OBAMA 2.O / DRONE WARFARE
sive, safe (for Americans) and
easily hidden way to wage war
— squarely on top of Obama’s
agenda as he takes up his second
term. Complicating a potential
reform of the drone program:
Its chief architect and apologist,
White House terrorism adviser
John Brennan, is Obama’s pick to
run the CIA — which operates in
secret many of the drone strikes.
“Our criteria for using [drones]
is very tight and very strict,”
Obama insisted in August. In an
interview with CNN, Obama explained that any proposed strike
has to comply with U.S. and international law, and the target
must be a real threat who cannot
be captured.
“And we have got to make sure
that in whatever operations we
conduct we are very careful about
avoiding civilian casualties. And,
in fact,” the president said, “there
are a whole bunch of situations
where we will not engage in operations if we think there’s gonna be
civilian casualties involved.”
On the morning of March 17,
2011, more than three dozen village elders and local government
leaders gathered in an open-air
bus depot in the town of Datta
Khel, in North Waziristan, Paki-
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
stan. Under discussion: how to
avoid being drawn into the insurgency raging there and across the
border in Afghanistan. At about
10:45 a.m., a drone hovering overhead fired a supersonic missile
into the gathering. One man remembers hearing a slight hissing
noise before the blast threw him,
unconscious, several yards away.
An immediate second strike killed
many of the wounded.
What happened in Datta Khel
has been exhaustively documented,
at some risk, in on-site investigations by The New York Times, the
“The anger, fear and resentment the
strikes leave behind among civilians
seems to outweigh any potential
military benefit.”
Associated Press, The Guardian,
and the independent Bureau of Investigative Reporting, among other
organizations. The results were
verified and compiled in a report by
law-school researchers from Stanford and New York universities.
U.S. officials insisted that all
those killed were insurgents. But
interviews with survivors and
families of the dead, along with
other eyewitnesses and