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Press TV has interviewed Rick Rozoff, a manager at Stop NATO Network, from Chicago, to discuss the US assassination drone program.

Press TV: I quote the words of Christopher Haines, he’s the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, and he says the US policy of using drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the Second World War. Do you see it that way too?

Rozoff: It’s a flagrant violation of international law. It is establishing unilaterally by one nation, the United States, the right to kill at will.

In the common parlance of the Central Intelligence Agency, the US Air Force and other government agencies involved in international drone warfare, the unmanned aerial vehicles being used right now referred to as ‘hunter, killers’ - they bear names like Predator and Reaper, Reaper presumably as in the expression Grim Reaper - that is they’re murderous by intent. They have accounted already for conservatively five to six thousand deaths in the last 10 years, in the last decade.

It’s been a decade of slaughter from the air. You use the word assassin. I think that’s inappropriate. They’re aerial assassins. If they offend international law, they certainly offend human morality.

Press TV: Ok Mr. Rozoff, jump in there. It seems like you want a response [to the previous guest speakers, Mr. Bob Ayers, comment].

Rozoff: Yeah, that’s morally reprehensible. It’s also unfactual. We know for example that one of the five countries which the US has waged drone warfare – you know, Pakistan is the most egregious example where easily 4,000 people have been killed.

To believe that various ages and both genders, to believe they’re all high-profile al-Qaeda commanders is simply ludicrous.

Second of all, they’ve also been used in Iraq in the past, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Yemen, actually in a sixth country we should mention, Libya. Pray tell, which al-Qaeda operatives were hit by US hellfire missiles fired from Predator drones in Libya?

Let me tell you something, those drones were used to attack government sources on behalf of al-Qaeda-linked terrorists, who the US and NATO were operating as an air force for. That’s simply an indefensible position.

I would suspect the people on the ground know best of all who are killed in drone strikes rather than somebody sitting in Nevada, New Mexico or California, who haven’t a ghost of an idea of who they’re ordering to be killed.

Press TV: Is the US ensuring that its drones do not target civilians? –Because I’m going to read out what President Obama said earlier regarding his drone warfare and he declared that before any strike is taken, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured, the highest standard we can set. And he added that by nearly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people that they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life. Do you see it that way, Mr. Rozoff?

Rozoff: I don’t dispute that officials in the United States government, the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Special Operations Command, the US Air Force and all the various agencies and branches of government involved in the now decade-long international drone warfare campaign would prefer not to kill civilians. I’m not contesting that point.

There’s a notorious expression from the 1990s, “collateral damage”, that was used in reference to the weapon of choice at that time, you know, two decades ago, which was the cruise missile. And I don’t doubt that the hellfire missile fired from a Predator or now increasingly a Reaper drone is less devastating and is going to cause less civilian death and casualties. Nevertheless, the fact is that they’re not as precise as to key in on somebody who is identified beyond question.

You know, first of all this ‘actionable intelligence’ expression that is being used by the White House incidentally goes back to Barack Obama’s statements repeatedly during his first presidential campaign in 2008 that, and I’m roughly paraphrasing him, that if the US has actionable intelligence that there’s terrorist activities being planned inside Pakistan, the sovereign nation thereof, and if the government is either unable or unwilling to take action against them, the US reserves the right to bomb targets inside a sovereign nation without even presumably consulting with the government of that nation.

Similar complaints have been registered, as you indicated earlier in this program, by the Yemeni government. And I can certainly assure you the former government of Libya did not authorize the US firing its weapons even at its head of state, if the report most of us are acquainted with is factual, which it is, that a US hellfire missile hit the convoy that Muammar Gaddafi was in, which ultimately led to his brutalization and murder.

To presume that there’s a humanitarian component to drone warfare is simply not true.

I’m not saying that the US goes out of its way to gratuitously kill innocent civilians. I’m not asserting that, but it’s the inevitable result of this sort of military activity.

And this is no excuse in the war crimes tribunal. It certainly won’t be if the US is ever held accountable for its actions.

Press TV: Mr. Rozoff, do you agree [on the previous speaker’s comments]?

Rozoff: Do I agree that al-Qaeda ought to lay down its arms in the best of all possible situations? Certainly!

Let’s keep in mind that we would not even be speaking about al-Qaeda if not for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation Phoenix in the 1980s that was instrumental in recruiting extremists from around the Islamic world to be trained in military camps in northwest Pakistan for a war in Afghanistan, amongst whom incidentally was Osama bin Laden, we have to recollect, and many of his chief lieutenants.

The US is hardly the innocent babe in the woods that my colleague on the other side is trying to portray or implicitly suggesting it is. The US is up to its bloody elbows in supporting terrorist activities around the world including most recently in Libya, but also in the Balkans in the 1990s and Afghanistan in the 1980s, and heaven knows where else currently.

Look, there are people sitting in the United States right now, some of them living rather poshly, many of them with political refugee status, who are making the same claims towards other countries; but what they would like to do is -- the other guest suggests the al-Qaeda operatives hiding out in caves in the federally administrated tribal areas in Pakistan are, I’m talking about Chechen separatists or Dagestani separatists who would like to do to Russia what is claimed al-Qaeda wants to do to the United States -- I don’t believe the other guest would permit Russia to reserve the same right as the United States does which is to launch preemptive strikes inside the United States against targeted terrorists.

Press TV: Mr. Rozoff, I’d like to get your opinion on this, does the inability of the US to capture these so-called terrorists deny them the right to do judicial process?

Rozoff: No, of course not. We have made such an elastic concept of identifying a perpetrator. Incidentally in most instances, I believe in the discussion we’ve had today, it’s the presumed motives of somebody who may be contemplating some action. In other words, somebody is not being judicially processed, is not being tried after an act has been perpetrated.

We are reading the thoughts, if you will, of people who may or may not entertain certain projects that they have no ability to execute. For example, somebody’s station in the very same cave complex that we just eluded to in Afghanistan, you know, can talk about anything they choose to talk about. They can intend to do anything. They can dream about anything, but realistically their ability to put that into practice is another question.

And when do you preemptively kill somebody for what they may be planning or intending? This is how I think the unconscionable elasticity of moral and legal concepts that has permeated the last decade has led us to the point right now that you can even kill somebody in anticipation of their possibly thinking tomorrow about perpetrating an act against us. That’s a horrible misuse of legal philosophy and legal practice.

Press TV: Mr. Rozoff, I give the last comment to you, very quickly if you can. Sometimes we’ve seen that legislation and law is always trying to play catchup with evolving technology. Do you think that the international community has done enough to cover the loopholes to ensure that this drone warfare is done responsibly without violation of international law?

Rozoff: There’s a question about whether targeted assassinations – I know they’re called targeted killing by Harold Koh in the State Department – but the substitution of the word killing for assassination doesn’t get around US law that forbids assassinations internationally.

I just want to bring a couple of things up on the question of the CIA being monitored. This is the very same CIA that ran, as I mentioned earlier, Operation Phoenix in the early 1980s, that armed to the teeth and in other ways assisted Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose two fighting groups incidentally are two of the three groups the United States acknowledges is currently fighting in Afghanistan.

If the CIA activities are so closely monitored and supposedly ethical in nature, then they have traded the very monsters they claim to be fighting in South Asia right now.

I don’t for a moment trust that Congressional and Senatorial oversight, you know, the House and Senate oversight is going to prevent the further commission of egregious acts around the world including killing 14- and 15-year-old boys, and then having US government officials saying they should have selected better parents.