Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2015
LONDON—A new analysis of data available to the public about drone warfare, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals—the most focused effort of what President Obama calls “targeted killing”—they kill vastly more people than those targeted, often needing to strike multiple times. As of late November, attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people. The human rights group Reprieve, using reports compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, examined cases in which specific people were targeted by drones multiple times. “Drone strikes have been sold to the American public on the claim that they’re ‘precise.’ But they are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them. There is nothing precise about intelligence that results in the deaths of 28 unknown people, including women and children, for every ‘bad guy’ the US goes after,” said Jennifer Gibson, who spearheaded Reprieve’s study.
—Space Alert!, Winter/Spring 2015
Leave a Reply