Human Rights Report and Targeted Killings
Today—eighty-nine days past its legal deadline—the State Department released its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011. The new, user-friendly interface allows you to find and read individual country chapters much more quickly and easily (and might explain the delay). For all its flaws, the report remains a must-read for its reporting and candor. It serves as a generally honest counter to the rosier assessments of U.S. partners and allies’ human rights practices.
From my vantage point of trying to understand the Obama administration’s policies and practices of target killings, the report is also notable for what it does not include; namely, any mention of U.S. involvement in or responsibility for such operations.
The chapter on Yemen, for instance, has an entire section dedicated to “killings:”
The government also employed air strikes against AQAP and affiliated insurgents in Abyan, with some strikes hitting civilian areas. Although some accused the government of intentionally striking civilians in Abyan, most if not all noncombatant casualties from these bombardments were attributed to a lack of air force training and technical capability.
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But the most remarkable and hypocritical aspect of U.S. unwillingness to acknowledge its role in civilians killed during counterterrorism operations, is that it reports other air strikes with collateral damage. The chapter on Somalia, for example, contains this finding:
On October 30, a Kenyan military airstrike in the town of Jilib, Middle Juba, reportedly hit an IDP camp. According to Doctors Without Borders, its clinic received five dead and 45 wounded, mostly women and children, from the incident. The Kenyan military spokesperson dismissed reports of civilian casualties and instead claimed the aerial bombs had hit al-Shabaab targets who used the IDPs as human shields.
http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2012/05/24/human-rights-report-and-targeted-killings/