To defend himself against allegations of war crimes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recalled that the United States had been the subject of such allegations on several occasions.
Last week, Israel dropped at least two 2,000-pound bombs on the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza, killing dozens of people and wounding hundreds. Experts identified the bombs as US-supplied Boeing GBU-31 or GBU-56.
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said “these are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes.”
In 2016, the State Department warned U.S. officials that they could be convicted of war crimes for selling bombs used in Yemen that caused massive damage and resulted in civilian casualties in Saudi Arabia.
In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as in the many other wars in which it was involved, the United States was often accused of committing war crimes against civilians, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they needn’t have worried.
Shortly before plunging the United States into these two useless and disastrous wars, George W. Bush had removed his country from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, following the example of Russia, China, Iran and other Israel, among others.
Democrats and Republicans alike
The USA has been carrying out drone attacks since the early 2000s. For the UN special rapporteur Philip Alston, these are extrajudicial and extrajudicial executions, i.e. criminal acts under international law.
Furthermore, the Pentagon refused to carry out these missions. American drones that killed nearby terrorist suspects and innocent civilians (collateral damage) were controlled by CIA employees in front of their computer screens.
Deadly US drone strikes began under George W. Bush and continued under Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Without due process, suspects were executed after the U.S. government decided they deserved to die.
The statistics compiled by the NGO Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) are revealing. From 2004 to March 2020, 13,694 US drone strikes on targets in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan killed 8,845 to 16,794 people; including 910 to 2,181 civilians, including 283 to 451 children.
Trump hits the spot
The incumbent Trump has significantly increased the pace of drone strikes and relaxed the rules for targeting. Result: an increased number of innocent civilian casualties. In the case of Somalia, for example, there were as many US drone strikes (40) in the first half of 2020 as between 2007 and 2016. Trump quadrupled the number of attacks in that country compared to the number ordered by Bush and Obama.
U.S. impunity has opened the door for other countries whose drones could do the same. I am thinking in particular of Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey.
Joe Biden has put an end to that. According to an October 2022 presidential directive obtained by The New York Times, CIA drone operators must now seek approval from Biden to strike a jihadist outside a war zone. They must also be “almost certain” that civilians will not be killed or injured. The rules restore restrictions on drone strikes that Trump eased in 2017.
