Executed Britons 47


The two British men executed by US drone attacks in Pakistan were not killed in combat. They were assassinated while going about normal life. This is a most barbarous practice, which amounts not just to execution without trial, but to inaccurate execution killing many who were never accused in the first place.

Being British does not make these particular victims more important than the thousands of others – including numerous women and children – that the US has assassinated in this way. But it does give the British government a standing to protest. Sadly there is no chance that the neo-cons in power will do anything about it. If there was one area where you might have expected the Lib-Dem presence in government to give it a slightly more liberal tinge, it was foreign affairs. In fact, there has been no evidence of that whatsoever.


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47 thoughts on “Executed Britons

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  • Tiwo

    @Ingo

    Wedding parties, innocent civilians, mother and child etc
    .
    .
    Are these not now collectively reffered to as COLLATERAL DAMAGE?

  • Mary

    Quelcrime. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle
    from where these most evil machines are operated. What a world.
    .
    Armed attacks
    See also: Targeted killing, Unmanned combat aerial vehicle, and Drone attacks in Pakistan
    .
    MQ-1 Predator UAVs armed with Hellfire missiles are now used as platforms for hitting ground targets in sensitive areas. Armed Predators were first used in late 2001 from bases in Pakistan and Uzbekistan, mostly for hitting high profile individuals (terrorist leaders etc.) inside Afghanistan. Since then, there have been several reported cases of such attacks taking place in Pakistan, this time from Afghan-based Predators. The advantage of using an unmanned vehicle, rather than a manned aircraft, in such cases is to avoid a diplomatic embarrassment should the aircraft be shot down and the pilots captured, since the bombings took place in countries deemed friendly and without the official permission of those countries.
    .
    A Predator based in a neighboring Arab country was used to kill suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen on November 3, 2002. This marked the first use of an armed Predator as an attack aircraft outside of a theater of war such as Afghanistan.
    .
    Questions have been raised about the accuracy of the targeting of UAVs. In March 2009, The Guardian reported allegations that Israeli UAVs armed with missiles killed 48 Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, including two small children in a field and a group of women and girls in an otherwise empty street.

    .
    In June, Human Rights Watch investigated six UAV attacks which was reported to have resulted in civilian casualties, and alleged that Israeli forces either failed to take all feasible precautions to verify that the targets were combatants, or failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians. In July 2009, Brookings Institution released a report stating that in the United States-led drone attacks in Pakistan, ten civilians died for every militant killed. S. Azmat Hassan, a former ambassador of Pakistan, said in July 2009 that American UAV attacks were turning Pakistani opinion against the United States, and that 35 or 40 such attacks only killed 8 or 9 top al-Qaeda operatives.
    .
    CIA officials became concerned in 2008 that targets in Pakistan were being tipped off to pending U.S. drone strikes by Pakistani intelligence, when the U.S. requested Pakistani permission prior to launching targeted killing attacks. The Bush administration therefore decided in August 2008 to abandon the practice of obtaining Pakistani government permission before launching missiles from drones, and in the next six months the CIA carried out at least 38 Predator targeted killing strikes in northwest Pakistan, compared with 10 in 2006 and 2007 combined.
    .
    The Predator strikes killed at least nine senior al-Qaeda leaders, and dozens of lower-ranking operatives, depleting its operational tier in what U.S. officials described as the most serious disruption of al-Qaeda since 2001. It was reported that the Predator strikes took such a toll on al-Qaeda that militants began turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust. A senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said: “They have started hunting down people who they think are responsible” for security breaches. “People are showing up dead, or disappearing.”
    .
    By October 2009, the CIA said they had killed more than half of the 20 most wanted al-Qaeda terrorist suspects in targeted killings.

  • tonB

    Control Orders are a sham & are a way of the government controlling thoses who have been caught up in (fake) terror plots.
    .
    Consider the cases of Mohammed Gulzar, who was originally touted as a ‘ring-leader’ of the Aug 2006 Airline Liquid Explosive ‘plot’. Gulzar was acquitted on the direction of the judge at the first of 3 or 4 trials (count ’em), however he was then placed immediately onto a control order, & is still under a control order now.
    .
    Or the case of <bAmir Ali, a London Underground tube train driver who refused to play ball with the security services.
    .

  • Suhayl Saadi

    TonB, throughout the world, taxi-drivers are prime targets for such recruitment – for obvious reasons. This account seems typical: Intimidation and blackmail.

  • ingo

    If there is a blatant untruth in Wendy supposition, Stephen, why don’t you not come up with the evidence supporting your bald reposte on this side issue?
    Fact is, drone warfare is unregulated and breaks many UN rules regarding sovereign territories. I would understand if you lamented about the lack of resolve on their part but to argue some sort of leaglity here is naive, to say the least, too many people on here just know too much about the subject as to be baldowered by you.

  • Komodo

    Mary:
    “Questions have been raised about the accuracy of the targeting of UAVs. In March 2009, The Guardian reported allegations that Israeli UAVs armed with missiles killed 48 Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, including two small children in a field and a group of women and girls in an otherwise empty street.”
    Why would anyone doubt the accuracy of the UAV’s? Given the IDF’s general record?

  • Bongo

    Craig, you owe your comfortable career to men who bombed civilians.\

    It’s the nature of war.

    It’s what’s permitted you to get fat and grow that awful chin that you try to hide by snipping your photo.

    Well-off fatties such as yourself should reflect on where their wealth came from, and what happened in the wars that allowed you to live in such comfort. And please stop picking on the lower classes. We have every right to play loud music on the train. If you don’t like it, fight like a man.

  • ingo

    ‘Every right to play loud music on the train’? may be if you’re a girating drunk moose in bongo bongo land, but nowhere else.
    There is no need to excert such hormonally challenged excuses for some anti social scrots here. So you want fights on trains? do you punk?

  • Ken

    @Mary..Perhaps Wikipedia has been got at then.

    Wikileaks is overrun with Israeli apologists, I know this for a fact as I was an editor on there and you will find it very difficult to get anything on that site that reflects badly on Israel as their group will just come and delete it and when you put it back with sources and everything another one comes and deletes it for no reason again. You cannot keep putting it back up as that is against wikipedia rules. So I suggest not to get your info from that site as it is unreliable.

  • Ken

    Komodo Questions have been raised about the accuracy of the targeting of UAVs

    Just an Israeli supporter throwing that in the article to suggest that the Israelis did not kill those people on purpose it must have been the fault of the targeting system. Usual rubbish you get on wikipedia to counter showing Israel in a bad light. Of course we all know they target civilians, the reports are too numerous to suggest otherwise.

  • OldMark

    ‘Fact is, drone warfare is unregulated and breaks many UN rules regarding sovereign territories.’

    However the technology is presently only deployed by ‘western’ countries, so it gets a free pass.

    There is every reason to be suspicious of what, exactly, the 2 executees were up to in Waziristan,(Rashid Rauf ditto, with knobs on) but the cavalier disregard for due process is very troubling. If these guys were shot dead at a roadblock (as happened a few times to IRA men in NI 3 decades ago)concerns would be widely expressed, but impersonal execution by drone seems, as a method, to be immune from criticism in some quarters.

    Presumably though, if the 2 men were ‘British’, an inquest into their deaths will have to be called, as it is with soldiers killed in that part of the world ?

  • Michael Culver

    I don’t know the exact price of a hellfire missile but its hardly suprising that the usual sick assassins are so in debt;roughly half a million dollars to kill a youth on a motor bike even Al Capone might have queried the kill/reward ratio. It is no use anyone bleating about international law any more its just who has the biggest gun period.I wrote a letter to Justine Greening my M.P. re: the continuing horrors in Iraq which she claimed she would forward to Hague, not a word , old hat,been there done that move on.I was born in 38 grew up and was taught how we won the war against fascism,as I move towards my little end it sickens to see this country embracing exactly that sick ideology,might is right whats in it for us etc: etc: So back to Parliament Sq: with bigger banners!! Maybe the British people will send an even louder shout of defiance on November 30 but not just for a day, sit in the streets bring London to a halt, we are ruled by ethnocentric genocidal psychopaths somehow they must be stopped.Power to the 99% power to the people!!

  • Parky

    Very recently there are a couple of cases of trial by media I noticed. The group in the west midlands and an individual in new york. On a news report i heard on our state broadcaster the words “terrorist, terrorism or terror” were used three or four times in an item lasting no more than twenty seconds to describe the group. In the NY case the mayor of NY effectively tried, judged and executed the individual even before due process had commenced and they even had knocked up an unconvincing demonstration of a car being “blown up” by the type of bomb he was planning. Even so it would appear to have injured only the occupants and people very close to it even if true. All this and the same murderous bunch are sending real and deadly bombs into Pakistan every day, such bare faced hypocrisy is stunning ! My conclusion is that both the UK and USA populations are being softened up for the next round in “the war of terror”.

  • Stefan

    “The two British men executed by US drone attacks in Pakistan were not killed in combat. They were assassinated while going about normal life.”

    Presumably you have seen the high-side reporting that corroborates this? Or were you surmising?

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