CR Exercise June 27 2012

In the following passage there are four sentences that are not part of the original writing and hence disrupt the flow. Read the passage carefully and identify these sentences.

Unmanned U.S. aircraft now routinely fly over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Their cameras record the presence of men in motion. A commander sitting in a base thousands of kilometres away gives the kill order. The U.S. President had previously been over lists of alleged terrorists and marked off those who can be killed. This is the “kill list”. If only one person is to be killed, the execution is called a “personality strike”. There are a wide variety of drone shapes, sizes, configurations, and characteristics. If the drone kills more than one person, it is called a “signature strike”.

On September 30, 2011, two U.S. Predator drones fired Hellfire missiles at a car in Yemen's al-Jawf province. The missiles destroyed the car. Among the four dead were two U.S. citizens, the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and the editor of Al Qaeda's English language magazine Inspire, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, on October 14, another U.S. drone fired at a group who were on their way to dinner. Among the 10 dead were 16-year-old Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, the son of the cleric, and his 17-year-old cousin Abdulrahman.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) estimates that between 2001 and 2012, the U.S. launched about a hundred drone strikes in Yemen, killing between 317 and 826 people. The civilian casualty is estimated to be anywhere between 58 and 138, of them 24 being children. These are all very poor numbers, as the Bureau acknowledges. The U.S. has not released any firm data; indeed the U.S. continues to have an ambiguous attitude regarding its assassination policy. Many people have mistakenly used the term Unmanned Aerial System, or Unmanned Air Vehicle System, as these designations were in provisional use at one time or another. It takes credit for the killings, but does not take responsibility for the programme itself.

In a stinging 29-page report in 2010, former United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions Philip Alston asked the major powers to lay out the legal limits to extrajudicial assassinations. In a statement that accompanied the report, Alston described the political problem for the U.S.: “I'm particularly concerned that the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe. But this strongly asserted but ill-defined licence to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is a British not-for-profit news organisation backed by a number of prominent journalists. In the quiet rooms of the U.N., such language is rare: it asserted that the continual U.S. use of drones was not only a violation of current norms but a threat to the architecture of conflict resolution and the rules of war.

The BIJ collected data not only from Yemen but also from Pakistan and Somalia. In Pakistan, U.S. drones have killed between 2,462 and 3,145 people, among whom 482 to 830 were civilians (including 175 children). The numbers of those injured are upwards of 3,000. After the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in Chicago, the U.S. struck in Waziristan about seven times (by June 3). In Somalia, the U.S. conducted a handful of drone strikes, with deaths reported in the hundreds (among them three children). The BIJ's method is eclectic; it uses news reports and speeches. These are, therefore, not exact numbers, only indications of a trend. With no information forthcoming from the U.S., there is no way to have better figures.

The first public admission of extrajudicial executions came with the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, and the first public admission of the use of drones came from President Barack Obama in an Internet interview on January 30 this year. Of the drone attacks, Obama said, “This is a targeted, focussed effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases and so on.” He said geographical conditions necessitated these attacks. These  Unmanned Aircraft Systems range in cost from a few thousand dollars to tens of millions of dollars, with aircraft ranging from less than one pound to over 40,000 pounds. According to him, the alleged terrorists are in a region in Pakistan that is not amenable to a simply military operation. “Obviously a lot of these strikes have been in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] and going after Al Qaeda suspects who are up in very tough terrain along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The key phrase in his statement was that he had a “list of active terrorists” who could be killed by the unmanned drones.