Obama's Weak Defense of His Record on Drone Killings | The Atlantic - Dec 2016 |

Shortly before Obama took office, leaving his job as a United States senator, a CIA drone strike on a funeral in Pakistan killed as many as 41 civilians, an incident that apparently wasn't enough to cause him to rethink the wisdom of the U.S. approach.

President Obama presided over a drone strike for the first time shortly after taking office, on January 22, 2009. The strike missed its target, and Newsweek reported that Obama was made aware almost immediately that innocents died in the attack.

Jan. 23, 2009 - Briefing: The first Obama fatal strike killed between seven and twelve people, reported initially as `foreign militants'. Seven civilians, mostly of one family, reportedly died. Lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar, representing surviving family members, has named the dead civilians as: retired school teacher Mohammad Khalil; Mansur ur Rehman; 14-year-old Azaz ur Rehman; Khushdil Khan, who owned a hardware store; and farmers Obaidullah, Rafiqullah and Siffatullah. Another boy survived with terrible injuries.

In a later report personally given to Obama by his then-CIA chief General Michael Hayden, the Agency admitted missing its high value target and killing `five al Qaeda militants', but made no mention of civilian deaths. Location: Zharki, Mir Ali, North Waziristan.

By the end of 2009 the CIA had already conducted its 100th drone strike in Pakistan.

The following year, a significant escalation in the drone war occurred not because "this technology really began to take off," to repeat Obama's construction, which seems to assign responsibility for targeted killings to drones themselves, but in part because of a deliberate response to a suicide attack on a U.S. outpost in Afghanistan that killed multiple CIA officers, prompting an unnamed official to tell The Guardian, "This attack will be avenged through successful, aggressive counterterrorism operations." Many were cross-border drone strikes targeting the Taliban. As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism later reported in its retrospective timeline, "2010 was to be the bloodiest year of drone strikes in Pakistan."

These are war crimes according to International Law and Human Rights principles ...

From the diaries ...

Af-Pak War: Failure to Win Hearts and Minds | Jan 2, 2010 |

FOB Chapman Hit by Suicide Bomber - 8 CIA Killed | Dec 31, 2009 |

PS US Intelligence persons never cease to get out of their role of lying and putting innocent lives in harms way for a greater objective. Michael Hayden and PropOrNot

'Sapere aude'