Common Dreams – by Jon Queally
The Senate Intelligence Committee and the Obama administration agree on this: the American people should not know the number of people killed by U.S. drone attacks overseas, nor should they hope to understand the circumstances under which such lethal killings are authorized or executed.
This high-level agreement was confirmed on Monday after a “modest” provision designed to add transparency to the US drone assassination program was killed in the Senate committee following objections by the Obama administration’s intelligence chief.
As The Guardian reports:
At the behest of the director of national intelligence, US senators have removed a provision from a major intelligence bill that would require the president to publicly disclose information about drone strikes and their victims.
The bill authorizing intelligence operations in fiscal 2014 passed out of the Senate intelligence committee in November, and it originally required the president to issue an annual public report clarifying the total number of “combatants” and “noncombatant civilians” killed or injured by drone strikes in the previous year. It did not require the White House to disclose the total number of strikes worldwide.
But the Guardian has confirmed that Senate leaders have removed the language as they prepare to bring the bill to the floor for a vote, after the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, assured them in a recent letter that the Obama administration was looking for its own ways to disclose more about its highly controversial drone strikes.
Critics of the Obama administration’s use of drones and ongoing assassination program say that even though the language of the provision was mild, it was at least a step towards transparency and oversight.
“Congress is charged with oversight of the administration and this is a matter of life and death,” Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA, told the New York Times. “A basic report on the number of people killed shouldn’t be too much to ask.”
And Hawkins’ colleague Zeke Johnson, Zeke Johnson, who directs the group’s security and human rights program asked:
“How many people have to die for Congress to take even a small step toward transparency? It’s stunning that after all these years we still don’t know how many people the Obama administration has killed with drones.”
If a drone should hit congress, we would at least have the start of a count.
I would call that ” A good start”
Where do our employees in the Senate get the gonads to think they should be able to decide what the Americans people can and cannot see?
We paid for the drones, we pay your salary, and the killings were done in our name. We have every right, and indeed a responsibility to know who was killed in the drone strikes, and any resistance on your part to share that information is criminal, but I guess that none of you arrogant tyrants are going to remember who you work for until it’s too late.
It’s always that way. Arrogance is always invisible to the arrogant, and that’s why heads come off. Just ask Marie Antoinette.
Those in the govt. could care less about who they drone and they don`t want the public to know about it.
I wonder how many in our own military has been droned and then blamed on a foreign country.
Yea, our govt. has not been held accountable for so many years that if they were now – especially about theses damned drone strikes – the govt would be destroyed.
Yea this american? govt. is irresponsible and out of control and they know it and they just do not care .
Yep, it would serve the govt. right if all those govt. buildings were droned in wash. while in full session – yea the white house, the pentagon, etc., every one of those buildings – yea blow all them F`n poloticions right to hell where they belong.