Counting the Bodies in the Pakistani Drone Campaign

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/15


Funeral prayers for the victims of a suspected US drone in North Waziristan (Photo: Getty)

The US government must release its estimates of how many people are being killed in CIA drone strikes, to end an over-reliance on often scanty media reports, a new study on drone casualties says.


The absence of ‘hard facts and information that should be provided by the US government’ means that the public debate is dependent on estimates of casualties provided by organisations including the Bureau, academics at Columbia University Law School’s Human Rights Clinic said. This risks masking the ‘true impact or humanitarian costs’ of the campaign, they added.

The study also found that the two US-based monitoring organisations, the Long War Journal and the New America Foundation – have been under-recording credible reports of drone civilian casualties in Pakistan by a huge margin.

When all credible reports of casualties for the year 2011 were examined, only the Bureau was found to properly reflect the number of civilians reported killed.