Lamenting the murder of Pakistani aid workers working in polio eradication campaigns the New York Times editors show some breathtaking imperial arrogance:

On Wednesday, there were reports that local police had promised extra protection for aid workers who are planning to conduct a polio vaccination campaign on Saturday in Peshawar and other cities in northwest Pakistan. That move is clearly necessary, though far from sufficient. The federal authorities need to make sure that the killers are brought to justice and make clear that murdering health workers is a terrorist act against the nation itself.

The real terrorists and killers of these aid workers and of the children that will die for lack of vaccination are the idiots in the CIA that abused a fake polio campaign to go after Osama Bin Laden and his family. It was them who committed the real crime.

When that fake CIA campaign was made public in a report in the Guardian it was immediate obvious and clear to me as to many other people that this would kill children:

So far the Taliban cooperated
with such vaccination campaigns. From now on they will not trust these
anymore. The abuse of such medical services for spying operations will
be deadly for many children.

Why would the CIA run such a campaign, and later even brag about it, when anyone with a tiny bit of knowledge about the area could easily predict that it would have deadly consequences for many innocent people? The first victims of distrust into aid workers the CIA sowed were already reported on more than a year ago. Being very late behind the news the NYT plays down the role the CIA campaign had:

No one has claimed responsibility for the most recent attack, but suspicions point to the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups that have opposed the vaccination drives, calling them a cover for government or international spies, or part of a plot to sterilize Muslim children. Those conspiracy theories intensified when the Central Intelligence Agency used a vaccination team, led by a Pakistani doctor, to visit Osama bin Laden’s house in 2011.

How can the believes that such vaccination campaigns get abused by the CIA be called "conspiracy theories" when the editors, in their very next sentence, acknowledge that that is exactly what happened?

And while there were "suspicions" about such campaigns before the CIA admitted abusing them aid workers were warned off, but not killed, when the local warlords did not want them in their areas. There is now a new quality of hostilities against such campaigns solely because the CIA abused them.

What the NYT is now calling for is military protection for the vaccination workers. How is that supposed to work? Coming in gun blazing to "do good"?

A responsible editorial would call out the CIA for screwing up an important public health issue and would ask for the obvious solution we presented 18 month ago:

By law U.S. agencies are not allowed to use journalist covers for spying. The same should apply for medical personal.

Instead the editors in their imperial arrogance call for more killing. In their mind set that is always the solution. Then, having more victims, the can again lament about them the thereby soothe their bad conscience.

The premier Pakistani newspaper Dawn reports today of two separate drone attacks by U.S. forces against targets in Pakistan:

In the attack in South Waziristan, an unmanned drone fired two missiles at a vehicle killing six people in the Sar Kanda area of Birmil in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal district of South Waziristan.

While talking to Dawn.com, local Taliban and intelligence sources confirmed the killing of pro-government and anti-US Taliban commander Mullah Nazir along with five of his companions near Wana.

One might concede that such a drone strike could be legal because the Pakistani government seems to condone these and has done nothing to prevent them. But there was another drone strike today and that one was, independent of the Pakistani government's stand, blandly illegal and constitutes a war crime:

Separately, four people were killed and several others injured in a drone attack in the Mubarak Shahi village in North Waziristan tribal region’s Mir Ali Tehsil.

The US drone targeted a vehicle with two missiles, and then fired another two missiles when rescuers gathered at the site to carry the bodies and the injured.

Such an attack on first responders have happened before and are, even by U.S. military standards, explicitly designated as being against the law of war.

Consider this from the MARINE
CORPS COMMON SKILLS HANDBOOK (pdf, pg 21)

The nine principles of the law of war are

· Fight only enemy combatants.
· Do not harm enemies who surrender: disarm them and turn them over to your superior.
· Do not kill or torture prisoners.
· Collect and care for the wounded, whether friend or foe.
· Do not attack medical personnel, facilities, or equipment.
· Do not destroy more than the mission requires.
· Do not steal; respect private property and possessions.
· Do your best to prevent violations of the law of war; report all violations to your superiors, a military lawyer, a chaplain, or
provost marshal.

An attack on first responders is clearly a violation of the three highlighted points.

"Who cares," one might think. With U.S. justice keeping even the legal rational for assassinating U.S. citizens secret, there is no chance that those who committed this war crime by ordering and/or executing the killing of first responders will ever be found guilty in front of a court.

But even then, the Marines' manual argues, the consequences of such war crimes can be dire:

Violations of the law of war have an adverse impact on public opinion, both nationally and internationally. Instead of weakening the enemy's will to fight, such violations actually strengthen it. In fact, they have, on occasion, served to prolong a conflict by inciting an opponent to continue resistance. Violations of these principles prejudice the good order and discipline essential to success in combat.

The U.S. military knows that such attacks on first responders strengthen the enemy and prolong the conflict. Knowing that are we to conclude that this was the purpose of this attack?

At least 60,000 people have died in Syria's conflict, UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay says.

How does Navi Pillay knows this? The UN does not have any presence in Syria.

At least 60,000 people have died in Syria's conflict, UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay said on Wednesday, citing what she said was an exhaustive UN-commissioned study.
…
The new study, by Benetech, a non-profit technology company, showed deaths rising from around 1,000 per month in the summer of 2011 to an average of more than 5,000 per month since July 2012.

Benetech:

Using scientific methods from demography, epidemiology, and mathematical statistics, the Human Rights group at Benetech® transforms information into knowledge about past and on-going human rights violations.

But that does not explain where the information that gets "transformed" by Benetech is actually coming from. I have yet to find their "sources".

Benetech's funders, according to its website, include the National Endowment for Democracy, the Soros Open Society Institute and the US Department of State. Are those also the entities that generate the information Benetech is "transforming"?

Is it really well advised for the United Nations to use a U.S. government funded entity to calculate some inevitably disputed numbers of casualties when the U.S. is supporting one side of the conflict?

UPDATE: Here is the full Benetech report (pdf). As expected the analysis is based on information that, at least for all of 2012, comes solely from Syrian opposition groups. The process of analysis performed therein can be described as garbage in, garbage mixing and garbage out. It is pure opposition propaganda, laundered through a U.S. financed entity, to be presented by a partisan UN Human Rights Commissioner.