Just as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA and U.S. military act on bad intel when designating targets for drone attacks. As when the United States greased the skids for war with Iraq, it’s ratcheting up tensions with Iran by disseminating misinformation about nuclear weapons. The United States has also failed to learn …
Continue reading “US Using Bad Info for Drone Strikes Like It Did for Detainees”
Several friends of mine are among the 35 American activists assembling in Pakistan in recent days in an effort to seek ground truth on the impact of U.S. drone strikes on civilians there. I will be holding them and their Pakistani hosts and co-travelers in the Light, as my Quaker friends like to say, and …
Continue reading “Silence of the Drones”
Medea Benjamin and activists banned, harrassed
Last spring at the first annual Drone Summit in Washington, Reprieve founder Clive Stafford Smith took to the stage, and by the second slide in his presentation had splashed across the screen the cherubic face of his little boy Wilfred, a British portraiture straight out of a Whistler painting. This mostly white, Western audience was …
Continue reading “Clive Stafford Smith: Menace to Drone Society”
I’ve written several critical appraisals of Spies Against Armageddon, Yossi Melman’s trashy spy novel which passes for a sober account of the Mossad’s heroics. After reading Marcia Cohen’s review at Lobelog, I’ve discovered that there is at least one important segment worth examining. Melman recounts the story of the assassination of Abbas Musawi, at the …
Continue reading “US Counterterror Policy Brought to You by Our Sponsor, Israel”
Slate columnist Fred Kaplan recently attempted to defend President Obama’s increasing reliance on drones. While he partially concedes that drones could be "morally iffy," Kaplan argues that this "kill list" of extrajudicial assassination could be "assuring": "Not only are people—trained, authorized personnel—very much in control of what the drones do; in the most sensitive cases, the ultimate decision is …
Continue reading “Drone Strikes Do Fuel Blowback in Yemen”
The principal function of government since 9/11, even if unintentional, has been to develop strategies to reduce individual liberties and transfer power to the government while not appearing to do so. Of course, neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama actually explains it in those terms. They say instead that they are making Americans safer, …
Continue reading “Drones Overseas Lead to Drones at Home”
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Christopher Swift attempts to show that cause-and-effect is not a concept applicable to foreign policy in “The Drone Blowback Fallacy.” What he ends up doing only reinforces the idea that a government can’t continue butchering children and not expect the parents to one day retaliate. It should be noted that blowback …
Continue reading “The Real Blowback Fallacy”
In recent months, the U.S. policy of drone attacks to kill suspected militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen has come under heated criticism. The extrajudicial targeted killings of suspects, including American citizens, is in itself a stark violation of international law. Add to that the fact that President Obama has ordered hundreds of …
Continue reading “The Specter of Domestic Drones”
Listen to Rep. Paul deliver this address. Last week I joined several of my colleagues in sending a letter to President Obama requesting clarification of his criteria for the lethal use of drones overseas. Administration officials assure us that a “high degree of confidence” is required that the person targeted by a drone is a …
Continue reading “Unconstitutional Use of Drones Must Stop” 
