The Pakistani government has done nothing to enforce the Peshawar High Court's order of May 2013. Even suggesting that the government act to protect its people creates controversy. An uncertain number of other cases are still pending in Pakistani courts. One of those is Kareem Khan's 2010 wrongful death suit against the CIA for killing innocent people in his house in 2009.
On New Year's Eve in 2009, Kareem Khan was a respected working reporter in Islamabad, Pakistan, perhaps wishing he could be home that night. At 9 pm on December 31, 2009, an American drone controlled by the CIA attacked Kareem Khan's house in North Waziristan, killing all three civilians inside: Khaliq Dad, a visiting stone mason; Asif Iqbal, a secondary school teacher and Kareem Khan's brother; and Zahin Ullah Khan, a government security employee and the reporter's 18 year old son.
None of these three had any connection to militants in the region, nor did Kareem Khan, other than sometimes reporting on them.
Attorney Shahzad Akbar, working with Reprieve, filed Kareem Khan's wrongful death suit in late 2010, seeking $500 million from the CIA. The case is still pending. In the interim, another 35 Pakistanis have joined the suit, seeking justice for the wrongful deaths of members of their families.
Will the International Criminal Court act on war crimes?
On February 19, Kareem Khan and Attorney Akbar were at The Hague, where they filed a complaint against NATO countries for committing war crimes by aiding and abetting U.S. drone assassinations. A press release from Reprieve announcing the filing said: "It has been revealed in recent months that the UK , Germany, Australia , and other NATO partners support US drone strikes through intelligence-sharing. Because all these countries are signatories to the Rome Statute, they fall under The ICC's jurisdiction and can therefore be investigated for war crimes. Kareem Khan " is at The Hague with his lawyers from the human rights charity Reprieve and the Foundation for Fundamental Rights who have filed the complaint on his behalf."
[Last fall, a group of Egyptian lawyers filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court, charging President Obama with crimes against humanity in connection with U.S. support for the Muslim Brotherhood. In June 2013, in South Africa, the Muslim Lawyers Association there petitioned the court to arrest and try President Obama for war crimes and crimes against humanity resulting from the American drone killing program.]
Accused of murder, the United States has offered no explanation, no defense, no information whatsoever to justify this extrajudicial execution campaign in which President Obama functions as judge, jury, and executioner, although he sometimes delegates some of these activities to underlings. The United States has become a rogue state and a state sponsor of terrorism and apparently the best justification the president has to offer for a decade-long killing spree in Pakistan and wanton lawless executions elsewhere is that -- they do it too!
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