Tuesday, June 26, 2012

UN Hits on President Obama’s Drone Warfare

The UN sees Obama’s drone warfare as violating international human rights.

From Personal Liberty Digest,

A U.N. investigator wants some answers regarding President Barack Obama’s penchant for carrying out targeted drone attacks overseas that routinely result in civilian casualties.

The United States uses military drones to carry out attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia. In a 28-page report addressed to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Christof Heyns, special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said that Washington must clarify the legal basis for the policy of killing suspected al-Qaida and Taliban leaders and associates rather than trying to capture them.

“The government should clarify the procedures in place to ensure that any targeted killing complies with international humanitarian law and human rights and indicate the measures or strategies applied to prevent casualties, as well as the measures in place to provide prompt, thorough, effective and independent public investigation of alleged violations,” the report says.

President Obama’s imperial role as one man judge, jury and executioner through the drone warfare has in fact been implemented in the Philippines.

In my view, the territorial disputes, which I think China has been complicit, has only opened the doors for deeper intervention by the US in local politics.

And more incidences of drone warfare or overt interventions (in the name of war on terror) will likely lead to more anti-American protests.

As Ron Paul recently warned,

The use of drones overseas may have become so convenient, operated as they are from a great distance, that far more “collateral damage” has become acceptable. Collateral damage is a polite way of saying “killing innocent civilians.”…

This dramatic increase in the use of drones and the lowered threshold for their use to kill foreigners has tremendous implications for our national security. At home, some claim the use of drones reduces risk to American service members. But this can be true only in the most shortsighted sense. Internationally the expanded use of drones is wildly unpopular and in fact creates more enemies than it eliminates.

President Obama perhaps believes that he is the world’s savior.

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