Survivor of Obama's first drone war crime: "What he has done...is an act of tyranny"

Posted on: Sat, 01/23/2016 - 23:16 By: Tom Swiss

Why do they hate us? Oh yeah, because we kill and maim them.

Victim of Obama's first drone strike: 'I am the living example of what drones are' (the Guardian)

It took nearly 40 days for Qureshi to emerge from a series of hospitals, all of which he spent in darkness. Shrapnel had punctured his stomach. Lacerations covered much of his upper body. Doctors operated on the entire left side of his body, which had sustained burns, and used laser surgery to repair his right eye. They could not save his left.

...Two of Qureshi’s uncles, Mohammed Khalil and Mansoor Rehman, were dead. So was his 21-year-old cousin Aizazur Rehman Qureshi, who was preparing to leave the family’s North Waziristan home for work, also in the UAE. Fourteen of Qureshi’s cousins were left fatherless.

Barely a teenager, Qureshi was suddenly an elder male within his family, tasked with providing for his mother, brothers and sisters. Once a promising student who wanted a career in chemistry, his priority would become scrounging a living....

Obama, now in the twilight of his presidency, wants to be remembered as a peacemaker. In his own telling...he is the man who denuclearized Iran peacefully, who opened Cuba and ended the last vestige of the cold war, who replaced the “dumb wars” he campaigned against with the prudent, precise counter-terrorism of drone strikes.

All Qureshi knows about Obama, he told the Guardian from Islamabad, “is what he has done to me and the people in Waziristan, and that is an act of tyranny. If there is a list of tyrants in the world, to me, Obama will be put on that list by his drone program.”