At least 18 Afghan civilians, including seven children, were killed early Wednesday morning after US special operations troops called in an air strike on their homes.

The massacre provoked an angry demonstration in Pul-i-Alam, the capital of Logar province southeast of Kabul, where the strike took place. Afghanistan's PAN news service reported that residents came to the capital carrying the shattered bodies of the dead, to prove that the victims were civilians.

"The protesters chanted anti-US and anti-Afghan government slogans, saying 'death to America, death to the Afghan government, death to [Afghan President] Hamid Karzai and death to Barack Obama," PAN reported.

Security forces opened fire on the protesters, wounding at least one of them.

As is its standard operating procedure, the US-led occupation denied any knowledge of civilian victims, claiming all of the dead were "Taliban insurgents".

"I do not have any reporting that would allow me to confirm civilian deaths," Major Martyn Crighton, a spokesman for the occupation forces said.

The Associated Press, however, reported Wednesday that its photographer in Logar province "saw the bodies of five women, seven children and six men piled in the back of vans that villagers drove to the capital of Logar province to protest the overnight strike."

According to local Afghan officials, US special operations troops were mounting a night raid on a house in the Baraki Barak district in Logar province, when they came under fire. In response, they called in an air strike.

The strike reportedly hit the home of a village elder, Bashir Akhundzada, who was killed in the attack. The Associated Press quoted the head of the local village council as saying that a number of families had gathered at Akhundzada's home Tuesday night for a wedding party.

"The house is completely destroyed," said the local official. "Everyone is shovelling to try to get the bodies out. Some of the bodies have no legs, no hands."

Two and a half weeks after the NATO summit in Chicago-where President Obama declared that "the Afghan war as we understand it is over"-violence in Afghanistan continues to escalate and the death toll continues to mount.

In Ghazni province, south of Logar, troops of the US 82nd Airborne are carrying out a major offensive in what has long been a stronghold of the armed opposition groups, as well as a route for men and supplies joining the fight from Pakistan. The Pentagon has billed the operation as the last major offensive in which massed American troops will be "clearing" villages, going house-to-house in a bid to drive out resistance forces.

An armed US helicopter went down over Ghazni province on Wednesday, killing two American pilots. "It is likely that the helo today was brought down due to enemy small arms and RPG fire," a Pentagon official told CNN.

The 82nd Airborne units fighting in Ghazni are scheduled to leave Afghanistan in September, as the US military completes the drawdown of the troops sent there in the "surge" ordered by Obama in December 2009.

That drawdown will leave approximately 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan after September. While a formal deadline set by NATO calls for completing the withdrawal of all "combat forces" from Afghanistan by 2014, a "strategic partnership" deal signed by Obama and Karzai in Kabul at the beginning of last month sets the stage for a continued occupation of the country by what is projected to be at least 20,000 US troops, including large contingents of special operations forces. The US will maintain its control over air power in the country and, through the deployment of "trainers" and "advisors", will direct the operations of the Afghan security forces.

The type of operation carried out in Logar province, involving Special Forces night raids and air strikes, will continue well past 2014 under the plans drafted by the Obama administration and the Pentagon. These operations are hated by the Afghan people and have prompted impotent protests by Karzai, who has publicly demanded that US military forces stop operations in Afghan villages and end air strikes that kill civilians. In reality, however, Karzai's puppet regime, widely hated by the Afghan people, remains dependent upon US firepower to keep him in the presidential palace.

Washington is also escalating its military violence across the border in Pakistan, with eight drone strikes carried out against targets there over the past two weeks. Pakistan's foreign ministry called in a senior US diplomat Tuesday following a drone strike the day before that killed at least 15 people in the northwestern frontier tribal region of North Waziristan. It was the third such strike in as many days, which together claimed 27 lives.

A statement issued by the Pakistani ministry called the drone strikes "unlawful, against international law, and a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty".

Rebuffing the Pakistani protest, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Wednesday that the drone strikes are "about our sovereignty as well". He claimed that the US is "fighting a war in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas]" and is justified in doing so, "because there were a group of individuals who attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 of our citizens."

While Panetta invokes September 11 as the pretext for Washington's drone war in Pakistan, the majority of the missile strikes from the pilotless aircraft are directed at individuals suspected not of terrorist plots against the United States, but of resisting the more than decade-old US military occupation of Afghanistan.

The provocative character of Panetta's comments were magnified by the fact that he delivered them from New Delhi, Pakistan's historic rival in south Asia, where he also urged greater involvement of India in Afghanistan, a prospect seen by Islamabad as a direct threat to Pakistan's strategic position in the region.

Demonstratively identifying US interests with those of India, Panetta said: "Just as India views the relationship with Pakistan as complicated, so we do. It is a complicated relationship, often times frustrating, often times difficult."

Relations between Washington and Islamabad have been marked by tension, particularly since US air strikes on Pakistani posts on the Afghan border last November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. In retaliation, Islamabad closed the routes from the port of Karachi to the Afghan border upon which the US-led occupation force depended for at least a third of its supplies.

On Monday, the Pentagon announced that it had reached deals with the former Soviet Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, allowing US troops and equipment to use their territory to enter and leave Afghanistan. This so-called Northern Distribution Network is considerably longer and more expensive than the route through Pakistan, but it appears Washington is turning to it as part of preparations for a protracted and intensifying military intervention in the South Asian country.

US Airstrike Kills 18 Afghan Civilians

meanwhile .....

A former top terrorism official at the CIA has warned that President Barack Obama's controversial drone programme is far too indiscriminate in hitting targets and could lead to such political instability that it creates terrorist safe havens.

Obama's increased use of drones to attack suspected Islamic militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen has become one of the most controversial aspects of his national security policy. He has launched at least 275 strikes in Pakistan alone; a rate of attack that is far higher than his predecessor George W Bush.

Defenders of the policy say it provides a way of hitting high-profile targets, such as al-Qaida number two, Abu Yahya al-Libi. But critics say the definition of militant is used far too broadly and there are too many civilian casualties. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates up to 830 civilians, including many women and children, might have been killed by drone attacks in Pakistan, 138 in Yemen and 57 in Somalia. Hundreds more have been injured.

Now Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA's counter-terrorism center from 2004 to 2006 and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, has told the Guardian that the drone programme is targeted too broadly. "It [the drone program] needs to be targeted much more finely. We have been seduced by them and the unintended consequences of our actions are going to outweigh the intended consequences," Grenier said in an interview.

Grenier emphasised that the use of drones was a valuable tool in tackling terrorism but only when used against specific identified targets, who have been tracked and monitored to a place where a strike is feasible. However, recent media revelations about Obama's programme have revealed a more widespread use of the strike capability, including the categorising of all military-age males in a strike zone of a target as militants. That sort of broad definition and the greater use of drones has outraged human rights organisations.

The BIJ has reported that drone strikes in Pakistan over the weekend hit a funeral gathering for a militant slain in a previous strike and also may have accidentally hit a mosque. That sort of action adds credence to the claims that the drone campaign is likely to cause more damage by creating anger at the US than it does in eliminating terrorist threats.

"We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield. We are already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan," he said.

Grenier said he had particular concerns about Yemen, where al-Qaida linked groups have launched an insurgency and captured swathes of territory from the over-stretched local army. US drones have been active in the country, striking at targets that have included killing US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son.

The BIJ estimates that there have been up to 41 confirmed US drone strikes in Yemen since 2002 and possibly up a 55 unconfirmed ones. Grenier said the strikes were too indiscriminate and causing outrage among the civilian population in the country, lending support to Islamists and seeing a growth in anti-US sentiment.

"That brings you to a place where young men, who are typically armed, are in the same area and may hold these militants in a certain form of high regard. If you strike them indiscriminately you are running the risk of creating a terrific amount of popular anger. They have tribes and clans and large families. Now all of a sudden you have a big problem ... I am very concerned about the creation of a larger terrorist safe haven in Yemen," Grenier said.

Grenier was the CIA's station chief in Islamabad when terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York and attacked the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. He played a key role in co-ordinating covert operations that led up to the downfall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. He later headed up the CIA's CTC where he led the CIA's global operations in the War on Terror as its top counter-terrorism official. He left the agency in 2006.

Drone Attacks Create Terrorist Safe Havens, Warns Former CIA Official

The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said.

Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards.

In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested some may even constitute "war crimes". His comments come amid rising international unease over the surge in killings by remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Addressing the conference, which was organised by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a second UN rapporteur, Ben Emmerson QC, who monitors counter-terrorism, announced he would be prioritising inquiries into drone strikes.

The London-based barrister said the issue was moving rapidly up the international agenda after China and Russia this week jointly issued a statement at the UN Human Rights Council, backed by other countries, condemning drone attacks.

If the US or any other states responsible for attacks outside recognised war zones did not establish independent investigations into each killing, Emmerson emphasised, then "the UN itself should consider establishing an investigatory body".

Also present was Pakistan's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Zamir Akram, who called for international legal action to halt the "totally counterproductive attacks" by the US in his country.

Heyns, a South African law professor, told the meeting: "Are we to accept major changes to the international legal system which has been in existence since world war two and survived nuclear threats?"

Some states, he added, "find targeted killings immensely attractive. Others may do so in future ... Current targeting practices weaken the rule of law. Killings may be lawful in an armed conflict [such as Afghanistan] but many targeted killings take place far from areas where it's recognised as being an armed conflict."

If it is true, he said, that "there have been secondary drone strikes on rescuers who are helping (the injured) after an initial drone attack, those further attacks are a war crime".

Heyns ridiculed the US suggestion that targeted UAV strikes on al-Qaida or allied groups were a legitimate response to the 9/11 attacks. "It's difficult to see how any killings carried out in 2012 can be justified as in response to [events] in 2001," he said. "Some states seem to want to invent new laws to justify new practices.

"The targeting is often operated by intelligence agencies which fall outside the scope of accountability. The term 'targeted killing' is wrong because it suggests little violence has occurred.

The collateral damage may be less than aerial bombardment, but because they eliminate the risk to soldiers they can be used more often."

Heyns told the Guardian later that his future inquiries are likely to include the question of whether other countries, such as the UK, share intelligence with the US that could be used for selecting individuals as targets. A legal case has already been lodged in London over the UK's alleged role in the deaths of British citizens and others as a consequence of US drone strikes in Pakistan.

Emmerson said that protection of the right to life required countries to establish independent inquiries into each drone killing. "That needs to be applied in the context of targeted killings," he said. "It's possible for a state to establish an independent ombudsman to inquire into every attack and there needs to be a report to justify [the killing]."

Alternatively, he said, it was "for the UN itself to consider establishing an investigatory body. Drones attacks by the US raise fundamental questions which are a direct consequence of my mandate... If they don't [investigate] themselves, we will do it for them."

It is time, he added, to end the "conspiracy of silence" over drone attacks and "shine the light of independent investigation" into the process. The attacks, he noted, were not only on those who had been killed but on the system of "international law itself".

The Pakistani ambassador declared that more than a thousand civilians had been killed in his country by US drone strikes. "We find the use of drones to be totally counterproductive in terms of succeeding in the war against terror. It leads to greater levels of terror rather than reducing them," he said.

Claims made by the US about the accuracy of drone strikes were "totally incorrect", he added. Victims who had tried to bring compensation claims through the Pakistani courts had been blocked by US refusals to respond to legal actions.

The US has defended drone attacks as self-defence against al-Qaida and has refused to allow judicial scrutiny of the UAV programme. On Wednesday, the Obama administration issued a fresh rebuff through the US courts to an ACLU request for information about targeting policies. Such details, it insisted, must remain "classified".

Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's national security project, said: "Something that is being debated in UN hallways and committee rooms cannot apparently be talked about in US courtrooms, according to the government. Whether the CIA is involved in targeted lethal operation is now classified. It's an absurd fiction."

The ACLU estimates that as many as 4,000 people have been killed in US drone strikes since 2002 in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Of those, a significant proportion were civilians. The numbers killed have escalated significantly since Obama became president.

The USA is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or many other international legal forums where legal action might be started. It is, however, part of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) where cases can be initiated by one state against another.

Ian Seiderman, director of the International Commission of Jurists, told the conference that "immense damage was being done to the fabric of international law".

One of the latest UAV developments that concerns human rights groups is the way in which attacks, they allege, have moved towards targeting groups based on perceived patterns of behaviour that look suspicious from aerial surveillance, rather than relying on intelligence about specific al-Qaida activists.

In response to a report by Heyns to the UN Human Rights Council this week, the US put out a statement in Geneva saying there was "unequivocal US commitment to conducting such operations with extraordinary care and in accordance with all applicable law, including the law of war".

It added that there was "continuing commitment to greater transparency and a sincere effort to address some of the important questions that have been raised".

Drone Strikes Threaten 50 years Of International Law, Says UN Rapporteur

meanwhile .....

The Obama administration has sought to block the release of documents related to its use of robot drones to strike suspected terrorists overseas, claiming that it can still not admit that the secretive programme of targeted killing exists.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the New York Times have both submitted freedom of information requests to the department of justice, the CIA and the Pentagon seeking information about the programme. They have now gone to court to try and force the government to answer those requests and release details of its activities.

However, in a motion filed just before midnight ET on Wednesday, the government asked for the cases to be dismissed, saying that to release information would hurt national security, even while still insisting it cannot admit any such programme of targeted killing exists.

"Whether or not the CIA has the authority to be, or is in fact, directly involved in targeted lethal operations remains classified," the government said in a court filing.

The move prompted the ACLU to label the continued refusal to acknowledge the use of drones to kill alleged terrorist leaders as "absurd" given that both President Barack Obama and his counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan have both made public references to it.

There have also been extensive leaks to the press, notably the New York Times, which recently ran a highly detailed story about a "kill list" that the Obama administration maintains.

"The notion that the CIA's targeted killing programme is still a secret is beyond absurd. Senior officials have discussed it, both on the record and off. They have taken credit for its putative successes, professed it to be legal, and dismissed concerns about civilian casualties," said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director.

US drone strikes have been credited by the administration with having badly damaged al-Qaida in places like Pakistan and Yemen, but are widely criticised by rights groups over the secrecy that makes it impossible to determine casualty figures, whether they are military or civilians, or on what legal basis the attacks occur.

Particular points of contention have been the New York Times' revelation that the administration considers any male of military age in a strike zone when a drone hits to be a militant and thus a legitimate target.

The deaths via drone attacks of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son - who was also an American citizen - have likewise earned condemnation from many human rights and civil liberties organisations.

The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which runs a drone-monitoring project, estimates that the US has used drones against targets in Pakistan up to 332 times in the past eight years, with a huge jump in activity under Obama. The Bureau believes up to 800 civilians may have been killed in the attacks. It has also monitored scores of drone attacks in Yemen and Somalia.

Jaffer called on the administration to be more open and demanded some form of public legal oversight. "We continue to have profound concerns that with the power the administration is claiming and with the proposition that the president should be be permitted to exercise this power without oversight by the courts. That the administration believes a power so sweeping should be exercised in secret is astounding," he said.

Despite its refusal to acknowledge a targeted killing programme exists there have been numerous public statements about the programme.

In April Brennan gave a speech where he said the programme "sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft" was carried out "in full accordance of the law" and used to strike specific al-Qaida terrorists.

Obama himself referenced the programme when asked about it in January. The president said the programme used only "precise, precision strikes against al-Qaida and their affiliates."

Drone Strikes: Obama Moves To Block Release Of Files On Kill Programme

Drone strikes and targeted assassinations abroad have seen the US violating human rights in a way that "abets our enemies and alienates our friends", according to the former president Jimmy Carter.

He said America was "abandoning its role as a champion of human rights", and called on Washington to "reverse course and regain moral leadership".

Revelations that US officials were targeting people including their own citizens abroad were "only the most recent disturbing proof" of how far such violations had extended, he wrote in the New York Times.

At a time when popular revolutions were sweeping the globe, the US should be strengthening, not weakening, "basic rules of law and principles of justice", Carter said.

Attacks on human rights after 9/11 had been "sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public", he said. "As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues."

Carter added: "While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past."

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 with US leadership, "has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world's dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs," he said.

"It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government's counter-terrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration's 30 articles, including the prohibition against 'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment'."

Recent legislation had made legal the president's right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organisations or "associated forces", Carter said. "This law violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration."

There were "unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications. Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate."

Carter said: "Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable. After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in any war zone. We don't know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times."

Regarding the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Carter said of the 169 prisoners held there: "About half have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom. American authorities have revealed that, in order to obtain confessions, some of the few being tried (only in military courts) have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semi-automatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers. Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a defence by the accused, because the government claims they occurred under the cover of 'national security'. Most of the other prisoners have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either."

Instead of making the world safer, "America's violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends", he said.

"As concerned citizens, we must persuade Washington to reverse course and regain moral leadership according to international human rights norms that we had officially adopted as our own and cherished throughout the years."

Jimmy Carter Savages US Foreign Policy Over Drone Strikes

The effort to depict drone warfare as some sort of courageous and noble act is intensifying:

'The Pentagon is considering awarding a Distinguished Warfare Medal to drone pilots who work on military bases often far removed from the battlefield. . . .

[Army Institute of Heraldry chief Charles] Mugno said most combat decorations require "boots on the ground" in a combat zone, but he noted that "emerging technologies" such as drones and cyber combat missions are now handled by troops far removed from combat.

The Pentagon has not formally endorsed the medal, but Mugno's institute has completed six alternate designs for commission approval. . . .

The proposed medal would rank between the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Soldier's Medal for exceptional conduct outside a combat zone.'

So medals would be awarded for sitting safely ensconced in a bunker on U.S. soil and launching bombs with a video joystick at human beings thousands of miles away.

Whatever one thinks of the justifiability of drone attacks, it's one of the least "brave" or courageous modes of warfare ever invented. It's one thing to call it just, but to pretend it's "brave" is Orwellian in the extreme. Indeed, the whole point of it is to allow large numbers of human beings to be killed without the slightest physical risk to those doing the killing. Killing while sheltering yourself from all risk is the definitional opposite of bravery.

Bravery & Drone Pilots

Robert Greenwald, head of the progressive internet video and documentary film company, Brave New Films, recently traveled to Pakistan, supported financially by hundreds of BNF donors, to witness first hand the stories of families who have had innocent loved ones killed by US drone attacks.  

Greenwald is challenging both the morality and the factual effectiveness of the U.S drone program as we learn more about the failures and questionable policies.  

The US claims that drone missiles are aimed at potential terrorists but because the ground rules of who can be targeted is both vague and has been loosened, the number of innocents being killed has risen sharply. Furthermore, the information that is used to target people, appears to be the result of a system of bribery at the local level, which is of questionable reliability.

It wasn't until April 2012 that John Brennan, White House counter-terrorism adviser admitted for the first time publicly, that our government has been using drones in Pakistan, and later Yemen, to attempt to kill those they consider as potential terrorists. This was the first public acknowledgment, despite the fact that the program had been going for at least several years. Still far more information was withheld in Brennan's announcement about the program, than was revealed.  

As The Washington Post reports: "Brennan’s speech was also noteworthy, however, for what he withheld. He did not disclose how many people have been killed, list all the locations where armed drones are being flown or mention the administration’s increasing reliance on 'signature' strikes, which allow the CIA to fire missiles even when it doesn’t know the identities of those who could be killed."

The CIA runs the drone program and it is shrouded in secrecy, which enables people like Brennan to characterize the program in glowing terms, which go mainly unchallenged by the media, and contribute to the public assumption that drones are accurate, safe, and taking out the bad guys. Thus  Brennan is able to get away with saying, as reported in the Post : Drones’ capability to linger over targets for days enables unprecedented “surgical precision,” Brennan said, “the ability, with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qaeda terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it - that makes this counter-terrorism tool so essential.” This despite little evidence that active or powerful elements of Al-Qaeda are operating in the Swat area of Pakistan which has been targeted by drones.

Nevertheless, increasingly another story is emerging which raises fundamental questions about the wisdom and the morality of our policy vis a vis Pakistan, and Brennan's effort to pretend that the drone program isn't destructive, and hugely alienating to Pakistan.   According to Greenwald, speaking to his staff in a briefing upon his return from Pakistan, people with whom he spoke "said the Drone attacks were a great recruiting tool for the Taliban, because powerless people want to fight back for the losses they have suffered, as their communities and families are attacked.  Many businesses have been destroyed in the Swat area, and schools are empty because everyone is afraid of drone attacks.

Greenwald explains:  Let's assume for a moment the drones can be technically accurate, although that is questionable. What information are they using to establish their targets? Basically it is a form of bribery, where the CIA gives former Pakistani military large sums of money to pass out to sources on the ground in Swat, where the Taliban are most active. Sometimes, - and it is impossible to tell how much - these bribes lead to the settling of old and local scores."

So there is another painful and tragic side to the drone story - not the one of killing so called "militant targets" but rather the slaughter of innocent civilians, as stories of drone victims have emerged in the Fata area of  Swat where the drones are targeted. 

Greenwald recounted one situation, as told to him from people from area of the bombing  that there was  a group of elders were meeting in a Jirga - a kind town meeting of elders - to  resolve a community conflict , this one a dispute about mining. But the meeting was interpreted by drone intelligence as a group of men with guns - obviously not unusual for the region - and it became a "signature strike" - and a missile killed between 20 and 40 of the elders. 

Like with their intense efforts to work to end the war in Afghanistan, Greenwald and Brave New Films started their quest to change U.S. drone policy with heavy odds (and check out his latest efforts at WarCosts.com). But just as the public attitude toward the Afghan war shifted over time, with heavy dosages of strong factual information contrary to the administration's line, Greenwald is confident that thee attitude toward drones will shift.

AlterNet spoke with Greenwald in his Culver City California offices on November 26th, just after his return from Pakistan.

Don Hazen: Tell us a little bit about what it was like in Pakistan, and what surprised you, and made you think you were doing the right thing by going there and pursuing the drone story.  

Robert Greenwald: The first-hand experience immediately was that the people couldn't have been more gracious, and that was surprising, given how hated the drones are - by virtue of all measure of statistics - in the great majority of the country. 

Don Hazen: What was their message to you? Did they understand you to be a messenger to the public here in the US?

Robert Greenwald: Many of the people asked me to talk to the president of the United States, and to explain to him who they were - that they were not terrorists; they were farmers, they were peasants, they were poor people, they were working people, they were religious people. I heard that over and over again - to please explain this to the President how much damage this was doing. And some of them had the belief that just his understanding who they really were would force him to change his mind about the drone attacks. 

Don Hazen: What is your sense of the Obama policy's effect in Pakistan?  What's your thinking about why we have moved to the use of drones as a major policy shift, and is it working? 

Robert Greenwald:  After a trip to the region, is very hard to understand or justify why we're doing it. I feel, like when I went to Afghanistan - there two minutes after walking around on the streets, and you knew this was a country that invading and occupying was not going to be a security solution. After a short period of time in Pakistan, it's clear that drones are not a security solution either. If you believe in drones, the original idea was to go after so-called high-value targets, which according to the NYU-Stanford study 2% of the people killed by drones are high-value targets - now, who are all the rest of the people? Well, it's a secret program, so therefore the CIA doesn't have to tell us anything, yet they claim that with each attack they're getting militants. Now we have people coming forward, saying, actually, no we're not terrorists. One man, he had a picture of a 65 year old woman with grey hair - his mother. She's not a militant terrorist. So the notion that we're killing terrorists exclusively is fundamentally inaccurate. It has been estimated by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that as many as 178 children have been killed in drone attacks (Read the full report on child casualties from the drone war on WarCosts.com and watch Greenwald's related video at the bottom of this interview). 

Don Hazen: Why is the CIA in charge of this? What would they say to argue with you? And why do they think the drone policy is working? 

Robert Greenwald: The CIA is in charge, because remember, we're officially not at war with Pakistan. Tell that to the population and in Pakistan, who see this as an extreme violation of their sovereignty. The Pakistan Parliament voted three times unanimously against the use of drones.  One of the original justifications by the CIA was that there was this "imminent threat" of terrorism. Well, I defy anyone to prove that the individuals attacked by drones in Pakistan pose an imminent security threat to the security of the United States. I think the CIA would say, and they have said that it's the least-bad solution, but I have concluded it's far from the least bad solution.  Basically   the   CIA has decided that they can unilaterally pick who should be assassinated - No proof, no evidence, no court of law. A small group of people are deciding who should be assassinated and which countries its OK to do this in, and they are often very, very wrong.

Don Hazen: And how do we fight that? As more people are mobilized to be against drones, what would be the strategy and tactics to try to change the policy; It seems like there's no access to changing this policy in a democracy, since much of it is secret, and a "matter of national security." Nobody is voting on it. The Congress isn't saying - Yes, on drones; or no on drones.

Robert Greenwald: It's somewhat analogous to Afghanistan - Congress had to have a series of votes over the years to fund that war, keep it going. I think the first step is to have investigations - It looks like they're going to have an investigation in the UK, and also now that the United Nations is going to be conducting its own. We need to first know: what exactly is the policy, how is it being decided, and to push for transparency. There's absolutely no reason - with the exception of avoiding outside scrutiny - for the CIA to keep this hidden. Everyone knows drones are being deployed outside the US for assassinations. Let's say you even believe in drones. Shouldn't we have a system that would "justify" their use?   Ie: we did this attack, because these bad guys were there, and here's what we did. We don't even have that. So that's where we start. We are asking for people to contact Pelosi/Boehner and push for the House Resolution that Dennis Kucinich introduced that calls for an investigation.

Don Hazen: Do you have a sense of where this is coming from beyond the CIA? Is Obama and his national security staff all pro-drone? 

Robert Greenwald: Based on limited information, it appears to be primarily driven by the CIA and especially John Brennan, chief counter-terrorism advisor to Obama.  But now we hear that Brennan is trying to rein the program.

Don Hazen: Moral issues aside, what do you say to the people who a. believe drones will save American lives, b. cost a lot less than the traditional model of bombers? For example there was a huge issue in Afghanistan of bombing weddings, where part of the celebration involves firing machine guns into the sky - the proponents of drones say, look we're avoiding a lot more casualties with this approach.

Robert Greenwald: Well, the accuracy argument - whether it's a wedding in Afghanistan or a funeral in Pakistan, it comes down to who was on the ground giving you the information telling you who the attendants were. And we know that the people who give that kind of information are being bribed. So their intelligence is going to be faulty. It's an approach that creates doubts from the outset. 

Don Hazen: All this is going on in Swat, a semi autonomous area of Pakistan right? How much of a threat are the Taliban there?

Robert Greenwald: Yes, the Swat area is part of the nation state of Pakistan, but it follows its own set of rules and regulations. It's semi-autonomous, highly uneducated, extreme levels of poverty, as we understand the word poverty, and highly mountainous. That area is where almost all of the attacks on Pakistan have been unleashed. 

As far as the he Taliban goes, it is not one unified organization some of them are brutal to the population, some are less aggressive. But the key is that none of them pose an immediate threat to the US. So, what's central here is that it's the drone attacks that are creating the threat, as angry people may try to seek revenge against us, as has already been the case. 

Its Time To Challenge Propaganda Regarding Who Is Killed By US Drones