One of the many unintended child victims of US remote-controlled UAVs in Pakistan

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Comment by Tony Nuspl on June 15, 2012 at 10:17am

Karzai Demands Full Halt to US Airstrikes on Civilian Homes
US Downplays Significance, Insists Civilian Deaths 'Rare'

by Jason Ditz, June 12, 2012

Afghan President Hamid Karzai criticized a US promise to restrict airstrikes as insufficient, saying that he is demanding an immediate and complete ban on all st....

Karzai insists that the US agreement with his government, which governs the US occupation through the end of 2024, mandates such a ban.

Karzai insisted that there was no good reason for the US to bomb known civilian homes, even if they were coming under attack from militants that they thought might be in those homes. Last week a NATO airstrike in Logar destroyed several homes in a village, killing 18 civilians.

Read more from Jason Ditz: http://news.antiwar.com/2012/06/12/karzai-demands-full-halt-to-us-a...

Comment by Tony Nuspl on June 9, 2012 at 3:02pm

Jason Ditz, news editor at antiwar.com:  "While these drone strikes have managed to kill roughly 50 named people over the last almost four years, they’ve killed over 2,000 overall, and the vast majority of these people have never been identified beyond vague comments that they were suspects and we’ve never seen any evidence to indicate that this overwhelming majority of the people killed were anything but innocent bystanders. ... At best one in about 40 people is somebody that they’ve ever heard of and that they have a name for. The rest of the people, who knows who they killed. "

http://original.antiwar.com/jason/2012/06/08/jason-ditz-vs-richard-perle-on-bbc/

Comment by Tony Nuspl on May 29, 2012 at 2:58pm

"For every so-called 'high-value' target killed by drones, there's a civilian or other innocent victim who has paid the price. The first major success of drones – the 2002 strike that took out the leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen – also resulted in the death of a U.S. citizen. More recently, a drone strike by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2010 targeted the wrong individual – killing a well-known human rights advocate named Zabet Amanullah who actually supported the U.S.-backed government. The U.S. military, it turned out, had tracked the wrong cellphone for months, mistaking Amanullah for a senior Taliban leader. A year earlier, a drone strike killed Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban, while he was visiting his father-in-law; his wife was vaporized along with him. But the U.S. had already tried four times to assassinate Mehsud with drones, killing dozens of civilians in the failed attempts. One of the missed strikes, according to a human rights group, killed 35 people, including nine civilians, with reports that flying shrapnel killed an eight-year-old boy while he was sleeping. Another blown strike, in June 2009, took out 45 civilians, according to credible press reports."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-rise-of-the-killer-dr...