CIA behind drone strikes in Muslim world

There is an interview with Ray McGovern, Former CIA Analyst, to share his opinion on this issue.

Q:  Philip Alston the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial fair, said US government should disclose the legal basis for such killings and identify any safeguards designed to reduce collateral civilian casualties and also insure that the government has targeted the correct person. Is the US doing this?

McGovern:  Well first of all, in my view I am not an international lawyer but I think most international lawyers would say this is illegal. If it was legal it would be the US armed forces doing it. It is illegal and so the CIA which is allowed under our law to do illegal things abroad does it. And with respect to people being killed, people ask me are the hellfire missiles accurate and I say they are extremely accurate and so people say if so there is no problem with collateral damage and I say no there are lots of problems. The hellfire missiles are accurate, the intelligence is notoriously inaccurate. It all depends on what the target is and whether you have correct information on the target.

Now for John Brennan, the Deputy National Security advisor at the White House, for him to claim, that he claimed this last spring that over a whole year there was not one civilian casualty. It is ridiculous. There have been many. And his thesis there has been disproven by investigators on the ground and people who know about such things. So there is a lot long with this idea.

I am a little bit biased because I was in army infantry officer and we learned in military that the infantry wins the war if the war is to be won. During Vietnam when I was on active duty we were told that these blue suited folks with the B52, they would bomb North Vietnam and parts of the South and we would win the war that way. We infantry officers left at that. We never ever win a war by bombing. And so what we have here is a replay of new toys. In fact in the 60's the new toy was the B52 bomber. Now it is drones with hellfire missiles, never ever would that win a war.

If you look at what happened in Somalia just over the last two days, 85 people killed, alright. Now if you say 85 people that means when you talk about extended family and friends let's say a dozen for each. You got one thousand, one thousand people who are irrevocably antagonistic to the United States because they lost their friends, their brother, their son, their uncle. So what we have here is a situation that drones are running the war, creating more terrorists and it is quite amazing.

Q:  What about the fact that the US claims to fight and help countries that want to achieve democracy? Are the drone attacks peaceful and democratic in your opinion?

McGovern:  Well they are not peaceful. They are killing people. Democracy means that the people have a voice. Most of the people in our country have not been able to vote on whether we should use drones or not and most of this is a secret by definition. They are been done by the CIA. The information is very sparse and worry to inquire into the particulars? Well, that's classified. So the answer to your question, no it is not innocent and no, it is not sparing lives.

Q:  Drone attacks have become the weapon of choice for the US fights against Taliban militants, however innocent civilians are paying the deadly cost. How is the US allowed to continue this method?

McGovern:  Well the only rational that makes any sense to me is that this new toy has captured imagination of the air force in our country. No air force people get killed. They sit behind these councils, push levers and buttons from a half a world away and so if one of them crashes there is nobody in it and they lose a million dollar or so. That is no big deal and so yes, it is a weapon of choice but a weapon that is just prolonging the war making still more terrorists that we will have to contempt with and so why is this, the weapon of choice?

Well part of it has to do with not letting our blue suited air force folks get killed but some of it I am afraid has to do with the people who make the weapons, the people who make the drones, the people who profit from this war. Referred about the military industrial complex, those who are the only ones that are profiting from this war but they are making a big, big bundle of money and I am afraid that the policy makers are being bought to support this kind of outlandish activity because the war will continue. That is why our General in Afghanistan now says that this is the new normal that we will be here for a long time and Petraeus himself, the General now head of the CIA has said that this war will be fought by our grand children as well.

So that is what they are preparing for. It is good for the military. It is good for the industrialists that build the weapons. It is terrible for us people in the United States because all the money we need for education and other things are been spent on war and of course it is even more terrible for those receiving ends of these very accurate targeted drone missiles.

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