Iran Press/ Iran News: In a letter to US President Joe Biden, dozens of Democrats in Congress raised grave concerns about “repeated civilian casualties arising from secretive and unaccountable lethal operations.”
Congressional Democrats on Thursday urged President Biden to overhaul his counterterrorism strategy and targeting criteria for drone strikes, citing grave concerns about “repeated civilian casualties arising from secretive and unaccountable lethal operations.”
The letter came a day after The New York Times published newly declassified surveillance footage providing additional details about the final minutes and aftermath of a botched drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August that killed 10 innocent civilians, including seven children. Eleven senators and 39 members of the House, led by Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut, cited that strike as “emblematic of this systemic failure that has persisted across decades and administrations.”
Kazem Gharibabadi said in his last tweet: "Under the pretext of countering terrorism, the U.S has conducted at least 14,000 drone strikes in seven countries over the last two decades."
"The result? 48,000 civilians killed, tens of thousands of homes shattered into pieces," added he.
It should be noted that 50 members of the US Congress wrote a letter to the President of the United States Joe Biden in the past few days, referring to the damage of the US counter-terrorism policy to civilians, calling for a change in this policy.
The US Defense Department has long said that it tries to minimize civilian casualties. US Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III conceded in November that the military needed to do more to prevent them, days after an investigation by The Times revealed that top officers had sought to conceal a US airstrike in Syria in 2019 that killed dozens of women and children. Seperate investigations, relying on the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties obtained by The Times, showed that the air campaign against the Islamic State was marked by flawed intelligence, confirmation bias and scant accountability.
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