With another drone strike carried out on the town of Radda in Yemen, it’s clear that the United States shows no signs in letting up while keeping the American people in the dark when it comes to drone strikes.
Democracy Now correspondent, Jeremy Scahill, who made a movie titled ‘Dirty Wars’, sums it up best, in saying, “I hope that people pay attention to these stories, that Americans will know what happened to the Bedouin villagers in al-Majalah, Yemen, where three dozen women and children were killed in a US cruise missile strike that the White House tried to cover up.”
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) has been tracking these drone attacks for sometime now and find evidence contrary to Obama’s speech at the National Defense Academy in regard to not minimizing the killing of civilians.
In fact, more people have been killed in Pakistan and Yemen after this speech which was delivered in May 2012.
But that’s not all – the BIJ estimates that more than 4000 people were killed in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia while the US government rarely comments on the programs much less the number of civilians killed.
Yet most of all, the government isn’t able to clarify as to what kind of threat villagers in Yemen pose to the United States – the basis for Obama’s action against terrorists.
And which begs the question: Why does the nation ignore the government’s killing of innocents abroad but care so much about mass killings that take place within their own community?