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While the U.S. media blasts allegations of China committing genocide against Uyghurs and that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to attack Ukraine “essentially at any time,” and as early “as this week,” hardly a peep from the Presstitutes about America’s long history of slaughtering innocent civilians with drone strikes.
After being silent for nearly 10 years, last week the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing about the U.S. military’s use of drones in the Middle East and the number of civilians who have died in bombings.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the chairman of the committee, said up to 30,000 civilians have been killed in U.S. drone strikes since the last meeting occurred in April 2013. (See “BIDEN PRESIDENCY= OBAMA 2021.”)
“These are not just numbers,” Durbin said, according to Middle East Eye. “These are real people.”
Perhaps the most infamous recent strike occurred on 29 August in Kabul that resulted in the deaths of 10 innocent people—including seven children. The New York Times called the strike “a tragic blunder that punctuated the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.”
Hina Shamsi, the National Security Project at the ACLU, blasted the “secretive war-based rules to kill terrorism suspects in places where we weren’t or aren’t at war.”
“Despite widespread credible accounts of horrifying civilian deaths, the executive branch kept expanding the program and the categories of groups and people who could be targeted,” she said. “It used vague and ever-shifting secret legal justifications. If any other country had done this, we would call it unlawful extrajudicial killing, yet it’s a core component of what Americans now call our forever wars.”
The Middle East Eye pointed out that Republican and Democrat lawmakers have attempted to curb the president’s ability to authorize these strikes. Dozens of lawmakers sent President Biden a letter asking for him to change the policy.
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the committee, was dismissive of the proceeding, according to CommonDreams.org. He said he wanted to address “the growing spike in violent crime, including murders and attacks on police” in the United States. “But the order of the day by the majority is drones.”
TRENDPOST: Also not mentioned, is President Barack Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, was a master at mass drone murders. Back in 2014, with the nation in a vacation state of mind as it celebrated July 4, the White House released its tally of civilians killed in drone strikes outside battle zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria from when Obama took office in 2009 until 2015.
From the man who spends his “Terror Tuesdays” signing a “kill list” and was quoted in the book “Double Down” that “I’m really good at killing people,” Obama launched over 10 times as many drone strikes as former murderer-in-chief, George W. Bush.
Although the administration put the number of civilians killed between 64 and 116, human-rights organization Reprieve said over 4,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed by Obama drones: “What little the Obama administration has previously said on the record about the drone program has been shown by the facts on the ground, and even the US government’s own internal documents, to be false,” Reprieve said regarding the White House report.
“It has to be asked what bare numbers will mean if they omit even basic details such as the names of those killed and the areas, even the countries, they live in,” the group wrote.
Considering all males between ages 18 and 80 blown to death by US Hellfire missiles automatically are deemed “combatants” and are not counted as civilians killed—and considering that Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria were not included in the White House report—human-rights organizations had brought the death tally much higher.