Drone victim funeral December 29 2010 – two named civilians are known to have died that day. (AP)
Sunday’s death of Fahd al-Quso in a CIA drone strike was a significant US success. The admitted al Qaeda bomber had long been sought for his role in the deadly attack on the US navy ship the USS Cole back in 2000.
At the Bureau we logged al-Quso’s name – along with his nephew Fahed Salem al-Akdam – in our Yemen database. Another two names added to the many hundreds we’ve now recorded for the US covert war in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
The Bureau has so far identified by name 317 civilians killed in US attacks in Pakistan. Between 170 and 500 further civilians have yet to be identified.
A day earlier, a CIA strike in Pakistan also killed around ten people. Here the information was less clear, with reports vague about who had died. While most claimed that a militant training camp had been struck, a single source claimed those killed were ‘local tribesmen.’ This clearly needs further investigation.
Although we’re not alone in recording US covert drone strikes, the Bureau also tries to identify by name all of those killed – both civilian and militants. And those names – which the Bureau recently presented at a Washington DC drone summit – reveal some startling truths about the US drone campaign.
To date in Pakistan, we have been able to identify 170 named militants killed by the CIA in more than 300 drone strikes. Among them are many senior figures, including Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistan Taliban; Ilyas Kashmiri, an al-Qaeda linked strategist; and Nek Mohammed, once a militant thorn in Pakistan’s side.
Certainly these drone strikes have severely affected the ability of militants to operate openly in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The recently-declassified ‘bin Laden papers’ talk of the impact of the CIA’s attacks, with the Taliban ‘frankly exhausted from the enemy’s air bombardments.’
Yet there’s a darker side to this coin. The Bureau has also been able to name 317 civilians killed in US attacks in Pakistan. Between 170 and 500 further civilians have yet to be identified.
On October 30 2011, for example, we know that the CIA killed four chromite miners in Waziristan – foreman Saeedur Rahman, and miners Khastar Gul, Mamrud Khan and Noorzal Khan. And on July 12 last year, field researchers working for the Bureau found that drones returned to attack rescuers, killing four Taliban and four civilians we named as Shabbir, Kalam, Waqas and Bashir.
US Lists
We’re not alone in keeping lists of the covert war dead. Just a few days ago, the Washington Post reported that ‘U.S. officials have said that more than 2,000 militants and civilians have been killed in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere since Obama took office in 2009.’
The Bureau’s data indicates that between 2,300 and 3,290 people have died in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia strikes under Obama.
Given that the Bureau’s base estimate for the total killed in Pakistan drone strikes is close to the CIA’s own, what clearly irks the US intelligence community is the light we continue to shine on civilians reported killed.
Since we began publishing our reports on civilian deaths from drone strikes, the US intelligence community has aggressively sought to attack our findings. Our media partners have been leaned on. The CIA claimed that we were getting our information from a ‘Pakistani spy’ (a barrister representing drone strike victims). And when we definitively showed, with the Sunday Times, that the CIA had been bombing rescuers and funeral-goers, it was suggested that we were ‘helping al Qaeda.’
What clearly irks the US intelligence community is the light we continue to shine on civilians reported killed.
Redefining ‘civilian’
At stake may be the very definition of a ‘civilian’ in the modern battlefield. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos recently pressed US chief counter terrorism adviser John Brennan on his remarkable claim in June 2011 that the CIA had not killed ‘a single non-combatant in almost a year.’
In reply, Brennan said that ‘over a period of time before my public remarks [that] we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant being killed.’
Even a cursory examination of credible media reports between June 1st 2010 and June 29 2011 (when Brennan made his original claim) shows that dozens of civilians were reported killed in that period. Among those who died were more than 40 tribal elders and villagers in a single disastrous CIA strike in March 2011. That attack led to public protests from Pakistan’s president, prime minister and army chief.
Perhaps the CIA’s own human intelligence-gathering abilities are so poor in Pakistan that it can no longer identify civilians killed on the ground. Perhaps the Agency has been misleading Congress and the President about the true extent of civilian deaths. Alternatively, the very definition of civilian may have been radically changed. If the latter is true – and it seems the most likely scenario – then this has worrying implications.
New phase
The covert drone war appears to be entering a new phase. Until recently, strikes were carried out with the tacit co-operation of host governments. But now Islamabad is saying no. Recent CIA strikes in Pakistan have been publicly condemned by the government as being ‘in total contravention of international law.’ The strikes are carrying on regardless.
Yemen’s new president appears more pliant. Yet in a little-reported comment, the nation’s prime minister Muhammad Salem Basindwa recently told a local newspaper: ’The government has never asked the US to carry out drone attacks on the Yemeni soil because there should not be external meddling in Yemen’s own affairs.’
Part of the justification for the US carrying out drone strikes without consent is their reported success. And naming those militants killed is key to that process. Al Qaeda bomber Fahd al-Quso’s death was widely celebrated.
Yet how many newspapers also registered the death of Mohamed Saleh Al-Suna, a civilian caught up and killed in a US strike in Yemen on March 30?
By showing only one side of the coin, we risk presenting a distorted picture of this new form of warfare. There is an obligation to identify all of those killed – not just the bad guys.
Follow @chrisjwoods on Twitter
Sign up for email alerts from the Bureau here.
May 11th, 2012 at 3:57 pm (#)
Chris, congratulations on this piece (which appeared in Common Dreams here in the US).
Here’s my comment from CD on your fine reporting:
The key point that needs to be understood is that this modernized, and mostly unseen global ‘drone war’ is a device of the modernized, and mostly unseen global EMPIRE.
Woods, as a Brit, should understand better than deluded Americans that Empire always ‘extracts’ wealth (as Timothy Parsons perfectly defines in his fabulously revealing “The Rule of Empires”).
Woods, as a Brit, should also understand from the history of the British Empire, that Lloyd George in 1934 negotiated in Geneva to reserve the legal use of modern technology (aeroplanes) to discipline/oppress ‘subjects’ of the Empire in these same Middle Eastern ‘territories’ of the Empire, and cabled London that his negotiation had successfully “reserved the right to bomb niggers from aeroplanes” — which is precisely what our multi-racial, progressive, Nobel Peace Prize winning, Democratic President has accomplished through the use of modernized and disguised ‘drone war’.
But the even bigger issue, in fact, the cancerous CAUSE of these disgusting ‘symptom issues’ of unrestrained murder of people, resource wars, economic oppression (in the territories and ‘at home’), environmental death-spiral, etc., etc. is that Empire has followed the same modernized course as ‘drone war’ technology, in ‘Disguising itself’.
Woods, as a Brit, should understand far better than the propaganda deluded Americans that all Empire did not end just because the British public finally rejected the immoral and self-destructive construct of Empire after the Second World War (of Empires).
Neither did the construct of Empire end after the next-to-the-last “Evil Empire” ended just because the Russian people finally rejected the immoral and self-destructive construct of Empire in 1991 —– Empire, like drones, just made itself invisible, but continued and expanded into this modernized DGE (Disguised Global Empire).
Yes, the DGE, the disguised global empire, the modernized post-nation-state ‘drone form of empire’ in the 21st century, is a corporate/financial/militarist and media Empire which has captured and now fully “Occupies” our former country by hiding behind the facade of its modernized two-party ‘Vichy’ sham of faux-democratic and totally illegitimate government.
It is not surprising that this ‘drone form of disguised Empire’ evolved in the US, since the US is the only remaining military super-power, and the US contains the most easily fooled citizens (or rather ‘subjects’) in terms of being able to hide Empire.
Woods, like all Europeans and Japanese, can more easily remember only a generation ago the awful devastation that Empires caused in the Second World War (of Empires), while the more poorly educated and propaganda infused American public’s only dim memory of Empire goes back over 200 years to the ancient history of the founding conflict with the British Empire.
American ‘subjects’ of this DGE cannot even remember nor understand the 20th century history of the financial Empire that caused the 1930′s Great Depression — as proved by Americans’ failure to remember and retain the value of the Glass-Steagall Act in preventing such economic looting by financial Empire, which continued in 2008.
So Americans are now oblivious of the FACT that a disguised global Empire headquartered in what they still think of as ‘their country’ is currently destroying the world, both through wars and financial looting/’extraction’, and need the knowledgable assistance of other ‘citizens of the world’ who understand the deadly effect of all Empires, in order to have any chance of preventing all of us from becoming merely oppressed ‘subjects’ of this modernized ‘drone form’ of disguised global Empire — which will certainly lead to global extinction.
Best luck and love to the “Occupy
Empire” educational and revolutionary movement.
Liberty, democracy, & justice
Over
Violent/Vichy
Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
May 12th, 2012 at 12:56 am (#)
We need to name them because they are real, authentic people, with feelings and needs just like EVERYONE ELSE IS!
June 9th, 2012 at 4:46 pm (#)
The Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is the lead agency in the covert ‘war on terror’ in Somalia, although the CIA also has a strong regional presence. The US has been carrying out extensive covert military operations inside Somalia since 2001, as a major six-part investigation by the US Army, the Times recently revealed. The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed. As Yemen came under severe pressure during the Arab Spring and militants seized control of cities and towns in the south, the US significantly stepped up its attacks, most notably with drone strikes. Since mid 2011 US counter terrorism operations in Yemen have been conducted by both the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency. In the eyes of the International community, there is no need for any operations at all in foreign lands, these countries never attack the CIA who’s trespassing on another man’s soil and are not even at war with the United States.