Yemen Feature: Drones & the Killing of an American Teenager (Greenwald)
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 4:06 | James Miller in EA Afghanistan-Pakistan, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran, US Foreign Policy 
Salon's Glenn Greenwald explores the moral and legal issues surrounding the use of drone strikes against militants by the United states. As the US draws down the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of drones is the newest iteration of the "War on Terror", and Anwar Awlaki's 16 year old son is one of it's most recent collateral casualties:
Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people. News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that Awlaki’s son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (needless to say, as Terrorist often means: “anyone killed by the U.S.”), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote: “Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions say either about the the quality of the government’s evidence — or the honesty of its claims — and about our own capacity for self-deception.”