Naming the dead: Only 10 of scores killed by US drones in Pakistan last year have been identified

Jack Serle, 3 February 2016 in the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Photos for nine of the 10 killed in 2015 for whom we have names, including Warren Weinstein (bottom left) and Giovanni Lo Porto (top left). Qari Ubadiullah’s picture is not available.

Just 10 of the scores killed by US drones in Pakistan last year have so far been identified, according to data collected by the Bureau’s Naming the Dead project.

The names for all 10 came from either terrorist propaganda or the US government, with officials from Pakistan’s government, military and intelligence services declining to provide any names of those killed by the CIA for the first time since strikes started in 2004.

Only a minority of those killed are ever identified, but the number of those named in 2015 was particularly low. In total, according to Bureau research, of the minimum 2,494 people killed by US drones since 2004, only 729 have been named. At least 1,765 victims remain nameless.

The Bureau’s Naming the Dead project is an attempt to identify more of these victims to better ensure accountability for the drone strikes. The CIA continues to carry out signature strikes in Pakistan – attacks on people it claims are terrorists from extensive surveillance and data analysis operations – but the targets’ names are often not known.

In 2015, at least 60 people were killed by 13 strikes.

Of the 10 victims named, two were civilians: westerners Giovanni Lo Porto and Warren Weinstein, who were both aid workers taken hostage by al Qaeda when they were killed in a calamitous drone strike on January 15.

Five more were from al Qaeda and the remaining three were part of the Pakistan Taliban (TTP).
Of the 10, four names were provided by the US after weeks of CIA investigations, while the other six emerged from al Qaeda and TTP propaganda.

Name	Nationality	Group affiliation or job	Source
Giovanni Lo Porto	Italian	Aid worker	The White House
Warren Weinstein	US	Aid worker	The White House
Ahmed Farouq	US	Al Qaeda	The White House
Adam Gadahn	US	Al Qaeda	The White House
Qari Ubaidullah	Pakistani	Al Qaeda	Al Qaeda propaganda
Mohammad Ashraf Dar	Indian	Al Qaeda	Al Qaeda propaganda
Talwar Shaheed	Pakistani	Pakistan Taliban	Pakistan Taliban propaganda
Umar Shaheed	Pakistani	Pakistan Taliban	Pakistan Taliban propaganda
Kharey Mehsud	Pakistani	Pakistan Taliban	Pakistan Taliban propaganda
Burak Karlier	Turkish	Al Qaeda	Al Qaeda propaganda

Little or nothing is publicly known about the remaining 50 people. Most were described as “militants” of varying nationalities by intelligence and government officials, and military officers who were quoted anonymously in Pakistani and international media.

In six of the 13 strikes in 2015, the unnamed sources labelled some if not all the people killed as “Uzbeks”.

In four more strikes, the dead were described by their affiliation to an armed group, such as a TTP faction under a specific commander.

Although Pakistani officials were happy to brief journalists throughout last year on the nature of the drone strikes and the nationalities or terrorist affiliations of those killed, it was the first time since 2004 they did not help in the identification process.

They have previously leaked the names of those killed.

Why so few named in 2015?

It is unclear why 2015 was different. It could be that the identities of those killed were not known before Hellfire missiles struck and unless friends, relatives or comrades come forward their names might never be known.

Alternatively, victims’ names could have been caught in the information lock down put in place in the tribal areas by ISPR – the Pakistani military’s propaganda wing.

The Pakistani military has been fighting terrorists and other non-state armed groups in Waziristan since June 2014. Since then there has been a tight control on information released to the press about the campaign.

CIA drone strikes may be subject to the same strict information control.

Spies, officials and terrorist propaganda: How we get the names

It is not unusual for the those carrying out drone strikes – nor for communities on the receiving end – to give out the names of the dead, though they have never been the only sources of names.

Terrorist propaganda has been a rich seam for identities and background information. Similarly, intelligence service and government officials in Washington have also quietly revealed to reporters the names and potted histories of some of the senior terrorists killed in the strikes.

Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the ISI, may know the identities of many if not all of the dead. It is believed to have kept a record of the names of the people killed in the tribal areas, by drones and other means. Its officers have been sources of names of the dead in strikes from 2004 to 2014.

Why this stopped in 2015 is all the more confusing considering unnamed “Pakistani security officials” told the Express Tribune the first and so far only CIA strike of 2016 killed senior Taliban commander Maulana Noor Saeed, along with four others, on January 9.

Although the ISI enjoys a reputation for omniscience it is still possible even its officials do not know who died.

The same officials, intelligence officers and soldiers in Pakistan, however, told journalists the names of TTP and al Qaeda terrorists killed in US strikes across the border in eastern and southern Afghan provinces.
The Pakistani army has slowly worked its way across the tribal areas that run along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, driving the various armed groups deeper in to the mountains that run across the boundary separating the two countries.

Many of these fighters appear to have been forced across the border.

Afghan officials in Kabul and the provincial capitals also identified people killed in strikes in Afghanistan. The Bureau has recorded more than 100 names from over 700 people reported killed last year in Afghanistan.

The true death toll is higher. The Bureau’s tally of people killed relates to 187 US strikes in Afghanistan last year for which there are media or other open source reports. The US says it carried out 411 air and drone strikes in total. The US will not provide individual details on each of these attacks and most of them go unreported – leaving a considerable gap in public understanding of the ongoing US war in Afghanistan.

Picture credit: Composite of images from terrorist propaganda videos, except Giovanni Lo Porto which is adapted from Nazionale Anpas/Flickr (Creative Commons).

The Naming the Dead project is funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

Follow Jack Serle on Twitter and sign up for the monthly update from the Bureau’s Covert War project.

Drones and 'What Makes Us Different'

by Joseph Nevins  Published on  Monday, January 25, 2016 by Common Dreams

The documentary Drone makes painfully clear that it is the U.S. government’s ability to kill at a distance—with impunity and with widespread support, or at least resignation, of the citizenry—that "makes us different" from other nations. (Still image: Drone, The Documentary)

Seven years ago this month and three days after Barack Obama assumed the presidency on January 20, 2009, the first drone strike of his administration took place--in a small village in the region of Pakistan known as North Waziristan. It targeted the family compound of Faheem Qureshi, fracturing the young teen’s skull and destroying one of his eyes, while killing, among others, two of his uncles and a 21-year-old cousin. The White House’s intended target, it was later revealed, was not, nor had he ever been, present at the site. About ten months later, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its decision to award Obama the annual Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

In his speech at the Oslo City Hall upon accepting the prize on December 10, 2009, Obama insisted that “the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war,” suggesting that U.S. war-waging is somehow superior, more ethical, than those of the country’s adversaries. “That is what makes us different from those whom we fight,” he proclaimed. “That is a source of our strength.”

No doubt there are many things that distinguish the United States—not least the enormity of its military budget, and its global network of military bases. But as the documentary Drone (which premiered in the United States and Canada in late November and which includes footage from Obama’s speech) makes painfully clear, it is the U.S. government’s ability to kill at a distance—with impunity and with widespread support, or at least resignation, of the citizenry—that also “makes us different.”

Remotely piloted aircraft, what are popularly known as drones, allow the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence apparatus to track and monitor individuals from afar with little risk. According to Brandon Bryant, a former drone operator interviewed in the film states, “We’re the ultimate voyeurs, the ultimate peeping toms. No one is going to catch us.”

It also allows the Pentagon to engage in what is effectively a global assassination program with little domestic cost. “It’s never been easier for an American president to carry out a killing operation at the ends of the earth at any time in American history,” explains Mark Mazzetti, a reporter with The New York Times. “And when you define the world as a battlefield, that’s a very broad range of operations you can carry out.”

An explosive series of articles published in October by The Intercept shows just how far-reaching—and, perhaps most damningly, indiscriminate—these operations are. Based on classified documents leaked to the online magazine by an unnamed whistleblower within the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the series exposes the falsehoods underlying official Washington’s spin on drone strikes. While Obama administration officials claim that civilian casualties are not common in drone strikes, the documents make clear that the Pentagon typically does not know who it has killed.
 
U.S. airstrikes carried out in northeastern Afghanistan between January 2012 and February 2013 (as part of Operation Haymaker), for example, killed more than 200 people, only 35 of whom were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.

That the U.S. government can and does kill in this way, and often in countries with which the United States is not even at war, with little protest at home, demonstrates one of the ways imperialism functions: the deaths of “others,” particularly those associated, even if only by virtue of where they happen to reside, with people and places constructed as threats, are not only undeserving of sympathy, they’re also barely noticed.

Writing soon after the November release of the video of the horrific police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald—shot 16 times as he was moving away from Chicago police officers—New York Times columnist Charles Blow argues that the “only reason that these killings keep happening is because most of American society tacitly approves or willfully tolerates it. There is no other explanation. If America wanted this to end, it would end.”

Blow goes on to say that the “exceeding sad and dreadfully profound truth is that America — the majority of America, and that generally means much of white America — has turned away, averted its gaze and refused to take a strong moral stance in opposition. That’s the same as granting silent approval.”

These observations could just as easily apply to the Obama administration’s brutality toward Faheem Qureshi and the killing of his loved ones—and of so many others around the world. Just as white America must be made to overcome what Blow calls an “endemic anti-black bias” to help bring an end to the grossly disproportionate killing of African Americans by police, so, too, must the United States as a whole be made to “see the issue [in this case drones] as an intolerable human cruelty” to stop the Pentagon’s killing ways abroad.

Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the London-based human rights organization Reprieve, offers a similar analysis while speaking to a crowd of Pakistanis during the film Drone: “Until America sees your children as they see my children, we will never get justice in the world.”

Realizing the radically egalitarian vision implied by these words is obviously no easy task. This makes it all the more important that those of us who see all children, and adults, as being inherently of equal worth back the efforts of those opposing killer drones—from those of courageous U.S. air force veterans publicly denouncing the drone program to peace groups such as CODEPINK.

Supporting such efforts would be one small way to acknowledge what the United States has done to Faheem Qureshi and his family, something the Obama administration has thus far refused to do, and constitute a step in the long journey to a more just world. As Brandon Bryant, one of the air force whistleblowers has asserted, “At the end of our pledge of allegiance, we say ‘with liberty and justice for all.’ I believe that should be applied to not only American citizens, but everyone that we interact with as well, to put them on an equal level and to treat them with respect.”

In other words, we need to act in a fundamentally different way than one which involves the nationalist proclamation of “what makes us different” (and supposedly better).

Joseph Nevins is an associate professor of geography at Vassar College. His latest book is Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books).
 

Reflections – By Nick Mottern of Know Drones

DRONE WAR ORGANIZERS BULLETIN
January 2, 2016

  1. REFLECTION ON DRONE WAR AND CONSCIENCE – By Nick Mottern

I have been thinking over the last month about what might be worth saying at this time when our work to stop drone killing and surveillance has been met with the announcement that the United States government intends to expand its drone program.   And almost certainly the level of drone killing – assassination - is soaring as drones are integrated into an air war strategy that appears to be limitless in its intensity, geography and willingness to pummel defenseless, poor people into fleshy pulp and terror, with those left living attempting to scratch out survival amidst rubble and unsustainable communities.  (See this link, starting at 0:32
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxc_OgzIvJM)

On Meet the Press, October 15, 2015 Chuck Todd asked Bernie Sanders: “…you’re comfortable with using drones if you think you’ve isolated an important terrorist?”  Sanders said “Yes” as part of a longer exchange in which he endorsed the Obama war practices and said that, if elected president, he would do this and more, with the qualification that the blood being spilled should be largely Arab.  (This exchange begins at 13:37 in the interview
http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/bernie-sanders-on-guns-clinton-and-capitalism-542497347638)

Hope

But in this interview there is also a note of real hope with respect to drone war because, for whatever reason, Todd chose to be very specific in asking Sanders about whether drone war is OK.   And, earlier this week I was listening to the Midday Briefing on the POTUS satellite radio channel, and anchorman Tim Farley said the question of drone “assassination” is one that needs to be addressed although there was not time to do it during that particular program.

The point is that the legality and morality of drone war is by no means a settled issue in the mind of the U.S. press and possibly a significant number of the American people.  Drone war is seen as war by assassination, killing without due process based on relentless stalking of thousands of people.  There is a moral stench to this that no amount of official talk can blow away. 

To this point, in a remarkable presentation a year ago at a drone conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, former Congressman Rush Holt spoke of drone war as assassination, and he sketched out the ethos that supports it and some of its inescapable moral implications. (See this link, starting at 1:13:05, which includes an introduction of Holt by the Rev. Robert More, Executive Director of the Peace Action Education Fund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMgeDLbLX1c)

Decapitation

The moral stench of drone assassination is of broad significance, of course, because drone assassination is so central to the Obama “targeted killing” war strategy that involves the use of special operations forces as well as drones.  Niall Ferguson, an historian and geopolitical analyst of some renown, who advocates increasing US military strength, surprisingly said the following about Obama’s war strategy in an interview in Barron’s newspaper, published December 28, 2015:

“The resources that go into producing radicalism aren’t about to disappear.  Networks are difficult to decapitate.

“The president (Obama) has failed to understand this because his model is decapitation.  You think, let’s take out the boss.  Then your are amazed to find the network (still) grows.”

Kelly and Tolstoy

Kathy Kelly told me earlier this week that she is finding compelling reading in Leo Tolstoy’s “The Slavery in Our Time”, a profound work that examines the dependency of governments on violence, completed in 1900.  http://www.nonresistance.org/docs_pdf/Tolstoy/The_Slavery_of_Our_Time.pdf
The whole thing is very worth reading; here is a quote, among others, that seems appropriate to our involvement in drone war and war.

“I have one life, and why should I act contrary to the voice of my conscience in this brief life and become a participant in your abominable deeds?  I will not do so.

“What will come of that?  I do not know.  But I think that nothing bad can happen from my acting as my conscience commands me to act.”

So it is encouraging to me to be reminded that conscience is what caused an unnamed whistleblower to release “The Drone Papers”, published in October 2015 https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/ and what brought the four drone whistleblowers forward in November. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/obama-drone-war-isis-recruitment-tool-air-force-whistleblowers

It may be that we will find it liberating, and more effective, to have to argue to stop drone war, and war, solely on the basis of conscience now that fear among the public has undermined the value of arguing about the cost or effectiveness of systematic, methodical governmental killing. 

In short, I find comfort and encouragement in this time in what appears to be the indomitable power of conscience.

                            
                  ____________


2. THE REAL STATE OF THE UNION PROTEST – JAN. 12

Plans are moving forward for the “Real State of the Union” protest on Jan. 12 in Washington, DC and at Beale AFB outside Sacramento, CA and Creech AFB outside Las Vegas.  An explanation of this protest appeared in last month’s drone organizers bulletin.

The protest in Washington is planned to start at 1:30 pm on the sidewalk in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.  More details will be published here next week in a special drone organizers bulletin.

The protests at Beale and Creech are scheduled to run from 6 am – 8 am.  For more details contact Mauro Oliveira: smallworldradio@outlook.com

Create a Quilt Square on Saturday January 16

Decorate a quilt square to memorialize the death of a victim of a drone strike. It will be sewn together with other squares into a quilt by an experienced quilter. Thread, floss, fabric, fabric markers will be available but feel free to bring your own too.

Sit in front of our fireplace with members of the Ground All Drones Committee of Women Against Military Madness, old and new friends to discuss drones and sew, write, color, or paint a quilt square together.

WAMM Office
4200 Cedar Ave S
Minneapolis, MN

Saturday January 16, 2016
1:00-4:00 pm 


Images taken from Drones Quilt Project

initiated by Leah Bolger former president of Veterans for Peace.

Exclusive: 2 Air Force Vets Speak Out for First Time on Why They Want the Drone War to Stop

Story from Democracy Now!

In an unprecedented open letter to President Obama, four U.S. Air Force servicemembers who took part in the drone war say targeted killings and remote-control bombings fuel the very terrorism the government says it’s trying to destroy. Two of the signatories, former sensor operator Stephen Lewis and former Air Force technician Cian Westmoreland, tell us why they are speaking out for the first time about what they did. "Anybody in the Air Force knows that an air strike has collateral damage a significant amount of the time," Westmoreland says. "I’m saying it wasn’t all enemies. It was civilians, as well."
 
TRANSCRIPT This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Stephen Lewis, I wanted to ask you—you made one kill, and then you immediately appealed to your superiors about—about what you were doing. Could you talk about your experience, who you killed?
STEPHEN LEWIS: It was late 2009, and I was tasked to go support a troop in contact. And that’s whenever our troops are taking fire.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this was in which country?
STEPHEN LEWIS: Oh, this is in Afghanistan. And during this troops in contact, we were told to go to this specific location. It was four guys walking down a mountain path. And I didn’t see any weapons. I didn’t see anything. About five minutes goes by, and two Hellfires come in, and they kill three people. And there was one wounded guy left. I was given clearance to—we were given clearance to fire the missile. And that guy just—he just wasn’t there anymore.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This is—you were given clearance to fire at the wounded guy on the ground.
STEPHEN LEWIS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So what did you do next?
STEPHEN LEWIS: Seriously re-evaluated my life. Shortly after that, I ended up writing a very, very convincing letter to my leadership and told them that I didn’t belong there, I didn’t want to do it anymore, and I wanted out.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was their response?
STEPHEN LEWIS: Six months later, I was out of the Air Force.
AMY GOODMAN: How are you chosen as a drone operator?
STEPHEN LEWIS: I was chosen basically at random. I went to imagery analysis school, which I—I wanted to look at satellite photos. That’s what I wanted to do. And about halfway through it, they come up and they say, "You’re going to Las Vegas. You’re going to go to sensor operator school, and you’re going to do this." There’s—
AMY GOODMAN: Did they say why?
STEPHEN LEWIS: They don’t have to. There is no argument there. It’s "Yes, sir, yes, ma’am, I’ll do whatever you tell me to."
AMY GOODMAN: And now that you’re out of the Air Force, how has what you did in the Air Force, being a drone operator, engaging in that kill, affected you?
STEPHEN LEWIS: It makes any kind of relationship difficult. I can’t—I can’t communicate properly with my friends. I have to preface it with "I’m sorry, guys. I can’t hang out with you tonight. There’s too much going on right now." It’s, in effect, killed every single relationship that I’ve had afterwards. I can’t—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What about this issue that you raise in your letter, how the drone program is actually helping to fuel or create more terrorism?
STEPHEN LEWIS: Well, it’s been noted in the film, Drone, that kids are afraid to go outside and play, or go to school during the day, whenever the sun is out, whenever the sun is shining, because they’re afraid that they’re going to get struck by a drone.

Continue on Democracy Now!  

Part of three segments found on Democracy Now! From November 20, 2015 See video and interview there. 

From Console to Trigger: How Pentagon "Exploits" Video Game Culture to Wire Youth for War

November 20, 2015

Story on Democracy Now!

Among the issues tackled in the new documentary film "Drone" is the connection between video games and military recruitment. We air a clip from the film and speak to its director, Tonje Hessen Schei, as well as drone war whistleblower Brandon Bryant. "I think gamers should be offended that the military and the government are using [video games] to manipulate and recruit," Bryant says. "We’re more interconnected now than at any time in human history — and that’s being exploited to help people kill one another."

TRANSCRIPT This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to turn to a clip from the film Drone about the connection between video games and military recruitment. This clip features Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Callahan and former U.S. Navy pilot Missy Cummings. But first, P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War.

P.W. SINGER: There’s always been a connection between the world of war and the world of entertainment. And I call this phenomenon "militainment," where the military world is actually now pulling tools from the world of entertainment to do its job better. The military has invested in creating video games that they’re using as recruiting tools.

LT. COL. BRYAN CALLAHAN: How do we find our 18X pilots? There’s been a lot of different theories. If you can answer that question or I can answer that question, you can make a lot of money for the Air Force right now, because we don’t know. We’re trying to get our arms around what really does make the best candidate for unmanned airplanes and how do we identify these people early.

TO read whole article and watch on Democracy Now! 

Two other related articles also from Democracy Now from the same day. 

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/numbing_horrible_former_drone_operator_brandon
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/exclusive_2_air_force_vets_speak

The Drone Papers

Breaking News from The Intercept

The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. The documents provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama's drone wars.  See for yourself now. 

Or listen to Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now! 

Drone War Exposed: Jeremy Scahill on U.S. Kill Program's Secrets & the Whistleblower Who Leaked Them.  from October 16, 2015 on Democracy Now

One of the most secretive military campaigns in U.S. history is under the microscope like never before. In a major exposé based on leaked government documents, The Intercept has published the most in-depth look at the U.S. drone assassination program to date. "The Drone Papers" exposes the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, revealing a number of flaws and far more casualties than the intended targets. The documents were leaked to The Intercept by an unnamed U.S. intelligence source who says he wanted to alert Americans to wrongdoing. Hear The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, lead author of the exposé, "The Drone Papers."