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Thursday, October 24, 2013

U.S. drone killings of civilians in Pakistan have WWII precedent

Long before American drones were murdering civilians in Pakistan, American pilots were committing similar war crimes in Germany

In a 1985 autobiography by the American who was the first pilot to break the sound barrier, the author described how, while serving in the US armed forces during World War II in the autumn of 1944, his fighter group was attacking Germany and "...assigned an area fifty miles by fifty miles and ordered to strafe anything that moved...We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it ... We were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple, but the brass who approved this action probably felt justified because wartime Germany wasn't easily divided between 'innocent civilians' and its military machine. The farmer tilling his potato field might have been feeding German troops.”

Chuck Yeager, Yeager: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1985) pp. 79-80.

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