According to the New America Foundation, the US killer drone attacks in Yemen almost tripled in 2012, surging from 18 to over 50. Related Interviews:
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Two people have lost their lives in a US assassination drone strike in Yemen’s central province of Bayda, Press TV reports.
Yemeni military sources said the airstrike was carried out in the provincial capital city of al-Bayda, situated 200 kilometers (about 124 miles) southeast of the capital, Sana’a, on Monday.
Reports say the victims were suspected al-Qaeda militants.
On May 18, a US drone targeted a truck in the al-Mahfad region of Abyan Province. Local officials confirmed the death of four people but said it was not clear if they were al-Qaeda militants.
Five people were also killed in two similar strikes in a mountainous area near Sana’a on May 16.
Four of the victims were killed in the first strike as they were riding a vehicle in the desert area of Oussab al-Ali, while the fifth victim died when a drone fired a missile that hit his house.
The United States has stepped up its killer drone operations in Yemen over the past few years.
Washington has come under fire for increasing the drone attacks in the country, where the people have held many demonstrations to condemn the violation of Yemen’s sovereignty.
According to the Washington-based think tank the New America Foundation, the US drone attacks in Yemen almost tripled in 2012, surging from 18 to 53.
US officials claim that the airstrikes target militants, but local sources say civilians have been the main victims of the attacks.
The US also conducts drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia.
Over 80 US drone attacks reported in Yemen in 2012: Rights group Sun Apr 28, 2013 5:1PM GMT
United States has carried out over 80 assassination drone attacks in Yemen in 2012, which have caused significant civilian casualties, a Yemeni rights group says.
According to Yemeni National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms (HOOD), unmanned US drones carried out over 80 air attacks in Yemen last year.
Meanwhile, Yemeni activist Farea al-Muslimi, said in his testimony before a US Senate committee that "rather than fighting terrorism, US drone strikes in his country were fuelling it". He also said that the United States has become an enemy of Yemenis by carrying out the drone strikes and targeted killings.
"While American hold courses on the rule of law for Yemenis, they are violating it by carrying out drone attacks," Muslimi told the Senate committee.
Washington uses its assassination drones in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia, claiming that they target the terrorists. The attacks, however, have mostly led to massive civilian casualties.
The United Nations has censured the US drone attacks as targeted killings, stressing that the raids flout international law. Reports, however, say that the CIA is seeking to expand its covert drone attacks in Yemen.
Yemenis have held several anti-US rallies across the country over the past months and have called on their government to cut all ties with Washington over the deadly airstrikes.
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Political officials in Yemen have expressed discontent with the increasing number of attacks by the US assassination drones in their country.
According to a report by the United Arab Emirates daily Al Khaleej, Yemeni officials have expressed their disapproval of the US assassination drone attacks around Yemen's capital city, Sana’a and other cities including Hazar al-Mot, Marib, al-Bayda and Sa’dah.
The report said that Yemeni officials have demanded that the US drone attacks be confined to sparse, uninhabited and border areas.
The officials have also noted that the ground operations against al-Qaeda in border areas such as al-Bayda and Sa’dah are being carried out only by Yemeni forces.
The report further added that Yemen’s President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi has rejected a request by the United States to deploy more troops to the Arab state, saying based on agreements between the two sides all the troops should withdraw from Yemen before the beginning of the second half of 2013.
The US has increased the number of drone strikes dramatically, with 53 taking place in 2012. This figure is three times higher than the figure for a year before.
The US regularly carries out assassination drone attacks in Yemen, which is located on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula and among the poorest in the region.
Washington uses its assassination drones in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia, claiming that they target the terrorists. The attacks, however, have mostly led to massive civilian casualties.
The United Nations has censured the US drone attacks as targeted killings, stressing that the raids flout international law. Reports, however, say that the CIA is seeking to expand its covert drone attacks in Yemen.
Yemenis have held several anti-US rallies across the country over the past months and have called on their government to cut all ties with Washington over the deadly airstrikes.
There is no excuse for this (carrying out drone strikes); the drone strikes should come to an end immediately and every single drone strike should be investigated and if there is culpability, those that are in charge of these drones should be brought to The Hague and tried.” Related Viewpoints:
Obama legalizes targeting innocents
A Washington-based political activist tells Press TV that the US’s assassination drone strikes, which target civilian populations in countries like Yemen and Pakistan, are absolutely ‘illegal’ under international law and the culprits must be tried in The Hague.
Two separate US assassination drone strikes killed at least nine people in Yemen on Wednesday. The first drone strike killed seven people travelling in a vehicle near the town of Khawlan, about 35 kilometers (20 miles) southeast of the capital, Sana’a. Two other people died in another attack on a house in the town of Radda in al-Bayda Province. Three people were also reportedly injured in the second strike.
In an interview with Press TV, Tighe Barry, a political activist and member of CODEPINK in Washington, shares his thoughts regarding the issue. The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.
Press TV: We keep hearing about these assassination drones and we have of course also heard about that manual of sorts that has been drawn up by the Obama administration to ‘legalize’ these drone strikes. How far do you think such a manual would go?
Barry: Thank you for having me. I think it is telling that after 10 years of drone warfare, the administration is finally saying that they are going to draw up a legal argument or at least a definition of what the ‘war on terror’ is and we see that even when they draw up these rules for killing overseas, the murder that they do with these drones, with these flying robots, they will allow the CIA one more year of additional murder that they can do and it should be noted that this is against our laws in the United States.
The CIA is a civilian organization that is meant for intelligence gathering, not for killing. As a matter of fact, in the 1970s, the CIA was strictly forbidden under law from carrying out targeted assassinations which is exactly what these drone strikes are.
These are targeted assassinations; they are secret and I cannot find any law under international law, under Geneva Conventions, under the rules of warfare that allow the United States to carry out these drone strikes.
As a matter of fact, we met with several NGOs over the weekend to discuss ways to combat to end these drone strikes by the United States but as of yet, no one is able to give me a clear argument as to why the United States is still allowed to carry on these targeted assassinations.
Press TV: Certain countries such as Pakistan and especially Yemen as well have been accused of being complicit in fact in these drone strikes and in providing ‘intelligence’ to the US as to where to attack. So then if the governments themselves are allowing the US to do this, then why not just let the US do it?
Barry: Even if let’s say these governments which I am sure they are complicit to a degree are allowing these drone strikes to happen within their borders on their sovereign citizens without giving them due process in courts of law or allowing them to surrender, then it is still a violation under international law, under the Geneva rules, under all rules of warfare, these drone strikes are considered murder or targeted assassinations.
There is no excuse for this; the drone strikes should come to an end immediately and every single drone strike should be investigated and if there is culpability, those that are in charge of these drones should be brought to The Hague and tried.
Obama is committing crimes against humanity under the guise of ‘a nice man’; as ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’, he is making every brazen effort to legalize the illegal and justify the unjustifiable. Related Interviews:
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was bitterly right when he said US President Barack Obama “seems to be a nice man, and that is precisely the problem” and aptly described him as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.
Under the pretext of combating terrorism, Obama has followed in the footsteps of former President George Bush and even intensified the killer drone attacks in different parts of the world, a move which has terminated in the unfortunate deaths of multitudes of innocent people. President Obama argues that the drone strikes are focused efforts to exterminate people who are on a list of active terrorists and that they have not caused huge human losses.
Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents families of civilians killed in US killer drone strikes, says, "Either President Obama is lying to the nation, or he is too naive, to believe on the reports which CIA is presenting to [him]."
In a similar strain, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK has said:
"So many people who spoke out against George [W.] Bush’s extraordinary rendition and Guant?namo and indefinite detention have been very quiet when it comes to the Obama administration, who is not putting people in those same kind of conditions, instead is just taking them out and killing them. So we need to make people speak up and say that when Obama says this [program] is on a tight leash, this is not true, this is a lie."
Only in Pakistan, Obama has authorized over 300 drone attacks and has killed innocent civilians. A new study by Stanford Law School and New York University's School of Law shows that the killer “drone strikes in Pakistan have killed far more people than the United States has acknowledged, have traumatized innocent residents and largely been ineffective.” Besides, the study calls for a re-evaluation of the practice, saying the number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low - about 2%. The report says Washington is misrepresenting drone strikes as "a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer," saying that in reality, "there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians."
In a 29-page report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions, called on the United States to exercise greater restraint in its use of drones.
“I’m particularly concerned that the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe. But this strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.”
Considered the most extensive effort by the UN to deal with the legal aspects of armed drones, the report says:
“Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield, and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing.”
In parallel with the illegal CIA-operated killer drone attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and many other secret destinations, Obama has initiated a system of silent killings in Iran by imposing sanctions which have indirectly but agonizingly targeted the Iranian patients, endangering the lives of 6 million people and claiming the lives of many. On November 26, Dr. Seyed Alireza Marandi, President of the Academy of Medical Sciences, wrote a letter to Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General and voiced grave concern over the health of the ailing people in Iran and called on him to take necessary steps for the effective removal of the sanctions so brutally targeting the Iranian patients.
Besides, Obama is a source of shame to the black race as they are being increasingly targeted by brutality and hate crimes. According to a report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups has continued to grow. The center, which has kept track of such groups for 30 years, recorded 1,018 hate groups operating in 2011. Last year, the center tracked 1,274 of those groups, up from 824 the year before.
“They represent both a kind of right-wing populist rage and a left-wing populist rage that has gotten all mixed up in anger toward the government,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the author of the report.
Although the report traces the ‘stunning rise’ in hate crimes to antagonism towards Obama, it seems a far-fetched assumption as social unrest is rife in the country and it well accounts for a considerable percentage of the crimes committed on a daily basis in the United States. In July 2012, a gunman in a gas mask and bullet-proof vest killed 12 and wounded dozens more at a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises movie. He did not target black people and his shooting spree can be but seen in the light of some social insecurity brought about by a warmongering government rather rather stemming from a feeling of hatred conceived towards Obama. Ergo, the rise in hate crimes is not limited to the black race only. Like a sort of canker, hatred is eroding the very fabric of the American society, a society being fed by a government’s perennial sense of antagonism for this or that race or religion. James Holmes, the Batman killer, is indeed 'bane' of this warmongering government bequeathed as an accursed legacy from Bush to Obama who instead of returning the genie to bottle fed and nurtured it.
As the situation stands, the promises Obama made to the American people and the Muslim community ostensibly went to waste as he made no tangible efforts to eliminate poverty in the US and deracinate Islamophobia in the country and the West. On the contrary, he has consciously augmented the phenomenon to a degree of inconceivable horror. For instance, the only reaction he showed to the sacrilegious act of the Quran burning in Afghanistan at the hands of a bunch of sadomasochist reservists and the massacre of innocent Afghans went no further than a few words of apology.
Thus, Obama is committing crimes against humanity under the guise of ‘a nice man’; as ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’, he is making every brazen effort to legalize the illegal and justify the unjustifiable.
As a peace Nobelist, Obama is indeed a man dressed in borrowed robes. Needless to say, those who awarded him with the peace prize should now be hanging their heads low in shame.
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