From: Mail Online
COMMENT - Clearly, the military is not aware it violates the Constitution to bomb other nations. Of course, the CIA does not seem concerned with those details, either.
By
David Rose
The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
A
damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the strikes’
targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers,
students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved
relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts
in the aftermath of strikes.
The
dossier has been assembled by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who
works for Pakistan’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British
human rights charity Reprieve.
Filed
in two separate court cases, it is set to trigger a formal murder
investigation by police into the roles of two US officials said to have
ordered the strikes. They are Jonathan Banks, former head of the Central
Intelligence Agency’s Islamabad station, and John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s
former chief lawyer. Mr Akbar and his staff have already gathered
further testimony which has yet to be filed.
How the attacks unfolded...
‘We have statements from a
further 82 victims’ families relating to more than 30 drone strikes,’ he
said. ‘This is their only hope of justice.’
In
the first case, which has already been heard by a court in Islamabad,
judgment is expected imminently. If the judge grants Mr Akbar’s
petition, an international arrest warrant will be issued via Interpol
against the two Americans.
The second case is being heard
in the city of Peshawar. In it, Mr Akbar and the families of drone
victims who are civilians are seeking a ruling that further strikes in
Pakistani airspace should be viewed as ‘acts of war’.
They
argue that means the Pakistan Air Force should try to shoot down the
drones and that the government should sever diplomatic relations with
the US and launch murder inquiries against those responsible.
According
to a report last month by academics at Stanford and New York
universities, between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed since the
strikes in Pakistan began in 2004.
The
report said of those, up to 881 were civilians, including 176
children. Only 41 people who had died had been confirmed as
‘high-value’ terrorist targets.
Getting
at the truth is difficult because the tribal regions along the frontier
are closed to journalists. US security officials continue to claim that
almost all those killed are militants who use bases in Pakistan to
launch attacks on Western forces across the border in Afghanistan.
In his only acknowledgement that the
US has ever launched such attacks at all, President Barack Obama said in
January: ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a
list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans.’
But
behind the dry legal papers seen by The Mail on Sunday lies the most
detailed investigation into individual strikes that has yet been
carried out. It suggests that the US President was mistaken.
Missile attacks in in Pakistan have had devastating affects, the dossier revealed
The plaintiff in the Islamabad
case is Karim Khan, 45, a journalist and translator with two masters’
degrees, whose family comes from the village of Machi Khel in the tribal
region of North Waziristan.
His
eldest son, Zahinullah, 18, and his brother, Asif Iqbal, 35, were
killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone that struck
the family’s guest dining room at about 9.30pm on New Year’s Eve, 2009.
Asif had changed his
surname because he loved to recite Iqbal, Pakistan’s national poet, and
Mr Khan said: ‘We are an educated family. My uncle is a hospital
doctor in Islamabad, and we all work in professions such as teaching.
‘We have never had anything to do with militants or terrorists, and for that reason I always assumed we would be safe.’
Mr
Khan said: ‘Zahinullah, who had been studying in Islamabad, had
returned to the village to work his way through college, taking a
part-time job as a school caretaker.
‘He was a quiet boy and studious –
always in the top group of his class.’ Zahinullah also liked football,
cricket and hunting partridges.
Asif,
he added, was an English teacher and had spent several years taking
further courses to improve his qualifications while already in work.
Mr
Khan said: ‘He was my kid brother. We used to have a laugh, tell
jokes.’ His first child was less than a year old when Asif was killed.
Included
in the legal dossier are documents that corroborate Asif and
Zahinulla’s educational and employment records, as well as their death
certificates. Killed alongside them was Khaliq Dad, a stonemason who was
staying with the family while he worked on a local mosque.
Mr
Khan, who had been working for a TV station in Islamabad, said he was
given the news of their deaths in a 2am phone call from a cousin.
Drones have caused untold damage, and the dossier reveals just how devastating they have been for families
‘I called a friend who had a car
and we started driving through the night to get back to the village,’
he said. ‘It was a terrible journey. I was shocked, grieving, angry,
like anyone who had lost their loved ones.’
He
got home soon after dawn and describes his return ‘like entering a
village of the dead – it was so quiet. There was a crowd gathered
outside the compound but nowhere for them to sit because the guest rooms
had been destroyed’.
Zahinullah,
Mr Khan discovered, had been killed instantly, but despite his horrific
injuries, Asif had survived long enough to be taken to a nearby
hospital. However, he died during the night.
‘We
always bury people quickly in our culture. The funeral was at three
o’clock that afternoon, and more than 1,000 people came,’ Mr Khan said.
‘Zahinullah had a wound on the side of his face and his body was crushed
and charred. I am told the people who push the buttons to fire the
missiles call these strikes “bug-splats”.
‘It
is beyond my imagination how they can lack all mercy and compassion,
and carry on doing this for years. They are not human beings.’
Mr
Khan found Mr Akbar through a friend who had attended lectures he gave
at an Islamabad university. In 2010, he filed a criminal complaint –
known as a first information report – to police naming Mr Banks.
However, they took no action, therefore triggering the lawsuit – a
judicial review of that failure to act.
If
the judge finds in favour of Mr Khan, his decision cannot be appealed,
thus making the full criminal inquiry and Interpol warrants inevitable.
According
to the legal claim, someone from the Pakistan CIA network led by Mr
Banks – who left Pakistan in 2010 – targeted the Khan family and guided
the Hellfire missile by throwing a GPS homing device into their
compound.
A senior CIA officer said: ‘We do not discuss active operations or allegations against specific individuals.'
Mr
Rizzo is named because of an interview he gave to a US reporter after
he retired as CIA General Counsel last year. In it, he boasted that he
had personally authorised every drone strike in which America’s enemies
were ‘hunted down and blown to bits’.
He
added: ‘It’s basically a hit-list . . . The Predator is the weapon of
choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head.’
Last
night a senior Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition
of anonymity, said that Pakistan’s own intelligence agency, the ISI, has
always been excluded by the CIA from choosing drone targets.
‘They insist on using their own networks, paying their own informants. Dollars can be very persuasive,’ said the official.
He
claimed the intelligence behind drone strikes was often seriously
flawed. As a result, ‘they are causing the loss of innocent lives’.
But
even this, he added, was not as objectionable as the so-called
‘signature strikes’ – when a drone operator, sitting at a computer
screen thousands of miles away in Nevada, selects a target because he
thinks the drone camera has spotted something suspicious.
He
said: ‘It could be a vehicle containing armed men heading towards the
border, and the operator thinks, “Let’s get them before they get there,”
without any idea of who they are.
‘It
could also just be people sitting together. In the frontier region,
every male is armed but it doesn’t mean they are militants.’
One
such signature strike killed more than 40 people in Datta Khel in North
Waziristan on March 17 last year. The victims, Mr Akbar’s dossier makes
clear, had gathered for a jirga – a tribal meeting – in order to
discuss a dispute between two clans over the division of royalties from a
chromite mine.
Some of the
most horrifying testimony comes from Khalil Khan, the son of Malik Haji
Babat, a tribal leader and police officer. ‘My father was not a
terrorist. He was not an enemy of the United States,’ Khalil’s legal
statement says. ‘He was a hard-working and upstanding citizen, the type
of person others looked up to and aspired to be like.’
Khalil,
32, last saw his father three hours before his death, when he left for a
business meeting in a nearby town. Informed his father had been killed,
Khalil hurried to the scene.
‘What
I saw when I got off the bus at Datta Khel was horrible,’ he said. ‘I
immediately saw flames and women and children were saying there had been
a drone strike. The fires spread after the strike.
‘I
went to the location where the jirga had been held. The situation was
really very bad. There were still people lying around injured.
‘The
tribal elders who had been killed could not be identified because there
were body parts strewn about. The smell was awful. I just collected the
pieces that I believed belonged to my father and placed them in a small
coffin.’
Khalil said that
as a police officer, his father had earned a good salary, on which he
supported his family. Khalil has considered returning to the Gulf, where
he worked for 14 years, but ‘because of the frequency of drones I am
concerned to leave my family’.
He added that schools in the area were empty because ‘parents are afraid their children will be hit by a missile’.
In
another statement – one of 13 taken by Mr Akbar concerning the Datta
Khel strike – driver Ahmed Jan, 52, describes the moment the missile
hit: ‘We were in the middle of our discussion and I was thrown about
24ft from where I was sitting. I was knocked unconscious. When I awoke, I
saw many individuals who were injured or dead.
‘I
have lost the use of one of my feet and have a rod inserted because of
the injuries. It is so painful for me to walk. There are scars on my
face because I had to have an operation on my nose when it would not
stop bleeding.’
Mr Jan says
he has spent £3,600 on medical treatment but ‘I have never been offered
compensation of any kind . . . I do not know why this jirga was
targeted. I am a malik [elder] of my tribe and therefore a government
servant. We were not doing anything wrong or illegal.’
Another
survivor was Mohammed Noor, 27, a stonemason, who attended the jirga
with his uncle and his cousin, both of whom were killed. ‘The parts of
their bodies had to be collected first. These parts were all we had of
them,’ he said.
Mr Akbar
said that fighting back through the courts was the only way ‘to solve
the larger problem’ of the ongoing terrorist conflict.
‘It
is the only way to break the cycle of violence,’ he said. ‘If we want
to change the people of Waziristan, we first have to show them that we
respect the rule of law.’
A
senior CIA officer said: ‘We do not discuss active operations or
allegations against specific individuals.’ A White House source last
night declined to comment.
