Democrats, Press Gloss Over Original "Double Tap" Operations

"What Trump is doing is expanding something that existed before," says Mustafa Qadri, who investigated earlier drone "Double Taps"

Barack Obama, 2015, answering questions about drone strikes

On February 6th, 2012, fourteen years before the current controversy over Venezuelan boat bombings, Scott Shane of the New York Times wrote a story with the ominous title, U.S. Said to Target Rescuers in Drone Strikes. Though the phenomenon had been mentioned in academic reports previously, the Times piece was one of the first press organs in America to describe “follow-up” drone strikes, which came to be better known as “double tap” strikes.

The piece explained that British and Pakistani journalists had counted 50 civilians had died in recent “follow-up strikes” that sources on the ground claimed were intended to kill rescuers and first responders. The Times report elicited a bizarre non-denial denial from Barack Obama’s White House, in which an unnamed spokesman said we should “wonder” about “misinformation” coming from “elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”

Because the U.S. and its allies were releasing so little information about these strikes, Amnesty International in 2013 sent a researcher named Mustafa Qadri to Pakistan to try to collect information about them. Currently the CEO and founder of a human rights organization called Equidem, Qadri conducted 60 interviews, mainly at nine strike sites in south Waziristan, Pakistan (the Pakistani government wouldn’t allow entrance into more heavily-bombed northern Waziristan). Qadri ended up compiling a long report that described the U.S. as complicit in a variety of grisly offenses. The first known strike took place in the village of Dhok in 2004, but after January, 2009, “President Barack Obama markedly expanded the use of drone aircraft for killings.”

Qadri put named sources to accounts of drone killings. This was rare, because there was significant fear of reprisal by Pakistani authorities at the time. He nonetheless detailed deaths of people like 68-year old Mamani Bibi, who was so accustomed to seeing drones that she continued work outside gathering okra at the sight of one on October 24th, 2012, until she was blown up in front of her grandchildren (who described the “terrible smell” and the site of her empty shoes) by at least two Hellfire missiles. Even more relevant to the present was Qadri’s documentation of a July 6, 2012 attack in the the village of Zowi Sidgi, where at least eight people were killed instantly in a first drone attack. When villagers rushed and found “body parts everywhere… bodies without heads and bodies without hands or legs,” people came with “stretchers, blankets, and water” until they heard a second missile coming and ran in all directions. At least eight more people were killed in this “second strike,” of which Qadri documented many. As he wrote:

How could the USA attempt to justify the second missile strike which appeared to target those who had gone to rescue people injured in the first strike and recover the dead? Attacking the injured and those who are hors de combat is prohibited under international humanitarian law; and medical personnel and first-responders trying to treat the wounded must be respected and protected.

The issue was looked at very differently back in the States. The video below is of Maine Independent Senator Angus King in February 7, 2013, roughly the same time as Qadri’s investigation, telling Donnie Deutsch and the rest of a Morning Joe panel that drone killings are “more civilized” in “the context of 1,000 years of war.” King’s only intellectual objection to drone strikes back then seemed to involve the possibility of American targets:

The dirty secret underlying the current mass freakout over “illegal orders” in Venezuela is that virtually every element of this story has reached the public before, only to receive very different reactions from people like King and the hosts of Morning Joe. The alleged “double tap” second strike on September 2nd seems to have been an outlier in the Venezuela campaign (at least, there haven’t been additional allegations along those lines yet). However, as Qadri noted then and now (see the Q&A below), the United States employed “double tap” strikes as a regular strategy in drone campaigns all over the world after 9/11.

Since last Friday’s still-disputed Washington Post report accusing the Trump administration of authorizing a second drone strike of shipwrecked drug suspects, politicians from both parties, retired military officials, and media figures have been rewriting history at a furious pace. One of the notable voices accusing the administration of “war crime”? Leon Panetta, who was Secretary of Defense during the period when the “Double Tap” strikes on Pakistan were taking place. This is Panetta this week:

Other comments raised eyebrows in different ways: