Pakistani Family Wants Murder Warrants Over Drone Deaths

CIA chiefs face arrest over horrific evidence of bloody 'video-game' sorties by drone pilots
 By DAVID ROSE from the Daily Mail in the UK

The plaintiff in the Islamabad case is Karim Khan, 45, a journalist and translator with two masters’ degrees, whose family comes from the village of Machi Khel in the tribal region of North Waziristan.
His eldest son, Zahinullah, 18, and his brother, Asif Iqbal, 35, were killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone that struck the family’s guest dining room at about 9.30pm on New Year’s Eve, 2009.
Asif had changed his surname because he loved to recite Iqbal, Pakistan’s national poet, and Mr Khan said: ‘We are an educated family. My uncle is a hospital doctor in Islamabad, and we all work in professions such as teaching.
‘We have never had anything to do with militants or terrorists, and for that reason I always assumed we would be safe.’
Mr Khan said: ‘Zahinullah, who had been studying in Islamabad, had returned to the village to work his way through college, taking a part-time job as a school caretaker.
‘He was a quiet boy and studious – always in the top group of his class.’ Zahinullah also liked football, cricket and hunting partridges.
Asif, he added, was an English teacher and had spent several years taking further courses to improve his qualifications while already in work.
Mr Khan said: ‘He was my kid brother. We used to have a laugh, tell jokes.’ His first child was less than a year old when Asif was killed.
Included in the legal dossier are documents that corroborate Asif and Zahinulla’s educational and employment records, as well as their death certificates. Killed alongside them was Khaliq Dad, a stonemason who was staying with the family while he worked on a local mosque.

To me, there's no difference in how a human being is killed. Killing an innocent human being by blowing them up with a missile with a high explosive warhead isn't any different from killing an innocent human being by shooting them. Or from killing an innocent human being by flying a plane into their building.
Its not the method that creates evil, its the act of killing an innocent human being that is evil.

According to the legal claim, someone from the Pakistan CIA network led by Mr Banks – who left Pakistan in 2010 – targeted the Khan family and guided the Hellfire missile by throwing a GPS homing device into their compound.
Mr Rizzo is named because of an interview he gave to a US reporter after he retired as CIA General Counsel last year. In it, he boasted that he had personally authorised every drone strike in which America’s enemies were ‘hunted down and blown to bits’.
He added: ‘It’s basically a hit-list .  .  . The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head.’

According to the article, we've killed somewhere between 2,500 and 3,300 people in Pakistan by our drone strikes. To put that number in perspective, just under 3,000 people died in the Washington DC and New York City terror attacks on 9-11.
The US and NATO claim that pretty much every person killed by a drone strike is a 'terrorist'. Its pretty much by definition, if you were killed by a drone, then you had to have been a terrorist.

Last night a senior Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Pakistan’s own intelligence agency, the ISI, has always been excluded by the CIA from choosing drone targets.
‘They insist on using their own networks, paying their own informants. Dollars can be very persuasive,’ said the official.
He claimed the intelligence behind drone strikes was often seriously flawed. As a result, ‘they are causing the loss of innocent lives’.
But even this, he added, was not as objectionable as the so-called ‘signature strikes’ – when a drone operator, sitting at a computer screen thousands of miles away in Nevada, selects a target because he thinks the drone camera has spotted something suspicious.
He said: ‘It could be a vehicle containing armed men heading towards the border, and the operator thinks, “Let’s get them before they get there,” without any idea of who they are.
‘It could also just be people sitting together. In the frontier region, every male is armed but it doesn’t mean they are militants.’
One such signature strike killed more than 40 people in Datta Khel in North Waziristan on March 17 last year. The victims, Mr Akbar’s dossier makes clear, had gathered for a jirga – a tribal meeting – in order to discuss a dispute between two clans over the division of royalties from a chromite mine.

Do you really believe the generals and the politicians when they say that such a process is so perfect that absolutely everyone they kill is always a terrorist? Lets see what the people on the ground think. As part of a longer statement, one resident of the region says ...

He added that schools in the area were empty because ‘parents are afraid their children will be hit by a missile’.

We've created a world where mom's are too terrified of our drone strikes that they won't send their children to school.  How many mom's have you met who didn't want their children to be educated?  Not many, but in this region, the mom's of the region obviously feel that its better to have their children alive and at home.

Does that sound like the people who live in these areas can obviously see that the only people who die in these strikes are terrorists?

If you think this is wonderful, vote for Romney or Obama in this election, and they'll both continue and probably expand this facet of America's Terror Wars. If you think this is just plain wrong, try voting for someone else.

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