A new report finds U.S. drone strikes kill, on average, 28 unidentified people for every intended target. While the Obama administration has claimed its drone strikes are precise, the group, Reprieve, found that strikes targeting 41 people in Yemen and Pakistan have killed more than 1,000 other unnamed people. In its attempts to kill al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri alone, the CIA killed 76 children and 29 adults. al-Zawahiri remains alive.
Jennifer Gibson talking:
I think the title is quite self-explanatory for us. Basically, what happened is we started noticing a pattern among the drone strikes with our investigations in pakistan and Yemen. The pattern was that the same high-value targets seem to die again and again and again. When we started digging into it and looking at the news reporting, what we found was that in targeting 41 high-value targets, the U.S. Took on average three times — it was three attempts to kill them and actually, with seven of the individuals, they didn’t even kill them. Instead, during the multiple attempts, what you had happened was they killed over 1000 people.
obviously, the drone program is covert. U.S. Government, despite repeated promises of transparency, has refused to discuss the program on record in any sort of detail. So, all we had to rely on were public news reports. But, those public news reports are often fed by intelligence officials, either American, Pakistani, or Yemeni, and it is often those officials who leak the name of the target as either being targeted or killed in the strike.
we have ongoing litigation on behalf of civilian victims of drone strikes, both in the Pakistani courts, and most recently here in Germany, which is where I am at today, against the german government because of a U.S. Base here called Rammstein Airbase that, leaks have shown, is integral to drone strikes in Yemen. The orders to give the strikes are coming through that base. So, we have brought litigation on behalf of some of the victims of that program here in german court, basically, under the constitution claiming the right to life is being violated.
Ayman al-Zawahiri is quite a disturbing case because in two attempts to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri, 76 children lost their lives. In total in Pakistan in attempts to target these 41 men, 142 children have lost their lives to drone strikes. In his case, he was targeted and missed on two different occasions. He is still alive today. And there are others that are perhaps even more disturbing. You have a man by the name of al-Masri in Pakistan who was targeted three times, killed — there were 120 people were killed in his place. And in the end, it wasn’t a drone strike that killed him, but he died of natural causes.
The administration really needs to come clean on what is happening with this program. It consistently tells the American public that this is a surgical, precise weapon, that the strikes are targeted, don’t worry we are only killing bad guys. What this data suggests, is there’s nothing precise about the program at all. And in fact, we’re potentially killing hundreds in an effort, unsuccessfully in some instances, to get 41 men on a kill list who may or may not be a threat to the U.S. That, in my opinion, makes us less safe rather than more safe.
— source democracynow.org
Jennifer Gibson, staff attorney at the international legal charity Reprieve. http://www.reprieve.org/uploads/2/6/3/3/26338131/2014_11_24_pub_you_never_die_twice_-_multiple_kills_in_the_us_drone_program.pdf