A long article in today’s NYT on Death-by-Drone Brennan, your choice to head the CIA, sheds a little light on some very dark corners. Brennan, a defender of torture during the Bush years is the architect of Kill Lists, targeted assassinations, drone wars and, most recently, cyberwars. A versatile guy if you want to terrorize a village, a region or a country. His old CIA connection with Saudi Arabia got us that secret drone base there, handy for sending drones and Hellfire missiles into neighboring Yemen. Brennan sees al-Qaeda affiliates everywhere but he’s especially obsessed with Yemen which he’s using as a test case for his theories on drone warfare. It’s pretty obvious his theories are self-destructive; there are more al-Qaeda militants now than when he started the attacks in 2009. Even retired generals say the drone strikes are the best recruiting tool al Qaeda has. The first attack on Yemen was a disaster. On December 17, 2009, Cruise missiles carrying cluster bombs struck a tiny mountain village and killed 41 people including 21 children and 14 women. Here’s a link to a photo of 2 survivors of that attack, Sumaia Abdullah Louqye, 4, and Nada Mokbel Louqye, 5. Their entire families were wiped out. Take a good look at the fear and confusion in their young faces, Mr. President, it’s the face of war: http://www.trust.org/alertnet/multimedia/pictures/detail.dot?mediaInode=df398f9e-9c84-40e5-a608-b3618bb6d67f The second attack in June 2010 killed a popular deputy governor and incited anti-American riots and since then it hasn’t gotten much better. Last August, a Hellfire missile incinerated 5 men including Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, a 40-year-old cleric and his policeman cousin, outspoken opponents of al Qaeda who were arguing with 3 low level “militants.” And a few weeks ago on January 23, another CIA drone attack killed Saleem Hussein Jamal, a 21-year old university student and his 33-year old schoolteacher cousin who gave 5 strangers a ride to the next village. The strangers, it turned out, were low-level members of al-Qaeda. These are all war crimes, Mr. President, and all on your watch, orchestrated by the man you want to head the CIA. He is the modern day equivalent of Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s architect of the Holocaust. He is an architect of torture, of terrorism and of crimes against humanity. He should be in the dock at the ICC charged with war crimes not in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee for a confirmation hearing.
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| Sumaia Abdullah Louqye, 4, (L) and Nada Mokbel Louqye, 5, look on as they stand outside their family's hut in the mountainous village of al-Ma'jalah, in the southern Yemeni province of Abyan, February 2, 2013. The two girls are the only survivors among the members of their families that were living in a rural community at the time that it was hit by a U.S. missile strike on December 17, 2009, according to local authorities. The attack left 41 people, including 21 children and 14 women dead in the highest civilian death toll of any U.S. strike in Yemen to date, according to an Amnesty International report. Nada lost her mother, three brothers, sister and several other extended family members, and Sumaia lost her parents, three sisters, a brother and an uncle and several other members of her extended family, according to tribal community leaders. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah |
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