By Elizabeth Leafloor | RedIceCreations.com

It’s being reported by Agence France-Presse and RawStory that, "US missiles killed 15 militants in Pakistan’s Taliban and Al-Qaeda stronghold of North Waziristan on Monday, the third drone strike in three days and the deadliest this year".

The attack looked set to inflame tensions with Islamabad ahead of a visit by a US assistant defence secretary, Peter Lavoy, on a mission to persuade Pakistan to end a six-month blockade on NATO supplies crossing into Afghanistan.

[...]

“Fifteen militants were killed in a dawn strike on a compound. The bodies of those killed were unable to be identified,” a security official in Miranshah told AFP.

He said there were unconfirmed reports that foreigners were among the dead.

Local resident Gul Jaan Wazir told AFP that the dead bodies were quickly buried after being pulled out of the rubble. The drone strike destroyed the room in the mud and wooden house where they had all been sleeping, Wazir said.

In the debris, local people found letterheads of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the country’s main umbrella Taliban faction waging an insurgency against the Pakistani government, wooden beds, blankets and mattresses.

It is often been reported that President Obama has urged officials to avoid wherever possible the deaths of civilians in covert US actions in Pakistan and elsewhere. But reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane reveal that Obama inserted a loophole.

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

So concerned have some officials been by this ‘false accounting’ that they have taken their concerns direct to the White House, according to the New York Times.

The revelation helps explain the wide variation between credible reports of civilian deaths in Pakistan by the Bureau and others, and the CIA’s claims that it had killed no ‘non-combatants’ between May 2010 and September 2011 – and possibly later.

The investigation also reveals that more than 100 US officials take part in a weekly ‘death list’ video conference run by the Pentagon, at which it is decided who will be added to the US military’s kill/ capture lists.

Pakistani ribesmen from Waziristan protest against US drone attacks, outside parliament in Islamabad.
2010 Photograph: T Mughal/EPA