Journalist Says Obama-ordered Strikes in Yemen Constitute “Murder”
US investigative journalist, Jeremy Scahill, believed that the [Barack] Obama administration's drone strikes in the Middle East, when killing innocent civilians, amounted to being "murder".
Scahill, The Nation Institute's national security correspondent, and author of the best seller "Blackwater: The World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," was part of the panel discussion that tackled the recent article published by the New York Times, unveiling a "kill list" of wanted terrorists, possessed by the Obama administration.
In an interview with the "Up with Chris Hayes" Saturday morning show on MNSBC, Scahill clarified, "If someone goes into a shopping mall in pursuit of one of their enemies and opens fire on a crowd of people and guns down a bunch of innocent people in a shopping mall, they've murdered those people."
"When the Obama administration sets a policy where patterns of life are enough of a green light to drop missiles on people or to send in AC130s to spray them down..." he went on to say.
When the show's host defended the US administration's killings, saying that a targeted person would be involved, Scahill stressed, "If you go to the village of Al-Majalah in Yemen, where I was, and you see the unexploded cluster bombs and you have the list and photographic evidence, as I do--the women and children that represented the vast majority of the deaths in this first strike that Obama authorized on Yemen--those people were murdered by President Obama, on his orders, because there was believed to be someone from Al Qaeda in that area."
"There's only one person that's been identified that had any connection to Al Qaeda there. And 21 women and 14 children were killed in that strike and the U.S. tried to cover it up, and say it was a Yemeni strike, and we know from the Wikileaks cables that David Petraeus conspired with the president of Yemen to lie to the world about who did that bombing," the US journalist added.
"It's murder--it's mass murder--when you say, 'We are going to bomb this area' because we believe a terrorist is there, and you know that women and children are in the area. The United States has an obligation to not bomb that area if they believe that women and children are there. I'm sorry, that's murder," Scahill concluded.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by moqawama.org
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