Secret blackhole battlefield of CIA drone 'Bugsplat' atrocities revealed prompts discussions on President Obama war crimes
Prominent human rights defender Clive Stafford Smith, head of legal action charity Reprieve, has helped release rare photographs Monday of tribal childrens' and other innocent civilians' bodies after attacked by President Barack Obama's weapon of choice, drones, used by U.S. military and CIA in the president's undeclared secret war on Pakistan. Stafford Smith has threatened to suit the U.S. embassy in Pakistan for its complicity in civilian deaths by drones, part of the program officially called by U.S. authorites, "Bugsplat."
"The CIA may have launched 70 drone strikes in tribal Pakistan in 2011 alone. But Americans, like the rest of the world, have no idea what the area looks like, or who lives there," reported Wired Magazine on Monday.
"Be advised: Many of these pictures are disturbing. Some of them show dead children," Wired Magazine reported.
President Obama's CIA drone strikes in Pakistan are largely focused on mountainous areas of Waziristan near the Afghanistan border.
In the broad-based campaign against the CIA' remote control drone attacks, Noor Behram, a resident of North Waziristan, has been working with Stafford Smith after spending years photographing the aftermath of drone strikes, often at personal risk.
"I want to show taxpayers in the Western world what their tax money is doing to people in another part of the world: killing civilians, innocent victims, children," Behram said.
Stafford Smith is threatening to suit the U.S. embassy in Pakistan for its complicity in civilian deaths from drone strikes.
"Last Friday, lawyers representing victims of CIA drone attacks wrote to the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, to inform him that we were going to bring him to justice for his complicity in the illegal killing of Pakistan citizens," Stafford Smith stated yesterday in his report, "Drone attacks in Pakistan: bringing the diplomats to justice."
"Here is the problem, already well-known in Pakistan: whenever the CIA wants to fire a missile at someone in its undeclared war in the Pakistan border regions, they have to get the Ambassador's view before they press the kill button. Presumably Mr Munter gets a précis of the dubious intelligence that the CIA is using, and then gives a thumbs up or thumbs down, along the lines of the Emperor in the Colosseum. The Predator drone then spews forth a hellfire missile, and various people end up dead."
Wall Street Journal reported last week, "The British-based charity Reprieve and its Pakistani partners, in an initial step, sent a letter Dec. 2 to the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, asking about his role in authorizing a drone strike on Oct. 31 that the lawyers said killed two youths, age 12 and 16. The letter offers Mr. Munter a chance to "disavow what happened" before the group files suit.
Stafford Smith, founder of Reprieve, has spent 27 years working on behalf of people facing the death penalty in the U.S.
Reprieve's former legal actions filed in the U.S. and Europe helped expose clandestine CIA programs that prompted some governments to scale back their cooperation according to WSJ.
These include the CIA's extraordinary rendition, the U.S. kidnapping and moving prisoners to third countries for detention and "questioning."
The Obama "administration needs to think about the potential international legal liability of their officials," said John Bellinger, a former legal adviser for the State Department during G.W. Bush's administration, now at the Council on Foreign Relations reported WSJ.
"They're convinced they're on the side of the angels and can't believe someone might accuse them of war crimes."
In July, Reprieve hosted a drone photograph exhibition in London, 'Gaming in Waziristan', with Pakistani lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar, who has brought cases against the CIA on behalf of victims of drone attacks.
"'Bugsplat' is the official term used by the U.S. authorities when human beings are successfully killed with drone missiles – whether they are significant terrorists or (more commonly, it seems) innocent civilians," explained Reprieve in July.
Reprieve reports up that US ‘drones’ in Pakistan have killed up to 2,283 people since 2004 -- "with the numbers rapidly escalating in the past two years under President Obama."
"The implications of this novel form of videogame warfare are profound: how likely is it that the US soldiers and CIA civilians operating drones from 13000 km away will hit the right person in the middle of the night? How can people surrender to a drone that is plying the sky above their homes? What is the US doing using drones in Pakistan anyway, given that the US is not at war with their ally?" (Reprieve)
"Even though Mr Munter is in our legal sights, I hope that our latest gambit will help provide him with his own ammunition: to help him put the State Department's case that every drone strike in Pakistan exacerbates extremism in Pakistan and makes his task more difficult," Stafford Smith reported in Huffington Post.
Stafford Smith says security of everyone from Waziristan to Washington has been placed in greater jeopardy due to U.S. drones.
By August, London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) report showed U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan had killed more civilians than previously reported, including 168 children.
The TBIJ database study, led by Chris Woods, "was compiled from over 2,000 media reports, witness testimonies, NGO field reports, secret US government cables, leaked intelligence documents and accounts from lawyers, journalists, politicians and former intelligence officers," reported Channel 4 News.
"The CIA's insistence that it is not killing civilians in Pakistan is at odds with the reported evidence," Woods said.
Commenting on those report findings, UNICEF had stated: "Even one child death from drone missiles or suicide bombings is one child death too many.
"Children have no place in war, and all parties should do their utmost to protect children from violent attacks at all times."
Behram wants to publish a book of his hundreds of photographs of deaths by drones.
Wired Magazine says, "A black hole might soon become a floodlight."
Comments