Huffington Magazine Issue 33 | Page 73

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