Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
^ a sad fact indeed 
k:
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Claiming that drone strikes are illegal and immoral automatically means I support terrorism and Taliban?
Bush Logic.
No, & taking out terrorists is neither illegal nor immoral.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
No, & taking out terrorists is neither illegal nor immoral.
taking out civilians with them is collateral damage... right? Strategies like drone strikes have helped foster extremism rather than quelling it. I would agree with you if violence subsided after years of drone strikes. Sorry, but opposite is the case.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
^^^ Well, in perfect world there would no collateral damage to civilians in a war, but we don't live in a perfect world. The fact is, AQ is on the run & its capabilities are fairly degraded by any objective measures & Osama have became fish food.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
^^^ Well, in perfect world there would no collateral damage to civilians in a war, but we don't live in a perfect world. The fact is, AQ is on the run & its capabilities are fairly degraded by any objective measures & Osama have became fish food.
I don't care what happened to AQ. What I know is that there are bomb blasts and killings in different parts of Pakistan on daily basis and their frequency has increased a lot since direct US intervention.
Perhaps Pakistani lives are valued much less than Americans. Pakistanis and Afghans killed in 1980s fighting American war. Pakistanis and Afghans getting killed now again, fighting American war. I'm sorry, that's not acceptable to me.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
I don't care what happened to AQ. What I know is that there are bomb blasts and killings in different parts of Pakistan on daily basis and their frequency has increased a lot since direct US intervention.
Perhaps Pakistani lives are valued much less than Americans. Pakistanis and Afghans killed in 1980s fighting American war. Pakistanis and Afghans getting killed now again, fighting American war. I'm sorry, that's not acceptable to me.
There is cause and effect relationship here. The US hand no intention of getting involved in war with jihadis. The war was started by AQ in the name of Islam from Afghanistan. What did you expect world's supper power to do? Forget about the fact that 3000 of its citizens were slaughter by freelance jihadi terrorists & do nothing?
And, lets not pretend Pakistan's innocence because it actively supported these jihadis killers before 911, and ISI still supports them. If you want drones to stop Pakistani security agencies need to act & throw out terrorists; deny them space inside the country's borders & there won't be any drone attacks.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
.....If you want drones to stop Pakistani security agencies need to act & throw out terrorists; deny them space inside the country's borders & there won't be any drone attacks......
I agree with you here. This is what we need to do. What our security agencies are doing is wrong. Drone strikes are wrong too. But does that mean I need to support either? Can't I be critical of both?
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
**PESHAWAR: ****A Pakistan-based legal charity has sought court injunctions for the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) to shoot down American drones flying into the Pakistani airspace in a lawsuit.
**
Foundation for Fundamental Rights has filed two petitions before the Peshawar High Court on behalf of victims of the drone strike carried out on March 17 last year.
The petitions cite the federation of Pakistan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence among others as its respondents. One of the petitioners is Noor Khan, the surviving son of Malik Daud Khan, who was the head of a North Waziristan Jirga and was killed along with 50 other tribal elders and notables by CIA operated drones last year.
On March 17, 2011, a US drone fired missiles, brutally killing 50 people, including Khan, five members of the Khasadar force, and a small child.
FFR works along with British legal charity Reprieve which had filed a similar petition in London earlier against involvement of the British government in drone strikes in Pakistan.
According to the PHC petition, over 3,000 people have been killed in over 320 drone strikes in FATA.
The petitioners are seeking court orders asking the federal government to take up the issue before the United Nations Security Council, International Court of Justice and UNHRC.
They have also stated that the federal government should order the Pakistan Air Force to shoot down drones flying inside Pakistani territory in order to protect its citizens and initiate criminal proceedings against those involved on Pakistani or American side
Petition seeks injunction for PAF to shoot down drones – The Express Tribune
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Pakistani students win international award for film on drones – The Express Tribune
**A short film on US drone attacks in Pakistani made by Iqra University students won an international award this week, said a press release.
**
The film The Other Side was awarded with Best Audience Award at National Film Festival For Talented Youth, Washington. The short film is written and directed by Danish Ali along with five other team members.
The 20-minute film revolves around the idea of assessing social, psychological and economical affects of drones on the people in tribal areas of Pakistan.
The film identifies the problems faced by families who have become victims of drone missiles, and it unearths the line of action which terrorist groups adopt to use victimised families for their vested interests.
Despite being chosen for the award, the filmmakers were unable to attend the award ceremony as their visa applications were rejected twice.
“If we got the visa then it would have been easy for us to frame our point of view in front of the other selected youth filmmakers,” Ali said.
“The film gained interest from the audience across the globe compelling festival administrators to give Audience Award to the film,” he added.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
Poor tribals stuck between rock and a hard place.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
:(
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
good article
Drone doctrine of necessity | DAWN.COM
http://dawncompk.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/army-chief-drone-support-290.jpg?w=670
Illustration by Faraz Aamer Khan
Last week, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor admitted that the US is operating a drone program in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Many have commended the Obama administration for disclosing the existence of the drone program, while the president’s advisor, John Brennan, claimed that the program was “legal”, “necessary”, and “wise” under international law. In many ways, his arguments mirrored the doctrine of necessity adopted by Pakistan’s Supreme Court justices in 1955, who claimed “that which is not legal, necessity can make legal.” It took several generations of jurists to realise the fallacy of this doctrine, and it may take the United States just as long to realise the long-term negative implications of utilising the drone program as it currently stands.
Throughout Pakistan’s history, the Supreme Court has toyed with the doctrine of necessity, which is basically used to justify military coups. This doctrine was born out of the perception that the only institution capable of handling Pakistan’s complex problems is the military, and that the Army was a benevolent guardian of the state. What Pakistani jurists have come to understand over several decades is that the Constitution is the true guardian of the people, and the doctrine of necessity is an invalid violation of the democratic principles laid out in the Constitution.
While the Supreme Court has yet to declare the doctrine of necessity null and void, its practice will hopefully not return, considering its effects. By legally justifying coups and martial law under dictators, the doctrine of necessity showed the inability of the judiciary to confront the injustice of authoritarianism. Further, the doctrine allowed for the military to sabotage civilian ruling regimes in order to justify their unconstitutional coups, which has limited the stable democratic growth of the nation. Similarly, the use of drones threatens to limit the ability of the US to legally engage with the international community.
**To begin any discussion on international law, one should recognise that the major powers control the application and interpretation of international law as they have funded and created all of its institutions and treaties. Therefore, it is no mistake that the international criminal court has exclusively prosecuted African leaders, with the exception of Yugoslavia, and failed to exercise its powers on any European or American wrongdoers.
**
Even still, with regards to Obama’s potential violation of international law through the drone program, one must understand that most international legal doctrines were created to maintain global peace and limit the use of force by states. It is no coincidence that the first line of the United Nation’s charter is that the purpose of the organisation is to “to maintain international peace and security,” it goes onto state later that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
However, the international law does not bind the hands of nations facing attacks, whether by enemy-state actors or non-state actors, like terrorists. Under the UN Charter Article 51, a nation is allowed to take measures to defend itself “if an armed attack occurs against” it. Several motions and resolutions passed by the UN identify al Qaeda and the Taliban as willful combatants engaged in armed hostilities against the US, which validates the use of force against them.
**This legal reasoning allows for the US to utilise its drone program as a supplement to troops on the ground in areas like Afghanistan, but the international law has not developed a solid ruling on whether the same program can be used in Pakistan. Pakistan does not have the same cooperation agreement with the US government as Afghanistan, and has not consented publically to the drone program, despite backdoor permission granted by General Kayani as revealed by Wikileaks. Therefore, unilateral action by the US using drones to kill militants and civilians alike without any due process in Pakistan is not as acceptable under international law as Mr. Brennan would have us believe.
The analysis of self-defense under international law is far more complex than merely accepting that nations can use any type of force against their enemies, even if those enemies do not respect borders and are attempting to fight a global jihad. The Caroline case limited the power of nations to use force only by “measures which are proportional to the armed attack and necessary to respond to it.”**
It is interesting to note the facts of the Caroline case which dates back to 1837, when British naval officers shot down an American civilian ship without any provocation on American waters. The officers targeted the civilian ship to punish the Americans, who had been supporting revolutionaries in Canada that were attempting to secede from the British Crown. Like Pakistan, the US was a developing power at the time and was suspected of funding an insurgency across its border.
On the other hand, the British were a superpower much like the US today, who attempted to justify their blatant aggression as self-defense, claiming that anyone who supported Canadian secessionists deserved to be attacked by the British Crown. The US argued for a narrow interpretation of self-defense at that time but now adopts the same legal defense of drones as their former colonial tormentors – claiming that a terrorist anywhere is eligible to be killed by unilateral decision by the US.
Many have made arguments that the drone program fails to satisfy the requirements of “necessity and proportionality.” Under the necessity requirement, a nation can only utilise force when it is necessary to avoid an attack against their citizens or soldiers. Therefore, there are many scenarios where the US drone program has legally targeted individuals who were in fact actively engaged in a plot to target American soldiers or citizens abroad. However, the secretive nature of the program belies the transparency required for human rights monitors to analyze each case of drone attacks to assess its necessity.
This leads to the second requirement that the use of force by a state must be proportional to the threat it faces. Katherine M. Loyal and Saad Gul argued in a 2006 law review article that the use of drones was like a farmer “burning the farm to roast the pig.” Or rather,** the use of drones is not solving the problem of international terrorism, but making it worst by allowing extremists to gain more sympathisers. Unlike in Afghanistan, where troops on the ground can offer on-the-ground intelligence and take supplemental means to avoid civilian deaths, the US does not have a ground presence in Pakistan where it wishes to use drones.**
Therefore, as terrorists travel with their lackeys and families embedding themselves in civilian-populated areas, they ensure that the US will face a public backlash from using a drone on them, as it will likely cost civilian lives. Pragmatically, the US is stuck between a rock and a hard place as its drone attacks have incensed the Pakistani public, who could have been an ally in a war on terror which has plagued most of the Pakistani populace in one way or another.
The secret and blanket drone policy enacted by the US military in Pakistan is unacceptable under international law because it fails to satisfy the necessity and proportionality requirements set forth in the doctrine of self defense. However, like Pakistan’s doctrine of necessity, it may take the US several generations to realise the error in attempting to manipulate the law in order to justify illegal military oppression and brutality.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
for US, nothing is illegal and brutal.
they need to realize drone strike are increasing terrorism, not the other way around.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
^ it does not matter to them it seems, they are going forward on a set agenda and now i feel that every Muslim country will have to face the consequences at some stage.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
If you ask Al-ciada they will say their acts are also just and legal, what is the difference between two? One uses media/law-cover while other does not.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
4 drone attacks during the past 4-5 days, seems to becoming a daily routine.
One of them was on a bakery where the ‘militants’ had stopped for shopping, and I agree wth white house no innocent would have been killed there.
Pakistan: US Missile Attack Kills 4 in Northwest - ABC News
**An American drone fired two missiles at a bakery in northwest Pakistan Saturday, killing four suspected militants, officials said, as the U.S. pushed ahead with its drone campaign despite Pakistani demands to stop. This was the third such strike in the country in less than a week.
**
Drone attacks in Pakistani tribal areas where Afghan and other militants have found refuge are considered a key tactic by U.S. officials in the war against al-Qaida and its Taliban supporters. But many Pakistanis resent the strikes, which they consider an affront to their sovereignty.
Two Pakistani intelligence officials said the latest attack took place in Miran Shah, the main town in the North Waziristan tribal region.The officials said the victims were buying goods from a bakery when the missiles hit. Residents were still removing the debris, officials said. All of the dead were foreigners, but the officials did not have any information on their identities or nationalities.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. The U.S. rarely talks publicly about the covert CIA-run drone program in Pakistan.
Drone strikes have become an increasingly contentious issue between Washington and Pakistan. Pakistan’s parliament has demanded the U.S. end all attacks on its territory.
Some figures within the Pakistani government and military are widely believed to have supported the attacks in the past. Washington-Islamabad security cooperation has declined as relations between the two countries have deteriorated, but many analysts believe there is still some support for the attacks on militants within Pakistan’s senior ranks.
U.S. officials have said in private that the strikes are a vital anti-terror tool and have killed many senior al-Qaida and Taliban commanders.
On Thursday, a suspected U.S. drone killed 10 alleged militants in northwest Pakistan near the Afghan border.
The attack took place in a militant hideout in the North Waziristan tribal area. Most of those killed were believed to be Uzbek insurgents.
On Wednesday four suspected militants were killed in the village of Datta Khel Kalai in North Waziristan.
The ongoing strikes have complicated negotiations between Islamabad and Washington about reopening supply routes for NATO troops in Afghanistan. Pakistan closed the routes six months ago in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border. The Americans say the attacks were an accident.
Also Saturday, insurgents fired two rockets that killed two people and wounded 21 others in the city of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, said senior police officer Qazi Abdul Wahid. One man was killed when a rocket slammed into a small Christian neighborhood, and a boy died when the second rocket hit a shoe store.
Baluchistan has experienced a decades-long insurgency by nationalists who demand greater autonomy and a larger share of the province’s natural resources. The province is also thought to be home to many Afghan Taliban militants.
Anyone who claims or believes US cares about human rights, be it in their own country or abroad are deluded. They need a wake up call, and remove the veil from their eyes. They simply do not care!
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
**US terror drones and attack helicopters have killed 31 people in Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan over the course of 72 hours.
**A non-UN sanctioned US assassination drone strike in the southern Yemeni province of Bayda left seven people dead on Monday. The drone fired missiles on a convoy of three cars near the town of Radda, 160 kilometers south of the Yemeni capital Sana’a.
A local official said the target of the strike was al-Qaeda’s leader in Bayda province, Qaed al-Dahab, and his brother, both of whom escaped uninjured.
Also on Monday, two separate US drone attacks killed at least twelve people in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal area, which borders Afghanistan.
Both airstrikes took place near Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan.
The first attack happened early in the morning in the town of Hassokhel, 25 kilometers east of Miranshah. A Pakistani security official said US drones fired four missiles at a compound, leaving eight people dead.
The second attack, late in the evening, targeted a vehicle in the Datta Khel district, 30 kilometers west of Miranshah, and killed four people.
Monday’s second airstrike was the fifth attack on North Waziristan since Wednesday. The five non-UN sanctioned US assassination drone strikes left 31 people dead in Pakistan – five on Wednesday, ten on Thursday, four on Saturday, and twelve on Monday.
In Afghanistan, US attack helicopters launched an airstrike that wiped out an entire family.
On Sunday, a spokesman for the governor of Paktia province said Mohammad Shafi, his wife, and their six children died in an airstrike late on Saturday in the village of Suri Khail in the Gurda Saria district.
“Shafi was not a Taliban. He was not in any opposition group against the government. He was a villager,” the official said. “Right now, we are working on this case to find out the ages of their children and how many of them are boys and girls.”
The US is conducting airstrikes with warplanes, attack helicopters, and drones in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
Washington claims that its airstrikes target militants, but local sources say civilians have been the main victims of the attacks. The UN has called the US drone attacks targeted killings that flout international law.
On January 31, President Barack Obama confirmed that the US uses the unmanned drones in Pakistan and other countries.
In reply to questions about the use of the assassination drones by his administration in a chat with web users on Google+ and YouTube, the US president said, “a lot of these strikes have been in the FATA” – Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
PressTV - US terror strikes kill 31 in 72 hours
and the Whitehouse spokeperson says: they carry out these attacks to prevent attacks on US. really??? howso?? they are attacking countries who have never attacked them? how are these countries a threat to them? What a joke!!
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house
And now Yemen and interestingly in Yemen the secularists unlike Pakistan are also against the drone policy.
Losing Yemeni hearts and minds | Human Rights Watch
Losing Yemeni hearts and minds | Human Rights Watch
**During meetings with young, reform-minded activists last month in Yemen, the talk invariably turned to accelerating CIA drone strikes against Islamist militants, and the temperate voices quickly turned angry. The youths’ comments underscored how swiftly the U.S. is losing hearts and minds as it battles Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its local affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia.
**
“These drone strikes are stupid policy,” said a secular female activist from Taizz, a city that is considered Yemen’s intellectual capital. “Every time they kill Yemeni civilians they create more hatred of America.”
**The youth activists sounded a lot like residents in a new Washington Post feature about how the dramatic increase in U.S. drone strikes in southern Yemen — at least 21 attacks since January — is breeding anger and sympathy for al-Qaeda. **The Post primarily quoted tribal leaders in areas under attack or residents whose loved ones were killed by drones. In contrast, the activists I met hailed from cities far from the militant safe-havens that drones are targeting. Most were political moderates eager for reforms — just the sort of potential leaders the U.S. should be cultivating as it seeks to steer Yemen toward a rights-respecting democracy after three decades under its autocratic former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The U.S. has good reason to be concerned about armed Islamist groups in Yemen. AQAP this month tried for the third time since 2009 to blow up a U.S.-bound jetliner. Ansar al-Sharia claimed responsibility for last week’s attack on a military parade rehearsal that killed nearly 100 soldiers in the heart of Sanaa; it also controls cities and towns in southern Abyan province, where it has imposed a brutal interpretation of Islamic law.
The U.S. also is aware of the need to strike with caution, whether with drones, missiles or conventional aircraft. After a couple of horribly botched U.S. drone and cruise missile strikes in 2009 and 2010, many tribal leaders and residents no longer allege a broad pattern of civilian casualties. That gives credence to the U.S. diplomat in Yemen who told me recently that “the notion of trigger-happy Americans sitting around in some remote room with their computers, killing Yemenis without thought to whether they are genuine militants, is utterly false.”
But solid information is hard to find because Washington shrouds its drones program in secrecy, leading to widespread speculation over how many civilians have been killed and in what circumstances. States are obligated under international law to conduct targeted killings only under circumstances permitted by international human rights or humanitarian law, and to investigate credible allegations of unlawful attacks. While the U.S. provides minimal information on drone strikes by the U.S. military, it has refused to provide almost any details on drone attacks under CIA command, citing the need to respect the covert nature of the agency. In this climate, even one confirmed civilian casualty can sway public opinion against the U.S. Some Yemenis who did not take issue with the U.S. drone strike last September that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemeni-American cleric whom the Obama administration called an AQAP operative, remain furious over another U.S. airstrike a month later that killed Awlaki’s teenage son Abdulrahman, also a U.S. citizen. In particular, they point to the U.S. failure to officially acknowledge the boy died in a U.S. attack.
AQAP and Ansar al-Sharia also kill inside Yemen, but they mostly target Yemeni security forces or foreigners. Moreover, their propaganda machine remains resilient. When Ansar al-Sharia blew up parading Central Security force members on May 21 in Sanaa, it brazenly claimed it was avenging deadly attacks by that unit on protesters during last year’s uprising — attacks that risk going unpunished thanks to a U.S.-backed Yemeni law granting immunity to Saleh and all his aides in exchange for the president’s resignation.
To win Yemenis’ confidence, the U.S. should transfer command of all drone strikes from the CIA to the U.S. military and provide a detailed rationale of why its targeted killings in Yemen are legal under international law. It should insist on more transparency as well from the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which also reportedly conducts drone strikes in Yemen under a veil of secrecy approaching that of the CIA. That will not only give Yemenis information about U.S. strikes but also allow them to seek redress for any unlawful attacks.
The U.S. also should do far more to show Yemenis that it cares not just about defeating Islamist militants but also about putting their country on track. Yemen is still reeling from the yearlong uprising that removed Saleh but left his brutal security forces intact and allowed already acute poverty, unemployment and internal displacement to reach crisis proportions. At a meeting last week of the Friends of Yemen, a group of western and Arab states seeking to jumpstart the Yemen economy, the .U.S pledged $80 million — a sum that looked like pocket money compared to the $3.25 billion promised by Saudi Arabia.
Until the U.S. takes such steps, Yemenis are likely to become increasingly disinclined to give Washington the benefit of the doubt — much to the delight of groups such as AQAP.
Re: Drone attacks just and legal: white house