What do you do when sky robots from an empire halfway across the world keep buzzing around and bombing your people? In Pakistan, step one is asking the empire nicely if it would please stop terrorizing folks. When that doesn’t work, there’s step two: publicly name the CIA agents behind the drones.
That’s happened for a second time now, as of today, with an open letter by former cricket player Imran Khan’s nationalist political party. The letter calls the head of the CIA and the agency’s station chief in Pakistan—named as Craig Osth in the letter—”murderers.”
The New York Times, because it’s a reliably American institution that protects American interests, rather than an independent check on the empire, doesn’t mention the station chief’s name or bother explaining why it censors itself in this way. It does say that US officials wouldn’t confirm the authenticity of the name in the letter.
In 2010, the CIA’s previous Pakistan station chief was outed in legal complaints filed by anti-drone activists; he subsequently left the country. Today’s letter appears to have been prompted by an unusual drone strike which killed five people last week in Khan’s own province, outside of the tribal areas in which they’ve typically been confined. The county’s interior minister complained this month that a drone attack which killed the head of the Pakistani Taliban had nonetheless “wrecked the government’s efforts to hold peace talks with militant groups,” the Guardian reports.
The Obama administration would prefer not have the CIA involved in “large-scale lethal operations,” though, and is seeking to transfer the responsibility for drone strikes to the military. Specifically, to the Joint Special Operations Command unit, which, as the the documentary Dirty Wars details, is hardly less secretive and already has its own bloody trail of victims around the world.