© AP/ Mhamed Sheikh Norus
US airstrikes targeting what the Pentagon is calling an al-Shabaab training facility in Somalia killed over 150 people on Saturday. In an announcement Monday,
the Pentagon classified the dead as "militant fighters" who were allegedly preparing a large-scale attack against US and African diplomatic personnel.International human rights groups quickly contested the Pentagon's official narrative, however, asking
how a strike killing in excess of 150 people could be anything but the product of widespread collateral damage.The Bureau of Investigative Journalism scoffed at US assertions calling the death toll from the strike "unprecedented." The Saturday strike was the deadliest single US counterterrorism action since the group began monitoring drone strike reports in 2010.
The Pentagon countered that not only were the dead only al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists, but also that the "fighters" were scheduled to carry out an imminent attack against US interests.Controversial drone program likely resulting in massive, unreported civilian deathsThe US drone program, a lynchpin in America's global war on terrorism, has faced widening condemnation by the international community in recent years. Legal experts argue that the strikes cannot be legal without a proper congressional war authorization or the presence of ongoing hostilities, or a "hot war," within the targeted territories.
More concerning to human rights advocates, however, are reports in recent years that
many of those killed in drone strikes are civilians, who are then reported by White House officials as having been combatants. One report on Nevada-based drone operators observed that they
"often do not know who they are killing, they are making a guess."Furthermore, investigations by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and other advocacy groups, who are backtracking news reports on drone strikes to the locations, indicated they have found
startlingly different results than those suggested by the White House.Repeatedly, when traced to the scene of strikes in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Libya,
family members and witnesses on the ground decry the attacks as collateral damage, and claim that their slain family members were civilians.Washington defines away collateral damage by use of "kill-boxes"The death misreporting may be legal sleight-of-hand, as anyone who is present in a so-called "kill-box" is a legitimate target. Kill boxes are areas defined as small geographic spaces of hostility in which
those present are automatically defined as a combatant.This notion of a kill box made sense in conventional wars - civilians had notice and would stay away from battlefields. Today, however, a kill zone is defined as a perimeter around a high-level target or targets that actually moves with the target. In effect,
US lawyers have simply defined away collateral damage.
Comment: The Dutroux affair has been linked to other pedophile networks in the highest ranks of leadership all over the world. From politicians, judges, public servants, businessmen, wealthy people, media personalities, celebrities, and other influential citizens. For more on this monstrous web, see: