A wrongly targeted Afghan aid worker and his family are among the latest casualties. On August 29, in the final days of our 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, the United States launched a drone strike, firing a 20-pound Hellfire missile at an aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi as he parked his car outside his home in a residential neighborhood of Kabul.[Read More…]
What a way to end a war! Apologies all around! We’re so damn sorry — or actually, maybe not! I’m thinking, of course, about CENTCOM commander General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr.’s belated apology for the drone assassination of seven children as the last act, or perhaps final war crime, in this country’s 20-year-long Afghan nightmare. Where to begin (or end, for that[Read More…]
Facing unrelenting criticism over the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden Administration is insisting that the United States will maintain a capability to launch airstrikes in Afghanistan, regardless of the legal limitations and possibility of perpetuating the war. The Biden Administration vows to keep in place an “over-the-horizon capability,” meaning that the United States will still be able to strike targets in Afghanistan[Read More…]
The August 29 U.S. drone strike in Kabul that killed ten civilians, including seven children, demonstrates the bankruptcy of the war on terror. Like many other drone strikes, the strike in Kabul targeted innocent people and achieved nothing except to blow up civilians that had the misfortune to be in the vicinity. According to two recent investigative reports in The New York Times and The Washington[Read More…]
No more profoundly disturbing statement was needed. In the dying days of the official US departure from Kabul, a US drone etched its butcher’s legacy with a strike supposedly intended for the blood-lusty terrorist group ISIS-K, an abbreviation of Islamic State in Khorasan Province. Its members had taken responsibility for blasts outside Harmid Karzai International Airport that had cost the[Read More…]
In May 2019, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that famous bastion of anti-whistleblowing fervour, unsealed an indictment charging former intelligence analyst Daniel Everett Hale with five counts of providing classified information to a reporter. The first four focused on obtaining national defense information, retaining and transmitting that information, causing the communication of that same information[Read More…]
“We now kill people without ever seeing them. Now you push a button thousands of miles away … Since it’s all done by remote control, there’s no remorse … and then we come home in triumph.” —US Navy Admiral Gene LaRocque, speaking to a reporter in 1995. Dear Judge O’Grady, It is not a secret that I struggle to live[Read More…]
The whistleblower acted on behalf of the public’s right to know what is being done in its name “Pardon Daniel Hale.” These words hung in the air on a recent Saturday evening, projected onto several Washington, D.C. buildings, above the face of a courageous whistleblower facing ten years in prison. The artists aimed to inform the U.S. public about Daniel[Read More…]
“Over-the-horizon” air operations, possibly directed at the Taliban, may rely very heavily on drone assassination and drone targeting for manned aircraft. On July 2, fleeing questions from reporters about U.S. plans in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden sought refuge behind the July 4th Independence Day holiday, yet obliquely acknowledged that the U.S. will use some level of “over the horizon” air attacks[Read More…]
There has increasing concern in recent times of robot weapons becoming more of a real-life threat, and a very serious one at that. So it was only a matter of time before we would hear of a horrible robot weapon being used in real battlefield. This appears to have happened last year in Libya with the appearance of what[Read More…]
At the High Line, a popular tourist attraction in New York City, visitors to the West side of Lower Manhattan ascend above street level to what was once an elevated freight train line and is now a tranquil and architecturally intriguing promenade. Here walkers enjoy a park-like openness; with fellow strollers they experience urban beauty, art and the wonder of[Read More…]
On Thursday, April 15, the New York Times posted an article headed, “How the U.S. Plans to Fight From Afar After Troops Exit Afghanistan,” just in case anyone misunderstood the previous day’s headline, “Biden, Setting Afghanistan Withdrawal, Says ‘It Is Time to End the Forever War’” as indicating the U.S. war in Afghanistan might actually come to an end on[Read More…]
In the first two months of Joe Biden’s presidency, you could feel the country holding its breath. Sheltered in place, hidden behind masks, unsure about whether to trust in a safe-from-pandemic future, we are nonetheless beginning to open our eyes collectively. As part of this reemergence, a wider array of issues — those beyond Covid-19 — are once again starting[Read More…]
by Medea Benjamin and Barry Summers “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.” That same persistent eye in the sky may soon be deployed over U.S. cities. At the time he made that comment about surveillance drones over[Read More…]
“Give us the chance to compete, to see our capabilities, to compare, to see the benefit we can bring with our [drone] system.” Shaul Shahar, Israel Aerospace Industries Vice-President, March 2, 2017 A certain part of you should go on vacation when a drone company, certainly one dedicated to killing, gets less custom to do what it does best. The[Read More…]
The computer whined
a kind of laugh….
“You’re on a biometric leash!
We know your thoughts before you strew them
haphazardly about.”
The Trump White House has secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to resume drone assassination strikes that in the latter years of the Obama administration had been largely reserved for the US military, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The Journal cited unnamed US officials revealing that the authorization was granted shortly after Trump visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia[Read More…]
Elections come and go but when “The Don”, Barack Obama, meets with his inner circle of Capos every Tuesday morning its breakfast with drones as in the Murder Incorporated assassination program. Think about it, every Tuesday morning in the White House this breakfast club decides who they are going to blow to smithereens that week, with fresh fruit and cappuccinos[Read More…]
“We believe in what we are doing… If you are pushed you push back.” Julian Assange The mutterings have become furious, and it is clear that the Democratic contender for the White House has again shown how traditional her ploys towards power are going to be. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have again managed to pull the blinds off an episode[Read More…]
I got involved in the whole drones process because I was representing people in Guantanamo Bay. And when President Obama came into office he says we’re going to close Guantanamo Bay and fairly quickly it dawned on me that yeah he didn’t like Guantanamo, so they were just going out and killing the people instead of locking them up. And[Read More…]
Think of it as the Trojan Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American warfare in these years, a single remotely operated plane sent to take out a single key figure. It’s a shiny video game for grown ups — a Mortal Kombator Call of Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the giant wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to[Read More…]
Neil Armstrong once said that ‘science has not yet mastered prophecy, we predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next ten’. This quote is so true in the Indian context as none can imagine exactly ten years ago that drones can be used for civilian purposes but now they are all set to[Read More…]
US President Joe Biden: Representing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 
Japan’s Upcoming Nuclear Waste Dump 
Supreme Court Judge Gives Voice to Agony of Millions Belonging to Denotified and Nomadic Tribes 
Acrid, Rotten-egg Smell, Noxious Gas, Headaches, Stomach Pain: Tale Of A City In U.S. 
Leaders of cities in Asia Pacific commit for united local actions to meet global health goals 
What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Cuba and Venezuela 
Biden-Putin meeting is a cliffhanger 
Punishing the Unvaccinated: Europe’s COVID-19 Health Experiment 
How Congress Loots the Treasury for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex 
International Brigade Against Apartheid 
Adolph & Co. Would Have Been Proud!! 
Elephant In The Room 
Rajasthan’s open mines invite disaster 
UN’s highest ever humanitarian appeal falls on imperialism’s deaf ears 
A Peep into the past: On the occasion of 65th Anniversary of Ambedkar’s Nirvana – Remembering Ambedkar and Revisiting his Thoughts 
Cuba Supports Nicaragua’s Decision To Leave OAS 
United Kingdom Owes Remedial Justice To The Eelam Tamils 
‘Honour killings’ in the land of ‘self-respect movement’ (Part-1) 
Why Countercurrents Should Be Sustained: Ram Puniyani 
Omicron and the Travel Ban Itch 
The Donald Also Rises? The Far Right Continues to Build Its International 
The Hollowness of India’s Education System 
Declining fertility rate and population in India 
Big builders lording over the textile mill area in Mumbai 
29th anniversary of demolition of Babri Masjid which was the most defining moment of ascendancy of Saffron Fascism 
Activists, you must shame and pressure the PA for its sins as much as you pressure Israel for its crimes 
India-Bangladesh ties at inflection point 
World Soil Day 
An Option Taken Off the Table 
Courage, Caution and the Spirit of 1971 
The landscape of a Cashless India 
Backing Horses: Australia’s Solomon Islands Intervention 
Pavel Kussa on Agrarian Crisis, Victory and Challenges ahead 
Time to Fight Climate Change, Not Each Other 
As UAE embraces Iran, fizz goes pop for Abraham Accords 
Front-of-Pack Label regulation will be ‘good for India’ 
Burned-out Forests Are Not Re-Growing 
Is the collegium system of appointment a disappointment? 
UN should brand Hindutva terrorist groups 
Can the Green New Deal save us? No it can’t 
Dear Friends We are passing through difficult times. As sectarian nationalism is increasing its grip on the state and society intolerance is rising. The mainstream media has been taken over by the pro-state corporate sector. Its responsibility to audit the state policies has been replaced by media singing paeans to the rulers. It uncritically appreciates what the state is doing[Read More…]
