Missiles shot from drones are but one of the weapons Americans use to kill children.
[T]he London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has issued a new study on civilians killed by American drones, concluding that at least 385 civilians have been killed in the past seven years, including at least 168 children.
The Bureau says the number of civilians killed by American drones may be as high as 775. It says most of those killed have been militants, but the Brookings Institute, home of Michael O'Hanlon, estimates that drone attacks have killed ten civilians for every militant.
Solid info is hard to come by. We can say for sure that drones have killed hundreds of innocents, including many children. And that the U.S. estimate is, uh, low:
John O. Brennan, clearly referring to the classified drone program, said in June that for almost a year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” [Laugh track]
It's even funnier in light of this recent bit of reporting from the Wall Street Journal:
Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren't always known. The bulk of CIA's drone strikes are signature strikes.
Their identities aren't always known!
Perhaps raw numbers are just to dry to move you. Here's a true crime story.
Tariq was proud to be part of this meeting. About 18 months earlier, in April 2010, his cousin Aswar Ullah was killed by a missile fired from a drone as he rode a motorcycle near Norak.
Tariq, like all of us, listened intently to the speakers, who included the politician and former cricketer Imran Khan.
What none of us could have imagined was that 72 hours later, this football-loving teenager would himself be killed by a CIA drone, along with his 12-year-old cousin Waheed Khan.
Still too removed from your day-to-day experience to tweak your heart? Try a thought experiment.
Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot plane swooped over your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It is controlled with a joystick from 7,000 miles away, sent by the Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses on your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbors until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops. Why? They refuse to comment. They don't even admit the robot planes belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is because one of you was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them. Who? You don't know, and there are no appeals against the robot.
Now imagine it doesn't end there: These attacks are happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up funerals and family dinners and children. The number of robot planes in the sky is increasing every week. You discover they are named "Predators," or "Reapers" -- after the Grim Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you make it clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your life, it won't stop. What do you do? If there were a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved to be violently attacked, would you now start to listen?
My knowing friends will point out that drones are more accurate than manned aircraft. And that's probably true. "Pilots" sitting thousands of miles away can use drones to collect intelligence, monitor a target, and pick the "best time" to strike. (Accuracy also depends, of course, on what kind of weapon is employed.)
But "more accurate" or "less inaccurate" doesn't equal moral.
I admit that I have trouble accepting the morality of killing people from the sky, period. For the purpose of this post, however, I will submit to a creepy utilitarianism, a moral math, and grant that killing civilians from the sky, unlike torture and assassinating civilians, can be kosher in some cases. (International law would call this proportionality, whereby the number of civilian deaths must be proportional to the value of the military target.)
But this ain't that, friends. Killing children in an attempt to kill people who might be -- might be -- mid-level AQ militants? Killing children as part of an immoral and mindblowingly stupid occupation of Afghanistan? In other words: fuck you if you think George Bush's Great War of Terror justifies killing thousands of innocent people and their children.
Drones attacks are all the rage -- the new American way of war -- and they even have their own congressional caucus of more than 50 members, but they're not the only American child-killers. There are infamous nighttime raids:
On Thursday, a girl was spending the night, with other relatives, outside. “As it is warmer now, we sleep in the courtyard,” Neik Mohammed, the girl’s father, told a reporter for the Times. She was killed, along with her uncle, when NATO troops raided the wrong house by mistake. They threw a grenade into the yard, and shrapnel hit her head, killing her almost instantly—maybe quickly enough that the explosion merged with a dream, unless the opening notes of the raid had woken her already.
And artillery fire.
Fourth grade is where a ten-year-old girl should be; the one killed Monday was gathering firewood with other girls, as were nine boys killed a few months ago. She and her friends, some of whom were wounded, were not mistaken for anybody; they were apparently just too close to a suspected insurgent position that was being shelled with artillery.
And classic manned aircraft.
Abdul Samad, an uncle of four of the children who were killed, disputed the government’s version of the attack. He said his relatives were working in fields near their village when they were attacked without warning by an aircraft.
His brother-in-law, Mohammad Rahim, 50, had his two sons and three daughters with him. They were between 4 and 12 years old and all were killed, except an 8-year-old daughter who was badly wounded, Mr. Samad said.
“There were no Taliban in the field; this is a baseless allegation that the Taliban were planting mines,” Mr. Samad said. “I have been to the scene and haven’t found a single bit of evidence of bombs or any other weapons. The Americans did a serious crime against innocent children, they will never ever be forgiven.”
Had enough? It gets numbing, doesn't it? Just one more example: sometimes American aircraft unleash a particularly nasty for of weapon called a cluster bomb. The good news is that the United States recently failed in its attempt to gut the ban on such weapons. The bad news is that the U.S. hasn't signed the ban and uses cluster bombs.
Thirty five women and children were killed by an American cruise missile armed with cluster bombs which struck an alleged al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, according to a study.
And no, I'm not maintaining that all this child-killing is unprecedented; brutality is baked into the American pie; just ask Native Americans, blacks, Filipinos...but to accept it as inevitable is fatalistic to the point of nihilistic and un-progressive to the point of conservative. It doesn't have to be this way. It does not have to be this way.
I could write at length about the strategic stupidity, the self-destructiveness, of all this -- why or why do they hate us? -- but that's not what this post is about. What the United States is doing is wrong. Full stop.