Washington Covering Up Number Of Victims Killed By Drones

The Senate's Intelligence Committee -- an oxymoron if ever there were one -- stripped a provision from the bill requiring President Obama to issue a annual public report that clarified the total number of "combatants" and "noncombatant civilians" killed or injured by drone strikes the previous year after relying on assurances from James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence who has lied and perjured himself numerous times in front of the U.S. Congress with total impunity, that the Obama White House was looking for its own ways to disclose more about the illicit drone strikes (link: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/28/drone-civilian-casualties-senate-bill-feinstein-clapper).
 
After his blatant lies about the NSA's illegal surveillance, Americans can rest assured that Clapper is yet again blowing smoke up their collective asses. Clapper claims that the Obama administration is confident that they can find a way to report to the American people more information to help them understand the importance of Washington's egregious actions that allegedly protect our nation while continuing their illegal activities. The government routinely uses lies and secrecy to shade its illegal activities conducted around the globe and as history has repeatedly shown, the only information the U.S. public will receive from the White about its illegal drone strikes is more propaganda.
 
SENATE’S ACTIONS ARE HARDLY SURPRISING
 
By removing the provision, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee hopes to preserve the illicit secrecy surrounding Washington's illegal actions and maintain the status quo. The Senate hopes to pass the bill in the coming weeks, offering Americans yet more evidence that the U.S. Congress is in collusion with a criminal Presidential administration that has further violated International law and will continue to do so with total impunity. And so the illegal actions in Washington will continue unabated. Covering up the number of actual victims killed by Washington’s drones does not make them legal.
 
Like the Obama White House, Feinstein's Intelligence Committee has fallaciously claimed that the drone targeting program kills only single digits of civilians, but that can't be confirmed by Washington due to the extreme secrecy surrounding the attacks. Basic information about the drone strikes is hard to obtain because of the dubious secrecy surrounding them. Numerous independent groups have been able to track the scores of people killed by drones, but an official U.S. count is not forthcoming. Most of the world only learns about the strikes after the fact when they are reported in the News.
 
The Senate's actions are hardly surprising given that the Obama administration has been so reticent about the illegal drone program and how many innocent victims it has actually killed. To date, Obama claims to have only killed four people in the illegally targeted drone strikes, but according to actual credible accounts, Obama's administration has actually killed several thousand people with UAVs (link: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/) since taking office. Why is Obama lying to the American people? For that matter, has Obama ever told the truth about anything his administration does? In a word: No.
 
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION HAS A TRANSPARENCY PROBLEM
 
Obama has lied repeatedly about his administration's illegal use of drones to target innocent civilians. He claimed that drone strikes would only be authorized away from the battlefield and only when necessary to respond to "continuing and imminent threats," but that too has been revealed as a lie. Obama has also lied repeatedly about drone strikes being carried out when people can't be captured and only when there is near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured. That too has also proved to be nothing but a fallacy as more innocent victims than terrorists have been slaughtered by his illegal drone strikes.
 
Given the Obama administration's problem with providing transparency – despite the many broken promises to be more transparent -- it is not surprising that Obama would want to cover his dubious actions in killing thousands of innocent civilians with illegal drone strikes. Claiming plausible deniability for killing innocent victims in Pakistan and Yemen is the norm since both governments routinely kill their own citizens with total impunity, but Obama's deniability in killing scores of innocent civilians in illegal drone strikes is no longer plausible, regardless of how often Obama denies his role in the crimes.
 
Since September 2012 Yemeni President Abed Raboo Mansour Hadi has signed off on Washington's drone strikes in Yemen and in April 2013 former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf admitted that his government agreed to Washington's drones strikes in Pakistan, But following a drone strike on a wedding party that killed a number of innocent victims in Yemen last December, Yemen suspended permission for the U.S. to conduct further drone strikes there until the incident was investigated. Naturally Washington never acknowledged its illegal actions or role in killing those innocent victims.
 
TOO MANY INNOCENT VICTIMS PAYING THE ULTIMATE PRICE
 
Several people have called on the Obama administration to increase transparency around the drone strikes but to no avail. In May of 2013 Obama claimed he wanted to restrict but not end the illegal drone strikes as they are a supposedly necessary tool to fight terrorism, confirming that civilians have been killed by them but he would not elaborate further into how many innocent victims have been struck or errantly targeted by them. The amount of U.S. drones strikes attacks are declining around the world but too many innocent victims are still paying the ultimate price for Washington's malfeasance.
 
International law does acknowledge that killing is not always illegal or wrong and that a government does have the authority to do so as a last resort in an actual case of self-defense, but the bulk of Washington's drone strikes do not fall into that category. If the killings are lawful as Obama had dubiously repeated, he should have no reservations at all about the public being made aware of them. But for obvious reasons, bringing that kind of transparency to the public is too much for the Obama administration (link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38370.htm).
 
The Senate and the Obama administration feel that the U.S. public should not know how many thousands of innocent people are killed by Washington's illegal drone strikes overseas, nor should they hope to understand the delusional circumstances under which such illegal strikes are authorized or executed (link: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/04/29). Obviously the U.S. Senate has no intention, or is not capable of, overseeing the Obama administration's illegal actions, choosing instead to be complicit while allowing them to continue unabated. We've seen how effective Congressional oversight really is since the so-called "terrorist attacks" of 9/11 -- virtually nonexistent.
 
Keywords: Drones, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAVs, Pakistan, Yemen, President Obama, US Senate, James Clapper, Illegal Drone Strikes, US Senate Intelligence Committee