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Drones
Drone Killings a Stain Upon Our Nation
By Dennis Kucinich
WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 31, 2012) -- Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has opposed the use of combat drones against suspected terrorists abroad since the first known attack in 2004. In February 2006, he asked the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency to suspend the use of Predator drones citing the “high toll in innocent civilian life.” In the 111th Congress, he sponsored a bill to prohibit the extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens abroad in response to revelations that the Administration included U.S. citizens on its targeted killing list. Today, he is leading a growing number of Members of Congress to demand the President’s legal justifications for drone strikes.
“The New York Times recently revealed a series of stunning revelations about the secretive U.S. drone campaign abroad. 1) President Obama personally authorizes each drone strike. 2) The White House continues to fail to provide its legal rationale for the killings which include Americans and civilians. 3) Any male of fighting age killed by a drone is automatically assumed to be a militant. At the same time, The Washington Post has reported that our use of drones in Yemen has actually strengthened Al-Qaeda’s recruiting efforts and generating sympathy for our enemies.
Sample Anti-Drone Ordinance for Your City
By Nick Mottern
ORDINANCE of the City (Town, Village, County)
of________________________________________
PROTECTION OF THE PUBLIC AGAINST USE OF UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES (DRONES)
Whereas:
1. United States airspace is the busiest in the world, with up to 87,000 flights per day, including commercial airliners and freight haulers, air taxis and private and military aircraft.
2. Unmanned aerial vehicles (referred to in the remainder of this ordinance as drones) are not now allowed in United States general airspace because of the threat they present to other aircraft. Under the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 the FAA is directed to create regulations that will enable drones to fly throughout US airspace by September 2015.
3. Small drones, 25 pounds or under, are now permitted to fly in general airspace below 400 feet for the use of police and first responders, with FAA permission.
On War Crimes and Regime Change
Meet the Little Girl Killed by a US Missile: Tracing One Tragic Story in Our Horrific Drone War
Around midnight on May 21, 2010, a girl named Fatima was killed when a succession of U.S.-made Hellfire missiles, each of them five-feet long and traveling at close to 1,000 miles per hour, smashed a compound of houses in a mountain village of Mohammed Khel in North Waziristan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Wounded in the explosions which killed a half dozen men, Fatima and two other children were taken to a nearby hospital where they died a few hours later.
Behram Noor, a Pakistani journalist, went to the hospital and took a picture of Fatima shortly before her death, then went back to the scene of the explosions looking for evidence that might show who was responsible for the attack. In the rubble, he found a mechanism from a U.S.-made Hellfire missile, and gave it to Reprieve, a British organization opposed to capital punishment, which shared photographs of the material with Salon. Stafford Smith alluded to the missile fragments in an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times last fall. They have also been displayed in England.
“Forensically, it is important to show how the crime of murder happened (which is what it is here),” said Reprieve executive director Clive Stafford Smith in an email. “One almost always uses the murder weapon in a case. But perhaps more important I think this physical proof — this missile killed this child — is important to have people take it seriously.”
Turnabout is Fair Play: Proud to Be an Extortionist!
By Yasmeen Ali
Lahore -- US Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ), the chair and ranking minority member respectively of the Senate Armed Services Committee, say the US must not pay $5000 per truck as demanded by Pakistan, for supplies being shipped through this country to American troops in Afghanistan. McCain went further, calling the Pakistni demand “extortion.”
Local Governments Have the Power to Restrict Drone Surveillance in the US
By Trevor Timm, EFF
A series of events in the last two weeks have set the stage for how surveillance drones will be operated by local law enforcement in the United States and how citizens can demand privacy protections as domestic use escalates.
ACTIVISTS VIGIL AT CAMP WILLIAMS: CALL FOR END TO DRONE WARFARE
Camp Douglas, WI – Thirteen Wisconsin citizen activists held their monthly vigil outside the gates of Camp Williams/Volk Field on Tuesday May 22, 2012, calling for an end to drone warfare. People attended from Madison, Monona, Portage, Montello, Mount Horeb, and Wisconsin Rapids. Camp Williams/Volk Field is a National Guard facility where testing and training for the RQ-7 Shadow 200 drones is being conducted. The monthly vigils are organized by the Wisconsin Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars, a group that practices nonviolent civil resistance against the illegal and immoral policies of our government. They join an increasing number of activists all over the country who are speaking out against drone warfare.
Why is the New York Times enabling a U.S. government smear campaign against reporters exposing the drone wars?
The Times let government officials anonymously attack a group of journalists and a lawyer who have uncovered evidence that belies the White House's claim that drones aren't killing many civilians. Was their rationale for that justified?
By John Hanrahan -- Nieman Watchdog
hanrahan@niemanwatchdog.org
A human rights lawyer and a group of investigative journalists who have exposed the extensive civilian casualties from CIA drone strikes in Pakistan are being smeared by anonymous U.S. government officials, who have even accused them of being sympathetic to al Qaeda.
Two of the anonymous accusations came in articles in The New York Times, despite the paper's own rules against personal attacks by unnamed sources.
Pakistani human rights attorney Shahzad Akbar and the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) say the campaign is intended to deter mainstream news organizations from reporting that the White House is lying about how many innocent people are being killed by the drone strikes.
President Obama's top terrorism adviser John O. Brennan recently contended that civilian deaths were "exceedingly rare." The BIJ, though, puts total drone deaths in Pakistan since 2004 at between 2,440 and 3,113, and they say between 479 and 821 of the dead were civilians, including 174 children. Drone attacks in Pakistan have dramatically increased since Obama took office: President Bush was responsible for 52; Obama for 270 and counting.
Relying on the BIJ’s comprehensive research and his own investigations in support of a number of clients who are drone victims or families of victims and who are suing the CIA, Akbar has for the last two years sharply challenged U.S. government assertions regarding civilian casualties, most recently by filing two lawsuits in Pakistan, demanding a criminal investigation into the killings by Hellfire missile of some 50 people, including tribal elders in Waziristan in March 2011. (See Niemanwatchdog.org's May 10 story, Civilian drone victims, unrecognized by the U.S. government and public, seek justice.)
