drones

(IPS) — After a drone strike had reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud November 1, the spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council declared that, if true, it would be “a serious loss” for the terrorist organisation.
That reaction accurately reflected the Central Intelligence Agency’s argument for the strike. But the back story of the episode is how President Barack Obama supported the parochial interests of the CIA in the drone war over the Pakistani government’s effort to try a new political approach to that country’s terrorism crisis.

At each of the over 200 cities I’ve traveled to this past year with my book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, I ask the audience an easy question: Have they ever seen or heard from drone strike victims in the mainstream US press? Not one hand has ever gone up. This is an obvious indication that the media has failed to do its job of humanizing the civilian casualties that accompany President Obama’s deadly drone program.

The United Nations General Assembly just released the latest Report of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The report is necessary, in part, because “There is… a notable lack of consensus on how to apply the rules of international law that regulate the use of force to drones.”

RT | October 18, 2013

President Barack Obama has chosen a former Pentagon attorney who defended the extrajudicial killing of American citizens to man the helm of the United States Department of Homeland Security and replace outgoing Secretary Janet Napolitano.
Jeh Johnson, a general counsel for the Pentagon during the president’s first term in office, was named by Mr. Obama as his choice for new DHS secretary during a Friday afternoon press conference.

The prompt for a recent Atlantic Community call for articles on utilizing drones for military purposes asks “When do we have to start considering human rights violations and what the consequences of that might be?” As an American whose government has been a pioneer in deploying drones offensively in war zones, that question is of primary importance and ought to be addressed before the practicality of drones comes into question.

RT | September 23, 2013

Iranian officials say they have completed decoding the surveillance data and software extracted from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drone that the United States lost possession of nearly two years ago near the city of Kashmar.

US; the real global terror alert
A man stands in a sea of rubble in Hiroshima on September 8, 1945
By Finian Cunningham
 
(PRESS TV) – Sixty-eight years ago this week, the United States wiped out more than 200,000 people when it dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yemen seems like an interesting place to visit. So far the closest I've come is listening to Ofra Haza's music and sitting around a kitchen table in Los Angeles and talking with her before she passed away.

Not all that many of his own constituents have noticed, but last week the BBC called out a congressman from Santa Clarita: A lawmaker helped create the drone industry-- and has reaped the benefits. Don't expect any exposés like this in the Signal, or even the L.A. Times, but Buck McKeon's cushy-- and extremely corrupt-- deal with the drone industry has been raising eyebrows all over the world.

RT | July 22, 2013

Leaked internal data produced by Pakistani officials documenting drone strikes on the ground reveal a high civilian death toll, countering US claims that the targeted assassination campaign results in “exceedingly rare” fatalities.