Amnesty say US shouldn’t kill enemy

From the Guardian/Observer

A missile fired from a Predator killed more than 20 innocent people in Pakistan earlier this month in a botched US bid to kill Ayman al Zawahiri, the deputy leader of al-Qaeda, and similar attacks have been made in Iraq, Yemen and on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Excuse me. Where did the “innocent people” bit come from. According to an AP report;

… a provincial government of Pakistan had released a statement that said four or so “foreign terrorists” (they were not identified beyond that) had been killed in the CIA missile attack. And Pakistani intelligence officials told AP that Zawahiri had been invited to a dinner in the village but did not show up. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao would only say that there was a “possibility” that foreigners–presumably, militants–were killed in the strike. Officials in the tribal zone where the missile landed said separately that the strike was aimed at foreign militants invited to a dinner and that up to five of them were killed — the first such confirmation by Pakistan.

They then try and leave the impression that a previous Predator strike only killed one al-Qaeda operative but they use the “alleged” tag to indicate they don’t believe he’s a bad guy and that the US shouldn’t have struck.

An earlier case of what President George W Bush described as ‘sudden justice’ occurred in Yemen on 3 November 2002, when six men were killed in a car, blown up by missiles fired from a CIA-controlled Predator drone. One of the people in the vehicle was alleged to be a senior member of al-Qaeda, Abu Ali al-Harithi.

Reading that you would believe that maybe one guy was a terrorist and then only maybe when in fact he was a senior el Qaeda terrorist and the other five guys were also terrorists. Would a guy as senior as Abu Ali al-Harithi be driving around with the local boy-scout troop? From the Age November 6, 2002

A missile fired by an unmanned American aircraft over Yemen has killed six suspected al Qaeda terrorists on the first occasion the Predator drone has been used outside Afghanistan. A senior United States Government official said Yemeni officials had identified one of the men killed on Sunday as Abu Ali al-Harithi, an al Qaeda leader and one of the terrorist network’s top figures in Yemen.

Al-Harithi was one of the suspected planners of the October, 2000, attack on the USS Cole in which 17 sailors were killed while the ship was berthed in Aden and has been linked to the October 7 bombing of a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. All this is good stuff until Annesty gets their hands on it.

According to Amnesty, under international standards, extra-judicial killings are always unlawful, and ‘a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any public emergency may not be invoked as a justification for such executions’.

The US are at war and some lawyer says they can’t kill the enemy. “Extra judicial” is a cute feel-good phrase that means nothing in the battle field. What do they want the Yanks to do? Issue a summons?