DRONE WATCH: This Week in Drones. | Sojourners

DRONE WATCH: This Week in Drones.

• During the week, reported drone strikes killed 3 in Pakistan on Monday and 5 in Yemen on Thursday. 

• A group of U.S. activists is in Pakistan this week protesting the drone attacks. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink writes of the reasons for the trip, Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy describes a meeting with Acting U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Hoagland. The group is planning to join Imran Khan, a charismatic Pakistani politician campaigning to become prime minister, in a march Sunday into South Waziristan to protest drones. The News International in Pakistan reported that Amb. Hoagland told the group there would be no drone strikes in Waziristan during their presence there.

• In Pakistan, DAWN reported on a Wall St. Journal story about the CIA drone program. Once a month, the CIA sends a fax to a Pakistani general outlining the places where it might conduct drone strikes. The Pakistanis do not respond, which the CIA takes as tacit consent to the strikes, and then cites as legal justification for them.

• Ahmed Wali Mujeeb reported for BBC on a trip to Pakistan's tribal region of Waziristan, site of most drone attacks. Noteworthy was his description of the psychological impact on local people; fear, stress, and depression caused by the constant presence of drones hovering in the sky.

• The Christian Science Monitor wonders if drone warfare makes us safer, and takes a look at the top three dangers of drone warfare to America

• In the UK, The Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church and the Baptist Union of Great Britain have written to Foreign Secretary William Hague, expressing their concern over the humanitarian and legal implications of the US drone campaign and urging him to distance the UK government from it.

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