In a “Friday news dump” the Pentagon finally admitted that a Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan killed 10 civilians.
NICK MOTTERN, nickmottern@gmail.
KATHY KELLY, kathy@vcnv.org
Mottern and Kelly are with the Ban Killer Drones campaign; many members of the group have gone to Afghanistan multiple times. Kelly just wrote the piece “To Counter Terror, Abolish War.”
The campaign just issued a statement: “The Pentagon’s and Biden administration’s efforts to cover-up the truth about the slaughter of 10 civilians in Kabul on Aug. 29, seven of them children, is simply an example of the on-going cover-up of killer drone atrocities that have been perpetrated by every U.S. administration since the first U.S. drone attack, in Afghanistan, on October 7, 2001, the day the U.S. invaded that tortured nation.
“The difference here is that the drone slaughter happened right under the noses of the international press rather than in remote areas in which reporters have not had the ability to immediately interview witnesses and to gather evidence at the scenes of the attacks.
“Chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, called the Aug. 29 drone attack ‘righteous’, but, in fact, no drone attack is ‘righteous.’ All drone attacks violate international law and morality by, among other things, bringing indiscriminate, unacceptable harm to civilians.
“Documents exposed by whistleblower Daniel Hale, who was recently sentenced to 45 months in jail for his truth telling, prove that the U.S. government is aware that 90 percent of its drone strike victims are not the intended targets.
“We, as world citizens, must understand that drone killing violates international law and leads to more war. The only path forward is to establish a global treaty to ban weaponized drones and military and police drone surveillance, all which lead inevitably to what we have just witnessed in Kabul.”
