Fahim Quireshi and Sadaullah Wazir: Child Victims of Drones

Dear Mr. President,

This morning’s NYT reports that you and your evil Rasputin, John Brennan, have just given the president authority to launch pre-emptive cyber attacks against “perceived enemies.” Of course, the legal justification for this, like the justification for drone attacks, is too secret to share with We the People and no one in Congress is willing to challenge you, so Executive power continues to expand and evolve in frightening ways. With cyberwar however, no one actually gets killed or maimed like they do in drone strikes. At least not yet. In addition to the secrecy surrounding legal justification and the rules for a pre-emptive cyberstrike, what really bothers me is that, like drone strikes against “suspected militants,” no proof needed to launch a pre-emptive strike, just the perception of threat. And like drone strikes, the intelligence is questionable at best, outright wrong most of the time. Like that missile strike on January 23, 2009 that killed 9 “militants” in Waziristan who turned out to be civilians. Fahim Quireshi survived that attack and described what it was like for the Stanford/NYU study, Living Under Drones. Neither he nor any of the 4 members of his family who died were militants. He was a 14-year-old boy who loved soccer and school. He lost an eye, hearing in one ear, and shrapnel ripped through his body. He no longer attends school or plays soccer. He has limited mobility and suffers from post traumatic stress, as do most of those who witnessed or survived the attack. Or take the case of Sadaullah Wazir. He was 15 when a Hellfire missile killed 3 members of his family in Waziristan and mangled both his legs so badly they had to be amputated. No one killed or wounded in that attack was a militant either but the U.S. has never acknowledged the injustice or apologized or offered compensation to Sadaullah or Fahim so they’ve joined a lawsuit against the CIA for these illegal acts. So far, the courts of Pakistan and the U.S. have refused to hear their case. Injustice on top of injustice. The Obama legacy grinds on: perpetual war; secrecy and suppression of information; no accountability for war crimes past or present. And all this from a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Here’s a picture of Sadaullah with his new legs: http://www.channel4.com/media/images/Channel4/c4-news/MAY/09/sadaullah_wazir_drones_k.jpg. And here’s a picture of Fahim taken late last year with his new glass eye: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m95z9kC9oq1qhvwfc.png

Fahim Quireshi, drone victim at 14

Sadaullah Wazir, drone victim at 15