"Hitherto the impression was that the United States’ drone attacks on Pakistani villages in Waziristan were counter-terrorist operations with a purpose. Now comes a rare peep into the range of factors that motivate the CIA when it orders the drone strikes. The AP exclusive is, to put it mildly, shocking. At least some of these drone attacks were apparently in the nature of the CIA’s revenge acts against the ISI. The famous drone attack of March 17, which killed 38 innocent people attending a tribal jirga, it now transpires, was indeed a revenge act for the detention of the ace CIA operative Raymond Davis for 7 weeks in custody in Lahore for killing in cold blood two persons. The chilling words of a US official, quoted in the AP story: “It was in retaliation for Davis. The CIA was angry.”
Isn’t it a war crime? Yet, then CIA boss Leon Panetta who ordered it has had a ‘promotion’ and is now Barack Obama’s defence secretary. Those 38 souls wouldn’t have known when they gathered to settle a land dispute at the jirga that Panetta and his CIA boys were so angry with the Pakistani military that they were going to be slaughtered as sacrificial lambs. It stands to reason that army chief Parvez Kayani made out the US’s motivation behind the war crime. It was a rare occasion when he publicly voiced criticism of a drone attack - that the jirga was “carelessly and callously targetted with complete disregard to human life”..............READ MORE
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