Chris Woods writes at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:
A major case in the British High Court has revealed fresh evidence of civilian deaths during a notorious CIA drone strike in Pakistan last year.
Sworn witness testimonies reveal in graphic detail how the village of Datta Khel burned for hours after the attack. Many of the dozens killed had to be buried in pieces.
I was thrown 24 feet from where I was sitting. When I awoke I saw many individuals who were dead or injured’ Ahmed Jan, attack survivor
Legal proceedings were begun in London recently against British Foreign Secretary William Hague, over possible British complicity in CIA drone strikes.
Britain’s GCHQ – its secret monitoring and surveillance agency – is reported to have provided ‘locational evidence’ to US authorities for use in drone strikes, a move which is reportedly illegal in the United Kingdom.
Sworn affidavits
The High Court case focuses in particular on a CIA drone strike in March 2011 which killed up to 53 people.
Sworn affidavits presented in court and seen by the Bureau offer extensive new details of a strike the CIA still apparently claims ‘killed no non-combatants’.
Ahmed Jan (pictured) is a tribal elder in North Waziristan. On March 17 2011 he was attending a gathering with other village elders, to discuss a mining dispute.
‘We were in the middle of our discussion when the missile hit and I was thrown about 24 feet from where I was sitting. I was knocked unconscious and when I awoke I saw many individuals who were dead or injured,’ he says in his affidavit.
Most of those who died in Datta Khel village that day were civilians. The Bureau has so far identified by name 24 of those killed, whilst Associated Press recently reported that it has the names of 42 civilians who died that day.
Pakistan’s president, prime minister and army chief all condemned the Datta Khel attack. A recent Bureau investigation with the Sunday Times quoted Brigadier Abdullah Dogar, who commanded Pakistani military forces in the area at the time.
We in the Pakistan military knew about the meeting, we’d got the request ten days earlier. It was held in broad daylight, people were sitting out in Nomada bus depot when the missile strikes came. Maybe there were one or two Taliban at that Jirga – they have their people attending – but does that justify a drone strike which kills 42 mostly innocent people?
Yet the US intelligence community has consistently denied that any civilians died.
My father was not an enemy of the United States or any other country‘
Khalil Khan
Last year an anonymous US official told the New York Times: ‘The fact is that a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with AQ [Al Qaeda] -linked militants, were killed.’
The sworn affidavits seen by the Bureau offer a very different perspective. Imran Khan’s father Ismail was another of the elders who died that day. Imran says of his father: ‘He always did the right thing for the community and the tribe. He opposed terrorism and militancy and was not himself in any way connected to these things.’
Khalil Khan’s late father Hajji Babat was a local policeman who was ‘not an enemy of the United States of America or any other country.’ His son describes in his affidavit how he rushed back to his village to find his father dead, the bus station and surrounding buildings still burning six hours after the drone strike.
And Fateh Khan, who once worked for British Telecom, lost his 25-year old nephew Din Mohammed in the CIA attack. He reports that his nephew’s body had to be buried in pieces, and that ‘he left behind four children, all of whom now live in my house. His eldest child is currently only five years old.’
‘Absolute lie’
The most senior tribal elder to die that day was Daud Khan. Initially he was claimed to have been a senior Taliban figure. His son Noor told the Bureau that this was ‘an absolute lie’.
‘My father was not a militant but an elder who was working day and night for his people. There have been many children who have been killed in drone strikes. I ask the US if they think those children were militants and combatants and dangerous enough to be killed in such a manner?’
The CIA declined to comment when asked whether it still believed it had killed no ‘non-combatants’ in Pakistan since May 2010, or that no civilians died in Datta Khel last year.
In London, legal campaigners are seeking a judicial review in the High Court – a process by which senior judges can question and even overturn any government policy on aiding US drone strikes.
The case is being brought by legal charity Reprieve, and by the Islamabad-based lawyer Shahzad Akbar and the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which focuses on civilian victims of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan.
The British government is understood to have firmly challenged the grounds of the case on a number of fronts.
The U.S. government [has] offered a $10 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Hafeez Saeed, the spiritual chief of Pakistan’s Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group and an alleged mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. A yearlong investigation by ProPublica and PBS’ Frontline explored the role of American David Coleman Headley in planning the three-day raid by gunmen of Lashkar-i-Taiba supported by Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI.
As we reported, Headley revealed that Saeed helped plan the Mumbai attacks. He credited Saeed for inspiring him to jihad and, after his arrest, told interrogators about Saeed’s ties to Pakistani intelligence. “He is very close to ISI,” Headley said of Saeed. “He is well protected.” (For more, see our complete coverage.) The U.S. State Department also offered a reward for Hafiz Abdul Rahman Makki, another senior Lashkar boss.
The announcements show how much U.S-Pakistani relations have deteriorated as the Obama administration has taken a harder line with Islamabad. When Headley was indicted in late 2009 for conducting reconnaissance for the attacks that killed 166 people, U.S. authorities tried to avoid diplomatic tensions by refraining from publicly identifying Lashkar masterminds involved in the deaths of six Americans and other Westerners as well as Indians in Mumbai.
Last year, U.S. prosecutors indicted midlevel Lashkar chief Sajid Mir, an ISI officer named Major Iqbal and two other accused plotters. Prosecutors detailed the ISI’s central role in the attacks during a federal trial in Chicago of an accomplice of Headley. The case, along with the discovery of Osama bin Laden in a military garrison town, raised alarming questions about the ISI’s support for terrorism and escalated tensions with Pakistan.
Although U.S. prosecutors have not indicted Saeed, the offer of the reward is clearly intended to increase pressure on Lashkar, the ISI and the Pakistani government. Saeed is a powerful public figure in Pakistan and has held mass rallies in recent months in which he denounced the West and India.
Pakistani authorities have occasionally placed him under brief house arrest, but Western and Indian counterterror officials say he continues to run Lashkar with the support and protection of the Pakistani government. Pakistani authorities have also refused to arrest Mir, Major Iqbal and other suspects despite abundant evidence against them. Their whereabouts, like Saeed’s, are well-known.
The trial in Pakistan of Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Lashkar’s military chief, and a few others charged in the Mumbai case has stalled. As ProPublica reported last year, Lakhvi continues to lead the group from jail and authorities have refused to confiscate his cell phone despite a direct appeal from a senior U.S. official to the director of the ISI.
“This is a name-and-shame tactic directed at two of the most public figures in Lashkar,” said Stephen Tankel, an American University professor and author of the book “Storming the World Stage” about the group. “It appears to be part of a long-term effort to exert pressure on the Pakistani government.”
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Mirrored from ProPublica under their Creative Commons license.
2. Dow Chemicals hired Stratfor to spy on activists in Agra who continue to protest over the Bhopal environmental disaster that blinded many workers and destroyed their health. I.e., Stratfor was not just doing analysis but was involved in private intelligence operations against civil society groups that had a right to protest.
3. Stratfor Vice President Fred Burton, a former State Department official involved in counter-terrorism, lamented that in the old days the US would simply have assassinated Venezuelan leftist leader Hugo Chavez and Bolivian leftist leader Evo Morales. The internal emails also suggest that Stratfor had placed a female asset in Venezuela, who was having sex with an officer and pumping him for information. The officer was said also to be “working with Israel.” Chavez is known for his criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
5. The fifth revelation is that often Stratfor analysts did not know what they were talking about and had an extreme rightwing bias. For instance, this memo on the revolution in Egypt attempts to argue that the officer corps was behind the revolution against Hosni Mubarak and that the masses were insufficiently mobilized to account for it. It is alleged that only 750,000 people came out in Tahrir Square, a small number for a country of 82 million. But in fact that was only in Tahrir. People demonstrated elsewhere in Cairo. And they were in the streets in Alexandria, Suez, Asyut and other cities. Even small towns saw burnings of police stations and HQs of the National Democratic Party. This memo makes a grassroots revolution that shook Egypt from Alexandria to Aswan into an officers’ putsch. While the officers tacked with the wind and did end up siding with the demonstrators against Mubarak, they were clearly playing political catch-up. It was revolutionary groups like April 6 that made the revolution in the cities, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the rural areas. The memo is frankly obtuse and if this is what Booz Allen was paying $20,000 a year for, they should demand their money back.
This fifth point, about the one percent interpreting the world for the one percent as being about the one percent, is a dire problem in our information system, since the one percent has the resources and can try to overwhelm reasoned analysis that recognizes the agency of the people. Ultimately, the political struggle here is an epistemological one (epistemology being the study of how we know what we know).
Chris Jones writes for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:
Two major investigations have provided fresh evidence that civilians are continuing to be killed in Pakistan’s tribal areas by CIA drones – despite aggressive Agency denials.
In a study of ten major drone strikes in Pakistan since 2010, global news agency Associated Press deployed a field reporter to Waziristan and questioned more than 80 local people about ten CIA attacks. The results generally confirm the accuracy of original credible media reports – and in two cases identify previously unrecorded civilian deaths.
In a further case, in which an anonymous US official had previously attacked the Bureau’s findings of six civilian deaths in a 2011 strike, AP’s report has confirmed the Bureau’s work.
Anglo-American legal charity Reprieve has also filed a case with the United Nations Human Rights Council, based on sworn affidavits by 18 family members of civilians killed in CIA attacks – many of them children. Reprieve is calling on the UNHRC ‘to condemn the attacks as illegal human rights violations.’
New casualties
The Associated Press investigation, authored by the agency’s Islamabad chief Sebastian Abbot, represents one of the largest field studies yet into casualties of CIA drone strikes.
AP’s field reporter interviewed more than 80 local civilians in Waziristan in connection with 10 major CIA strikes since 2010. It found that of 194 people killed in the strikes, 138 were confirmed as militants:
The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police, and 38 of them were killed in a single attack on March 17, 2011. Excluding that strike, which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants, villagers said.
In two of the ten cases AP has turned up previously-unreported civilian casualties.
On August 14 2010 AP found that seven civilians died - including a ten year old child – alongside seven Pakistan Taliban. The deaths occurred during Ramadan prayers. Until now it had not been known that civilians had died in the attack. US officials told AP that its own assessments indicated all those killed were militants.
On April 22 2011, AP confirms that three children and two women were among 25 dead in an attack on a guest house where militants were staying. Three named eyewitnesses in the village of Spinwan confirmed that the civilians had died – two had attended their funerals.
Bureau findings confirmed
The AP investigation has also independently confirmed that six civilians died alongside ten Taliban in an attack on a roadside restaurant on May 6 2011.
Pakistan is an important country and a key US partner, and so it is bad news that it is lurching from political crisis to political crisis. There is a crisis between the military and the civilian government. There is a crisis between the military and the US government. There is a crisis between the Supreme Court and the other two branches of government. There was a big Taliban bombing in Pakistan the day before yesterday. And, the Zardari government may fall at any time, either to clear a path to new elections or because of yet another military coup.
Pakistan is the world’s sixth most populous country, just after Brazil. It has only the 46th largest gross domestic product (in nominal terms). But it has a stockpile of nuclear warheads, and has perhaps the seventh largest army in the world, after the US, Russia, China, India and the two Koreas. It is a major recipient of US foreign aid, though some of that has been put on hold by an angry US Congress.
Pakistan’s elites are allied with the United States against some insurgent Afghan groups, and it is central to transporting goods for the NATO war effort in Afghanistan. On the other hand, it is allied with some Pashtun groups (especially the Haqqani network) against the US and against the Afghanistan government.
It has been facing serial crises of poor governance and bad politics. There are continual electricity outages (very bad for the industrial sector). There have been strikes over poor or late pay, including by the railway workers. Security is collapsing, even in Lahore, which used to be well run, but which is becoming seedy and dangerous.
The Pakistani government was embarrassed by the presence of Usamah Bin Laden in Abbotabad, not far from its equivalent of West Point. The revelation appears to have provoked a determination on the part of the civilian government of Yousuf Raza Gilani and President Asaf Ali Zardari to get more control of the Inter-Services Intelligence and the officer corps, who had in the past often ordered the civilian government around or made coups.
Then it was alleged that the Pakistani ambassador in Washington, Hussein Haqqani, passed over to the US National Security Council and the Pentagon a request for them to help the civilian government get power over the military bureaucracy. An intermediary was said to be Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz, whom the Pakistani Supreme Court and other authorities now want to depose.
Ambassador Haqqani had to resign when the existence of the memo became public.
This “memogate” deeply angered Pakistan’s powerful military, provoking rumors of a possible coup by chief of army staff Ashfaq Kayani.
The Pakistani Supreme Court is also interested in the memos, to see if the Pakistani government had violated any laws or perhaps even committed treason.
President Asaf Ali Zardari keeps going off to Dubai for medical treatment, causing many to wonder if he was trying to slip out of the country (he went back to the the Emirates again on Thursday.)
Then US aircraft killed some 24 Pakistani troops at a checkpoint near the Afghan border, creating severe tensions between the Pakistani military, which was already angry about the Bin Laden assassination mission on Pakistani soil and about Memogate and the possibility of US intervention in Pakistan’s civilian-military balance.
Then Pakistan threw the US air force off one of its bases. For several weeks, there were no drone strikes in the tribal belt by the US, probably because Pakistan was still sore about the killing of 24 troops by friendly fire. And for a long time Pakistan idled the NATO supply trucks coming up from Karachi to the Khyber Pass.
Then President Zardari flew to Dubai for medical treatment, which some speculated would lead to a soft coup by the military.
But it did not. Zardari returned. But now the Supreme Court is getting interested in him and in investigating Memogate itself.
Then a famous cricketer turned politician and philantropist, Imran Khan, started holding mega rallies in Lahore and Karachi, having gained sudden popularity. Imran Khan started to call for Zardari to resign. The government anyway could not go past February 2013, and Zardari’s political rivals want early elections.
On Monday Prime Minister Gilani gave an interview with the Chinese press in which he criticized the Chief of Staff and the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for submitting documents on Memogate indepedently to the Supreme Court, insisting they should have gone through him as head of state.
Then the military made dark noises, and Gilani responded by firing the minister of defense, who was close to the officer corps.
On Thursday, Zardari went to Dubai again, possibly for follow-up tests for whatever condition he has. That trip provoked more coup rumors.
So, Pakistan’s civilian and military wings of government are furious with each other and with the US military. There are suspicions that the US deliberately hit the soldiers at the checkpoint. There are suspicions that the US is trying behind the scenes to weaken the political power of the military in favor of the civilian government.
But Pakistanis are convinced by the lack of electricity that Zardari and Gilani could not govern themselves out of a paper bag, and that new elections for parliament should be held. Imran Khan is waiting in the wings as a new broom. Assuming that there are elections rather than a coup.
And, what will be the effect of these changes on the final years of the US and NATO war in Afghanistan? How badly did the interruption of the supply train hurt? What sorts of lack of Pakistani cooperation have been imposed with regard to Afghanistan?
My list of challenges last year this time more or less nailed it, especially my concerns about the Mubarak era ending in Egypt. Many of the dangers to which I pointed still exist, of course, but a whole host of new difficulties has emerged.
5. The compromise reached in Yemen is unacceptable to many reformers. Although Ali Abdullah Saieh says he is stepping down in favor of his vice president, he seems likely to remain the power behind the throne. He essentially has amnesty for his crimes through 2011. Yemen even in the best of times faces severe problems of water and resources and extreme rural poverty. Muslim radical movements are significant in the rural areas. Instability in Yemen can affect security in the Red Sea, southern Saudi Arabia, and even the US itself, as with the bombing plots originating there. The US should pressure Saleh to make the transition to another leader quicker and less chaotic.
4. Pakistan’s politics is crisis-prone, but this year governance reached new lows of efficiency. The possibility that president Asaf Ali Zardari attempted to reach out to the US military for help with curbing his own officer corps, dubbed “Memogate” in Islamabad, has made relations between the civilian government and the military “frosty.” The US Congress is withholding military aid to Pakistan this year, which has already begun driving Pakistan closer to China. Flashpoints include hot pursuit at the AfPak border, US drone strikes on militants in the Federally Administered Tribal areas, NATO transport of goods through Pakistan to Afghanistan, and covert Pakistani support for the Haqqani Network, which the uS calls a terrorist organization. Bad relations between the US and Pakistan could negatively affect the course of the Afghan War and presents problems for US policy in South Asia as a whole.
3. The crisis in Syria remains grave. It can only end in one of three ways: The regime succeeds in repressing the reform movement, 2) the reform movement comes to power, or 3) the regime makes enough changes to allow a slow transition away from one-party authoritarianism. In the meantime, destabilizing hostilities could break out, with resultant instability in Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
2. The elections in Egypt are producing a parliament strongly dominated by representatives of political Islam, whether the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafis. The Muslim Brotherhood is making it clear that they want to submit the 1979 Camp David Peace treaty to a national referendum. A Muslim Brotherhood prime minister or president is most unlikely to be willing to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or to continue to help impose a blockade on the Palestinian civilians of Gaza. The Egyptian military is still ultimately in control, and it does not want hostilities with Israel, so that this change is unlikely to go beyond producing tensions. But if the Israelis believed that the Egyptians were lax in their inspections at the Rafah checkpoint at Gaza, they might well bomb it, risking killing Egyptian troops. How such actions could spiral out of control is something no one can predict. In any case, rising Egyptian-Israeli tensions for the first time since the early 1970s present a severe challenge to US policy, which attempts to maintain good relations with both.
1. Iran presents the greatest challenges to Washington policy, mainly because Washington insists on building up Iran as a threat. The Iraq of PM Nouri al-Maliki has been moving closer to Iran, both because al-Maliki owes his position as prime minister to Iran, and in part because Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Bahrain has alarmed Shiite-ruled Baghdad. The low-key war between the US and Iran could be ratcheted up by legislation just passed by Congress that targets the Central Bank, based in Tehran. The US is increasingly blockading Iran, an act of war in international law, and the possibility of escalating tensions leading in unexpected and tragic directions cannot be discounted.
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Ahmed Jan (pictured) is a tribal elder in North Waziristan. On March 17 2011 he was attending a gathering with other village elders, to discuss a mining dispute.