OMNI
DRONE/ASSASSINATION
NEWSLETTER # 14. JUNE 3, 2014
Compiled by
Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice.
(Newsletter #1, Dec. 29, 2010; #2 July 20, 2011; #3
Feb. 16, 2012; #4 May 3, 2012; #5 June 9, 2012; #6 Oct. 12, 2012; #7 Dec. 20,
2012; #8 Jan. 22, 2013; #9, Feb. 16, 2013; #10 May 11, 2013; #11 May 29, 2013;
#12 Nov. 1, 2013; #13 Dec. 28, 2013.) See
Newsletters on ACLU, Air War, Assassinations, CIA, Civil Liberties, Constitution and Drones, Democracy
and Drones, Extra-Judicial Killing, Geneva Conventions, International Law, Killing Civilians, Media and
Drones, Obama , Pakistan
My blog: War
Department/Peace Department
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Index:
Visit OMNI’s Library.
“Act in such a way that the principle
according to which the action is performed can be accepted as a universal
law.” Immanuel Kant’s Categorical
Imperative. Ahimsa. Nonviolence.
Reverence for life.
DRONE
WATCH: www.MuckRock.com
, a free, online data-base.
Contents
Drone/Assassination/Extra-Judicial Murder Newsletter #14
Stop Drones
FCNL, Telephone Briefing
David Cole, How Many People Have We
Killed? Demand Transparency, Record the
Killed
Gagnon, Spring Campaign Against Drones and Global
Militarization
Rabbi Lerner, Heather Linebaugh, Stop Drone
War Campaign
Know Drones: Spring Days of Action
Progressive Secretary, Stop Double Tap
Richard Clarke, Obama’s Excesses
Drone Complex
and Contexts
Drones in Yemen
Conn Hallinan, Drone Pandora’s Box
Engelhardt, Murdock Paper’s Crass Headline
Akbar Akmed, From War on Terror to War on
Tribal Islam
Greeenwald’s New Film, Unmanned
Lawyer Who Justified Murder Nominated to Be
Judge
Al Jazeera, Israel
Recent Related Newsletters
Contact President Obama
Contact Senators
Earlier Newsletters
Drone Strikes or Shared Security?: Join Me
June 16 for a Conversation
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How Many Have We Killed? by David
Cole
The wreckage of a car destroyed by a
The
Senate’s decision is particularly troubling in view of how reticent the
administration itself continues to be about the drone program. To date, Obama
has publicly admitted to the deaths of only four people in targeted killing
operations. That came in May 2013, when, in conjunction with a speech at the National
Defense University ,
and, in his words, “to facilitate transparency and debate on the issue,”
President Obama acknowledged for the first time that the United States
In the
NDU speech, President Obama also announced new limits on the use of drones
“beyond the Afghan theater.” He proclaimed that drone strikes would be
authorized away from the battlefield only when necessary to respond to
“continuing and imminent threats” posed by people who cannot be captured or
otherwise countermanded. Most important, he said, “before any strike is taken,
there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the
highest standard we can set.” Yet in December, a US
drone strike in Yemen
The decision to drop the requirement to report
on the number of people we kill in drone strikes fittingly if depressingly came
on the ten-year anniversary of CBS’s airing of the photos of torture and
prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq United States has not held accountable any
senior official for torture inflicted during the “war on terror”—not at Abu
Ghraib, not at Guantanamo Guantanamo
To be
fair, Obama deserves some credit for both banning torture and achieving some
transparency on the subject. In one of his first acts as president, he formally
prohibited the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that his predecessor had
approved—and that Bush and Cheney both proudly proclaim in their memoirs they
would approve all over again. Shortly thereafter, Obama declassified the
chilling secret memoranda, drafted by various Justice Department lawyers in the
Bush Administration, that were designed to give legal cover to the CIA’s
torture program. And most recently, in March, Obama said that he thinks that the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s interrogation program,
the only comprehensive review based on access to classified information to date
of the agency’s treatment of prisoners, should be declassified and released to
the public. (The committee has voted to declassify and release a six
hundred-page executive summary from the 6,300 page report, and it is now up to
the president to live up to his statement and declassify it.)
But it’s one thing to demand transparency for
a predecessor’s wrongs. It’s another to support it in regard to one’s own
dubious actions. In the past, some have argued that the United States cannot be transparent about
targeted killings in countries like Pakistan
and Yemen
As
long ago as September, 2012, the Yemeni President Abed Raboo Mansour Hadi
disclosed that he signed off on every US drone strike in Yemen, and
in April 2013, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf similarly admitted that his government had agreed to
targeted killings in Pakistan. Following the strike on the Yemeni wedding party
last December, the government there conceded that civilians were killed,
provided reparations to the survivors, and suspended permission to the United States US
International law acknowledges that killing is
not always illegal or wrong, and that a government has the authority to do so
as a last resort in genuine self-defense. But if the US
© 2014 New York Review of Books
David
Cole, The Nation's legal affairs correspondent, is the
author, most recently, of The
Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (New Press
Spring Days of Action to End Drone Killing, Drone Surveillance
and Global Militarization
Global Network [globalnet@mindspring.com]Thursday, January 30, 2014 12:20 PM
CALL FOR SPRING DAYS OF ACTION – 2014
Today we issue an
international call for Spring
Days of Action – 2014, a
coordinated campaign in April and May to:
End Drone Killing, Drone Surveillance
and Global Militarization
The campaign will focus on
drone bases, drone research facilities and test sites and drone manufacturers.
The campaign will provide
information on:
1. The suffering of tens
of thousands of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza who
are under drone attack, documenting the killing, the wounding and the
devastating impact of constant drone surveillance on community life.
2. How attack and
surveillance drones have become a key element in a massive wave of
surveillance, clandestine military attacks and militarization generated by the
United States to protect a global system of manufacture and oil and mineral
exploitation that is creating unemployment and poverty, accelerating the waste
of nonrenewable resources and contributing to environmental destruction and
global warming.
In addition to cases in
the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, we will examine President Obama's
"pivot" into the Asia-Pacific, where the United
States has already sold and deployed drones in the
vanguard of a shift of 60% of its military forces to try to control China America
3. How drone attacks have
effectively destroyed international and domestic legal protection of the rights
to life, privacy, freedom of assembly and free speech and have opened the way
for new levels of surveillance and repression around the world, and how, in the
United States, increasing drone surveillance, added to surveillance by the
National Security Agency and police, provides a new weapon to repress black,
Hispanic, immigrant and low-income communities and to intimidate Americans who
are increasingly unsettled by lack of jobs, economic inequality, corporate
control of politics and the prospect of endless war.
We will discuss how the United States government and corporations
conspire secretly to monitor US citizens and particularly how the
Administration is accelerating drone surveillance operations and surveillance
inside the United States
The campaign will
encourage activists around the world to win passage of local laws that prohibit
weaponized drones and drone surveillance from being used in their communities
as well as seeking national laws to bar the use of weaponized drones and drone
surveillance.
The campaign will draw
attention to the call for a ban on weaponized drones by RootsAction.org that
has generated a petition with over 80,000 signers
and to efforts by the
Granny Peace Brigade (New York City
The campaign will also
urge participation in the World Beyond War movement.
The following individuals
and organizations endorse this Call:
Dennis Apel – Guadalupe
Catholic Worker, California
Judy Bello – Upstate NY Coalition
to Ground the Drones & End the Wars
Medea Benjamin – Code Pink
Leah Bolger – Former
National President, Veterans for Peace
Canadian Voice of Women
for Peace
Sung-Hee Choi – Gangjeong Village
International Team, Jeju , Korea
Chelsea C. Faria – Graduate
student, Yale
Divinity School
Sandy Fessler – Rochester
Joy First
Bruce K. Gagnon - Global
Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
Holly Gwinn Graham –
Singer/songwriter, Olympia ,
WA
Kathy Kelly – Voices for
Creative Nonviolence
Malachy Kilbride
Marilyn Levin and Joe
Lombardo – Co-Coordinators, United National Antiwar Coalition
Tamara Lorincz – Halifax Peace Coalition, Canada
Nick Mottern – KnowDrones.org
Agneta Norberg – Swedish
Peace Council
Pepperwolf – Director,
Women Against Military Madness
Lindis Percy, Coordinator,
Campaign for the Accountability of American
Bases CAAB UK
Mathias Quackenbush – San Francisco , CA
Lisa Savage – Code Pink,
State of Maine
Janice Sevre-Duszynska
Wolfgang Schlupp-Hauck- Friedenswerkstatt Mutlangen , Germany
Cindy Sheehan
Lucia Wilkes Smith –
Convener, Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) – Ground
Military
Drones Committee
David Soumis – Veterans
for Peace; No Drones Wisconsin
Debra Sweet – World Can’t
Wait
David Swanson -
WarisACrime.org
Brian Terrell – Voices for
Creative Nonviolence
United National Antiwar
Coalition
Veterans for Peace
Dave Webb – Chair,
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (UK
Curt Wechsler – Fire John
Yoo! (a project of World Can’t Wait) – San
Francisco , CA
Paki Wieland, Northampton
Loring Wirbel – Citizens
for Peace in Space (Colorado Springs ,
CO
Women Against Military
Madness
Ann Wright – Retired US
Army colonel and former diplomat
Leila Zand - Fellowship of
Reconciliation
Sign-On Info: Until
we have installed a program that will enable people to post their endorsements,
please ask people to send them to me at my email: nickmottern@earthlink.net I will update
the list daily; it should be only a few days until the endorsement link is
installed, and I will send full details.
Global Network Against
Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)
STOP DRONE WARFARE CAMPAIGN
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Issue
Terror: The Hidden Source. Review
by Malise Ruthven
The
Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on
Tribal Islam.
by Akbar Ahmed
Brookings, 424 pp.,
$32.95
Khaled
Abdullah/Reuters
A tribesman near a building damaged
by a US drone strike that
targeted suspected al-Qaeda militants last year, Azan , Yemen
Tolstoy’s novella Hadji
Murad opens with the image of a beautiful thistle
flower, wrenched from a ditch, that the narrator seeks to add to his bouquet.
His effort to pluck it, however, proved a very difficult task. Not only did the
stalk prick on every side—even through the handkerchief I wrapped round my
hand—but it was so tough that I had to struggle with it for nearly five
minutes, breaking the fibres one by one; and when I had at last plucked it, the
stalk was all frayed, and the flower itself no longer seemed so fresh and
beautiful…. But what energy and tenacity! With what determination it defended
itself, and how dearly it sold its life!
This late masterpiece, written in 1904 but never published in
Tolstoy’s lifetime, was based on a real-life episode. In 1851 the Avar warlord
Hajimurad al-Khunzaki, a confederate of the Imam Shamil, who led the resistance
to Russia ’s annexation of
the Caucasus , betrayed his ally and went over
to the Russians. In Tolstoy’s story he is driven by ambition, hoping to govern
the Caucasian tribes under the “white tsar.”
The most telling portrayals in the story—apart from Hadji Murad
himself, with his thistle-like mix of bravery, integrity, cunning, confusion,
and childlike candor—are the complementary, almost symmetrical descriptions of
Tsar Nicholas I and the Imam Shamil, both of whom are depicted as cold-eyed,
ruthless autocrats who represent opposing forces of absolutism. As Tolstoy
himself explained:
It is not only Haji Murad and his
tragic end that interest me. I am fascinated by the parallel between the two
main figures pitted against each other: Shamil and Nicholas I. They represent
the two poles of absolutism—Asiatic and European.
The reality, however, was a great deal more complicated than a
clash of absolutisms. Far from being the cold and ruthless autocrat depicted by
Tolstoy, Shamil, as the murshid,
or spiritual guide, of the orthodox Muslim Khalidiyya-Naqshbandiyya order, was
a leader who sustained the loyalty of the warring Caucasian tribes by diplomacy
rather than force. A Russian source described him as “a man of great tact and a
subtle politician.” His charismatic appeal was underpinned by his reputation
for piety and evenhandedness in dispensing justice in accordance with Islamic
sharia norms. These had been severely tested when the Russians introduced
alcohol into the region, corrupting, by sharia standards, the tribal chiefs who
became their clients.
As a renowned warlord and tribal leader, Hadji Murad had been a
Russian loyalist, defending Avaristan in the eastern part of Daghestan against
Shamil’s encroachments. It was only after the Russians had replaced him as
their client in Avaristan by a rival who had him arrested and abused that Hadji
Murad responded to Shamil’s overtures and joined the jihad.
The result of his defection in January 1841 had been dramatic:
by April Shamil ruled an area three times as large as at the beginning of 1840,
with a cascade of formerly compliant clans joining the jihad. Hadji Murad’s
rift with Shamil was a classic example of hubris. Hoping to be named his
successor as imam, he refused to recognize the nomination of Shamil’s eldest
son, Ghazi Muhammad. Faced with this challenge to his authority, Shamil
convened a secret council that charged Hadji Murad with treason and sentenced
him to death. Warned by friends, he redefected to the Russians in November 1851.
As an anthropologist with
deep knowledge and direct experience of tribal systems, Akbar Ahmed
demonstrates in The Thistle and the Drone how
richly Tolstoy’s thistle metaphor applies to contemporary conditions in
regions, distant from urban centers, where clans resist the writ of government
while also engaging with it. He points to their “love of freedom” to act
without external constraints, as well as egalitarianism, [and] a tribal lineage
system defined by common ancestors and clans, a martial tradition, and a highly
developed code of honor and revenge—these are the thistle-like characteristics
of the tribal societies…. Moreover, as with the thistle, there is a clear
correlation between their prickliness, or toughness, and the level of force
used by those who wish to subdue these societies, as the Americans discovered
after 9/11.
Ahmed is especially troubled by the
use of drones against Muslim tribal groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and
Somalia, but his analysis of the nature of the state and its relation with
tribal peoples has application far beyond the condition of Muslim tribal
societies. As he sees it, the use of unmanned aircraft as a leading
counterinsurgency weapon has morphed into a campaign against tribal peoples
generally, with the US
Flying at 50,000 feet above ground,
and therefore out of sight of its intended victims, the drone could hover
overhead unblinkingly for twenty-four hours, with little escaping its scrutiny
before it struck. For a Muslim tribesman, this manner of combat not only was
dishonorable but also smacked of sacrilege. By appropriating the powers of God
through the drone, in its capacity to see and not be seen and deliver death
without warning, trial, or judgment, Americans were by definition blasphemous.
The Zeus-like power, he writes, is
especially damaging to children. A Pakistani observer notes that drones circling the skies in
Waziristan on Pakistan New York
University Pakistan
Discussions about the use of drones, in the US as in Europe ,
have tended to focus on questions of legality and constitutionality. Their
wider strategic purpose in fighting America
Since Mr. Obama took office, the CIA and
military have killed about 3,000 people in counterterrorist strikes in Pakistan , Yemen
and Somalia United States
Citing counterterrorism specialists inside and outside of
government, Shane suggested that the policy of assassination or “targeted
killings” has been shaped by, among other things, the decreasing urgency of
interrogation as a mode of gaining intelligence “at a time when the terrorist
threat has diminished and the United
States
The claim of “deep intelligence” is questionable. As Kenneth
Roth has argued in these pages,1 the Obama administration may have
“dispensed with its predecessor’s language of the ‘global war on terror’” but
its basic approach is similar; and in his book Ahmed suggests that the “deep
intelligence” claimed for the US
The fundamental error, according to Ahmed, is that US
leaders believe they are facing a threat from enemies whose motivation is
primarily ideological. This was clearly stated by President Obama in his speech
at the National Defense
University last May, when he said that
most, though not all, of the terrorism faced by America
is fueled by a common ideology—a
belief by some extremists that Islam is in conflict with the United States and
the West, and that violence against Western targets, including civilians, is
justified in pursuit of a larger cause. Of course, this ideology is based on a
lie, for the United States
Although al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations had suffered
setbacks, said Obama, the ideology persisted, motivated by “the evil that lies
in the hearts of some human beings.” The primary task facing the United States America
In a striking reference to the terrain where the terrorists
operated, the president stated:
Al-Qaeda and its affiliates try to
gain a foothold in some of the most distant and unforgiving places on Earth.
They take refuge in remote tribal regions. They hide in caves and walled
compounds. They train in empty deserts and rugged mountains.
The Thistle and the Drone—published some time before Obama’s speech—makes a
clear argument that the president and his advisers are putting the al-Qaeda
cart before the tribal horse. This impression is reinforced by the recent
events in Yemen, where an alleged plot by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular (AQAP) led to the closure of US
embassies throughout the Middle East and North Africa—a move that seemed to
contradict Obama’s claim that Americans were safer as a result of his efforts.
Rather than exploiting the denizens of “remote tribal regions” as Obama’s
speech proclaimed, the terrorist activities associated with al-Qaeda and its
affiliates are actively engaging the responses of tribal peoples (the thistles
of Tolstoy’s metaphor) whose cultures are facing destruction from the forces of
modern society—including national governments—currently led by the United States
Ahmed’s book is a radical analysis based on extensive
anthropological detail too complex to be easily summarized. A good example of
his approach, however, is his analysis of the background of the September 11
hijackers. It is well known that fifteen of the nineteen terrorists were Saudi
nationals. Less well known or indeed understood is their tribal background. The
official report of the 9/11 Commission, based on information provided by the
Saudi authorities, states that four of the thirteen “muscle hijackers”—the
operatives whose job was to storm the cockpits and control the passengers—came
from the al-Bahah region, “an isolated and undeveloped area of Saudi Arabia Asir
Province , described as a poor, “weakly
policed area” that borders Yemen
Apart from the brief reference to “tribal affiliation,” the
September 11 report skates over the fact that all of these “muscle hijackers”
hailed from the contiguous regions of al-Bahah and Asir or from the Wadi
Hadhramaut in southern Yemen where Osama bin Laden’s own family came from.
Drawing on politically loaded information provided by Saudi intelligence and
the waterboarding inflicted on two al-Qaeda operatives, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
and the would-be hijacker Ramzi Binalshibh, the report focuses mainly on
personal contacts, training, and ideological influences. It goes so far as to
state that “ethnicity generally was not a factor in the selection of operatives
unless it was important for security or operational reasons.”
ROBERT GREENWALD’S FILM, UNMANNED
Here is the website for Robert Greenwald's Drone documentary
"Unmanned:
America's Drone Wars."
Carl
Drone
Lawyer: Kill a 16 Year-Old, Get a Promotion
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 Medea Benjamin, Op-Ed,
NationofChange, May 16, 2014: If you think that as a |
By People &
Power, Aljazeera, posted May 1
On Israel
RECENT RELATED NEWSLETTERS
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CONTACT SENATORS
CONTACT ARKANSAS
SENATORS
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Boozman,
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Pryor, Mark
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Contents Drone
Newsletter #11
Robert Greenwald Film Needs Our Help
Extra-Judicial Killing, UN Rapporteur
Medea Benjamin Challenges President Obama
Sprusansky on Muslimi and Obama Admin.
Preference for Killing
BOOKS ON DRONES (in reverse chronological
order)
Scahill, Dirty Wars
Benjamin, Drone
Warfare
Engelhart
and Turse, Terminator Planet
Cavallaro,
Living Under Drones (a long report)
Contents #12
Nov. 1, 2013
Goodman, Resistance to Obama’s Drone Wars
United Nations: Put Drones Under International Law
Draft Drone Ban Treaty
Malala to Obama: Drones Cause Terrorism
Dirty War Film
Jeremy Scahill
Amnesty International
Palast, Drones, Missiles, Etc.
FAIR, Media Not Examining Drone Attacks
Against Alleged “Terrorists” in Yemen
Savage and Baker, Obama Limits Targets and
Shifts to Military Control
Contents
#13 Dec. 28, 2013
Drones Coming to Ark.
NG 188th at Ft.
Smith
ANSWER Demonstration
Moyers on Drones.
New Greenwald Film, Unmanned: America
Moyers & Co. Nov. 3
Democracy
Now: Tahir, Director, Wounds of
Waziristan, New Film on US Drone War in Pakistan
Porter, CIA Revenge Strike Blocks Pakistan
Extra! Media Downplay Drones
Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on
Extra-Judicial Killing
Reprieve Organization Defending People
Sentenced to Death
Hina Shamsi, ACLU vs. Targeted Killing,
Extra-judicial Murder
CCR & ACLU Suit Soon to Be Decided by USSC
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