Thread by @rdevro

Thinking today about Nabeela ur Rehman and her brother Zubair. We met in 2013. Nabeela was 9. Zubair was 13. Along with their father Rafiq, they were the first victims of a US drone strike to meet with members of Congress. I was the first reporter they spoke to in the states.

Nabeela’s grandmother, Momina Bibi, was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan in 2012. The family’s unprecedented visit was the result of an extraordinary effort to bring American lawmakers face-to-face with the consequences of unaccountable US policy.

I had written a lot about the war on terror and drone strikes in particular but this was my first time meeting a family directly impacted by those operations.

The experience stuck with me. I wrote about it here. theguardian.com/world/2013/oct…

There was an argument you often heard from pro-drone types at the time, implying that people living under threat were too ignorant and uneducated to tell the difference between a drone, a plane and a helicopter, and thus couldn’t be trusted.

With that in mind, I began my interview by gently pressing Zubair about the kind of aircraft he saw.

“I know the difference,” he told me. “I am certain that it was a drone.”

Zubair not only provided a clear and detailed account of a drone’s unique features and sounds, he also painted a vivid and horrifying picture of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of an American air strike.

Nabeela, whose hand was injured in the blast, described how one minute her grandmother was there and the next she was gone. She recalled the scream she heard right before she disappeared.

At the time, the CIA was deep into its covert air war in Pakistan. Because these lethal operations were run by an intelligence agency in a country where the US wasn’t at war, the Obama administration took the position of providing zero accountability for their consequences.

Investigating civilian casualties in these cases was notoriously difficult but investigations did happen. @Mustafa_Qadri poured hours upon hours into unraveling what happened to Momina Bibi, cross-checking claims with Waziristan sources and examining physical evidence.

One of the standout factors in the case, Qadri told me at the time, was the precision of the strike. The missile did not land near Momina Bibi. It physically hit her.

The Rehmans hoped that coming to the US might break the cycle of impunity. The process wasn’t easy. To begin with, the kids didn’t have birth certificates and the State Department refused to give their lawyer a visa. The family eventually made it here anyway, on their own.

In DC, Rafiq, a school teacher, provided testimony so moving that it caused the translator to pause the proceedings and weep. His family wasn’t alone, Rafiq said: “Dozens of people in my own tribe that I know are merely ordinary tribesman had been killed.”

Unfortunately for the Rehmans, just five lawmakers found time to hear their story that day. They flew home with little to show for their efforts.

Yesterday, the Pentagon issued a public apology for a drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, last month that killed an Afghan aid worker and seven children. For weeks, the military had insisted that the attack was “righteous” and that the dead were terrorists who had it coming.

This pattern of events is familiar in Afghanistan. In 2015, I reported on secret government documents detailing a US counterterrorism campaign in which nearly nine out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets.

theintercept.com/drone-papers/m…

Everyone who was not among the 35 intended targets of those operations — more than 200 individuals — was summarily labeled an “enemy killed in action” with little to no effort exerted to determine whether that was in fact true.

Over the past two decades, human rights advocates, journalists, whistleblowers and victims themselves have been screaming into the void about these issues.

The scale and scope of harm that we’re talking about here is tough to comprehend. I agree w/ @mattaikins, Zemari Ahmadi’s family in Kabul deserves more than a mere recognition of what happened, as does every family impacted by these operations.

https://twitter.com/mattaikins/status/1438963536399638533