HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

By Patrick Martin*

25 April 2015 (WSWS) – Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of President Obama’s announcement Thursday [23 April] that two hostages of Al Qaeda, an American and an Italian, were killed in a US drone missile strike in Pakistan is the lack of any significant reaction from official political circles or the media.

**Photo: A US Air Force RQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle. Photo: US Department of Defense/James L. Harper Jr. | Source: UN News Centre

There was a certain amount of tut-tutting in the press and expressions of sympathy for the family of Dr. Warren Weinstein, the longtime aid worker in Pakistan who was kidnapped by Al Qaeda in 2011 and killed by the US government in January 2015.

But there was no challenge to the basic premise of the drone missile program: that the CIA and Pentagon have the right to kill any individual, in any country, on the mere say-so of the president. Drone murder by the US government has become routine and is accepted as normal and legitimate by the official shapers of public opinion.

Human Wrongs Watch

**Photo: Predator launching a Hellfire missile | Author: Brigadier Lance Mans, Deputy Director, NATO Special Operations Coordination Centre | Wikimedia Commons.

Two al-Qaeda hostages, an American and an Italian, were killed in one of January’s many air strikes. A former drone operator and USAF veteran Brandon Bryant said “the drone operations and even distance operations are probably the most dishonorable type of warfare we can create…”

RT: Hundreds of civilians have been killed by US drone attacks, but it took the killing of Westerners for Obama to express his regret. Doesn’t he care about the Pakistani civilians who died in his drone strikes?

Ivan Eland: The accidental killing of an American has a political problem in the US. Often times US military kills people whether it is via drone strikes in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries. The military doesn’t keep track of civilians, or it says it doesn’t. It keeps meticulous track of its own people getting killed or other armed forces that are allied with it.