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Given that Congress has decided to let the President kill people – including American citizens – without any due process it seems once again America will only face its problems due to outside pressure.
A United Nations expert has launched an investigation of drone attacks and targeted killings, scrutinizing a deeply controversial tool in the United States’ battle against Al Qaeda.
“The plain fact is that this technology is here to stay,” U.N. special rapporteur Ben Emmerson announced Thursday in London, “and its use … is a reality with which the world must contend.”
Drones are not the only way to carry out targeted killings, but the relative ease with which they are used and their devastating effects have spotlighted the legal unease around them, the U.N. expert said. The world urgently needs ways to regulate their use and keep it in line with international law, which has yet to settle how to handle such killings, he stated.
The Obama Administration has been playing the establishment media beautifully – the issue is hardly ever brought up and when it is every empty suit commentator intones with great pathos about necessity conjuring the magic words “national security.” Words that make all sense of law and justice disappear into a vortex of “we have to take this seriously.” You know, unlike the constitution or morality.
“The Obama administration seems to have decided that wherever it conducts a targeted killing, it is by definition engaged in armed conflict, even far from any obvious battlefield,” James Ross of Human Rights Watch said last year. “What would the U.S. say if Russia or China took the same approach to attack perceived enemies in the streets of New York or Washington?”
The New America Foundation estimates that since 2004 as many as 3,279 people have been were killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, including as many as 305 civilians and hundreds of others “unknown.”
The process will ramp up in May with investigators visiting Pakistan and other places the drone program is being used.
Photo by Paul Ridgeway of USAF under public domain.
18 Comments
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The UN drone report is due in the autumn. First, after the freeze, the leaves will come onto the trees and then the hot summer and then come the falling leaves of red and gold, which will possibly herald the drone report if anyone remembers it. How may Obama assassinations will occur in the meantime.
Prediction: Whatever the report says will make absolutely NO difference in how ObamaLLP acts.
Boxturtle (Yeah, I know. Not very far out on the limb with that one)
Oh, no Drones over New York? (Note I wrote “over” not “in”)
Well, so far, so good.
But how much credibility does the UN have? Are the gulags in N Korea next?
Too bad that there will be absolutely no consequences as a result of this investigation.
What?! Don’t they know we’re ‘muricans?!?! We can do what we damn well please!
delete
That’s as succinct a summation of American foreign policy as I’ve seen in a while.
I studied Russian language and history in the 1980′s, and one of the things that helped the Soviet dissident movement was its ability to forge ties with foreign media, governments and NGO’s. Increasingly that is the situation in which we will find ourselves.
Have any of the congresscreeps filed yet another resolution to defund the US contribution, that it doesn’t full pay anyway? Probably, there’s just a standing resolution.
Nice, I guess. But nothing will come of it, except conservatives being enabled & encouraged to, per usual, get their panties into a collective bunch because, you know: UN!!!!!!!!!111!!!!!!
The responses above that predict nothing will come of this are probably right insofar as any action by or against the U.S. is concerned; still, it is heartening that the investigation exists, because it is evidence that the world is beginning to get fed up with these anonymous killing machines. Stay tuned.
This will be another report that the General Assembly will adopt, but be vetoed by the Security Council, by the same vote that always protects Israel.
No news here. This is like asking the fox what happened at the chicken coop.
The United Nations has for decades happily setup the table for The United States & Britain (and really the Global Foreign Banking Powers that control them) to wage unlimited War all over the Globe whenever it feels like it. And Israel itself was a contrived creation of The United Nations, used to carve up Middle-East Oil for the Global Banksters, and their Mulitnational Oil Monopolies.
And also it is The United States itself here that has the largest controlling influence over anything that The United Nation does. So you cannot possibly have a Watchdog that is also itself the perpetrator of the Crime.
Finally, Obama’s Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice will assure that this is just simply meaningless theater, and any “report” will be far more likely to fraudulently clear or dismiss The United States of any wrongdoing, than it will to possibly serve even as a minor slap on the wrist (which would enforce nothing anyway).
So this is just a big gimmick.
The Drones will not stop, until you have a U.S. President that actually cares about Human Rights, and also about the concept of peace, ending Human suffering, International Law, and The U.S. Constitution. Obama never did. But he what he is committed to is stealing money from us U.S. Taxpayers on totally unnecessary LIFETIME Secret Service Protection of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush (War Criminals).
That’s something he cares about.
Martin Luther King would be ashamed of him.
Ditto on this being the likely outcome Jon73
POTUS Obama and Obama WH doing Bush/Cheney GWOT with O/D zealots backing as it is — Obama WH gets to keep doing this death dealing being Obama is a D POTUS with O/D zealots choosing to stay blind and chained to Obama (D) WH.
Any UN acts/actions/outcomes Obama WH/CIA/Pentagon do not want to see put in place will get diced/sliced until just some useless UN Kabuki.
So what will the O/D zealots do about this? Nothing — IOKIYAOBAMA+DPOTUS+OBAMA(D)WH
Guess who pays most of the UN’s expenses.
Guess how this is going to come out.
Lest we forget; drones kill far more innocents than culprits in what is euphemistically called “collateral damage”. Obama has ordered the murder of three American citizens without recourse to due process which was their right under the constitution.
This nation will not be a just and fair place until and unless its citizenry rises up and insists we stop the slaughter.
I know…it’s so discouraging.
One of Obama’s first acts as president was to forbid the CIA to detain and torture “suspected terrorists.”
The deal was that the CIA could then, using new technology, simply assassinate these “suspected terrorists” (plus anyone near them). Obama’s chief hit-man for this sordid, illegal program was John Brennan, a veteran of 25 years with the CIA and now nominated to be the next CIA chief.