Global US drone strikes : Strike casualties | Number of strikes |

By May 2015, the U.S. performed a minimum of 3,004 and possibly 5,378 or more state sponsored assassinations, including from 488 to 1,127 civilians, of which 180 to 227 children, and injured from 1,239 to 2,066 people, by means of at least 530 and possibly 659 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan.

For countless people, US drone strikes have rapidly become a deadly menace lurking in the night, circling above the heads with a monotonous buzz and nerve-racking apathy, ready to hit, destroy and kill at any instant. Allegedly devised as a method to take down elusive enemy leaders, they soon turned into a vehicle to inspire terror, and to dishearten any form of resistance by delivering death and annihilation to combatants, relatives, visitors, bystanders, and whomever happens to be found in the neighborhood.

It is strange that all those who were so vocally outraged by the killings and havoc caused by the September 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks in Manhattan remain so discreet regarding the US-triggered drone war. They are failing on two counts. People-wise, they should be reminded that a child is a child, whether white or colored, whether in Yemen, in Somalia, or in New York. Intelligence-wise, they would better review recent history, and understand how vain the US big-stick approach can be against today's Lernaean Hydra, the mythical beast that, for each head cut off, grows a dozen more.

Can't US famed schools provide US leaders with the cognitive capability to grasp that their December 6-17, 2001 Tora Bora battle in retaliation to the September 11 attacks, only gave birth to rebel organizations more aggressive than al Qaeda, and incubated a wanton war that currently ignites half of the planet, and is penetrating through the pores of the other half?

Sources: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

 U.S. Worldwide Drone War, Status as of May 2015.

 PlayStation war : US drone "targeted killings".

   Global US drone strikes : Strike casualties | Number of strikes |

US drone strikes remain under the cloak of secrecy, Washington refusing to disclose any details to the press or the concerned state and private bodies both in the United States and abroad. Nevertheless, independent observers, based on corroborated evidence, have evaluated the total number of drone strikes to at least 530 and possibly 659 or more, of which 417 in Pakistan, from 95 to 206 in Yemen, from 9 to 13 in Somalia, and from 9 to 23 in Afghanistan, since the alleged end of the NATO/ISAF intervention there.

The drone assassination program, launched by the hawkish George W. Bush in 2001, and shifted to higher gear by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner US president Barack Obama, has become the nightmarish quotidian menace for thousands of bystanders around the globe, and the latest and futile concoction of US warmongers' minds. After a series of humiliating military failures, namely in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and with the economy wrecked by sky-rocketing military spending, the United States government, unable to stop and think again, inanely try to fulfill their imperial ambitions by running faster forward, advised by disciples of Stanley Kubrik's fiction character Dr. Strangelove.

Wary of engaging in "limited" wars that, as a rule, not only extend in time and become the longest ones in the military history of the country — the Afghan war is the perfect example thereof —, but also spill over the borders and set whole regions on fire — the Iraq war unfolded to Syria, Yemen, and Saharan Africa —, Washington executives opted for a form of permanent, global, and unrestricted war, the drone war, which indeed is an avatar of a totalitarian and planet-wide order-enforcing process carried out, without any form of democratic oversight, by a shadowy, omnipotent, and unbridled mercenary corps. The target spreads beyond the enemy's territory, to reach both neutral and even friendly states' homes, and comprises enemy military personnel, unidentified suspects, and also undiscriminated civilian bystanders, including innocent children.

The drone war is not constrained by prerequisites other than an executive decision. The President and his cronies, security, legal and military advisers, do not wish to encumber themselves with the complications of the rules and procedures of international war law. They deem necessary and sufficient to rely on paper work processed by a restricted number of officials in the rarefied atmosphere of secluded war rooms. For them, there is no need for a formal declaration of war, or parliament scrutiny, or a vote by the UN Security Council — their dictate is all that matters. It is easy to predict that the drone war medicine will produce more harm than good, and will soon become the next link in the chain of discomfiture that binds the likes of the Iraq, the Afghanistan, the Somalia, the Libya, and the Yemen military adventures.

Sources: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

 U.S. Worldwide Drone War, Status as of May 2015.

 PlayStation war : US drone "targeted killings".

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