America’s Record of Murder and Mayhem Since 1945: Some of the Worst Hits

America’s Record of Murder and Mayhem Since 1945: Some of the Worst Hits

The United States has killed, maimed, displaced, and otherwise harmed an astonishing number of people (according to Ward Churchill) in its 241-year record of murder and mayhem – including more than 20 million killed in 37 nations since 1945.

Direct Assault

A distinction exists between those Uncle Sam has directly assaulted and those he has more indirectly attacked. Examples of direct assault are numerous and horrible to contemplate.

The history of direct U.S.-military mass killing since 1945 includes:

* The firebombing of Tokyo: roughly 100,000 Japanese civilians incinerated when U.S. bombers created the greatest firestorm in history.

* Hiroshima (146, 000 killed with a single bomb – what U.S. president Harry Truman called “the greatest thing in history”) and (80,000) Nagasaki: savagely unnecessary and arch-criminal atom-bombings carried out even though the U.S. high command knew that Japan was defeated and ready to accept U.S. surrender terms).

* Four million killed in Korea to prevent national unification under Left and Soviet-allied power there between 1950 and 1953.

* The “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky’s term at the time): the U.S. and its allies killed at least 3 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians between 1962 and 1975. (Operation Phoenix, a CIA and military operation, alone killed 40,000 Vietnamese – more than wo-thirds the total U.S. body count in the so-called Vietnam War)

*Iran Air Flight 655: on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes crossed into Iranian waters and shot down an Iranian civilian plane, blowing 290 people out of the sky. (The Vincennes’ commander was granted an award for “exceptionally meritorious conduct.”)

*The “Highway of Death”:  U.S. fighter jets engaged in a frenzied slaughter of tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops in 1991. (The Lebanese-American journalist Joyce Chediac testified that “U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions…. The victims were not offering resistance…it was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.”)

*Fallujah: the U.S. Marines waged chemical warfare and used radioactive ordnance in the process of leveling a great Iraqi city in April and November of 2004.

*Bola Boluk: an Afghan village where U.S. bombers blew 113 civilians (including dozens of children) to bits in May of 2009.

* The U.S. drone war  program (2001 to present), aptly described by Noam Chomsky as “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times”: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports a minimum number of U.S. 3,734 drone strikes with nearly 10,000 killed, including 1,427 civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen “since the Bureau began collecting data.”  (Chomsky’s description referred to Obama’s drone record; Trump has dramatically increased drone strikes).

* Bayda Province, Trump’s first blood: US Navy special forces carried out a raid – planned under the Obama administration and handed off to the incoming Trump team – that killed 25 civilians, including 10 children in the mountainous Yakla region of Yemen’s Bayda province. One of the children killed was an eight-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki, daughter of the Islamist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed on the order of Barack Obama in a September 2011 US drone strike in Yemen. Nawar’s older brother, 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, was killed in a second drone strike soon afterwards. The continued U.S.  slaughter of akl-Awlaki’s children was consistent with Trump’s campaign claims that he would kill the relatives of terrorist suspects – a war crime. The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump pronounced on  Fox News in December 2015.

Proxy Killing

Dreadful as such moments of direct imperial butchery may be, the United States may well have killed, maimed, and displaced more people indirectly, through proxies and clients.

In 1954, a CIA-orchestrated coup removed the democratically elected Guatemalan and Left government of Jacobo Arbenz. Over the next four decades, U.S.-backed right-wing Guatemalan regimes killed tens of thousands of peasants, workers, students, and activists.

In 1960, the CIA killed the Congo’s first independent head of state, the Left anti-colonialist leader Patrice Lumumba. The United States subsequently backed the brutal Congolese dictator Joseph Mobuto, who killed hundreds of thousands. (The U.S. has since been significantly responsible for as many 3 million deaths in that resource-rich country ever since. It sponsors and protects the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, whose body count in his own country and Congo runs into the tens of thousands.)

In 1965 and 1966, the United States worked with Britain and Australia to help orchestrate the overthrow the democratically elected Left government of Indonesia and the subsequent massacre of somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesian peasants, workers, intellectuals, and activists. Coup General Suharto received rich military and economic assistance from the U.S. over three decades of subsequent authoritarian rule.

In December of 1975, Suharto got a green light from his sponsors in Washington to invade East Timor. The Indonesian military received advanced weaponry from the United States and the U.S. client Israel as it brutally annexed the poor island nation and killed at least 180,000 of its inhabitants.

In 1973, a CIA-engineered coup overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Chilean president Salvador Allende and replaced him with the fascist butcher and close U.S. all General Augusto Pinochet.  Pinochet’s regime killed 30,000 workers, students, peasant, intellectuals and activists killed while introducing U.S.- (University of Chicago-) imported economic policies during the 1970s and 1980s.

A U.S.-sponsored and U.S.-equipped fascist regime in Argentina and allied death squads killed as many 30,000 workers, students, intellectuals, and activists in that country between 1974 and 1983.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Washington, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan created the extremist Islamo-Wahhabist forces that became al Qaeda and the Taliban as part of the U.S. Cold War with the Soviet Union and to destabilize a pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan. These Sunni jihadist forces have killed hundreds of the thousands of people in Southwest Asia and the Middle East ever since.

U.S.-sponsored authoritarian regimes in Central America killed over 300,000 people during Ronald Reagan’s two terms. Lavish funding, training and equipment from Washington fueled this epic bloodshed. Victims were murdered and maimed as punishment for—and warnings against—participation in popular struggles to redistribute land and improve working and social conditions for peasants and workers in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

Tens of thousands of Iranians were executed with U.S. economic, political, and military assistance and sponsorship by the Iranian dictator Mohammad Reza Shah Palevi, who was installed into power after a CIA-engineered coup overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Left government in 1953.

Between 1980 and 1988, the U.S. backed Iraq in an epic war with Iran. This horrific conflict produced at least 1 million Iranian casualties, including 300,000 soldiers killed and untold thousands still suffering from Iraqi chemical weapons developed with U.S. assistance.

The U.S.-sponsored and U.S.-armed Israeli government has killed hundreds of thousands if not millions (estimates vary) of Palestinians. It is a major recipient of U.S. military assistance as it continues to impose its vicious apartheid and settlement regime on the Palestinians with an iron fist.

An estimated 465,000 Syrians have been killed or gone missing in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, a conflict that has been significantly fueled by the U.S. and allied powers including Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Saudi Arabia, the most reactionary government on Earth, has slaughtered untold tens of thousands of dissenters and ethnic (Shia Muslim) minorities with U.S. arms, economic assistance, and diplomatic cover. It is home to the extreme Sunni-Wahabbist ideology that has fueled mass-murderous jihadists affiliated with al-Qaeda and Islamic State, which have received lavish funding from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi kingdom is a prized U.S. ally that has been visited by both President Obama and Trump in recent years. Trump went to Riyadh last May to seal a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis.

Untold tens of thousands of Black Africans died at the at hands of the U.S. supported apartheid regime of South Africa during the Cold War era.

U.S.-backed regimes and paramilitary forces (especially the UNITA armies that waged war on socialist Angola in the 1970s and 1980s) have killed many hundreds of thousands if not millions more in Africa since 1945. (Many hundreds of thousands of Congolese have died at the hands of the U.S.-sponsored Rwandan regime and related Congolese death squads in the post-Mobuto era. The current significantly U.S.-instigated South Sudanese civil war has killed an estimated 300,000.)

This is a very partial list. For a more comprehensive record, see William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Common Courage, 2005) and Ward Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Arrogance and Criminality (AK Press, 2003).

Given this record, it is hardly surprising that the United States has long been the nation that is most viewed by people the world over as the greatest threat to peace and security on the planet. This while the imperial homeland’s reigning media and politics culture claims that the United States is an exceptionally noble and democratic force for good and liberty the world over, leaving untold millions of U.S. Americans childishly clueless about the eternally and absurdly asked question: “why oh why do they hate wonderful us?”

Featured image is from the author.

The original source of this article is Paul Street

The West and International Terrorism

The West and International Terrorism

It is important to tell the truth. Terrorism in its various manifestations is generated and fomented by the aggressions of the West throughout the world.

Aggressions against whole nations. Aggressions of the past, but above all domination, plunder and the slow and inexorable destruction of national economies and the social fabric of a increasingly large number of countries.

A total of 55 wars implemented directly or by proxy by the West including US-NATO since the beginning of the 20th century.

The fallacious discourse propagated in the international political arena continues to legitimize Western warfare operations, by hiding the factors behind them. This assertion is corroborated by all those who have understood the underlying stratagems of propaganda of power politics. Two of them, Noam Chomsky and André Vltchek, proposed an analysis of this global situation in a book published by Éditions écosociété, entitled “The Wes’ Terrorism [L’Occident Terroriste]. From Hiroshima to the Drones’ War”. They give a picture of past centuries:

“There are certainly two ways of talking about terrorism, because terrorism is not considered as such when it is practiced (and in a much more deadly form) by those who, Their power, are adorned with virtue. ”

“Since the end of the Second World War, Western colonialism and neo-colonialism have caused the death of 50 to 55 million people, most often in the name of lofty ideals such as freedom and democracy. Yet the West manages to escape with impunity and to maintain, in the eyes of the rest of the world, the myth that it is invested with some moral mission.”

How does it work? Both authors criticize the fatal legacy of colonialism and the shameless exploitation of natural resources of the planet in the West. This book of interviews is augmented by two articles published in the wake of the attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, denouncing Western hypocrisy for terrorism ‘It has largely contributed to developing’.

The theses propagated in the West are those of the conquerors. All those who oppose the policies of intervention in the world by the Western powers are labeled terrorists or enemies of democracy. In this context, there is no mention of the process of militarization of economies and societies.

The capitalist state takes over the world’s political and social scene and acts in a dictatorial way in collaboration with the mainstream media which echo this situation by normalizing it in the eyes of the public.

Lies and false truths are then propagated ad nauseam, all supported by experts selected to corroborate them. It is the spread of the single thought so much decried in recent decades. It is the general wandering which develops the syndrome of the enemy and attacks on the individuals with the so-called terrorist profile according to the definition proposed by the Western experts.

I. Terrorism defined by the West

People gathering, chalk drawings and flowers for the victims. The largest message says (translated from French), Brussels is beautiful, with further inscriptions of Stop violence, Stop war, Unity, and Humanity. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Terrorism defined in the West (by the Western establishment) corresponds to all forms of activity that threaten the interests of those who control the heart of the capitalist world. The popular demonstrations in the streets of major metropolitan areas demanding the protection of their rights and social justice, associations fighting for the protection of these rights and, strictly speaking, progressive states are considered as a threat.

The attacks in Paris in November 2015 and those in Brussels in March 2016 made it possible to reaffirm the fallacious discourse of the Westerners. This tracking of the jihadists, this concentration of the news directed towards so-called radicalized and dangerous individuals has not yet allowed a reflection on the true supporters of international terrorism. Yet the war on terror should be elucidated in the eyes of the general public. On the contrary, it is being sought to speak of it as a search for individuals around the world who “threaten” the global security of the planet. 

II. Terrorism practiced by the West

It is important to tell the truth. The attacks in Paris and in Brussels lead nation states to adopt measures to control the people and thus militarize the civil society and it institutions. This regime, Latin America has known it for decades with the prolonged reign of several dictatorships and, in particular, in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile. A permanent state of siege and the loss of all civil rights and fundamental freedoms. This is what is now taking shape in Europe’s Shengen space. Deployment of police and armed forces, increased control of people’s movements, multiple searches, monitoring of strategic sites such as nuclear power stations and military bases. It will increasingly be the expression of state terrorism exercised over all citizens. A worrying prospect at the highest point.

III. Radicalization. A concept that applies well to the contingents of national armies

Another misleading conception diffused from all sectors of human activity: The phenomenon of radicalization. Individuals would be trained to develop radical thinking and to act violently to the detriment of innocent citizens. According to this view, this behavior appears to be the result of indoctrination and deep deviance. In this speech, it is forgotten that soldiers of the national armed forces around the world are trained to perform warlike actions, to kill human beings and, above all, to obey the orders dictated by the commandments. Can their actions be characterized as radical? These soldiers accept two elements: “Kill or be killed”. How can we conceal this reality and repeat that these soldiers are there to defend their country? They are trained to destroy an “enemy” that is taken care of in collective thought.

IV. Double Standards.

The West’s victims are acknowledged. The victims in poor countries are “statistics”. Examples: Brussels and Aden

This is exactly what we saw with the attacks in Brussels and those that took place a few days later, on March 25, in Yemen. The Brussels attacks, which killed 34 people and more than 200 wounded, resulted in a considerable deployment of police and armed forces and caused a global shock and concern. Yemeni suicide car bombs against three dams held by loyalist forces in the large port city of southern Yemen killed at least 22 people (Journal Le Devoir, 26 and 27 March 2016, P. 5). A dispatch appears at the bottom of an inner page. No tribute is paid to the victims. These events, which took place in Yemen as well as those that mark the invasion wars of the West in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Conclusion

The Paris and Brussels attacks revealed, once again, the blindness of the West over the terrorist actions which they continue to perpetrate in vast regions of the world.

The Global War on Terror delivered by the United States since 2001 Caused the Death of 1.3 Million People according to a Report entitled “Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the War on Terror” Organizations International Association of Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW, 1985 Nobel Peace Prize), Physicians for Social Responsibility and Physicians for Global Survival.

This report asserts, based on various sources, including governmental, that the death toll of 1.3 million deaths is “a low estimate” and does not take into account other countries in conflict (Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria ). 500 deaths a day in Iraq.

Here we take up the conclusion of Michel Collon analyzing the attacks in Brussels:

“The attacks are not inevitable, they are the result of a policy. Conducted in Washington. Then to London and Paris. Brussels following slavishly. Gentlemen, you are therefore jointly responsible. Do we have the right to debate it – in “democracy” – or will you still be pressing for the media to be silent? “.

***

Translated from the French original

Jules Dufour, Ph.D., C.Q. is Professor Emeritus, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG),  Knight (Chevalier) National Order of Quebec, Member of the World Commission on Protected Areas the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Gland, Switzerland, Member of the Universal Circle of Ambassadors for Peace, Paris.

Sources

AFP. 2016. Le Yémen secoué par trois attentats. Journal Le Devoir, les 26 et 27 mars 2016, p. C 5.

CHOMSKY, Noam et André Vltchek.  L’Occident terroriste. D’Hiroshima à la guerre des drones. Montréal, Éditions écosociété. 176 pages.  Traduit de l’anglais par Nicolas Calvé.

COLLON, Michel. 2016. Attentats de Bruxelles : non, monsieur le premier ministre !Mondialisation.ca et investigaction.net. Le 23 mars 2016. En ligne :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/attentats-de-bruxelles-non-monsieur-le-premier-ministre/5516181

DUFOUR, Jules. 2010. L’Occident et la diabolisation : Pour un changement radical du discours global. En ligne :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/l-occident-et-la-diabolisation-pour-un-changement-radical-du-discours-global/21739

DUFOUR, Jules. 2015. La militarisation planétaire s’intensifie. Les drones de combat sèment la terreur et la mort. Montréal, Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation (CRM). Le 3 mars 2015. En ligne :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/la-militarisation-planetaire-sintensifie-les-drones-de-combat-sement-la-terreur-et-la-mort/5434583

DUFOUR, Jules. 2015. L’aube du XXIème siècle. Plus d’armements. Plus de guerres. La spirale de la terreur et de la mort se poursuit (1ère partie). Montréal, Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation (CRM). Le 2 avril 2015. En ligne :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/laube-du-xxieme-siecle-plus-darmements-plus-de-guerres-la-spirale-de-la-terreur-et-de-la-mort-se-poursuit/5440161

DUFOUR, Jules. 2015. L’aube du XXIème siècle. Plus d’armements. Plus de guerres. La spirale de la terreur et de la mort se poursuit.  Les interventions et occupations militaires de l’Occident dans le monde. Irak, Syrie, Libye et Gaza (2ième partie). Montréal, Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation (CRM). Le 6 avril 2015. En ligne :

http://www.mondialisation.ca/laube-du-xxieme-siecle-plus-darmements-plus-de-guerres-la-spirale-de-la-terreur-et-de-la-mort-se-poursuit-2ieme-partie/5440984

DUFOUR, Jules. 2015. Le grand réarmement planétaire 2015. L’humanité se retrouve face à un grave danger d’extinction. Montréal, Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation (CRM). Le 14 novembre 2015. En ligne:

http://www.mondialisation.ca/le-grand-rearmement-planetaire-2015/5488806

IPPNW GERMANY, PSR (Physician for Social R[J1] [J2] [J3] [J4] [J5] [J6] responsibility) et PGS (Physician for Global Survival). 2015. Body Count. Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the “War on Terror” Iraq Afghanistan Pakistan. Mars 2015. 100 pages. En ligne :

http://www.ippnw.de/commonFiles/pdfs/Frieden/Body_Count_first_international_edition_2015_final.pdf

REUTERS ET AFP. 2016. 34 morts et plus de 200 blessés dans les attentats de Bruxelles revendiqués par l’État islamique. JOURNALDEMONTREAL.COM. Le 22 mars 2016. En ligne :

http://www.journaldemontreal.com/2016/03/22/attaques-a-bruxelles

WIKIPÉDIA. Terrorisme d’État. Dernière mise à jour : Le 23 février 2016. En ligne :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorisme_d%27%C3%89tat

WIKIPÉDIA. Guerre contre le terrorisme. Dernière mise à jour : Le 22 février 2016. En ligne :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerre_contre_le_terrorisme

Note: The text has been revised  by Lolita Memi, inf,,Quebec City, Canada

To go further, on the terrorist attacks in Brussels, see articles in English by Michel Chossudovsky:

Is the ISIS Behind the Brussels Attacks? Who is Behind the ISIS?, 22 mars 2016

Fake Video Used in News Coverage of Brussels Terror Attacks, 22 mars 2016

Media Manipulation: More Fake Video Reports of the Brussels Terror Attacks, 23 mars 2016

Paris, Brussels… The Role of “Massive Casualty Producing Events”. The Roadmap to a Police State, 24 mars 2016

The Brussels Attacks: What is True, What is Fake? Three Daesh Suspects at Brussels Airport, 25 mars 2016

The original source of this article is Global Research

US Drones “Kill Women, Children, They Kill Everybody”

US Drones “Kill Women, Children, They Kill Everybody”

Region: Middle East & North Africa
Theme: Crimes against Humanity, Militarization and WMD, Terrorism, US NATO War Agenda


“The United States found a solution to the problem of “collateral damage, by assuming that any male of military age in a war zone is a militant and worthy of execution” says in the following incisive interview the renowned researcher, Professor Doctor Peter Kuznick, Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, in Washington D.C. Drones “kill women, children, they kill everybody,” Professor Kuznick says.

He observes that odious Obama’s drone warfare was, appears today as the voice of moderation compared to Trump.

As for him, instead of using drones for humans and environment, US drone program is “mostly negative” as Washington is turning them into “killing machines.” Professor Peter Kuznick points out that the matter is not “a choice between drones, manned bombers, and boots on the ground. I see it as a choice between war and diplomacy.”

Edu Montesanti: US government assures that operations with drones are a more precise alternative to boots on the ground, authorized only when an “imminent” threat is present and there is “near certainty” that the intended target will be eliminated. The justification for the use of drones is that they are surgical and precise, and don’t kill civilians. However, the official number of civilians killed by drones is so large, for so long much larger than combatants killed. US drone program have been used as bombs out of regions at war such as Yemen and Somalia, and as surveillance all this mostly in secret by the Washington regime. How do you see US drone program. Professor Doctor Peter Kuznick, how do you see such a “policy” itself, that of substituting boots on the grounds by drones? And how precise are drones?

Prof. Dr. Peter Kuznick: I’m very much opposed to widespread U.S. use of drones, especially outside of declared war zones. I don’t see it as a choice between drones, manned bombers, and boots on the ground. I see it as a choice between war and diplomacy.


There are certainly situations in which diplomacy doesn’t work, but the U.S. has been much too quick to resort to military means to resolve all disputes and problems. Take the case of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan for example. Yes, the Taliban government in Afghanistan had sheltered Al Qaeda when it planned the attack on 9/11 and the Taliban government was extremely repressive, especially toward women. But has 16 years of U.S.-led war been an improvement? Some Afghans and American defense contractors have gotten rich, but most Afghans have been pretty miserable.

After 9/11, the U.S. insisted that the Afghans turn over the Al Qaeda leaders. On October 15, one week after Operation Enduring Freedom had begun, the Taliban foreign minister offered to turn Osama bin Laden over to the Organization of the Islamic Conference for trial, but the U.S. accused them of stalling. But Milton Bearden, the former CIA station chief who had overseen the 1980s covert war from Pakistan, the Taliban was sincere. “We never heard what they were trying to say,” he insisted. “We had no common language. Ours was ‘give up bin Laden.’ They were saying ‘do something to help us give him up.’” U.S. representatives had met with Taliban leaders more than 20 times the previous three years. Bearden said he had “no doubts they wanted to get rid of him,” but the U.S. was intent on going to war and never offered the face-saving measures the Taliban needed. Since then, Afghanistan has been a playground for U.S. drone warfare, especially after Obama withdrew most of the hundred thousand troops he and Bush had deployed.

But the justification for the use of drones is that they are surgical and precise and don’t kill civilians. President Obama made this case repeatedly when he was in office. Speaking at the University of Chicago Law School in April 2016, he declared, “What I can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional war.”

That sounds good, but it’s not true. A 2013 study by Larry Lewis of the Center for Naval Analyses and Sarah Holewinski of the Center for Civilians in Conflict concluded that drone use in Afghanistan caused ten times as many civilian deaths as manned fighter aircraft. In 2016, Micah Zenko and Amelia Mae Wolf of the Council on Foreign Relations reported that “The Obama administration’s assumption that drones cause less collateral damage than piloted aircraft is simply untrue. According to the best publicly available evidence, drone strikes in non-battlefield settings — Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — result in 35 times more civilian fatalities than airstrikes by manned weapons systems in conventional battlefields, such as Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.”

The real advantage of drones is that they result in far fewer U.S. combat deaths than would manned flights and boots on the ground.

Edu Montesanti: Contrary to Barack Obama, President Donald Trump has given the Central Intelligence Agency new authority to conduct drone attacks against suspected militants. The situations is going to get even worse, isn’t it, Professor Kuznick?

Prof. Dr. Peter Kuznick: As odious as Obama’s use of drone warfare was, he appears as the voice of moderation compared to Trump. Obama had his weekly meetings at which he personally signed off on his “kill lists.” After much criticism, he crafted new rules to limit the harm to civilians. Toward the end of his administration, he didn’t allow drone strikes outside war zones unless there was “near certainty” that civilians wouldn’t be injured, capture of the offenders was “not feasible,” and the target posed an “imminent threat” to the U.S.

Trump, on the other hand, has given carte blanche to his generals. He says he “trusts” his generals to make military decisions and leaves it up to them. As a result, the number of drone strikes has actually risen dramatically since Trump took office.

The Long War Journal reported that in Obama’s last year in office, there were only three drone strikes in Pakistan, down sharply from previous years, and 38 in Yemen. Trump has relaxed the rules Obama instituted and gives the CIA and military much more latitude in targeting Al Qaeda and ISIS in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

As a result, the number of civilian deaths has skyrocketed. Whereas Obama had sharply limited CIA involvement in drone warfare, Trump has expanded the CIA’s role.

Edu Montesanti: How do you see the official version in the US government involving drone “efficient” attacks as they actually kill much more civilians?

Prof. Dr. Peter Kuznick: As I mentioned before, the cavalier attitude sometimes expressed about “collateral damage” is unconscionable. It is obscene. As Archbishop Desmund Tutu said in his letter to the editor of the New York Times, “Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours?”

But the United States found a solution to the problem of “collateral damage.” The Obama administration defined the problem out of existence by assuming that any male of military age in a war zone is a militant and worthy of execution in a “signature” strike. In most of these strikes, the U.S. has no way of knowing whether those targeted were terrorists.

These attacks are not only morally objectionable and often illegal, they are also counterproductive. They produce more terrorists than they kill. As Faisal Shahzad, “the Times Square Bomber,” responded to the judge who asked him how he could risk killing innocent children and women, the drone strikes, he said, “don’t see children. They don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody.” Drone operators often dehumanize the victims by referring to them as “bug splats.”

Edu Montesanti: The renowned lawyer Professor Doctor Azadeh Shahshahani, Director for Project South, recently observed to me that:

a) In the domestic (US) context, they be used for artistic or investigative purposes. For example, they can be used to investigate agribusinesses to see if they are engaging in animal abuse or not. In that sense, they can play an important and legitimate role. However, their use needs to be regulated to ensure that they are used for surveillance by law enforcement agencies.

b) Per international humanitarian law, drones can only be used with bombs in an active armed conflict and even then with certain restrictions including military necessity, humanity, distinction, and proportionality. Only combatants or civilians who are directly participating in hostilities may be targeted. Targeting of other civilians is prohibited and may constitute a war crime. How much the US government is respecting these principles, Lisa, using drones both as surveillance and bombs?

Prof. Dr. Peter Kuznick: Like with most scientific and technological innovations, drones can be used for war or peace. They can be used to enrich human life or to destroy it. They represent not only an engine of death in warfare but an engine of surveillance that threatens privacy.

Their potential uses go far beyond making deliveries like Amazon has in mind. They can be used for monitoring the environment, protecting wildlife, and firefighting among other things. The sky, so to speak, is the limit for them. But right now the uses are mostly negative.

They have been turned into killing machines. And, as we’ve learned with nuclear arms and other dangerous weapon systems, once one country has them, others will too. So right now the U.S., Israel, and Britain have been weaponizing them for use in “war zones,” but what’s to stop the Russians from using them to kill Chechins or the Chinese from killing Uighurs? The U.S. approach is very shortsighted if U.S. leaders think they’ll retain a monopoly on this type of warfare.

China, Russia, and Iran also have very advanced systems of predator drones. The face of modern warfare is ugly and about to get uglier. Watch out.

The original source of this article is Global Research