Report about President Obama's recent apology for a radio-controlled drone strike, efforts to get more accountability on the issue, Sen. Lindsey Graham's drone plans, and Pakistani Zubair Rehman's views of the skies there.
Report contains brief audio clips of Barack Obama, Lindsey Graham, and Zubair Rehman. Produced for May 19, 2015, but can run a few days later. Info: newsroom.free103point9.org newsroom.wgxc.org
U.S. President Barack Obama apologized April 23 to the families of kidnapped aid workers Warren Weinstein (an American) and Giovanni Lo Porto (from Italy), both kidnapped aid workers, killed by a U.S. radio-controlled drone in attack somewhere along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border against terrorists there. âOne of the things that sets America apart from many other nations,â Obama said, âone of the things that makes us exceptional is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.â Most conservative estimates guess that the U.S. has accidentallly killed at least 1,250 other civilians in its âdrone war,â and now a coalition of human and civil rights groups are asking the administration honor the families of those victims in a similar way. The ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Columbia Lawâs Human Rights Clinic, Human Rights First, and other groups wrote, âWe write to urge your administration to adopt the same approach to all other U.S. counterterrorism strikes in which civilians have been injured or killedâregardless of their nationalities. To that end, your administration should establish a systematic and transparent mechanism for post-strike investigations, which are made public, and provide appropriate redress to civilian victims.â South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham would take a different approach if he were president, he said in a speech May 18. âIf Iâm president of the United States and youâre thinking about joining al-Qaida or ISILâanybody thinking about that? Iâm not gonna call a judge. Iâm gonna call a drone and weâre gonna kill you,â he said. So a warning to journalists, sociologists, political scientists and other who might visit websites of sworn enemies of the United States â a President Graham administration wants to unleash the drones, just like in Pakistan. In Congressional testimony last year, Pakistani Zubair Rehman described the sound of drones overhead.
Radio-Controlled Drone Attacks Could Be Coming to a Sky Near You May 19, 2015
Radio news about radio waves.
00:02:57
1
May 19, 2015
Produced at Wave Farm/WGXC in the Hudson Valley, New York.
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