US has no right to cross borders by drones and kill people: Activist

Press TV has interviewed Joe Lombardo, a member of the United National Antiwar Coalition in New York, about an American whistle-blower, who the media refer to as the “New Snowden,” releasing a series of documents that contain highly sensitive intelligence on US drones.

Following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: This certainly makes for quite unsettling reading: nine out of ten are innocents. Only 35 were the intended targets. How do you feel about this?

Lombardo: I feel terrible. But it is not something we really did not know or did not suspect. It was known for a long time that the intelligence was not good and that civilians were being killed in very large numbers and the chain of command that was revealed in these papers, in these leaked documents, that was also something that we kind of knew and suspected that it went right up to President Obama, who had to sign off on these kills. So they are terrible things that have been exposed.

Press TV: Where has it all gone wrong, do you think, in this drone war, because it was sold to us as a precision war, precision strikes, those words have repeatedly been used in the media?

Lombardo: The United States never has had a right to cross borders into the countries and kill people on assassination program. No government has the right to do an assassination program but the United States was crossing borders into countries that we were not at war with, such as Pakistan, and we were killing people. And we cannot let the refugees from the US wars into Europe but the US had the right to cross borders whenever it wanted to kill people, and there is something wrong with that policy.

Press TV: And do you think that the American public understands what is being done in their name, because many people ask the question quite regularly why do they hate us? Is this an answer of sorts to that question?

Lombardo: It is an answer but the majority of the American people will not see this, will not hear it. It will not be covered in the major news media. It will go out through organizations such as my own in the Anti-war Movement and other activists in this country and we will try to get as bigger hearing for this as possible, and we do demonstrations and actions.

Right now as we are talking, there are actually dozens of people walking across Upstate New York from one drone base to the next to call attention to this, to the drones and to this policy that the US uses. But it is an uphill fight for us to get this information out even when it is exposed in the way that it has been.

Press TV: I am wondering then, President Obama was not meant to be a war president. He was meant to be the complete opposite - at least that is the way he sold himself to the rest of us. What do you think went wrong?

Lombardo: I think it is the policy of the United States. They have bases, over 800 foreign military bases, the largest military budget of any country in the world. In fact, the military budget of the United States is about equal to that of every other country in the world and there is so much overseas wealth and money from the United States that is overseas that the US has to protect these interests and anybody that would not kowtow to the United States government and its policies is seen as an enemy.

And so drones are a weapon of choice because the American people do not really want to have wars. They do not want to fight. That is shown in every poll in this country, but if they try to put boots on the ground, we will start seeing casualties; there would be huge anti-war movement again. So they use drones and Special Operations Forces and so forth and proxies - allies of the United States - to fight these wars, so that that will not happen. But that anti-war sentiment is something that can be brought to bear on the US government and we are doing everything we can to make sure that happens.

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