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CIA may face prosecution for drone raids in Pakistan

Press TV – March 24, 2010

The US government’s refusal to offer legal grounds for CIA’s drones bombing raids in Pakistan may result in CIA officers facing prosecution for war crimes.

“Prominent voices in the international legal community” were increasingly impatient with Washington’s silence on the CIA’s bombing raids in Pakistan and elsewhere, Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University, told a congressional panel on Tuesday, AFP reported.

Lawyers at the US State Department and other government agencies were concerned the administration has “not settled on what the rationales are” for the drone strikes, he said.

“And I believe that at some point that ill serves an administration which is embracing this,” said Anderson.

The law professor said he believes the drone strikes are legal under international law, based on a country’s right to self-defense, and urged the US administration to argue its case publicly.

The drone attacks, which have so far taken the lives of many civilians, have sparked outrage among the Pakistani nation amid Washington’s claims that they are aimed at “Taliban militants.”

March 26, 2010 - Posted by | War Crimes

1 Comment

  1. The use of unmanned drones hurling lethal Jove-like bolts from the blue is the epitome of “Might Makes Right” and an example of technological arrogance. Following the Kennedy assassination, and in light of Administration efforts to assassinate Castro, the Church Committee’s work led to a ban on extrajuridicial killing. The use of drone-assassins, whose operators sit thousands of miles away will not stop based on any moral reckoning, it appears, but only after they are used against Americans themselves.

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    Comment by Robert | April 9, 2010


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