U.S. Drone Strikes Are Causing Child Casualties: Video and ReportDuring
my recent trip to Pakistan as part of our upcoming documentary film,
Drones Exposed, I was struck most by the stories told to me by children
who had experienced a U.S. drone strike firsthand. The impact of
America's drone war in the likes of Pakistan and Yemen will linger on,
especially for the loved ones of the 178 children killed in those
countries by U.S. drone strikes.
War Costs' latest video (with
accompanying report) brings attention to the children who have died as a
result of drone strikes. The video names some of the children who
perished in these strikes, and points out the obfuscation tactics of
American officials who will not own up to the significant amount of
civilian casualties that have occurred due to this legally- and
morally-dubious policy. Login with Facebook to see what your friends are readingEnable Social Readingi During
my recent trip to Pakistan as part of our upcoming documentary film,
Drones Exposed, I was struck most by the stories told to me by children
who had experienced a U.S. drone strike firsthand. The impact of
America's drone war in the likes of Pakistan and Yemen will linger on,
especially for the loved ones of the 178 children killed in those
countries by U.S. drone strikes.
War Costs' latest video (with
accompanying report) brings attention to the children who have died as a
result of drone strikes. The video names some of the children who
perished in these strikes, and points out the obfuscation tactics of
American officials who will not own up to the significant amount of
civilian casualties that have occurred due to this legally- and
morally-dubious policy.
In addition to the video, War Costs
offers this report detailing the effects of drone strikes on children.
The findings come mainly from the diligent investigative reporting of
TBIJ and the groundbreaking reports on the impact of drone strikes by
Stanford and New York University researchers (Living Under Drones:
Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in
Pakistan) and researchers at Columbia University (The Civilian Impact of
Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions)
In an effort
to compel answers about why these innocent civilians have died without
acknowledgement or explanation from the U.S. government, War Costs is
calling on the U.S. House of Representatives to debate and pass Rep.
Dennis Kucinich's bill that calls for more transparency regarding U.S.
drone strike policy.
An inside look at his pre-war decision making reveals how the public was misled and the constitution ignored.
We have all seen in the news the terrible conflict in Libya, but we are not all aware of the true story.
We have heard a very one sided argument presented to us from our media. We have heard many lies, which appear to be covering the truth from us so we cannot make a clear, fair judgment for ourselves.
This
film has been created to show the people of the world another side of
the story. The side from the Libyan people them selves.
We have been led to believe the majority of Libyans wanted an over- throw of their govnment, but this is far from the truth.
INCONSISTENT EXPLANATIONS
On March 28, 2011, Obama gave a televised address about Libya. It included this passage about his actions:
Confronted
by this brutal repression and a looming humanitarian crisis, I ordered
warships into the Mediterranean. European allies declared their
willingness to commit resources to stop the killing. The Libyan
opposition, and the Arab League, appealed to the world to save lives in
Libya. At my direction, America led an effort with our allies at the
United Nations Security Council to pass an historic Resolution that
authorized a No0Fly Zone to stop the regime's attacks from the air, and
further authorized all necessary measures to protect the Libyan
people.
In his telling, (a) America led the effort to
establish the No-Fly Zone; and (b) the No-Fly Zone would stop the
Libyan regime's attacks from the air.
Compare these assertions to the inside account reported by Lewis (which was vetted by the White House prior to publication):
If you were president just then and you turned your television to
some cable news channel you would have seen many Republican senators
screaming at you to invade Libya and many Democratic congressmen
hollering at you that you had no business putting American lives at risk
in Libya. If you flipped over to the networks on March 7 you might have
caught ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper saying to your press
secretary, Jay Carney, "More than a thousand people have died, according
to the United Nations. How many more people have to die before the
United States decides, O.K., we're going to take this one step of a
no-fly zone?"
By March 13, Qaddafi appeared to be roughly two
weeks from getting to Benghazi. On that day the French announced they
were planning to introduce a resolution in the United Nations to use
U.N. forces to secure the skies over Libya in order to prevent Libyan
planes from flying. A "no-fly zone" this was called, and it forced
Obama's hand. The president had to decide whether to support the
no-fly-zone resolution or not. At 4:10 p.m. on
March 15 the White House held a meeting to discuss the issue. "Here is
what we knew," recalls Obama, by which he means here is what I knew. "We
knew that Qaddafi was moving on Benghazi, and that his history was such
that he could carry out a threat to kill tens of thousands of people.
We knew we didn't have a lot of time--somewhere between two days and two
weeks. We knew they were moving faster than we originally anticipated.
We knew that Europe was proposing a no-fly zone."
That much had
been in the news. One crucial piece of information had not. "We knew
that a no-fly zone would not save the people of Benghazi," says Obama.
"The no-fly zone was an expression of concern that didn't really do
anything." European leaders wanted to create a no-fly zone to stop
Qaddafi, but Qaddafi wasn't flying. His army was racing across the North
African desert in jeeps and tanks. Obama had to have wondered just how
aware of this were these foreign leaders supposedly interested in the
fate of these Libyan civilians. He didn't know if they knew that a
no-fly zone was pointless, but if they'd talked to any military leader
for five minutes they would have. And that was not all. "The last thing
we knew," he adds, "is that if you announced a no-fly zone and if it
appeared feckless, there would be additional pressure for us to go
further. As enthusiastic as France and Britain were about the no-fly
zone, there was a danger that if we participated the U.S. would own the
operation. Because we had the capacity."
To summarize,
(a) America did not lead the effort to establish a no-fly zone -- it
reluctantly signed on to the idea after its hand was forced by the
French; (b) the no-fly zone wouldn't stop the regime's attacks because
they weren't coming from the air. It was, rather, a preamble to
escalation.
Due to the nature of the Libya conflict, these
misrepresentations weren't nearly as consequential as, say, the way
George W. Bush spoke out about weapons of mass destruction before the
Iraq war. It is nevertheless an example of the president deliberately
misleading the American people in order to facilitate false impressions
about foreign military actions that he finds convenient.
ZERO REGARD FOR CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL It's long been established that Obama failed to secure a congressional declaration of war, as the constitution and Senator Obama's understanding of it dictated; and that he violated the War Powers Resolution. It is nevertheless worth revisiting the subject given these new details about his thought process:
Obama
insists that he still had not made up his mind what to do when he
returned to the Situation Room -- that he was still considering doing
nothing at all. A million people in Benghazi were waiting to find out
whether they would live or die, and he honestly did not know. There were
things the Pentagon might have said to deter him, for instance. "If
somebody had said to me that we could not take out their air defense
without putting our fliers at risk in a significant way; if the level of
risk for our military personnel had been ratcheted up--that might have
changed my decision," says Obama. "Or if I did not feel Sarkozy or
Cameron were far enough out there to follow through. Or if I did not
think we could get a U.N resolution passed." Once again he polled the
people in the room for their views. Of the principals only Susan Rice
(enthusiastically) and Hillary Clinton (who would have settled for a
no-fly zone) had the view that any sort of intervention made sense. "How
are we going to explain to the American people why we're in Libya,"
asked William Daley, according to one of those present. "And Daley had a
point: who gives a shit about Libya?"
From the president's point
of view there was a certain benefit in the indifference of the American
public to whatever was happening in Libya. It enabled him to do, at
least for a moment, pretty much whatever he wanted to do. Libya was the
hole in the White House lawn.
Obama made his decision: push for
the U.N resolution and effectively invade another Arab country. Of the
choice not to intervene he says, "That's not who we are," by which he
means that's not who I am. The decision was extraordinarily personal.
"No one in the Cabinet was for it," says one witness. "There was no
constituency for doing what he did." Then Obama went upstairs to the
Oval Office to call European heads of state and, as he puts it, "call
their bluff." Cameron first, then Sarkozy. It was three a.m. in Paris
when he reached the French president, but Sarkozy insisted he was still
awake. ("I'm a young man!") In formal and stilted tones the European
leaders committed to taking over after the initial bombing. The next
morning Obama called Medvedev to make sure that the Russians would not
block his U.N. resolution. There was no obvious reason why Russia should
want to see Qaddafi murder a city of Libyans, but in the president's
foreign dealings the Russians play the role that Republicans currently
more or less play in his domestic affairs. The Russians' view of the
world tends to be zero-sum: if an American president is for it, they
are, by definition, against it. Obama thought that he had made more
progress with the Russians than he had with the Republicans; Medvedev
had come to trust him, he felt, and believed him when he said the United
States had no intention of moving into Libya for the long term. A
senior American official at the United Nations thought that perhaps the
Russians let Obama have his resolution only because they thought it
would end in disaster for the United States.
And it could have.
All that exists for any president are the odds. On March 17 the U.N.
gave Obama his resolution. The next day he flew to Brazil and was there
on the 19th, when the bombing began. A group of Democrats in Congress
issued a statement demanding Obama withdraw from Libya; Ohio Democratic
congressman Dennis Kucinich asked if Obama had just committed an
impeachable offense. All sorts of people who had been hounding the
president for his inaction now flipped and questioned the wisdom of
action. A few days earlier Newt Gingrich, busy running for president,
had said, "We don't need the United Nations. All we have to say is that
we think slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we're
intervening." Four days after the bombing began, Gingrich went on the
Today show to say he wouldn't have intervened and was quoted on Politico
as saying, "It is impossible to make sense of the standard of
intervention in Libya except opportunism and news media publicity." The
tone of the news coverage shifted dramatically, too. One day it was "Why
aren't you doing anything?" The next it was "What have you gotten us
into?" As one White House staffer puts it, "All the people who had been
demanding intervention went nuts after we intervened and said it was
outrageous. That's because the controversy machine is bigger than the
reality machine."
Put more succinctly, going to war in
Libya was a close call; there are things various folks could have said
to deter him; he ran the decision through executive branch and
international channels; most people told him not to do it; but if
Congress came into the picture at all, it wasn't enough to merit mention
in the retelling, and certainly not enough to follow the constitution
and put the prospective war to a vote. The people's representatives were
excluded.
The imperial presidency is so well entrenched that a journalist like
Michael Lewis needn't really question circumventing Congress to feel as
though he's including all the crucial parts of the story about going to
war.
That remains a scandal.
And it is telling that Michael
Lewis, one of America's finest journalists, didn't even ask Obama about
failing to put the decision about Libya before Congress. He didn't ask
despite the plain language of the Constitution, Obama's prior statements
indicating he fully understood his legal obligations, and the fact that
various members of Congress complained about his unilateral action. The
imperial presidency is so well entrenched that a journalist like Lewis
needn't really question those things to feel as though he's including
all the crucial parts of the story about going to war.
That is quite a precedent Obama has set. And Mitt Romney is ready to exploit it if he wins. As he put it: "I can assure you if I'm president, the Iranians will have no question
but that I will be willing to take military action if necessary to
prevent them from becoming a nuclear threat to the world. I don't
believe at this stage, therefore, if I'm president that we need to have a
war powers approval or special authorization for military force. The
president has that capacity now."
Question...Why are we Fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but Arming Al Qaeda in Syria?
The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee has voted to send a bill to
the floor for a vote that authorizes “critical support to the Syrian
opposition through provision of military assistance, training, and
additional humanitarian support.”
The bill's official title is the Syria Transition Support Act,
and its two co-authors were Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Senator
Bob Corker (R-TN). Aside from providing weaponry and armamments, the
bill includes:
• “Creation of a $250 million transition fund each year through FY2015
drawn from funds otherwise appropriated for regional transition
support”;
• “Sanctions on arms and oil sales to Assad: Targeting any person that
the President of the United States determines has knowingly
participated in or facilitated a transaction related to the sale or
transfer of military equipment, arms, petroleum, or petroleum products
to the Assad regime.”; and
• “Amendment to the Syria Accountability Act: To allow for sanctions
removal once a transitional government is in place and certain terrorism
and WMD criteria have been met.”
That last one is important, and we'll return to it later.
The bill easily got through committee 15-3, and the only Senator to offer meaningful opposition was Senator Rand Paul ( R-KY).
“This is an important moment. You will be funding, today, the allies of al Qaeda,” Paul said.
The biggest and most prominent armed factions in the Syrian resistance
are outright al-Qaeda affiliates like Jabhat al-Nusra and the Syrian
Free Army, which is a mixture of Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda
dominated factions. Even the new 'official' Syrian resistance groups
President Obama formed as a figleaf, the Syrian Opposition
Coalition,(SOC)and the associated Joint Military Council are dominated
by the Muslim Brotherhood.The leader of the SOC is one Ahmed Mouaz al-Khatib,
former imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, a religious cleric
closely allied to the Damascus branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and
fairly hardline and radical himself.
Senator Paul tried to tack two amendments on to the bill, one that would
have forbidden the transfer of weapons to the radical Islamists of the
rebel forces and another that would have prevented the use of U.S.
military armed forces in Syria.
Both were voted down.
There were the usual pro-forma remarks from Paul's colleagues about
'oversight' and transparency' but in the end, there's nothing to stop
the Syrian rebels from simply telling us what we want to hear to get
weapons and our money, and then turning those guns on whomever they
wish...including us. The Qu'ran tells Muslims explicitly that any
promise made to kuffars (non-Muslims), any treaty or agreement is null
and void whenever it's convenient.
Anyone taken a look at what's happening in Afghanistan lately?
Just for the record, (not that it matters), the original Authorization
for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) enacted after 9/11 specifically
called for finding and destroying al-Qaeda..and here we are a few years
later voting to supply arms to them!
What this is setting the stage for is a formalization of President's
Obama's desire to put Islamists in charge of yet another Muslim country.
What happened in Benghazi
was a failed Fast and Furious style covert attempt to purchase and
send weapons from Khaddaffi's arsenals to the Syrian rebels. That
failed, so now we're going to be doing it openly.
Americans traditionally rally behind a sitting president when there's a
foreign intervention or crisis, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if a
U.S. intervention in Syria wasn't timed to head off the fallout from the
massive scandals the Obama regime finds itself entangled in of late.
