On October 24, 2012, Mamana Bibi, the 68-year-old grandmother of - TopicsExpress



          

On October 24, 2012, Mamana Bibi, the 68-year-old grandmother of the child pictured below, was killed in a US drone strike as she picked vegetables in her familys fields outside the village of Ghundi Kala, North Waziristan, Pakistan. She was surrounded by a handful of her grandchildren. “The drone planes were flying over our village all day and night, flying in pairs, sometimes three together. We had grown used to them flying over our village all the time,” said Zubair Rehman, Bibis grandson. Nabeela, a granddaughter, added, “I was watering our animals and my brother was harvesting maize crop. Then, before her family’s eyes, Mamana Bibi was blown into pieces by at least two Hellfire missiles fired concurrently from a US drone aircraft. Thats just one of the stories in a devastating new report from Amnesty International, released in conjunction with Human Rights Watch earlier this week. Entitled Will I Be Next?: US Drone Strikes in Pakistan, the report documents recent killings in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas and the almost complete absence of transparency around the US drone program. You can read it full here: bit.ly/1fVIjLD Amnestys report comes on the heels of three other explosive exposes published last week. Ben Emmerson, the UNs special rapporteur of human rights and counter-terrorism, called on the US to declassify information about operations coordinated by the CIA and to clarify its position on the legality of unmanned aerial attacks in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan and Gaza. You can read more about it here: theguardian/world/2013/oct/18/drone-strikes-us-violate-law-un Emmersons U.N. report coincided with another. Professor Christof Heyns, the UNs special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, released a document warning that drone technology was being misused as a form of global policing. More here: theguardian/world/2013/oct/17/un-rapporteur-heyns-drone-strikes-yemen-pakistan Finally, on October 17, the Swiss-based Alkarama For Human Rights published License to Kill: Why the American Drone War on Yemen Violates International Law. Surveying the continuous US drone strikes and their dubious rationale, Alkarama argues that Yemen has become a testing ground for revolutionary new methods of warfare, not only technically, but also politically and legally. Read the report here: bit.ly/1eJRiMN
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 21:41:56 +0000

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