Pakistan drone victims seek CIA arrest

[S.M.R]

(AFP) – 4 hours ago
ISLAMABAD — Relatives of victims of a covert US drone war against Al-Qaeda in Pakistan on Monday filed a complaint with police in the capital, seeking the arrest of a now retired CIA official, their lawyer said.

"We have lodged the complaint for (issuance) of international arrest warrants for John A. Rizzo, a CIA official," over the killings of civilians, Mirza Shahzad Akbar told reporters at a press conference.

The drone war, targeting Taliban and Al-Qaeda commanders in Pakistan's tribal badlands, is hugely unpopular among a public opposed to the government's alliance with Washington and sensitive to perceived violations of sovereignty.

The document called on Interpol and the United States to enforce an arrest warrant against Rizzo, whom it says was until recently general counsel to the CIA and claims "the accused can be tried in Islamabad".

It accused Rizzo of conspiracy to wage a war of aggression, to commit murder and various other crimes, including crimes against humanity.

"Rizzo worked with the agency as one of their legal counsels from 1970s and was in that position at the time of the initial attacks on Pakistan sovereign territory (in 2004)," it said.

"At CIA, one of his roles was to approve a list of persons to be killed every month in Pakistan by CIA using unmanned aerial vehicles and he had already confessed of his crime publicly," it added.

Akbar has been something of a legal campaigner in Pakistan against the CIA. He also represents a tribesman seeking $500 million in compensation from the CIA after his son and brother were killed by a drone.

Akbar said he held out little hope that Pakistani authorities would cooperate with an arrest warrant, suspecting "they have fully connived with the US," in reference to US leaked cables that pointed to cooperation on drones.
Karim Khan, who said he lost his 16 year-old son and a younger brother, said the drone strikes were impossible to justify.

"Those who are carrying out these attacks are enemies of Islam and humanity as they are killing innocent men, women and children," he said.

Most US drone strikes are focused in North Waziristan, the country's most notorious Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda bastion, where the United States has long called on Pakistan to launch a ground offensive.

Meanwhile, a leading Pakistani lawyer and former deputy attorney general Raja Abdur Rehman said that there was a solid ground for filing a complaint with the police.

"Our law does not allow any action or a foreign operation on our soil and therefore these strikes violate our sovereignty and territorial integrity", he told AFP.

He said that the government would have to appoint an investigating officer within 48 hours of the filing of a complaint, who would "unearth the real facts and recommend necessary action".

However, he said that the time limit for appointment of an investigating officer could be extended beyond 48 hours.

More than 20 US drone strikes have been reported in Pakistan since the US Navy SEALs killed Saudi terror mastermind Osama bin Laden on May 2.

Relations between Pakistan and the United States deteriorated sharply since the bin Laden raid in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad.

AFP: Pakistan drone victims seek CIA arrest

How will it look like when Pakistani police will be interrogating CIA personnel in Drawing Room.

 

[Respect4Respect01]

But who will arrest them?

 

[S.M.R]

ISLAMABAD (AP) — A London gallery opened a photo exhibit Tuesday that allegedly shows innocent civilians killed by U.S. drone missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal region along the Afghan border.

U.S. officials do not publicly acknowledge the CIA's covert drone program, but they have said privately that the strikes harm very few innocents and are key to weakening al-Qaida and other militants.

"I have tried covering the important but uncovered and unreported truth about drone strikes in Pakistan: that far more civilians are being injured and killed than the Americans and Pakistanis admit," said Noor Behram, a 39-year-old photographer who has worked with several international news agencies.

Behram spent the last three years photographing the aftermath of drone strikes in North and South Waziristan, important sanctuaries for al-Qaida and Taliban militants in Pakistan. He managed to reach around 60 attack sites, and the exhibit that opened Tuesday at the Beaconsfield gallery in London features photographs from 28 of those strikes.

U.S. officials "don't see that they target one house and along with it, two or three adjoining houses also get destroyed, killing innocent women and children and other totally impartial people," Behram told reporters in Islamabad on Monday.

It is often difficult to verify who is killed in the strikes because the areas where they occur are dangerous and off-limits to foreign journalists. News agencies often rely on local intelligence officials to determine who perished in a strike.

The exhibition is sponsored by the British rights group Reprieve and by the Foundation for Fundamental rights, an NGO started by Pakistani lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar to help drone strike victims.

The exhibit includes a photo showing an 8-year-old boy allegedly killed in a drone strike in 2009 in South Waziristan, his body surrounded by flowers as it was prepared for burial. Another showed a man in North Waziristan holding what is described as a piece of a missile fired from a U.S. drone, with the rubble of several destroyed mud buildings behind him.

Other photos in the exhibit are more gruesome.

A poll conducted last year in the tribal region by two U.S.-based organizations, the New America Foundation and Terror Free Tomorrow, found that more than three-quarters of the residents surveyed opposed the U.S. missile strikes, and nearly half thought they mainly kill civilians.

But some analysts and activists have suggested people in the tribal region are not free to express their true views about the missile strikes because they fear Taliban reprisal.

One political and human rights activist from the Khyber tribal region, Lateef Afridi, said last year that he has found particularly strong support for missile strikes among people he has met from North Waziristan, where most of the attacks have been focused recently.

Akbar, the Pakistani lawyer backing the exhibit, has sought to bring lawsuits against CIA officials connected with the drone program. He filed a report to Pakistani police Monday calling for an international arrest warrant for John Rizzo, the CIA's former chief counsel. Last year, Akbar filed a similar report against the CIA chief in Pakistan, prompting the spy agency to withdraw him from the country.

Pakistani officials regularly criticize the drone strikes as violations of the country's sovereignty. But the government is widely believed to have supported them in the past — a position that has become strained in the wake of the covert U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden on May 2 and humiliated Pakistan.

Reprieve's director Clive Stafford Smith said he believes the drone strikes are doing more harm than good in Pakistan.

"I hate to expose the world to pictures of a child with his head blown half off, but that is what the U.S. military calls 'collateral' damage," said Smith. "This is another terrible U.S. policy in the war on terror."

Photo exhibit shows alleged US drone strike deaths - Westport News

 

[Oldman1]

Shouldn't the Pakistani govt. members be arrested first for providing intel and approval for these attacks? After all they are right there.