US drone strikes must stop, says American lawyer

A Global Hawk UAV is seen flying over an unidentified location in this US Air Force image.




Prominent international human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith was impressed by the 16-year-old boy who wanted to draw attention to civilian deaths caused by US drone strikes in Pakistan.

Tariq Aziz had volunteered to take pictures of people killed by the remotely piloted aircraft to help Stafford Smith highlight what he calls illegal killings.

Three days later, on October 31, he and his 12-year-old cousin were themselves killed by a drone missile strike in the North Waziristan region on the Afghan border, Stafford Smith said.

For the veteran lawyer, the deaths highlighted major flaws in the CIA-run drone campaign, which US officials say is invaluable in the war on militants.

“What they did to Tariq was absolutely disgusting,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview.



Stafford Smith made his name defending death row inmates in the United States and prisoners at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

He considers the drones as “scandalous” as the secret US bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

Eighty Pakistani tribesmen, including Aziz, recently met Stafford Smith and other Western lawyers for the first time, in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, to complain about the drones.

The United States has sharply stepped up the number of drone attacks in Pakistan’s unruly ethnic Pashtun areas in the northwest, along the border with Afghanistan.

In 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, there were 53 strikes, compared with 42 over the previous four years. In 2010, that number jumped to 118, followed by 68 this year, according to the New America Foundation.

The think tank’s statistics raise doubts about the success of the drones. It estimates as many as 471 civilians were killed by drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004-2011, a 20 per cent non-militant fatality rate.

US officials point to the deaths of senior al Qaeda and Taliban figures as proof the drones are highly effective, and no American troops are needed on the ground.

Missile-armed drones are playing a greater role than ever in US counterterrorism operations, as Obama winds down land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Washington’s focus expands to militant havens in countries such as Pakistan.

“Science fiction nightmare”

Stafford Smith says the strategy will cause more civilian deaths and create additional enemies for the United States.

“When you have warfare with no political costs at all, it becomes much too easy to resort to violence,” he said, adding his goal was to raise international awareness about the suffering caused by drone strikes.

“What we are seeing in Waziristan is a process that is alienating the population just as napalm in Vietnam did and it’s achieving very little benefit.”

Stafford Smith drew parallels between Guantanamo and the drone campaign in Pakistan, arguing both detentions and strikes were often based on dubious intelligence.

He suspects the death of Aziz was a prime example of that.

“We as America offer large bounties to different informants and these informants would sell their own mothers,” said Stafford Smith, 52, a dual US-British citizen who is the director of Reprieve, an organisation that advocates for prisoners’ rights.

“We don’t have proof but this (Aziz’s death) was the result of some Pakistani informants who want to show their paymasters they are doing their jobs. So they make up a story and a poor kid dies.”

Drone “pilots” based in the United States move joy sticks around as they watch live video feeds of militants, who are killed with the push of a button.

“We keep talking our way into a system of warfare that was in our science fiction nightmare 30 years ago and we really need to have an open debate on it,” said Stafford Smith.

He faces an uphill battle. US policy makers are encouraged by drone operations like the one that killed US-born militant cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in September.

But Stafford Smith believes “justice” will prevail.

“In the early days of Guantanamo Bay people said ‘no one will pay attention’. It was difficult,” he said.

“I have no doubt the American people and everyone else will recognise what’s going on here and put an end to it.”

Pakistan drone attack kills six 'militants'

There have been frequent drone attacks in Pakistan's border area

Six suspected militants have been killed by missiles fired by a US drone in Pakistan's tribal belt.

The missiles targeted a house in Karikot village near Wana, the main town in South Waziristan district.

The house belonging to a militant commander, Maulana Halimullah, has been destroyed, an official said.

Waziristan is a sanctuary for al-Qaeda and Taliban militants blamed for attacks in Afghanistan. The area has seen frequent US drone raids.



Pakistani officials say the US has carried out at least 70 such raids since January.

Pakistan publicly criticises the attacks, saying they fuel support for militants.

But observers say the authorities privately condone the strikes.

In one high-profile attack last August, Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was killed.

Qaeda says top leader Yazid dead-Possible killed by Pakistan drone attack.

Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri


Top Al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, has died, SITE reported

Al-Qaeda has announced the death of Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, regarded as its number three and Osama bin Laden's one-time top money man, in what would be a major blow to the global terror network.

US monitoring groups said the death of Yazid, who was most recently the leader of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and its liaison with the Taliban, was announced by the group in a message to jihadist websites on Monday.

In Washington, a US official said there was "strong reason" to believe that the Egyptian militant was dead and that he was killed recently in Pakistan's tribal areas, a hotbed of Islamist militants.

"In terms of counterterrorism, this would be a big victory," the official said.


Al-Qaida leader in Afghanistan, Mustafa abu al-Yazid, was killed last month in Pakistan, security officials believe


Yazid, one of a number of Egyptians in the higher echelons of Al-Qaeda, was a founder member of the network and a former treasurer to bin Laden who was accused of channelling money to some of the September 11 hijackers.

"Al-Masri was the group's chief operating officer, with a hand in everything from finances to operational planning," the US official said, using another name for the 54-year-old Yazid.

"He was also the organisation's prime conduit to bin Laden and Zawahiri," he said referring to Al-Qaeda number two and fellow Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri. "He was key to Al-Qaeda's command and control."

The Al-Qaeda message carried by the SITE group which monitors Islamist websites did not give any details about the circumstances of the death of Yazid other than to speak of his "martyrdom".

But it said the message from Al-Qaeda posted on jihadist forums on May 31 said his wife, three of his daughters, his granddaughter, and other men, women, and children, were killed.

"His death will only be a severe curse by his life upon the infidels. The response is near. That is sufficient," according to the message translated by SITE.

Yazid was on the list of individuals, organisations and charities whose assets were frozen by the US Treasury in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

According to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, it was Yazid who transferred funds via Dubai for Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Wal al-Shehri, three of the September 11 hijackers who flew aircraft into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

The dark-bearded Yazid has appeared in a number of videos released by Al-Qaeda since he first appeared as head of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in May 2007, wearing thick glasses and a white turban.

A former member of the Islamic Jihad movement in Egypt, he had close links with Zawahiri and served time in jail over the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

"This is one of the most significant blows against Al-Qaeda in recent years and its impact will be felt by the group," said Ben Venzke of intelligence analysis group IntelCenter.

He said Yazid ran Al-Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"While the loss of al-Yazid will have an impact, the group will likely maintain its operational tempo in terms of attacks and other activities."

According to Yasser al-Sirri, the director of the London-based Islamic Observatory, Yazid was born in December 1955 in the Al-Sharqiya area of the Nile Delta in Egypt.

Sirri said at the time of Yazid's appearance in May 2007 that he was "trusted by bin Laden, for whom he ran businesses in Sudan" when the founder of Al-Qaeda lived in exile there before Khartoum expelled him in 1996.

"Yazid is known for his integrity and management skills, but has never taken organisational or military responsibility at the heart of Al-Qaeda, of which he was one of the founders in 1989," Sirri said.

Yazid's last public statement was in a message released on May 4, when he delivered a eulogy for Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Masri, the two top Al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq who were killed in April.

Pakistani and US security officials say they believe the head of al-Qaida in Afghanistan has been killed in a drone strike in Pakistan's tribal area.

Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, a veteran Egyptian militant close to Osama bin Laden, was hit in a drone strike last month, an official with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) said. "He was killed on the 21st or 22nd, I believe," he said.

In Washington US security officials told reporters they had "strong reason" to believe Yazid was dead. "In terms of counterterrorism, this would be a big victory," a source told Reuters.

A website linked to al-Qaida also acknowledged his death.

Yazid, whose nom de guerre was Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, had a hand in al-Qaida training, logistics and finance for the resurgent Taliban insurgency.

US reports described him as al Qaida's "number three", a title frequently bestowed on assassinated Bin Laden associates, although some analysts said it may not be accurate in this case.

There is little doubt, however, that Yazid's death, if confirmed, marks the passing of a senior Arab militant of long experience and unusually close ties to both Bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.

In his mid-50s, Yazid was one of the founding members of al-Qaida in the late 1980s and followed Bin Laden to Sudan before returning to Afghanistan with him in the late 1990s.

He developed a close relationship with the Taliban, learning to speak Pashto and absorbing their culture, which earned him warmer respect than many other Arab fighters whom local Taliban found arrogant.

Specialised in logistic and finance, since 2001 Yazid became the key link between al-Qaida, which is based in Pakistan's tribal areas, and the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, according to Michael Scheuer, a former head of the CIA cell hunting bin Laden.

"They put him in charge of Afghanistan, so that al-Qaida could serve as the supporting instrument the insurgency. He would have made sure there was appropriate training, flow of arms, finance."

Yazid was erroneously reported dead by Pakistani officials after a drone strike in August 2008. But this time US officials are expressing greater confidence, citing chatter on Islamist networks and acknowledgement of his death on an al-Qaida website.

Some militancy experts, however, disputed the description of Yazid as al Qaida's "number three", saying the title may more properly belong to Abh Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan militant who escaped from a high-security US military prison in Afghanistan in 2005.

Although US officials are keen to stress his apparent death as a blow for al-Qaida and another success in the controversial drone campaign, it remains unclear what effect it will have.

Several other senior al-Qaida figures have been killed in drone strikes in recent years, and in each case a successor has quickly sprung up. What his death may mark, in fact, is the passing of the al-Qaida torch from one generation of militants to another.

Scheuer, a prominent critic of US foreign policy, said the drones could not compensate for the lacker of a wider, politically-based strategy against al-Qaida that defuses Muslim grievances across the world include the Israel-Palestine conflict.

"All this is negated by what the Israelis did to that relief convoy. Whatever we gained from killing Sheikh Yazid, what the Israelis did will just cause more animosity to the United States. But Americans have a very hard time connecting the dots.

C.I.A. Missile Strike May Have Killed Pakistan’s Taliban Leader, Officials Say

Officials in Washington and Islamabad were scrambling to make sense of communications intercepts and other intelligence that seemed to indicate that Mr. Mehsud might have been killed in the strike. By Thursday evening, American officials said they were growing increasingly confident that the Taliban leader was dead.

The missile struck a house in the remote village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan, about 1 a.m. Wednesday. Local residents reached by telephone confirmed that one of the wives of Mr. Mehsud, the leader of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, was among those killed. Her name or age could not be confirmed.

Five others, including four children, were reportedly wounded in the missile strike.

The compound where the attack took place belonged to Ikramuddin Mehsud, a local tribal elder whose daughter is Baitullah Mehsud’s second wife.

The strike by a drone early Wednesday morning hit a compound in the remote village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan. Village residents said that day that one of Mr. Mehsud’s wives had been killed in the attack and that several children had been wounded.

Pakistani officials publicly condemn these attacks, but they have privately given their blessing to the strikes in the country’s tribal areas, in part because the missile attacks increasingly have focused on Mr. Mehsud’s network.

Baitullah Mehsud, the self-professed leader of the Pakistani Taliban, has vowed to to send more suicide bombers to kill US troops in Afghanistan.(The Mehsuds are a large warrior Pashtun tribe renowned for never being pacified by the British forces.)

The US homeland security chief is calling on Pakistan to strike back against Taliban fighters on its border with Afghanistan.

The US and NATO say a truce between the Taliban and Pakistan in the North-West Frontier province has already led to more fighting.

Still, they cautioned that it may be weeks before they are certain, and they may never gain access to the remote location in South Waziristan to perform DNA tests.

“There is reason to believe that reports of his death may be true, but it can’t be confirmed at this time,” said an American official with access to classified intelligence reports.

Mr. Mehsud and his military network have been blamed for a wave of violence across Pakistan, including the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister.

The militant leader also seemed to take pleasure in taunting Pakistani officials and holding news conferences to demonstrate the inability of officials in Islamabad to rein in his network.

Mr. Mehsud pledged to attack Washington, but American officials did not take the threat seriously. Still, his network is believed to have close ties to Qaeda leaders in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The C.I.A. made killing Mr. Mehsud one of its top priorities this year, partly at the urging of Pakistan’s civilian government. Pakistani officials, including President Asif Ali Zardari, had complained that the campaign of missile strikes by American drones was killing only militants responsible for killing American troops in Afghanistan.

Since then, the State Department has offered a reward of as much as $5 million for Mr. Mehsud. The C.I.A. also began trying to track his daily movements, and American intelligence officials believed on several occasions that they had almost killed him.

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Past news :- Baitullah Mehsud believed to responsible for Bhutto assassinations.

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Insider story : Pakistan Taliban.Peace talks between the Pakistani government and Taliban rebels have collapsed as the government refused to pull its troops out of its tribal border region with Afghanistan. Inside Story asks what the failure of the talks will mean for Pakistan.

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