Hidden History: America's Secret Drone War in Africa. An MQ-9 Reaper in Iraq in 2008.
Photo: Air Force More secret bases. More and better unmanned warplanes. More frequent and deadly robotic attacks. Some five years after a U.S. Thanks to media accounts, indirect official statements, fragmentary crash reports and one complaint by a U.N. monitoring group, we can finally begin to define — however vaguely — the scope and scale of the secret African drone war. How Can Targeted Killings Be Justified? - Room for Debate. Ahmed Jabari, the top military commander of Hamas, was killed on Wednesday in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike on his car.Ali Ali/European Pressphoto On Wednesday, Israel began its broadest attack against Gaza in years with a pinpoint airstrike that killed the military leader of Hamas.
In Pakistan and Yemen, the United States has used drones to kill members of Al Qaeda. The legality and morality of such actions, and whether they constitute government-sponsored murder, have long been questioned. Special Report: How the White House learned to love the drone. Inside the Killing Machine - Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Secret ‘Kill List’ Tests Obama’s Principles. US Drone Strikes, Cyber Attacks Carried Out Under Cover of the Christmas Holiday. President Obama and national security staff meet on Nov. 14, 2012 (Flickr Photo by The White House) On Christmas Eve, a US drone attacked a vehicle and killed at least two suspected al Qaeda militants in the southern Bayda province of Yemen.
A dangerous new world of drones. A U.S.
Air Force MQ-1 Predator UAV assigned to the California Air National Guard's 163rd Reconnaissance Wing flies near the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California, on January 7, 2012. Remote U.S. base at core of secret operations. This is the third of three articles.
DJIBOUTI CITY, Djibouti — Around the clock, about 16 times a day, drones take off or land at a U.S. military base here, the combat hub for the Obama administration’s counterterrorism wars in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. Some of the unmanned aircraft are bound for Somalia, the collapsed state whose border lies just 10 miles to the southeast. Most of the armed drones, however, veer north across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, another unstable country where they are being used in an increasingly deadly war with an al-Qaeda franchise that has targeted the United States. Drone Documents: Why The Government Won’t Release Them.
The government has rebuffed attempts by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times to obtain documents related to drone strikes and targeted killing.
We lay out their argument. A crew chief with the 432d Aircraft Maintenance Squadron performs a pre-flight inspection on an MQ-9 Reaper at Creech Air Force Base in June 2008. (Steve Huckvale/U.S. How the Gov’t Talks About a Drone Program it Won’t Acknowledge Exists. The Obama administration still doesn’t officially acknowledge the CIA’s drone program, a stance that helps shield it from discussing the program’s most controversial elements.
An armed MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aircraft sits in a shelter Oct. 15 at Joint Base Balad, Iraq, before a mission. The Targeted-Killing Czar's Powerful Case Against the Drone War - Conor Friedersdorf. John Brennan has more control over who appears on the kill lists than anyone save President Obama.
And even he thinks the CIA can't be trusted. In Djibouti, a small East African country on the Gulf of Aden, the United States launches killer drones that strike in Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. Last spring, as one of the drones sat on a runway, it suddenly came alive "without any human direction, even though the ignition had been turned off and the fuel lines closed," the Washington Post reports.
Obama 'drone-warfare rulebook' condemned by human rights groups. President Barack Obama's administration is in the process of drawing up a formal rulebook that will set out the circumstances in which targeted assassination by unmanned drones is justified, according to reports.
The New York Times, citing two unnamed sources, said explicit guidelines were being drawn up amid disagreement between the CIA and the departments of defense, justice and state over when lethal action is acceptable. Human-rights groups and peace groups opposed to the CIA-operated targeted-killing programme, which remains officially classified, said the administration had already rejected international law in pursuing its drone operations. Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists. Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.
Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. “We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . . We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ” John O. Brennan on Use of Military Force Against Al Qaeda. Who will drones target? Who in the US will decide? WASHINGTON (AP) — White House counterterror chief John Brennan has seized the lead in guiding the debate on which terror leaders will be targeted for drone attacks or raids, establishing a new procedure to vet both military and CIA targets. White House Presses for Drone Rule Book.
U.S. Tightens Drone Rules for Its Pakistan Attacks. Jeremy Scahill and Dennis Kucinich: In Obama’s 2nd Term, Will Dems Challenge U.S. Drones, Killings? Dissecting Obama’s Standard on Drone Strike Deaths. What do we know about how the administration counts killings by drones? A U.S. Predator unmanned drone armed with a missile sets off from its hangar at Bagram air base in 2009. (Bonny Schoonakker/AFP/Getty Images) In a lengthy front-page story [1] last week exploring President Obama's use of drone strikes in countries including Pakistan and Yemen, the New York Times reported that the president had "embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. " Citing "several administration officials," the Times reported that this method "in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
" Covering Obama’s Secret War. Five Reasons Drone Assassinations are Illegal. US civilian and military employees regularly target and fire lethal unmanned drone guided missiles at people across the world. Thousands of people have been assassinated. Hundreds of those killed were civilians. Some of those killed were rescuers and mourners. These killings would be criminal acts if they occurred inside the US. Does it make legal sense that these killings would be legal outside the US? Some Facts About Drone Assassinations The US has used drones to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
In Pakistan alone, the New America Foundation reports US forces have launched 297 drone strikes killing at least 1800 people, three to four hundred of whom were not even combatants. Very few of these drone strikes kill high level leaders of terror groups. John Brennan Delivers Speech On Drone Ethics. Copyright © 2012 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy - John Brennan. How Obama’s drone war is backfiring. This essay was originally published in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy. When Barack Obama took the oath of office three years ago, no one associated the phrase “targeted killing” with his optimistic young presidency. In his inaugural address, the 47-year-old former constitutional law professor uttered the word “terror” only once.
Instead, he promised to use technology to “harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” Oddly, technology has enabled Obama to become something few expected: a president who has dramatically expanded the executive branch’s ability to wage high-tech clandestine war. With a determination that has surprised many, Obama has embraced the CIA, expanded its powers and approved more targeted killings than any modern president.