One Third of US Drone Victims are Civilians

The report, by the Washington-based New America Foundation, will fuel growing criticism of the use of unmanned drones in the fight against al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, who use Pakistan as a base for attacks on Nato forces in Afghanistan. Critics say their use not only takes innocent lives, but amounts to unlawful extra-judicial killing of militants. The report by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann found that 32 per cent of those killed in drone attacks since 2004 were civilians. Their report, The Year of the Drone, studied 114 drone raids in which more than 1200 people were killed. Of those, between 549 and 849 were reliably reported to be militant fighters, while the rest were civilians. ‘The true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 per cent,’ the foundation reported.  Read the full report here: http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/documents/NAF_YearOfTheDrone.pdf