USA: Acronym for United States of Assassinations?

What the United Nations independent investigator on extrajudicial killings would like is for countries that employ surprise drone attacks to first prove they have attempted to capture or incapacitate suspects. The investigator, Philip Alston, issued a 29-page report Wednesday that the New York Times termed "Highly Critical" of such attacks by the U.S. and, says the Associated Press, "called on countries to lay out rules and safeguards for carrying out the strikes." By going after terrorist networks, Alston warned, the U.S. example "could quickly lead to a situation in which dozens of countries carry out 'competing drone attacks' outside their borders against people 'labeled as terrorists by one group or another,'" Charlie Savage reported for the Times. "I'm particularly concerned that the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe," Alston is quoted as saying. "This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defense goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the U.N. Charter," Alston pointed out.

Alston can demand restraint all he likes but the administration of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama is not apt to listen. Obama has dramatically stepped up such attacks by the CIA over the occasional sorties resorted to by his predecessor. Washington's thinking appears to be, Why should U.S. troops risk storming some alleged terrorist hideout when a CIA operator in far-off Langley, Va., needs only to manipulate a computer screen to have a drone wipe them out?

Reasons against using the drones include the possibility there may be innocent persons in the same building as the alleged terrorists. Only a week ago the military conceded its own drone operators called in an airstrike in February that killed 23 Afghan civilians, including women and children. Another argument against drones is that the alleged terrorists have no opportunity to surrender or to get a jury trial.

The U.N.'s Alston also warns that for CIA operators thousands of miles from the point of attack "there is a risk of developing a 'PlayStation' mentality to killing." Yet another argument against the drones is that the survivors of those killed regard such attacks as cowardly and each successful (from the CIA's viewpoint) air strike only increases the public's resolve to resist the U.S. occupation.

Friends and relatives of the slain innocents turn bitterly against the U.S. This situation, by the way, is nothing new. U.S. and British air attacks on German facilities in occupied France during World War II were frequently so off target that the French Resistance pleaded with the U.S. to stop the bombing and to let them take out the Nazi targets from the ground, even at great risk to themselves. Sadly, 70,000 French civilians were killed by Allied aerial bombardments gone awry.

"So far," says international legal authority Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign, "all CIA drone attacks have been murders, assassinations, and extrajudicial executions -- a grave violation of international human rights law, the laws of the countries where the attacks took place, and of US domestic law." Boyle added, "All CIA drone strikes in Pakistan are criminal and a grave violation of international human rights law."

While the laws of war apply to insurgents engaged in armed combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, Boyle says, they do not apply "when they are sleeping at their homes with their families." Moreover, "it appears that the Pentagon's use of drones has serious problems of discriminating between civilians and insurgents engaged in armed combat, (resulting in a seriously disproportional ratio between allegedly dead insurgents and civilian casualties) which raises the issue of war crimes accountability."

In about his first 10 months in office, President Obama okayed at least 41 drone strikes in Pakistan that killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them "innocent bystanders, including children," according to a study by the non-profit New America Foundation of Washington, D.C. Example: on his third day in the White House, Obama sanctioned two strikes, the second of which mistakenly struck the home of a pro-government tribal leader that killed his entire family, including three children, one as young as five. "The point is," Louise Doswald-Beck, a professor of international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, told the AP, "innocent people have been killed, this has been proved over and over again."

Civilian casualties raise the issue of whether remote controlled drones "can ever be used in a manner consistent with the laws of war in actual war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan," Boyle says. "I suspect that...the Pentagon has consigned this 'wet-work' to the CIA," Boyle added, because "they have a long history of doing it, especially in Operation Phoenix during the Vietnam War. The CIA is an organized and ongoing criminal conspiracy under international law and US domestic law. Does the Pentagon want to or intend to become the same?" he asks.