The Year in Drones
by CHARLES PIERSON
2014 was a good year for US killer drones. In October, the US celebrated (if that is the word) its 400th drone strike on Pakistan. Unable to attend the festivities were the 2,379 Pakistanis killed by US drones since 2004. Of these, only 12% of the victims who have been identified have been linked to militant organizations, this according to an October
report from the independent British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Drone victims have been largely invisible to Americans. An exception is the family of Rafiq ur Rehman, a Pakistani schoolteacher. On October 24, 2012, a US drone killed Rafiq’s 67-year old mother while she was gathering okra behind the Rehmans’ home in Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal areas. A year later, on October 29, 2013, Rafiq and his two young children testified before Congress. The Rehmans were brought to Capitol Hill by Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) and
Robert Greenwald, director of
Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars. This was the first—and, so far, the only—time drone victims had testified before Congress. The Rehmans might just as well have saved themselves the trip. Only five members of Congress showed up to listen to the Rehmans’ testimony.
How has the US drone program fared since then?
Innocent civilians are still being killed by US drones. 104 people in Pakistan were killed in 2014, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Appalling as that figure is, there’s a small measure of comfort (very small) in the fact that the number of US drone strikes on Pakistan have declined sharply; there were 22 strikes this year after reaching a peak of 128 strikes in 2010. Yet as drone strikes on Pakistan have declined, drone strikes in Yemen have escalated. The first US drone strike on Yemen which killed four members of al-Qaeda occurred in 2002. After that, there were no further strikes in Yemen until 2010. Making up for lost time, the United States has gone on to attack Yemen with gusto. There have been 116 total strikes in Yemen which according to the New America Foundation have caused 811-1073 deaths, 81-87 of them civilians. Except for the single strike in 2002, all of the drone attacks in Yemen have taken place at the order of Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/07/the-year-in-drones/