Drones, Baby, Drones by Hutchinson Ron;Lamb Christina;Greig David;

Author:Hutchinson, Ron;Lamb, Christina;Greig, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oberon Books

FROM A VERBATIM INTERVIEW WITH CLIVE STAFFORD

SMITH O.B.E. DIRECTOR OF REPRIEVE.

EDITED BY NICOLAS KENT

SEPTEMBER 2016

I am Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, and I’ve been talking about Drones for days – (with a laugh in his voice) I’m claiming that I coined the phrase the Drone Age, like the Stone Age.

We know [that there are regular Tuesday targeting meetings at the White House] as a matter of fact; as they said it and they boasted about it. They said how it happened, the President of the United States sits there, and they have a power point display where he is shown the pictures of who they might want to kill this week and he, much like Nero, he does a yea or nay with his thumb.

It is certainly true that the CIA has its own Drone programme, [the Pentagon and the CIA] both operate on the border between Afghanistan and Waziristan. According to what they’ve released, the military which is supposedly more open, not very open but slightly more open, has a code of conduct that is fairly specific. The CIA has no such oversight whatsoever, has no code of conduct, and President Obama waived the rules for the CIA so if you are doing something that is totally illegal, as opposed to just pretty illegal, then the rules are much looser, and you can do worse things.

In terms of criminal law [the U.S.] has a line of defence: they are the ones who prosecute themselves; so as long as they have established the rules that they can’t be prosecuted – they are okay. So the U.S. has not signed on [to] the International Criminal Court so we cannot prosecute them there, and the [U.S.] Attorney General who has signed off on this whole process in the first place, that all this is legal, is not going to prosecute people in America for what they did – so there is simply no way that these people are likely to get prosecuted there.

The Drones programme is utterly counter-productive; so for an example according to recent figures we have, for every HVT – high value target – they target they never get them first time. There is one chap, Baitullah Mesud, they have targeted seventeen times – you know a cat has nine lives, this guy has seventeen. On average they kill nine innocent children for each person they target – now I have got an eight year old – so you can imagine what that does to these communities, to kill all these children. There was this intelligence officer who said, in 2004, that for every Guantanamo prisoner we have provoked ten people to want to kill us. It is way more than that in the context of Drones, for every one individual we have killed we have provoked a whole community.

We studied one particular group of people. For the whole figure of those they were targeting, it was 1437 people they had killed in an effort to target forty-seven

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