“A drone attack in a volatile tribal region of north-west Pakistan has killed at least five suspected militants, officials say.” (Source: BBC News)
Remember, suspected = innocent. But those people are still dead.
The frequency of the attacks has increased since President Barack Obama took office in 2008. More than 100 raids were reported in the area in 2010, and more than 60 took place last year.” (Source: BBC News)
Obama – a more efficient murderer. More here.
When tribal elders from the remote Pakistani region of North Waziristan travelled to Islamabad last week to protest against CIA drone strikes, a teenager called Tariq Khan was among them.
A BBC team caught him on camera, sitting near the front of a tribal assembly, or jirga, listening carefully.
Four days later he was dead – killed by one of the drones he was protesting against.
His family told us two missiles hit the 16-year-old on Monday near Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan. His 12-year-old cousin Wahid was killed alongside him.
(Source: BBC News)
I have tried to post an article on here every time the US has carried out another terrorist attack on innocent Pakistanis. I have tried but, I confess, some days I’m just not up to writing about more children killed by CIA drones, more families shattered by the USA’s brutality. The horror is too much.
Here are the current figures for the illegal drone war the USA is carrying out in Pakistan:
(Source: Wikipedia)
Let’s be perfectly clear here: the USA is not in a state of war with Pakistan. So, these attacks are terror attacks, pure and simple. And even if there was a state of war, the use of drones can be seen to be flouting so many of the Geneva Conventions set up precisely to protect non-combatants, as Clive Stafford-Smith points out:
“If you are trying to surrender and you put your hands up to a drone, what happens?” he asks.
“They just fire the missile, so there are all sorts of Geneva Conventions issues which are not being discussed.”
(Source: BBC News)
Stafford-Smith is a lawyer campaigning against the CIA’s terror in Pakistan. In a Guardian article in August, he reported a study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:
The BIJ’s study is everything that the CIA version of events is not: transparent, drawn from as many credible sources as possible and essentially open. It is clear about where its material comes from and what the margin of error may be. You should look, and you should engage, not just with the bare numbers, but also some of the stories: the attack on would-be rescuers by drones that had lingered, circling over the site of a previous strike, and opened fire – on the cruel assumption that any Good Samaritan must be a Taliban Samaritan; or the teenager who lost both legs when his family home was hit.
(Source: The Guardian)
How is this tolerated by the other “civilised” nations of the world? Why is the USA, alone among every nation, allowed carte blanche to murder over 2,600 people with its drone attacks?
I find the conspiracy of silence in our mass media to be mindboggling. This is the same media which descended into a feral frenzy over Ghaddafi’s death, scrambling to post up pictures of his corpse. And yet, it manages to miss displaying over 2,600 pictures of other corpses, these ones being the victims of American imperialism.
The CIA and USA’s justification for these attacks is laughable. Every attack is on a “militant.” But of course it is. This is a retroactive designation: anyone the US murders with its drones automatically becomes a militant. Including the children blown to tiny pieces, presumably.
Again, imagine if China started using drones against civilians in South Korea, saying that they had evidence that they were part of an anti-Chinese terror group. Could you really see the world standing by doing nothing in that situation?
One thing is clear. Obama = Blair. Both were seen as lions of the left, both are now nothing more than blood-encrusted war criminals. The blood of the innocents of Pakistan (and now Somalia) drips from Obama’s hands.
And the voices of protest will fall on deaf ears:
But Washington is unlikely to heed the anger here. Under President Barack Obama, the use of drone missiles has soared – there’s an attack on average every four days.
Increasingly, these remote-controlled killers are Washington’s weapon of choice.
(Source: BBC News)
A drone attack every four days under Obama. What a glorious leader!
Via Keyvan Minoukadeh, a devastating analysis of the West’s backing of dictatorships and selfish motives for military intervention.
GOOD ARAB vs. BAD ARAB, the current media myth.
A US drone attack has killed at least 21 militants in north-western Pakistan, local intelligence officials said.
The drone fired two missiles, destroying a vehicle and a compound near Miranshah town in North Waziristan tribal district, on the Afghan border.
(Source: BBC News)
As always, these weren’t militants or even ‘militants.’ The only people claiming they were are the US military and they’ve shown the world time and time again, from My Lai up to their mass slaughter in Iraq of 1.2 million civilians that they simply don’t care about human life.
So, when you switch on the radio or TV and you hear politicians wailing about how much they abhor violence and criminality, terror and the death of innocents, remember, it’s all lies.
Or else they would be talking about the 2,000+ people killed by the USA’s illegal, terrorist attacks.
And they aren’t. Nobody is.
The US has conducted its first drone strike on Islamist militants in Somalia, marking the expansion of the pilotless war campaign to a sixth country.
The missile strike on a vehicle in the southern town of Kismayo, reported last week as a helicopter assault, wounded two senior militants with al-Shabab and several foreign fighters according to the Washington Post.
Armed Predator and Reaper drones already operate in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya, where they are controlled by the US military or the CIA.
The CIA-run programmes are controversial. Although they provide the Obama administration with a low-risk weapon against Islamist militants, they stir intense anti-American hostility among the local population.
Opposition is most vociferous in Pakistan, where the government said on Wednesday it was shutting down a big CIA drone base, and had ordered US personnel based there to leave.
The closure of Shamsi airbase is unlikely to end the strikes. The CIA has moved its drones to bases across the border in Afghanistan, and some strikes have already taken place from there, according to a senior Pakistani military official.
via US extends drone strikes to Somalia | World news | The Guardian.
After killing hundreds of innocent Pakistanis while the world generally doesn’t give a fuck, the USA is now extending its terrorist bombing campaign. Here are some stats from their drone attacks so far:
(Source: New America Foundation and Time via Wikipedia)
Of course, this won’t be a major news story. The USA is now carrying out terrorist bombing campaigns in six countries and yet that doesn’t make any TV bulletins. These drones murder indiscriminately, are designed to inspire fear and uncertainty – they are the definition of terror.
What other country or group is carrying out so many terror attacks? How is it that the USA can spout its bullshit about fighting the War On Terror when it is, in fact, the biggest terrorist operative currently active?
The head of one of the unions striking over pensions has said Ed Miliband "should be ashamed of himself" for urging workers to call off the action.
Mary Bousted, leader of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, told a rally in London his stance was "a disgrace".
The Labour leader said the strikes were "wrong" because negotiations with the government were still ongoing.
(Source: BBC News)
The capitalists have the Tory party who dutifully represent the interests of their megarich buddies. Would it be too much to ask for a Labour party that actually represented labour?
In short, Miliband, fuck off to the Tories, you dick.
A North Carolina man with no health care robbed a bank for $1 in order to go to jail and get his ailments seen to. He is hoping to be convicted of a felony, so he can get the benefits he lost after he was laid off from his 17-year Coca-Cola delivery job. He has carpal tunnel, a bad back, and "a protrusion on his chest." He is in chronic pain. He has promised to reoffend if he isn’t convicted and treated.
(Source: Boing Boing)
THIS is what this government wants for all of us. It wants to destroy the socialist NHS and replace it with capitalist health care like the US “enjoys.” Because the free market is so efficient, great and all that.
Unless we get on the streets and protest on June 30th and make enough noise, this will be your future for health care for you and your family.
I wanted instead to write books that were fire and ice, wind sweeping the earth. I wanted to write books that, once experienced, could not be forgotten, books that would be cherished as we cherish the most exquisite light we have ever seen. I had contempt for anything less than this perfect book that I could imagine. This book that lived in my imagination was small and perfect and I wanted it to live in person after person, forever. Even in the darkest of human times, it would live. Even in the life of one person who would sustain it and be sustained by it, it would live. I wanted to write a book that would be read even by one person, but always. For the rest of human time some one person would always know that book, and think it beautiful and fine and true, and then it would be like any tree that grows, or any grain of sand. It would be, and once it was it would never not be.
In my secret longings there was another desire as well, not opposite but different, not the same but as strong. There would be a new social order in which people could live in a new way. There would be this new way of living which I could, on the edges of my mind and in the core of my being, imagine and taste. People would be free, and they would live decent lives, and those lives would not be without pain, but they would be without certain kinds of pain. They would be lives untouched by prisons and killings and hunger and bombs. I imagined that there could be a world without institutionalized murder and systematic cruelty.
I imagined that I could write a book that would make such a world possible.
(Source: New America Foundation and Time via Wikipedia)
Today, the US issued this statement:
The Obama administration has condemned what it says are “renewed atrocities” by Libyan forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
“Snipers have targeted civilians seeking medical assistance,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.
(Source: BBC News)
This post is not defending the despot and undoubted mass-murderer Gaddafi. But it is questioning how the USA continues to set itself up as moral authority for the “free world” when simultaneously murdering innocent people in its drone attacks against Pakistan. Look at the stats above: over 2,200 Pakistanis murdered by the USA’s missiles.
Today, Pakistan issued this statement:
Pakistan has sharply criticised the United States for a missile attack on Wednesday in which six people were reported killed near the Afghan border.
“Drone attacks have become a core irritant in the counter-terror campaign,” the foreign office said.
It was the first such raid in a month and came after Pakistan’s spy chief met his US counterpart to discuss a deep rift over CIA activities in Pakistan.
There was huge anger after a drone raid killed dozens of civilians on 17 March.
Although several militants were reported killed, the vast majority of the dead were civilians attending a tribal meeting.
(Source: BBC News)
Remember, these “militants” were still innocent, they weren’t arrested or detained or charged in any way. The US military simply killed them, along with a load of other Pakistanis even its huge mendacity couldn’t cover up.
The Pakistani government is, of course, in cahoots with the US. There are probably some very nice backroom deals going on there. They’ve only spoken out today because of the mass protests against US atrocities have forced them to pretend to care.
Like the US government, like the UK government, like all governments, they don’t care about their citizens, they only care about their own power and security.
You will hear the US moral indignation on your radios and televisions today. You won’t hear the Pakistani condemnation of the US, even though it comes from the government of a sovereign nation. Our mass media simply won’t repeat criticism of the US.
So, most people will only hear one side and therefore continue to live in the fantasy world where the USA is the good guy, selflessly fighting evil around the world.
The consumer products giants Unilever and Procter & Gamble (P&G) have been fined 315m euros (£280m, $456m) for fixing washing powder prices in eight European countries.
It follows a three-year investigation by the European Commission following a tip-off by the German company, Henkel.
(Source: BBC News)
The “free market” is just another term for organised crime. When will we throw the capitalist criminals off our backs?