After reading the report, antidrone activist Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who heads a British-American charity called Reprieve, which is opposed to drones, said that such “double-tap” strikes “are like attacking the Red Cross on the battlefield. It’s not legitimate to attack anyone who is not a combatant.” Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions as of 2010, concurred with Stafford Smith and added, “Allegations of repeat strikes coming back after half an hour when medical personnel are on the ground are very worrying. To target civilians would be crimes of war.”170 Such reactions were typical among readers, who doubtless envisioned the drones firing on responding paramedics and concerned civilians desperately trying to dig fellow civilians out of the rubble of a drone strike.
What most stories in the media that covered the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s investigation did not report were the further details found on the bureau’s website. According to the site,
The first confirmed attack on rescuers took place in North Waziristan on May 16, 2009. According to Mushtaq Yusufzai, a local journalist, Taliban militants had gathered in the village of Khaisor. After praying at the local mosque, they were preparing to cross the nearby border into Afghanistan to launch an attack on US forces. But the US struck first [author’s emphasis].
A CIA drone fired its missiles into the Taliban group, killing at least a dozen people. Villagers joined surviving Taliban as they tried to retrieve the dead and injured. But as rescuers clambered through the demolished house the drones struck again. Two missiles slammed into the rubble, killing many more. At least 29 people died in total.
“We lost very trained and sincere friends,” a local Taliban commander told The News, a Pakistani newspaper. “Some of them were very senior Taliban commanders and had taken part in successful actions in Afghanistan. Bodies of most of them were beyond recognition.”171
Essentially, the civilians killed in this drone strike were assisting Taliban militants who, before the drone struck them, had been “preparing to cross the nearby border into Afghanistan to launch an attack on US forces.” The civilians were thus aiding and abetting active Taliban militants whom the Pakistani, Afghan, and U.S. governments consider terrorists. The U.S. government had previously dropped leaflets in the FATA warning local tribesmen that if they assisted the terrorists, they would share their fate.172
Three independent studies discussed in chapter 7 have demonstrated that approximately 95 percent of those who are targeted in drone strikes are militants. Thus it follows that the vast majority of those who are being removed or rescued from the rubble of a drone strike are Taliban militants or al Qaeda terrorists, not civilians. In fact, in many, if not most, cases those who are removing the victims from the rubble are themselves Taliban militants; there are very few if any emergency medical technicians, paramedics, or first responders in this undeveloped area. The Taliban militants are the de facto authorities in these regions, so their presence at the scenes of attacks is not surprising.
There are scores of media reports of the Taliban “cordoning off” drone strike zones and “conducting recovery operations.”173 A typical account reads, “A local resident said he was woken by two loud explosions around 4 a.m. on Thursday. Militants rushed to the site immediately after the attack to clear the rubble and retrieve the bodies, he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.”174 A second report states, “First a volley of four missiles hit a compound in the village of Mizar Madakhel. After Taliban fighters cordoned the area and began to recover bodies, a second volley was fired. Initial reports indicated that 12 Taliban fighters were killed.”175 A third source reads, “Eight militants were killed and two wounded. Militants have surrounded the [targeted] compound and are removing the dead bodies.”176 Another local Pashtun source claims, “The reason why these estimates about civilian ‘casualties’ in the US and Pakistani media are wrong is that after every attack the terrorists cordon off the area and no one, including the local villagers, is allowed to come even near the targeted place. The militants themselves collect the bodies, bury the dead and then issue the statement that all of them were innocent civilians.”177 A BBC story similarly reported, “Officials say that local Taliban militants immediately cordoned off the [strike] area and closed the road in the aftermath of the attack.”178 The Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a think tank of researchers and political activists from the North-West Frontier Province and FATA, similarly reported, “People told me that typically what happens after every drone attack is that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda terrorists cordon off the area. No one from the local population is allowed to access the site, even if there are local people killed or injured.”179 Civilians are rarely able to rush to the scene of a drone strike on Taliban terrorists and insurgents in order to help wounded militants or retrieve their bodies.
So well-known is the Taliban’s propensity to cordon off areas where their comrades have been killed or wounded in a drone strike that a FATA-based Pakistani official even offered the Americans some advice on how to kill more Taliban using drones. According to Al Jazeera, “He explained that after a strike, the terrorists seal off the area to collect the bodies; in the first 10–24 hours after an attack, the only people in the area are terrorists. You should hit them again—there are no innocents there at that time.”180 FATA-based scholar Farhat Taj similarly wrote, “Your new drone attack strategy is brilliant, i.e., one attack closely followed by another. After the first attack the terrorists cordon off the area and none but the terrorists are allowed on the spot. Another attack at that point kills so many of them. Excellent! Keep it up!”181
Clearly the CIA has taken this advice and, on the basis of many reports of Taliban militants rushing to the scenes of drone attacks to save their buried or wounded comrades, begun targeting those who arrive at drone strike locations to rescue wounded militants. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism surely realized that in the vast majority of cases those who are killed or wounded in the drone strikes are themselves Taliban militants and that those who are killed in follow-up strikes are more than likely also Taliban militants. Yet they chose to completely omit this important detail in their scathing report.
As for the claim that the drones target funerals, we have already seen in chapter 1 that the CIA fired on a funeral for slain Taliban commander Sangeen Khan in 2009 in an effort to kill Pakistan’s most-wanted man, Baitullah Mehsud, who was in attendance. A local source claimed that of the sixty-seven people killed in that drone explosion eighteen were villagers.182 Clearly the CIA felt that on this occasion the risk of killing civilian bystanders at a Taliban-organized funeral for a militant was outweighed by the opportunity to kill the terrorist mastermind who had sent scores of suicide bombers into Pakistani towns killing and maiming hundreds if not thousands. Ironically, among the Taliban suicide bombers most-favored targets have been funerals of tribal chieftains who have resisted them.183
There has been one other famous drone strike on a Taliban funeral. Taj describes it as follows:
On the other hand, drone attacks have never targeted the civilian population except, they informed, in one case when the funeral procession of Khwazh Wali, a TTP commander, was hit. In that attack too, many TTP militants were killed including Bilal (the TTP commander of Zangara area) and two Arab members of al Qaeda. But some civilians were also killed. After the attack people got the excuse of not attending the funeral of slain TTP militants or offering them food, which they used to do out of compulsion in order to put themselves in the TTP’s good books. “It [this drone attack] was a blessing in disguise,” several people commented.184