Drone War Against Somalis and Yeminite Isn’t “Deterrence”

October 6, 2011

The WaPo's David Ignatius claims that the U.S. is using drones only against those who want to directly attack the U.S. The drones are thereby supposed to "deter" from doing so and not to intervene in civil wars on the ground.

A hint of deterrence in U.S. drone-war strategy

[I]n recent weeks a subtle limit has emerged in drone policy: Despite calls by some U.S. officials for drone attacks against the training camps of AQAP and al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, neither has been targeted. That’s a deliberate policy decision — aimed partly at preventing the spread of a Taliban-style insurgency to new theaters, such as Yemen and Somalia.
…
[A]s a matter of policy, Brennan and other top officials have decided (for now) against such strikes in the new battlegrounds, in part to prevent an ever-widening war that fosters the very Islamic insurgency we want to contain.

One wonders why WaPo even bothered to print the piece as the facts very obviously differ from that narrative.

Despite its claims the U.S. is openly engaged in the civil wars in Yemen and in Somalia on the sides of the U.S. supported dictators.

US drone strike kills six in Somalia – Oct 5, 2011

The US drone attack left six civilians dead and many more injured in the Dhoobley town located near Kismayo, the capital of the lower Juba region and a port city located some 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of the Somali capital of Mogadishu on Wednesday.

Hassan Ali, a Somali military official, told Press TV that the strike sought to target an al-Shabab base in the area. However, the casualties were all civilians.

The drone attack comes as 20 civilians, among them eight women, were wounded in a US aerial attack on the outskirts of Kismayo late on Tuesday.

US drone kills 5 al-Qaida militants in Yemen – Oct 5, 2011

A U.S. drone strike killed five al-Qaida-linked militants in southern Yemen on Wednesday, Yemeni officials said.

An official, who spoke on condition of anonymity according to military rules, said the dawn strike targeted militant hideouts in the al-Arqoub area east of Zinjibar, capital of Abyan province.

Somali militants in key port 'attacked by US drones' – Sep 25, 2011

The United States has launched a series of attacks by unmanned drones on the Somali Islamist group al-Shabab, local residents say.

At least three targets were hit around Kismayo, the southern port which is under the control of the militants.

Drone attack kills 10 Qaeda suspects in south Yemen – Sep 21, 2011

ADEN — Ten Al-Qaeda suspects were killed while a top leader in the network escaped death as US drones carried out several air strikes on their strongholds in Yemen's south, local officials said Wednesday.

"US drones carried out two air strikes on Al-Mahfad (in the southern Abyan province) where Al-Qaeda militants — among them Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's (AQAP) number two Saeed al-Shehri — are present," said a local official in the village.

Four suspected militants were killed while Shehri escaped, said the well-informed official who requested anonymity.

Another local official from the town of Shaqra — controlled by the militants since June — said that six other "Al-Qaeda gunmen" were killed and three were wounded in two separate air raids on the town.

It is very unlikely that all those people killed were engaged in any direct action against the United States. This is open warfare against the people of Yemen and Somalia, not "terrorism" deterrence.

Posted by b on October 6, 2011 at 09:05 UTC | Permalink

Comments

usg/military officials & politicians have finally worked themselves up into a state of delirium over an imagined threat that h.s.m. pose to the u.s. mainland – it actually has more to do w/ the ideologies of racism & imperialism, along w/ their bloodlust, that propels them over the edge & into another quagmire littered w/ corpses. while both somalia & yemen straddle a strategic waterway, they also present the threat of political islam in a part of the world not particularly enamored of the colonialist/xtian/white worldview. the drones in somalia are yet another layer of involving the us military in shoring up the govt they’ve put into mogadishu w/o actually putting their own infantry boots on the ground. the pretext for the brainwash back home is the well-worn cliche of ‘kill them where they live before they try to kill us here’, while the reality is that the cia is further drawing the u.s. military into a hot war they will never win.
found this bit of scahill’s interview on wed’s democracynow program especially interesting:

And Qanyare, who was this longtime CIA warlord, was complaining to me—-first of all, he thought I was a CIA agent. He refused to believe that I wasn’t CIA. I was like, all you need to do is Google Democracy Now! to find us. But, anyway, so I go—-I had a meeting with him and he thinks I’m in the CIA, and he’s complaining that we’ve cut him off—-we meaning me and the rest of the agency people—-that we’ve cut him off and we’re now working with these Islamic radicals. So, even the old CIA warlords are really upset about what the U.S. is doing.

wonder what the % of journalists who aren’t actually agents & assets is in spots like somalia… would imagine it’s still the most-used cover.

Posted by: b real | Oct 6 2011 21:47 utc | 1

Thanks to both b and b real for excellent material.
In a similar vein, the always lucid F.B. Ali dissects the issues raised by “unlimited drone warfare”, and as a counterpoint one might note this disturbingly curious report on the hacking of drone software . The latter link should be read right up to the end:

This is not the first time that the quality of the software behind the CIA’s Predator drone program has been questioned. Last year, a Boston-based software company, accused the CIA of unlawfully using proprietary coding, purchased through a third party. The company, IISi, also claimed that the pirated coding was in fact defective, and that the CIA runs the risk of its unmanned Predator drone strikes “being off by about 40 feet”.

Unfortunately, it seems that Cassandra is alive and indeed running a thriving prophecy business, with headquarters in the vicinity of the DC beltway.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Oct 10 2011 6:56 utc | 2

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