Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Targeted killing by the US - is it lawful?

The US has been killing so called terrorists inside Pakistani territory with missiles fired from the Predator drones since last almost a decade and no one dares unquestioning the USA for choosing at its own who to kill and why. This has been mainly due to the fact that all people so far killed in Pakistan have been non US citizens and killing these "enemies" always brings laurels to the US security forces, intelligence agencies and of course the Predator drones.

But after target killing of the notorious cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen, which otherwise brought a political victory for the US president, the Huffington Post in its issue dated 30 September has raised the issue of target killing and eye brows are being raised in the US as to the lawfulness or otherwise of the said act.  Questions are now being asked whether practice of targeting individuals around the world to death with remote-controlled drones or secret Special Operations raids a legal way to fight terrorism?

Although it is too late for such awareness to prevail as already thousands of innocent people have been killed in Pakistan as a result of the collateral damage while target practicing on non US citizens. But the good thing is that a US citizen had to die to raise such awareness and creating a ground for challenging US government's decision's of target killing - whether of US or non-US citizens the world over.

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