"Just six days ago, my
village was struck by an American drone in an attack that terrified the
region's poor farmers".
"I could never have imagined that the same hand that changed my life and took it from miserable to promising one would also drone my village. My understanding is that a man named Hammed al-Radmi was the target of a drone strike. Many people in Wessab know al-Radmi, and the Yemeni government could easily have found and arrested him. Al-Radmi was well known to government officials, and even to local government--and even local government could have captured him if the U.S. had told them to do so.
"In the past, what
Wessab's villagers knew of the U.S. was based on my stories about my wonderful
experiences here. The friendships and values I experienced and described to the
villagers helped them understand the America that I know and that I love. Now,
however, when they think of America, they think of the terror they feel from the
drones that hover over their heads, ready to fire missiles at any time. What
the violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike
accomplished in an instant. There is now an intense anger against America in
Wessab."
Farea al-Muslimi first wrote about the attack on Wasseb, that killed five alleged militants, the following day in the new media website Al Monitor that centers on Middle East news. The video of al-Muslimi's five and a half minutes of Senate testimony has gone viral on YouTube.
It's Not That We
Shouldn't Dismember People, It's That We Do It Properly
Georgetown Law Professor Rosa Brooks, who served as the Pentagon's special coordinator for rule of law and humanitarian policy during Obama's first administration, testified somewhat gingerly at the same hearing that:
-- right now we have the executive branch
making a claim that it has the right to kill anyone anywhere on earth at any
time for secret reasons based on secret evidence in a secret process undertaken
by unidentified officials. That frightens me.
"I don't doubt their good faith, but that's not the rule of law as we know it."
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