Obama's "Double Tap" War Crimes

Barack Obama is very probably a war criminal.  As Commander in Chief of a military behemoth that kills without regard to international law, Obama should be on trial if that sort of thing was conceivable in a world run on Victor's Justice.

The Obama White House is big, very big on the use of heavily-armed drones to take out perceived enemies, particularly in Pakistan.  We don't hear too much about what actually goes on but the drone programme is structured that way, to minimize public scrutiny.

Gwynne Dyer has written an eye-opener on a favoured tactic of American drone operators - the "double tap" attack.

Double tap” is what mobsters do when they put somebody down. One bullet in the heart, one in the head. That way they stay down. It’s practically standard operating procedure among hitmen.

Then there’s a different, nastier kind of “double tap”. Suppose you live in some hill village in western Pakistan, and one of the families nearby has a boy fighting with the Taliban who has come home for a visit, bringing several friends with him. It’s worrisome, because you are always hearing American drones overhead—and sure enough, one day there is a terrifying explosion and his house is destroyed.

What do you do now? There was a whole extended family living in that house: children, old folks, a cousin or two. Some of them are probably still alive under the rubble, perhaps badly injured. Do you rush over and help to dig them out? Better not. The Predator or Reaper drone (lovely names) will wait until all the neighbours have gathered round, and then launch a second Hellfire missile onto the site. Double tap.

“These strikes are becoming much more common,” Mirza Shahbad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents the victims of drone strikes, told the Independent newspaper recently. “In the past it used to be a one-off, now and then. Now almost every other attack is a double tap. There is no justification for it.” 

Double Tap drone attacks are executions, plain and simple.  They're murder and smack of the punitive measures the Germans employed on uncooperative civilian populations during WWII.  They absolutely beggar the Americans' claims that drone strikes are surgical and minimize collateral deaths of civilians.   That's precisely what the second missile is intended to cause.