Drones and Democracy (Moyers Video Interview) Leaked Obama Memo Shows Assassination of U.S. Citizens "Has No Geographic Limit" (Democracy Now!) Top Five Objections to the White House's Drone Killing Memo. Drones/UAVs. UN launches major investigation into civilian drone deaths. Ben Emmerson QC addresses reporters in London (Photo: TBIJ) A UN investigation into the legality and casualties of drone strikes has been formally launched, with a leading human rights lawyer revealing the team that will carry out the inquiry.
The announcement came as the latest reported US drone strike in Yemen was said to have mistakenly killed two children. Ben Emmerson QC, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, told a London press conference that he will lead a group of international specialists who will examine CIA and Pentagon covert drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The team will also look at drone strikes by US and UK forces in Afghanistan, and by Israel in the Occupied Territories. In total some 25 strikes are expected to be examined in detail. The senior British barrister will work alongside international criminal lawyers, a senior Pakistani judge and one of the UK’s leading forensic pathologists, as well as experts from Pakistan and Yemen.
America's murderous drone campaign is fuelling terror. Illustration by Belle Mellor More than a decade after George W Bush launched it, the "war on terror" was supposed to be winding down.
US military occupation of Iraq has ended and Nato is looking for a way out of Afghanistan, even as the carnage continues. But another war – the undeclared drone war that has already killed thousands – is now being relentlessly escalated. From Pakistan to Somalia, CIA-controlled pilotless aircraft rain down Hellfire missiles on an ever-expanding hit list of terrorist suspects – they have already killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians in the process. Code Pink Takes on Obama's Drones (Woods) Chris Woods writes at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism: Walk into any US bookstore and the stacks are crowded with hundreds of books on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet more than a decade in, its hard to find anything on the escalating use of armed drones by the United States. Now Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the US women-led peace movement Code Pink, is seeking to balance the shelves. Her new book Drone Warfare has just been published. Benjamin, along with Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights, also recently organised the first major international conference on drones in Washington DC.
The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret. US censures report on drone casualties - Americas. US officials have strongly rejected allegations in an independent UK study that a covert drone war in Pakistan has killed large numbers of civilians, saying the numbers are "way off the mark".
On Friday, US officials criticised the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism report's finding that there had been many more CIA attacks on alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban targets and far more civilian deaths than previously reported. Former Intel Chief: Call Off The Drone War (And Maybe the Whole War on Terror) ASPEN, Colorado — Ground the U.S. drone war in Pakistan.
Drones: A deeply unsettling future. San Francisco, California - On Sunday, Iran claimed to have taken down a US drone in Iranian airspace - not by shooting it out the sky, but with its cyber warfare team.
Reports confirm that the US believes Iran is now in possession of "one of the more sensitive surveillance platforms in the CIA's fleet", but deny Iran's involvement. Of course, Iran’s claim of overtaking the drone with its cyber warfare team should be tempered with a serious dose of scepticism, as cyber security experts say the facts may not add up. But this is just the latest story in a series of incidents that raises worrying questions about security problems caused by drones. And given the coming proliferation of drone technology both domestically and abroad, this should be a concern to citizens all over the world. Drone War Exposed – the complete picture of CIA strikes in Pakistan.
Pakistani villagers at funeral of drone victim – December 29 2010- AP CIA drone strikes have led to far more deaths in Pakistan than previously understood, according to extensive new research published by the Bureau.
Some 175 children are among at least 2,347 people reported killed in US attacks since 2004. There are credible reports of at least 392 civilians among the dead. In a surprise move, a counter-terrorism official has also released US government estimates of the numbers killed. These state that an estimated 2,050 people have been killed in drone strikes to mid-August – of whom all but an estimated 50 are combatants. The magical realism of body counts. A gypsy named Melquiades who died many years ago in Singapore returned to live with the family of Colonel Aureliano Buendia in Macondo, because he could no longer bear the tedium of death.
These are the kinds of characters that populate Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magnificent work One Hundred Years of Solitude. Today they also seem to occupy the tribal badlands of Pakistan's north-western frontier. On June 3, when Ilyas Kashmiri was killed in a US drone strike, he had already been dead for over a year. In September 2009, the CIA claimed that it killed Kashmiri along with two other senior Taliban leaders in North Waziristan. But the lure of the limelight was seemingly irresistible even in death, because on October 9, Kashmiri returned to give an interview to the late Syed Saleem Shahzad of Asia Times Online.
Baitullah Mehsud, the former commander of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also rose from the dead many times. Death is clearly not what it used to be.