The remote location of CIA headquarters in Langley, VA keeps its facility as distant from the public eye as its activities. But one day every month for the last year, activists opposing the CIA’s program of “targeted killing” by drones have staked out the gates of the intelligence agency. Standing on Rt. 123 with signs and banners, they want to hold the CIA responsible for thousands who have died in Pakistan and Yemen from bombing by drones, officially known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
The vigils are held on the second Saturday of each month and organized by several religious organizations and anti-war groups, including CODEPINK, Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore, Northern Virginians for Peace and Justice, Episcopal Peace Fellowship, Dorothy Day Catholic Worker of DC, NOVA Catholic Community, Langley Hill Friends, and Veterans for Peace.
“We are doing this vigil for two reasons,” said McHale. “Speaking truth to power and hope that more people will seek out information about the drone program because it’s not what people think.”
One goal is to debunk disinformation about the drone program propagated by the Obama administration. “One of the myths is that [drones are] targeting high value terrorists–which [they’re] not,” McHale said. “Unfortunately [they’re] killing a lot of people that are innocent. They’re not part of a conflict at all. Less than two percent of the thousands of people that have been killed are considered high value terrorists. It’s women, children, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers.”
Although human rights groups are calling drone strikes possible extrajudicial killings or war crimes on the basis of a report released in October, the U.S. government steadfastly denies wrongdoing and refuses to release official casualty or “collateral damage” counts.
The protestors placed stones at the entrance to the CIA headquarters, one for each victim of drone bombing.
Recently, a U.S. drone strike killed a Taliban leader in Pakistan soon after the Pakistani government announced peace talks with the Taliban. Pakistan filed a protest with the U.S. ambassador, accusing the U.S. of sabotaging the talks.
Only five members of Congress showed up to hear the testimony of drone victims. A family from North Waziristan testified at a Congressional hearing on October 29 that their relative, 67-year-old Momina Bibi, was killed by a drone strike.
CODEPINK, the Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation Magazine, and the National Lawyers Guild will hold a “Drone Summit” on November 16-17, 2013.
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- A stone for every person killed by drones.
