Lawfare › Thoughts on the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International Reports: I have now read both of the two major human rights reports released yesterday on civilian casualties in drone strikes—one by Amnesty International on strikes in Pakistan and the other by Human Rights Watch on strikes in Yemen. I have a few thoughts on them.
First, it is impossible for a modestly-moral person to read these reports without something approaching nausea. They are grisly. They involve the deaths of numerous apparently-innocent people. The deaths appear to have taken place at the hands of the United States. The reports involve some substantial new reporting on these incidents. And they thus raise serious questions about the way at least those drone strikes they cover took place: What went wrong, why, and how we can minimize the chances of such disasters in the future?
The power of both reports, however, is diminished—to what degree I am honestly not sure—by two factors that are worth spelling out.