Sadaullah Wazir: A Victim of Hope and Change

Dear Mr. President,
I was disappointed by your speech today. Same old lies and empty promises: we’re winning the war against terrorists; drones are effective, precise weapons that reduce civilian casualties, a key to victory; the preference is always to capture, not kill. Really? How many terrorists have your boys captured lately? One? Two? Capture is messy. Incarceration, maybe some torture, maybe a trial, evidence… easier to incinerate them with a Hellfire missile. You ticked off reasons to close Guantanamo, said you were appointing someone to be responsible for transferring prisoners to other countries but never mentioned you closed that same office last year. A heckler decried force-feeding. You were tolerant, let her shout her objection but never addressed the issue. At another point the heckler shouted her objection to the murder of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki; you paid lip service to her dissent but never addressed why the CIA assassinated him. You mentioned all the bad stuff his father, Anwar, did but offered no proof. You mentioned that Congress has been briefed on every strike. Really? The CIA won’t even tell Sen. Wyden (D-OR), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee with oversight of the CIA, what countries they’re killing people in let alone anything about the strikes. You assured us that targeted assassinations and drone strikes are legal but there’s an issue of transparency here; the legal justifications are too secret to reveal so we’re in the dark. Most ominous, however, you said you just signed guidelines for the use of drones—when, where, how. Sounds good till you realize that just bureaucratizes drone warfare as official foreign policy. You emphasized that all wars must end. True. But not on your watch. In today’s NYT, an op-ed piece (“Obama’s Forgotten Victims”) by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer suing the U.S. and Pakistan on behalf of some of those forgotten victims, talks about Fahim Quereshi and Sadaullah Wazir two of those victims suing for redress. He mentioned that Sadaullah, the 14-year old boy whose legs were blown off in a CIA drone strike that killed 4 members of his family (and no militants) died last year. Mr. Akbar called him (as well as Fahim and others), “a victim of hope and change.” Sadaullah never got justice, not even an acknowledgement, just a few years of pain and suffering. You said you will be forever haunted by the deaths of innocent civilians. I hope you feel haunted by Sadaullah’s death. I do.