Will Miller Green Mountain Veterans For Peace

On Tuesday afternoon, November 19th, the Will Miller Green Mountain Chapter of Veterans For Peace will submit to Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Peter Welch, at their Burlington offices, copies of its “Petition For the Redress of Grievances STOP THE DRONE KILLING.”

 

Over the past summer, members of the chapter gathered the signatures of 637 Vermonters living in 98 communities around the state. Each of the signatories agreed with the petition statement requesting our congressional delegation to introduce or join in legislation to ban the use of armed drones by the CIA and the U.S. Military.

 

The petition presents the findings of the UK based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, published in January, 2013, which reports that in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia between 3,061 and 4,731 people have been killed by drones of which 558 to 1,126 were civilians. Four US citizens have also been killed three of whom were civilians.

 

Also included in the petition are the findings of a joint study conducted by Stanford University School of Law and the New York University Law School which concluded that drone strikes are not “surgically precise” as the government claims but, in fact, kill innocent people, terrorize civilians and facilitate the recruitment of non-state armed groups to conduct violent attacks.

 

Subsequent to the completion of the VFP petition campaign, a report by a UN Security Council Special Rapporteur describing extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions by U.S. unmanned aircraft has been transmitted to the General Assembly for review. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also recently completed similar investigations documenting the unlawful drone killings in Pakistan and Yemen, respectively.