impunity. The Pakistan government must also ensure accountability for indiscriminate killing, in violation of international law, that occurs inside Pakistan,'
Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International

The study is based on close analysis of credible materials: some 2,000 media reports; witness testimonies; field reports of NGOs and lawyers; secret US government cables; leaked intelligence documents, and relevant accounts by journalists, politicians and former intelligence officers.
The Bureau's findings are published in a 22,000-word database which covers each individual strike in Pakistan in detail. A powerful search engine, an extensive timeline and searchable maps accompany the data.
The result is the clearest public understanding so far of the CIA's covert drone war against the militants. Yet US intelligence officials are understood to be briefing against the Bureau's work, claiming significant problems with its numbers and methodologies.'
Iain Overton, the Bureau's editor said: It comes as no surprise that the US intelligence services would attack our findings in this way. But to claim our methodology is problematic before we had even published reveals how they really operate. A revelation that is reinforced by the fact that they cannot bring themselves to refer to non-combatants as what they really are: civilians and, all too often, children'.
Many more strikes
The Bureau's data reveals many more CIA attacks on alleged militant targets than previously reported. At least 305 US drone strikes are now known to have taken place since 2004.
The intended targets militants in the tribal areas appear to make up the majority of those killed. There are almost 150 named militants among the dead since 2004, though hundreds are unknown, low-ranking fighters. But as many as 175 children have also been reported killed among at least 392 civilians.
More than 1,150 people are also revealed to have been injured in the US drone attacks the first time this number has been collated.
In the wake of the Bureau's findings Amnesty International has called for more CIA transparency. The Obama administration must explain the legal basis for drone strikes in Pakistan to avoid the perception that it acts with impunity. The Pakistan government must also ensure accountability for indiscriminate killing, in violation of international law, that occurs inside Pakistan,' said Amnesty's Director of Asia Pacific Sam Zarifi.

The Bureau's key findings

• 305 CIA attacks have taken place in Pakistan 8% more than previously reported. Under President Obama alone there have been 253 strikes one every four days.
  
• Between 2,347 and 2,956 people are reported to have died in the attacks most of them militants
  
• The minimum number of reported deaths is far higher than previously believed with 40% more recorded casualties. Most of those killed are likely to be low-ranking militants.
  
• Up to 150 named militants have so far been killed.
  
• The Bureau has collated credible news reports of 392-781 civilians being killed in the attacks.
  
• The Bureau has identified credible reports of 175 children killed in the drone strikes. Under President Bush, one in three of all attacks is reported to have killed a child.
  
• For the first time the Bureau has compiled accurate details of recorded injuries in drone strikes, revealing that at least 1,158 people have been wounded.
  

Civilian deaths
With the US military unable to operate overtly inside Pakistan, the Obama administration has come to rely heavily on CIA drone strikes to attack alleged militants in the country's western tribal areas. To date, at least 253 drone attacks have been ordered in Obama's name, the Bureau's research shows.
At least 1,897 people have been reported killed in the Obama strikes, most of them militants.
Recently, Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan stated that the president has insisted' that Pakistan drone strikes do not put… innocent men, women and children in danger'. Yet at least 225 of those killed in drone attacks in Obama's time in office may have been civilians.
More than 175 children are among at least 2,347 people reported killed in US attacks since 2004. There are credible reports of at least 392 civilians among the dead.

Civilian casualties do seem to have declined in the past year. Yet the Bureau still found credible evidence of at least 45 civilians killed in some ten strikes in this time. The US continues to insist that it can't confirm any noncombatant casualties' in the past year.
The most recently reported civilian fatalities were on October 31. Tariq Khan, aged 16 and his 12-year old cousin Wahid were killed in a strike on North Waziristan.
Internal US figures
The US government's own internal estimate of those killed in the drone strikes was released in August and totalled about 2,050. All but 50 of these were described as militants. No non-combatants' have died in the past year, a US counter-terrorism official claimed. The Bureau's own minimum suggested casualty figure across the campaign is 2,347 to the end of October 2011.
Yet a US counter-terrorism official told the Bureau that its numbers were way off the mark'. The Washington-based official said: These actions target militants planning actively to kill Afghans, Pakistanis, Europeans, and Americans among others, and most often the operations occur when they're training or on the move, getting ready to attack. Over 4,000 Pakistani civilians have been killed by terrorists since 2009the threat is clear and real.'
Reprieve, the legal action charity which campaigns on human rights issues said: With the Bureau's findings, at last we have a hard and comprehensive look at the facts. It is a great start. From now on, Reprieve hopes people will read official propaganda about drone warfare with a grain of saltand ask themselves whether drones are radicalizing as many young men as Guantánamo did.'
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/most-complete-picture-yet-of-cia-drone-strikes/

Quote:

CIA chiefs face arrest over horrific evidence of bloody 'video-game' sorties by drone pilots

By DAVID ROSE
PUBLISHED: 23:30 GMT, 20 October 2012 | UPDATED: 09:57 GMT, 21 October 2012

• The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
  

A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the strikes' targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones' dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes.
The dossier has been assembled by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who works for Pakistan's Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity Reprieve.
Filed in two separate court cases, it is set to trigger a formal murder investigation by police into the roles of two US officials said to have ordered the strikes. They are Jonathan Banks, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency's Islamabad station, and John A. Rizzo, the CIA's former chief lawyer. Mr Akbar and his staff have already gathered further testimony which has yet to be filed.
How the attacks unfolded...








We have statements from a further 82 victims' families relating to more than 30 drone strikes,' he said. This is their only hope of justice.'
In the first case, which has already been heard by a court in Islamabad, judgment is expected imminently. If the judge grants Mr Akbar's petition, an international arrest warrant will be issued via Interpol against the two Americans.

More...

• Terrible echoes of a bloody past: Violent scenes on the streets of Beirut as fears grow Syrian civil war could spill over border
  
• Drones were circling above U.S. consulate during Libya attack but officials decided NOT to mount a rescue mission
  

The second case is being heard in the city of Peshawar. In it, Mr Akbar and the families of drone victims who are civilians are seeking a ruling that further strikes in Pakistani airspace should be viewed as acts of war'.
They argue that means the Pakistan Air Force should try to shoot down the drones and that the government should sever diplomatic relations with the US and launch murder inquiries against those responsible.
According to a report last month by academics at Stanford and New York universities, between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed since the strikes in Pakistan began in 2004.
The report said of those, up to 881 were civilians, including 176 children. Only 41 people who had died had been confirmed as high-value' terrorist targets.
Getting at the truth is difficult because the tribal regions along the frontier are closed to journalists. US security officials continue to claim that almost all those killed are militants who use bases in Pakistan to launch attacks on Western forces across the border in Afghanistan.
In his only acknowledgement that the US has ever launched such attacks at all, President Barack Obama said in January: This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans.'
But behind the dry legal papers seen by The Mail on Sunday lies the most detailed investigation into individual strikes that has yet been carried out. It suggests that the US President was mistaken.

Missile attacks in in Pakistan have had devastating affects, the dossier revealed

The plaintiff in the Islamabad case is Karim Khan, 45, a journalist and translator with two masters' degrees, whose family comes from the village of Machi Khel in the tribal region of North Waziristan.
His eldest son, Zahinullah, 18, and his brother, Asif Iqbal, 35, were killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone that struck the family's guest dining room at about 9.30pm on New Year's Eve, 2009.
Asif had changed his surname because he loved to recite Iqbal, Pakistan's national poet, and Mr Khan said: We are an educated family. My uncle is a hospital doctor in Islamabad, and we all work in professions such as teaching.
We have never had anything to do with militants or terrorists, and for that reason I always assumed we would be safe.'
Mr Khan said: Zahinullah, who had been studying in Islamabad, had returned to the village to work his way through college, taking a part-time job as a school caretaker.
He was a quiet boy and studious always in the top group of his class.' Zahinullah also liked football, cricket and hunting partridges.
Asif, he added, was an English teacher and had spent several years taking further courses to improve his qualifications while already in work.
Mr Khan said: He was my kid brother. We used to have a laugh, tell jokes.' His first child was less than a year old when Asif was killed.
Included in the legal dossier are documents that corroborate Asif and Zahinulla's educational and employment records, as well as their death certificates. Killed alongside them was Khaliq Dad, a stonemason who was staying with the family while he worked on a local mosque.
Mr Khan, who had been working for a TV station in Islamabad, said he was given the news of their deaths in a 2am phone call from a cousin.

Drones have caused untold damage, and the dossier reveals just how devastating they have been for families

I called a friend who had a car and we started driving through the night to get back to the village,' he said. It was a terrible journey. I was shocked, grieving, angry, like anyone who had lost their loved ones.'
He got home soon after dawn and describes his return like entering a village of the dead it was so quiet. There was a crowd gathered outside the compound but nowhere for them to sit because the guest rooms had been destroyed'.
Zahinullah, Mr Khan discovered, had been killed instantly, but despite his horrific injuries, Asif had survived long enough to be taken to a nearby hospital. However, he died during the night.
We always bury people quickly in our culture. The funeral was at three o'clock that afternoon, and more than 1,000 people came,' Mr Khan said. Zahinullah had a wound on the side of his face and his body was crushed and charred. I am told the people who push the buttons to fire the missiles call these strikes "bug-splats".
It is beyond my imagination how they can lack all mercy and compassion, and carry on doing this for years. They are not human beings.'
Mr Khan found Mr Akbar through a friend who had attended lectures he gave at an Islamabad university. In 2010, he filed a criminal complaint known as a first information report to police naming Mr Banks. However, they took no action, therefore triggering the lawsuit a judicial review of that failure to act.
If the judge finds in favour of Mr Khan, his decision cannot be appealed, thus making the full criminal inquiry and Interpol warrants inevitable.
According to the legal claim, someone from the Pakistan CIA network led by Mr Banks who left Pakistan in 2010 targeted the Khan family and guided the Hellfire missile by throwing a GPS homing device into their compound.
A senior CIA officer said: We do not discuss active operations or allegations against specific individuals.'
Mr Rizzo is named because of an interview he gave to a US reporter after he retired as CIA General Counsel last year. In it, he boasted that he had personally authorised every drone strike in which America's enemies were hunted down and blown to bits'.
He added: It's basically a hit-list .  .  . The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head.'
Last night a senior Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Pakistan's own intelligence agency, the ISI, has always been excluded by the CIA from choosing drone targets.
They insist on using their own networks, paying their own informants. Dollars can be very persuasive,' said the official.
He claimed the intelligence behind drone strikes was often seriously flawed. As a result, they are causing the loss of innocent lives'.
But even this, he added, was not as objectionable as the so-called signature strikes' when a drone operator, sitting at a computer screen thousands of miles away in Nevada, selects a target because he thinks the drone camera has spotted something suspicious.
He said: It could be a vehicle containing armed men heading towards the border, and the operator thinks, "Let's get them before they get there," without any idea of who they are.
It could also just be people sitting together. In the frontier region, every male is armed but it doesn't mean they are militants.'
One such signature strike killed more than 40 people in Datta Khel in North Waziristan on March 17 last year. The victims, Mr Akbar's dossier makes clear, had gathered for a jirga a tribal meeting in order to discuss a dispute between two clans over the division of royalties from a chromite mine.
Some of the most horrifying testimony comes from Khalil Khan, the son of Malik Haji Babat, a tribal leader and police officer. My father was not a terrorist. He was not an enemy of the United States,' Khalil's legal statement says. He was a hard-working and upstanding citizen, the type of person others looked up to and aspired to be like.'
Khalil, 32, last saw his father three hours before his death, when he left for a business meeting in a nearby town. Informed his father had been killed, Khalil hurried to the scene.
What I saw when I got off the bus at Datta Khel was horrible,' he said. I immediately saw flames and women and children were saying there had been a drone strike. The fires spread after the strike.
I went to the location where the jirga had been held. The situation was really very bad. There were still people lying around injured.
The tribal elders who had been killed could not be identified because there were body parts strewn about. The smell was awful. I just collected the pieces that I believed belonged to my father and placed them in a small coffin.'
Khalil said that as a police officer, his father had earned a good salary, on which he supported his family. Khalil has considered returning to the Gulf, where he worked for 14 years, but because of the frequency of drones I am concerned to leave my family'.
He added that schools in the area were empty because parents are afraid their children will be hit by a missile'.
In another statement one of 13 taken by Mr Akbar concerning the Datta Khel strike driver Ahmed Jan, 52, describes the moment the missile hit: We were in the middle of our discussion and I was thrown about 24ft from where I was sitting. I was knocked unconscious. When I awoke, I saw many individuals who were injured or dead.
I have lost the use of one of my feet and have a rod inserted because of the injuries. It is so painful for me to walk. There are scars on my face because I had to have an operation on my nose when it would not stop bleeding.'
Mr Jan says he has spent £3,600 on medical treatment but I have never been offered compensation of any kind .  .  . I do not know why this jirga was targeted. I am a malik [elder] of my tribe and therefore a government servant. We were not doing anything wrong or illegal.'
Another survivor was Mohammed Noor, 27, a stonemason, who attended the jirga with his uncle and his cousin, both of whom were killed. The parts of their bodies had to be collected first. These parts were all we had of them,' he said.
Mr Akbar said that fighting back through the courts was the only way to solve the larger problem' of the ongoing terrorist conflict.
It is the only way to break the cycle of violence,' he said. If we want to change the people of Waziristan, we first have to show them that we respect the rule of law.'
A senior CIA officer said: We do not discuss active operations or allegations against specific individuals.' A White House source last night declined to comment.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2220828/US-drone-attacks-CIA-chiefs-face-arrest-horrific-evidence-bloody-video-game-sorties.html#ixzz29wS0EHRb
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Quote:Terrifying Techno-Fascist Quote of the Day:

"It is not my belief that an unmanned system will be able to be perfectly ethical in the battlefield, but I am convinced that they can perform more ethically than human soldiers are capable of." Ronald Arkin, Georgia Institute of Technology

Quote:"We can't possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us," a senior administration official said. "It's a necessary part of what we do. . . . We're not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, We love America.' "

Quote:The pragmatic inanity of the mentality driving this is self-evident: as I discussed yesterday (and many other times), continuous killing does not eliminate violence aimed at the US but rather guarantees its permanent expansion. As a result, wrote Miller, "officials said no clear end is in sight" when it comes to the war against "terrorists" because, said one official, "we can't possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us" but trying is "a necessary part of what we do". Of course, the more the US kills and kills and kills, the more people there are who "want to harm us". That's the logic that has resulted in a permanent war on terror.

Quote:Imran Khan detained and 'interrogated over drone views' by US immigration

Former cricket captain turned politician detained on flight from Canada to New York to be questioned over his views on jihad

Peter Beaumont
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 27 October 2012 14.12 BST

Imran Khan, the former Pakistan cricket captain turned politician, was taken off an international flight from Canada to New York and questioned by US immigration officials over his views on drone strikes and jihad.

Khan, who has been at the forefront of a high-profile campaign as leader of the Pakistan Movement for Justice party (PTI) to end US drone strikes in northern Pakistan, had been in Canada to give a speech and was on his way to a fundraising dinner in the US on Friday.

Khan recently attempted to lead a high-profile march into south Waziristan which included US peace activists from the Code Pink group with some 15,000 of his supporters.

He claims that the drone strikes kill large numbers of innocent civilians a claim denied by the US.

"I was taken off from plane and interrogated by US Immigration in Canada on my views on drones. My stance is known. Drone attacks must stop," Khan tweeted yesterday after his questioning.

He added: "Missed flight and sad to miss the fundraising lunch in NY but nothing will change my stance."

A US state department spokeswoman confirmed Khan's questioning. "We are aware that Imran Khan was briefly delayed in Toronto before boarding the next flight to the United States," she told Pakistani media.

"The issue was resolved. Mr Khan is welcome in the United States."

US immigration authorities refused to comment on Khan's case but a spokeswoman quoted by the Toronto Sun newspaper said: "Our dual mission is to facilitate travel in the United States while we secure our borders, our people, and our visitors from those that would do us harm like terrorists and terrorist weapons, criminals, and contraband," said CBP spokesman Joanne Ferreira.

"Under US immigration law, applicants for admission bear the burden of proof to establish that they are clearly eligible to enter the United States. In order to demonstrate that they are admissible, the applicant must overcome all grounds of inadmissibility."

Some Canadian commentators have speculated that Khan's questioning was because of groups who have been protesting his visit to the US, including a group called the American Islamic Leadership Coalition which reportedly wrote to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton asking her to revoke the US visa granted to Khan.

"The US embassy made a significant error in granting this Islamist leader a visa," the group said in a statement.

"Granting individuals like Khan access to the US to fundraise is against the interest of the people of Pakistan and the national security interests of the US."

Ali Zaidi, an official in Khan's party demanded "a prompt and thorough inquiry into this sordid episode" and "an unconditional apology from the US government".