Wall Street Journal Loves Obama's Drone War Vs. Pakistan: "Unmanned Bombs Away"

[laststeamtrain]

Wall Street Journal Loves Obama's Drone War Vs. Pakistan: "Unmanned Bombs Away"

The paper’s editors attack unembedded journalists who report the Pakistani deaths. Instead, they say, we should all just shut up and listen to U.S. intelligence agencies.

By Jeremy Scahill

The Wall Street Journal is officially in love with President Obama’s undeclared air war inside of Pakistan’s borders. In an unsigned editorial, the paper enthusiastically endorses Obama’s use of predator drones to bomb areas throughout Pakistan. The WSJ editors praise the administration, saying “to its credit, has stepped up the use of Predators.” The editors declare: “When Pakistan’s government can exercise sovereignty over all its territory, there will be no need for Predator strikes. In the meantime, unmanned bombs away.”

<snip>

The WSJ editors then reveal the highly independent, impeccable source for their information: “A U.S. intelligence summary we’ve seen corrects the record of various media reports claiming high casualties from the Predator strikes.” Wow. Remember when the Bush administration was correcting all those errors about Saddam’s WMDs? Not surprisingly, the WSJ states that “In each of the strikes in 2009 that are described by the intelligence summary, the report says no women or children were killed. Moreover, we know of planned drone attacks that were aborted when Predator cameras spied their presence.”

<snip>

It is very telling that the WSJ editorial—with no apparent shame—fails to mention the U.S. drone attacks last month that may have killed more than 80 people in Pakistan, including as many as 70 people in a U.S. bombing of a funeral procession in a tribal area. The WSJ editors defend the attacks, saying they are killing “high value targets,” saying of those killed by U.S. drone strikes, “Is the world better off with these people dead? We think so.” But the fact is that some statistics from the Pakistani government suggested that of the 700+ people killed in these U.S. drone strikes since 2006, 14 were “high value targets” or “al Qaeda” leaders and the vast majority were civilians. In this case, the real question is: “What does it say about the U.S. that its government authorizes the killing of these civilians?”

<more>

http://rebelreports.com/post/140987762/wall-street-journal-loves-obamas-drone-war-vs

[madrchsod]

1. "al qaeda" leadership is no longer in pakistan or afganistan

"al qaeda" was never the "bosom buddies" of the afgan taliban. there`s no reason to be there other than we are to protect the european and asian pipelines.