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Barack Obama

Ranson Madzamba Correspondent
SINCE the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States has adopted targeted killing as an essential tactic to pursue those responsible for the catastrophic incident. The CIA and the Department of Defence (DoD) have been and are still the masterminders of the targeted killings.

Targeted killings using unmanned vehicles or drones (remote controlled aeroplanes) has been employed in Afghanistan and Iraq and in counter-terrorism efforts in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The US targeted killings have, however, turned to be a genocide in which innocent civilians are turning to be the targeted militants and are losing their lives.

Killing so many innocent people in the name of searching for terrorists must be an issue of concern worldwide. Charges have to be raised against those responsible for such atrocities.

No matter how much US President Barack Obama might want to defend it, there is nowhere the world is supposed to ignore his administration’s drone strikes against civilians.

They make it a hymn that there are human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, a phenomenon which has never been witnessed by us who live in Zimbabwe.

People are rather witnessing human rights abuses in countries like Yemeni, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan where innocent people have died and will continue to die from the bombardment of the US’ unmanned aerial vehicles which they claim are targeting terrorist militants.

Since assuming office in 2009, Obama’s administration has escalated targeted killings, primarily through an increase in drone strikes on alleged Al-Qaeda, but also through the expansion of US special operations.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the White House has made notable efforts to clarify its legal justification for targeted killings amid calls from lawmakers, rights activists and legal scholars for greater transparency and oversight of the lethal drone programme. In May 2013, Obama discussed the need for a “comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy” and issuing a new policy guideline related to US targeted killings.

Scholars such as Robert Mandel note that the George W. Bush and Obama administrations have sought to justify targeted killings under both domestic and international law. The domestic legal underpinning for US counter-terrorism operations and the targeted killing of members of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and its affiliates across the globe is the 2001 Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which the US Congress passed just days after the September 11 attacks. The statute empowers the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force” in pursuit of those responsible for the terrorist attacks. Peacetime assassinations, which are sometimes conflated with targeted killings, have been officially banned by the US since 1976.

The Obama administration asserts the United States remains in a state of armed conflict with Al-Qaeda and associated forces, and has laid out its justification for targeted killings over several major policy speeches. These include those given by Harold Koh, legal adviser of the US Department of State, in 2010; White House chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan (according to one blog) in 2011; Defence Department general counsel Jeh Johnson in 2012; Attorney-General Eric Holder in 2012, and Brennan, once more, in 2012.

The US claims to have the right to self-defence as laid out in Article 51 of the UN Charter and may include the targeted killing of persons such as high-level Al-Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks, both in and out of declared theatres of war. The administration’s posture includes the prerogative to unilaterally pursue targets in other states without their prior consent if that country is unwilling or unable to deal effectively with the threat.

In May 2013, Obama delivered a major address on US counter-terrorism policy at the National Defence University in Washington DC, in which he announced new policy guidance for US targeted killings off the conventional battlefield. Notably, he said that the same “high threshold” the administration has set for targeting US citizens will be extended to non-citizens — a policy that “respects the inherent dignity of every human life”. While the president’s speech largely defended US drone policy, he also called for the refinement and eventual repeal of the AUMF — “to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing”.

Philip Alston, the former UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, condemns the US claims of self-defence as overly expansive, stating that “if other states were to claim the broad-based authority that the US does, to kill people anywhere, anytime, the result would be chaos”. So talking of democracy and human rights abuse from the mouths of the Americans is something that is difficult to grasp for they are not that exemplary.

Having noticed all above pertaining to the massacres of the drone strikes, it would be justified for one to say individuals like Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya deserved to be free men and alive now as stated by President Mugabe.

A major criticism of US targeted killings or a drone strike in particular, is over the issue of collateral civilian deaths. Official Pakistani sources claim that 700 innocent people were killed in 2009 alone. Is killing civilians the rule of law? Who is supposed to face the guillotine over the massacres of civilians by the drone strikes? Unfortunately, all responsible persons are as free as Ian Smith was after the Chimoio and Nyadzonia massacres. They even claim to be the pacesetters on liberty, equality and fraternity in this world.

In November 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported the CIA had made several “secret concessions” in its drone programme after US diplomats suggested strikes targeting large groups of militants were harming relations.

In May 2013, President Obama acknowledged incidents of civilian casualties, but said “there is a wide gap between US assessments of such casualties, and non-governmental reports”.

In further defence, he said “the terrorists we are after, target civilians …”. In Zimbabwe likewise they talk of targeted sanctions. Zdera has and is still causing havoc to the economy of Zimbabwe. It came into existence after Zimbabweans under the leadership of President Mugabe embarked on the land reform programme. The Americans claimed there were gross human rights abuses under the programme. Which one has the gross human rights abuse – Zimbabwe’s land reform or civilian killings by the drone strikes?

Even if the Americans climb Mount Kilimanjaro and shout that the number of the casualties who have died in their drone strike programme is exaggerated, action has to be taken against them.

This must start from the United Nations and Nato. America’s hegemonic status is not only proving to be dangerous but rather poisonous to the whole world.