Citizen Run Database Shows Over 1,000 People Killed by Cops in 2014
By Jay Syrmopoulos | The Free Thought Project | December 10, 2014
To date the most reliable data anyone has about law enforcement killings in the U.S. was the FBI’s statistics on homicides by law enforcement. But therein lies the problem.
Those numbers are voluntarily given to the FBI by police, and many jurisdictions simply don’t hand over this information, thus making an accurate accounting of exactly how many people police have actually killed each year extremely difficult to ascertain.
For instance, the killing of Eric Garner would not be included in the FBI’s 2014 statistics because New York doesn’t participate in the voluntary program.
Thankfully there is a new means of aggregating how many people are being killed by law enforcement. This new tool for accountability is the website www.killedbypolice.com.
It’s basically a spreadsheet that lists every person killed by cops in the years 2013 and 2014. In addition to naming those killed, it also provides a link to media reports for each of the killings, age, sex and race if available.
The information available on the site begins in May of 2013 and runs through now. The novel idea of monitoring the number of police killings through news reports has shown to be a much better accounting of deaths at the hands of cops than the voluntary FBI system.
The FBI’s stats show that in all of 2013 there were 461 people killed by cops, but when using the new site, which only shows from May 1 to Dec. 31, 2013, police actually killed 748 people. Keep in mind, 748 is drastically more than the feds claim police killed the entire year but only accounts for 8 months of 2013.
The site shows 2014’s total number killed by police to be at 1,029 with a few weeks left in the year.
Here is a link to their Facebook page. This is another wonderful tool to be utilized in holding law enforcement accountable for their actions, as they can no longer hide these numbers from the public.
This site has shown itself to be a dramatically better barometer for what is actually transpiring in police state USA, and accounting for how many citizens are actually being killed by police, than anything we previously had available.
Jay Syrmopoulos is an investigative journalist, freethinker, researcher, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs. Jay’s work has previously been published on BenSwann.com and WeAreChange.org. You can follow him on Twitter @sirmetropolis, on Facebook at Sir Metropolis and now on tsu.
Justice for Eric Garner? From the Justice Department? Don’t Hold Your Breath
By Mark P. Fancher | Black Agenda Report | December 10, 2014
When news broke of the grand jury’s refusal to indict Eric Garner’s killer, Spike Lee told CNN interviewers that because the death was video recorded he remains hopeful that the U.S. Department of Justice investigation will produce the results thousands of protesters crave. Based on the Justice Department’s record, it is probably a vain hope.
The Garner killing is not the first one to be captured by cameras. The Justice Department had access to a video record of the police firing squad execution of Milton Hall in Saginaw, Michigan, but no charges were brought against the cops who shot 46 bullets at the 49-year-old homeless black man. The reason? In a statement, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said: “…this tragic event does not present sufficient evidence of willful misconduct to give rise to a federal criminal prosecution of the police officers involved.”
Few who watch the police cruiser dashboard camera footage of the killing reach the same conclusion. That video is probably the best indication that if the Justice Department believes the evidence against Milton Hall’s killers is insufficient, then the bar is so high that there is no case that is likely to qualify for prosecution – including Eric Garner’s killing. While it is possible that public pressure might force Eric Holder to handle the Garner case differently, some legal analysts discount that possibility because they have bought into the Justice Department’s inaccurate and incomplete interpretation of the applicable federal law.
The law that authorizes federal criminal civil rights charges against police officers says that in a homicide case like Eric Garner’s or Milton Hall’s, a police officer can be guilty only if he not only violated the victim’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force, but the officer also “willfully” violated that right. In its explanation of why Milton Hall’s killers were not prosecuted, the Justice Department said: “Law enforcement actions based on fear, panic, misperception or even poor judgment do not constitute willful conduct prosecutable under the statute.” Implied in that statement is the belief that it would not be possible to get into the heads of the officers and extract private thoughts that might betray their intent to “willfully” violate a constitutional right.
To the great disappointment of those outraged by Milton Hall’s death, the Justice Department conveniently ignored what the courts have had to say about the “willfulness” requirement. Starting with the U.S. Supreme Court and ending with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (which has jurisdiction over Milton Hall’s hometown) the courts have made it clear that the Justice Department is not required to engage in mind reading in order to hold the police accountable.
The Supreme Court said: “[t]he fact that the defendants may not have been thinking in constitutional terms is not material” to whether they satisfy the willfulness requirement. The Sixth Circuit explained that a jury: “need not, in order to convict, determine that [the accused] actually knew that it was a Constitutional right that they were violating…”
Not only is it unnecessary to prove that an officer was thinking specifically of trying to violate a victim’s Fourth Amendment rights, but the Supreme Court took the additional step of providing a much easier way to charge and convict police who kill. The court said: “[to] act willfully in the sense in which we use the word [is to] act in open defiance or reckless disregard of a constitutional requirement…”
It is therefore hard to imagine why charges cannot be brought when police officers fire dozens of bullets at a homeless man armed only with a pen knife; or when police use a choke hold to put a submissive man on the ground because he was alleged to be engaged in unauthorized cigarette sales. By almost anyone’s reckoning, such conduct should be regarded as “open defiance” or “reckless disregard” for the constitutional rights of the victims.
Will the Justice Department’s investigation result in the criminal prosecution of Eric Garner’s killers? It’s possible, but don’t hold your breath. With each new incident of unpunished police violence, it becomes more likely that concerned observers will conclude that African people born or living in America have no rights that the Justice Department is bound to respect.
Mark P. Fancher is the staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan Racial Justice Project, which pursues justice for Milton Hall. He is also a member of the National Conference of Black Lawyers. He can be contacted at mfancher@comcast.net.
New ISIS “scare video” reveals Ottawa’s unprecedented hubris
By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | December 9, 2014
What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Canada’s puppet politicians have so little faith in the public’s ability to think critically or discern reality that they are now marketing the most ridiculous harebrained nonsense to further hoodwink an already woefully ignorant Canadian populace.
Despite the fact that Stephen Harper announced Canada’s participation in the fraudulent anti-ISIS (or “Islamic State”) coalition in Iraq many weeks in advance of any ISIS-inspired threat or attack in Canada, the professional script-readers in Ottawa are asserting that the existence of such threats is a de facto justification for this country’s involvement in the campaign.
Can Ottawa’s unprecedented hubris get any more depraved?
What’s more, the Canadian media is frenzied over the emergence of a new ISIS video featuring a Canadian citizen, John Maguire, who allegedly converted to Islam and traveled to Syria to join the ISIS insurgency in 2013. In the comical video, Maguire is seen sporting a foreboding Islamic beard and battle get-up as he calls for attacks on Canadian soil in retaliation for Ottawa’s participation in the US-led bombing offensive allegedly aimed at combatting the militant group.
“Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney says Canadian officials revoked the passport of John Maguire, an Ottawa-area man who joined ISIS in Syria and who is calling for Muslims to carry out lone-wolf attacks in Canada,” reported the CBC in a Dec. 8 article.
Was this video “threat” crafted in the propaganda caverns of the Harper regime? Or was it shot and filmed in a Mossad studio in Tel Aviv?
Skeptics are speculating that the new video is just another Hollywood deception designed to legitimize a morally bankrupt and irrational foreign policy. In a Dec. 10 article discussing the Maguire video, the Toronto Star mentions that it was procured by SITE Intelligence Group, a US-based intelligence-gathering organization. SITE’s founder and chief, Rita Katz, is an Israeli citizen whose father was executed in 1968 in Iraq as a spy for Israel during the Six Day War. Katz’s group has acted as little more than a propaganda outlet for Israel’s Mossad, routinely disseminating menacing videos depicting Arabs and Muslims as Captain Hook-style villains.
Even if the new video is genuine and the man in it is not some paid actor on the payroll of an intelligence service, it serves as nothing more than a painful reminder that Stephen Harper is a deadly miscreant whose every move is motivated by envious malice and an intent to eradicate anything good associated with the country he claims to represent.
Just as the US regime intermittently released al-Qaeda videos at opportune times after 9/11 to frighten their people into submission, the neocon-infested administration in Ottawa is mimicking the tactics of its ideological kinfolk in Washington. The mysterious shooting on Parliament Hill in October was Canada’s media-made 9/11-style spectacle, and the subsequent hyping of “jihadi” videos is undoubtedly part of a coordinated public relations campaign to “win over” the masses to Harper’s belligerent war agenda in the Middle East.
Irrespective of the verity that ISIS is a manufactured creation of the US-Israeli imperium and that its actions are wholly in sync with US-Israeli objectives in the region, it must be pointed out that even if an entity like ISIS was a grassroots organization acting on its own accord it is still much less of a menace to the world than its duplicitous shadow sponsors in Washington and Tel Aviv.
Whatever evil ISIS may represent, Israel and the US are substantially worse and markedly more dangerous and devastating in the reach and breadth of their crimes against millions of innocent people. Many awakened American college students attending Harvard University echoed this sentiment in a recent “Campus Reform” video posted to YouTube. It is American imperialism (and by extension Israeli imperialism) that is the culprit behind much of the unrest and turmoil in the Middle East, the students opined. It is America, not ISIS, which is the “bigger threat” to world peace, they said.
The Harvard students’ contention that the US government represents a greater peril than ISIS is confirmed by the facts. According to former CIA officer John Stockwell, the CIA has directly and indirectly caused the deaths of more than six million people by way of proxy wars, coups, assassinations and terrorist attacks. “In the 1980s, I coined the phrase the ‘Third World War’ because in my research I realized that we [the US] were not attacking the Soviet Union [or other big powers], we were [consistently] attacking people in the Third World,” Stockwell explained in a lecture on the CIA’s “secret wars” across the globe. Critics of US imperialism such as William Blum and Noam Chomsky have documented US military occupations, both overt and covert, in more than 50 countries, resulting in tens of millions of deaths since the end of World War II. In his magnum opus on US imperialism entitled Rogue State, William Blum documents the sordid details of America’s imperial interventions on every continent on earth. Blum’s research proves that the US has engineered the overthrow of dozens of foreign governments (installing brutal dictatorships in their stead) and has sponsored terrorists and death squads to do its bidding against “unfriendly” regimes.
Israel’s killing and maiming of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese and other Arabs in the mid-east since its creation in 1948 has yet to be matched by the likes of ISIS and affiliated groups. In addition to its direct victims, Israel is also to blame for much of America’s bloodletting in the region, principally the war in Iraq whose “American” masterminds in both propaganda and policy-making were by and large Jewish-Zionist dual-citizens with passionate links to the regime in Tel Aviv.
One cannot argue with these humbling truths. No matter how you look at it, the gruesome atrocities of the “Islamic State” pales in comparison to the genocidal conduct of that group’s clandestine backers in Washington and Tel Aviv.
Copyright 2014 Brandon Martinez
The New Republic’s Ugly Reality
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | December 8, 2014
There has been much hand-wringing of late in Official Washington about an editorial shakeup at The New Republic and the possibility that the century-old political magazine’s legacy will somehow be tarnished by its new owner. But the truth about The New Republic is that it has more blood on its hands than almost any other publication around, which is saying something.
In my four decades in national journalism – that’s two-fifths of The New Republic’s life – what I have seen from the magazine is mostly its smug advocacy for U.S. interventionism abroad and snarky putdowns of antiwar skeptics at home. Indeed, you could view The New Republic as the most productive hothouse for cultivating neoconservative dogma — and at least partly responsible for the senseless slaughter associated with that ideology.
Though The New Republic still touts its reputation as “liberal,” that label has been essentially a cover for its real agenda: pushing a hawkish foreign policy agenda that included the Reagan administration’s slaughter of Central Americans in the 1980s, violent U.S. interventions in Iraq, Syria and other Muslim countries for the past two decades, and Israel’s suppression of Palestinians forever.
Indeed, the magazine’s long-ago-outdated status as “liberal” has long served the cause of right-wingers. The Reagan administration loved to plant flattering stories about the Nicaraguan Contras in The New Republic because its “liberal” cachet would give the propaganda more credibility. A favorite refrain from President Ronald Reagan’s team was “even the liberal New Republic agrees …”
In other words, the magazine became the neocon wolf advancing the slaughter of Central Americans in the sheep’s clothing of intellectual liberalism. Similarly, over the past two decades, it has dressed up bloody U.S. interventionism in the Middle East in the pretty clothes of “humanitarianism” and “democracy.”
The magazine – which has given us the writings of neocons Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Steven Emerson, Robert Kagan and many more – has become a case study in the special evil that can come from intellectualism when it supplies high-minded rationalizations for low-brow brutality.
In the world of the mind, where The New Republic likes to think it lives, the magazine has published countless essays that have spun excuses for mass murder, rape, torture and other real-world crimes. Put differently, the magazine afforded the polite people of Official Washington an acceptable way to compartmentalize and justify the ungodly bloodshed.
Perhaps The New Republic had a different existence in the years before I arrived on the scene. I’ve heard some longtime New Republic lovers wax on about its era of thoughtful progressivism. But The New Republic that I encountered from the 1970s onward was the magazine of Martin Peretz, a nasty neocon who cared little about journalism or even thoughtful analyses, but rather pushed a dishonest and cruel agenda including crude insults against Muslims.
In his later years after moving part-time to Israel, Peretz began to expose more of his personal agenda. In one TNR blog post regarding the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan which prompted post-9/11 right-wing outrage, Peretz declared: “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf [the promoter of the Islamic center] there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood.
“So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” (Facing accusations of racism, Peretz later issued a half-hearted apology which reiterated that his reference to Muslim life being cheap was “a statement of fact, not opinion.”)
A New York Times magazine profile of Peretz in 2011 noted that Peretz’s hostility toward Muslims was nothing new. “As early as 1988, Peretz was courting danger in The New Republic with disturbing Arab stereotypes not terribly different from his 2010 remarks,” wrote Stephen Rodrick.
Steven Emerson, one of Peretz’s favored TNR writers, also became notorious for similar Islamophobia as well as shoddy and dishonest journalism. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Unmasking October Surprise Debunker.”]
Ignoring the History
Yet, very little of this real history of The New Republic can be found in the mainstream media’s coverage of the recent staff revolt against plans by new owner (and Facebook co-founder) Chris Hughes to modernize the publication. Hughes’s new chief executive – former Yahoo official Guy Vidra – vowed to rebuild the magazine as a “vertically integrated digital media company.”
At the Washington Post, the New York Times and pretty much the entire MSM, there has been much rending of garments over these plans and the ouster of some top editors but almost nothing about what some of those now ex-TNR editors actually did.
One was longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who was a prominent advocate for the Iraq War and a promoter of right-wing Zionism. Another was editor Franklin Foer, another hawkish intellectual. Their departures were followed by a walkout by a dozen or so members of the editorial staff, resignations from contributing columnists, an outraged letter from former TNR writers and furious columns by ex-TNR staffers.
“The New Republic is dead; Chris Hughes killed it,” wailed Post columnist Dana Milbank, another TNR alumnus.
On Monday, the 31-year-old Hughes took to the Post’s op-ed page to offer Official Washington something like a paper bag to control all the hyperventilating. He denied that he was behaving like some spoiled Silicon Valley rich kid imposing an Internet-style culture on an old-fashioned print publication, but rather was trying to save the institution.
“I came to protect the future of the New Republic by creating a sustainable business so that our journalism, values and voice — the things that make us singular — could survive,” Hughes wrote.
But the real question is: Does The New Republic deserve to survive? Wouldn’t it be appropriate that at least one neocon institution faced some accountability for the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, not to mention the other victims of reckless U.S. interventionism in the Middle East or the tens of thousands of murdered Central Americans during the Reagan years?
Though The New Republic’s apologists depict the magazine as an honorable place where “long-form journalism” thrived and “serious thinking” was nourished, the reality was actually much different. Indeed, much of the trivialization of U.S. journalism in the 1980s stemmed from the punchy opinions voiced by TNR columnists as they moonlighted as talking heads on the TV “shout shows,” like “The McLaughlin Group” and “Inside Washington.”
Many of the regulars on those media “food fights” came from The New Republic and lowered the intellectual level of Official Washington into a “thumbs up, thumps down” reductionism where political leaders were rated on scales of one to ten. Their well-compensated behavior was the opposite of true intellectualism or – for that matter – true journalism.
Phony Posture
The typical posture of these media-beloved neocons was to pretend that they were bravely standing up against some “liberal” orthodoxy, courageously daring to embrace the Nicaraguan Contras or other right-wing “freedom fighters” despite the danger of taking such principled stands.
The reality was that TNR’s writers were lining up behind the real power structure, standing with the Reagan administration and much of the major media while joining in the bullying of the relatively weak and vulnerable forces in Washington that went against this grain.
The phoniness of TNR’s pretend bravery was demonstrated by how the neocon commentators were rewarded with plum jobs, prominent op-ed slots, regular seats on the TV shows, lucrative speaking fees, book contracts, etc. The opposite was true for journalists who challenged the Reagan administration’s propaganda. They were the ones who faced real punishment.
Journalists who dared file critical stories about the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army or the CIA-trained Contra rebels found themselves reassigned or out on the street. The New York Times’ Raymond Bonner was the best known example after he was pulled out of Central America while under fierce right-wing attack for his accurate reporting on human rights atrocities in El Salvador.
In a similar case, the Reagan administration’s public diplomacy team browbeat National Public Radio for airing a story about a Contra massacre of farmworkers in northern Nicaragua. Sensitive to government strings on NPR’s funding, NPR executives appeased the administration by getting rid of foreign editor Paul Allen who had allowed the story to air.
Within a short time, Washington journalists understood that their route to professional success required them to swallow any propaganda from Reagan’s team, no matter how absurd.
That servility was on display when Reagan’s White House fumed over one human rights report citing 145 sworn affidavits signed by Nicaraguans who had witnessed Contra atrocities. Many of the witnesses described Contras slitting the throats of captives and mutilating their bodies.
In stepped The New Republic and one of its many pro-Contra writers, Fred Barnes, who countered the eyewitnesses by referencing the findings of a secret U.S. investigation which had absolved the Contras of many charges, he wrote. In a harsh article entitled “The Sandinista Lobby,” Barnes denounced the human rights community for hypocritically criticizing the innocent Contras and other pro-U.S. forces, while allegedly going soft on Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
But when I got hold of the investigative report in 1986, I found that it had been written by the CIA and was based on the word of the Contras themselves. One of the CIA’s key findings, supposedly debunking the slitting-throat allegations, was that the Contras said they could not have slit throats because they “are normally not equipped with either bayonets or combat knives.” The CIA failed to note that photographs of the Contras from that period showed them slouching off to battle carrying a variety of machetes and other sharp objects.
The absurdity of suggesting that the Contras could not have slit the throats of captives because they weren’t “normally” given knives should have been something a cub reporter would have laughed at. But clearly journalism was not what was going on at The New Republic where there was no interest in exposing the atrocities committed by the Contras. It was all about pushing a hawkish foreign policy and serving the Reagan agenda.
A Contra Exposé
That sort of behavior continued throughout the Reagan era with one notable exception in fall 1986 – when editor Jefferson Morley and investigative reporter Murray Waas asked me and my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger to expand the work that we had done exposing Oliver North’s secret Contra support network into a New Republic cover story.
Our article appeared in November 1986 while Peretz was out of town visiting Israel. But he soon weighed in after receiving a furious letter from then-Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams, another arch-neocon. Abrams ostentatiously canceled his TNR subscription in protest of our article, and Peretz responded to Abrams’s complaint by excluding Waas from the magazine and putting Morley in the publisher’s doghouse.
The situation could have gotten worse for those who had a hand in bringing our story into the magazine, except that the Iran-Contra scandal broke wide open in November 1986, confirming that Barger and I had been right about North’s secret network. Abrams eventually pleaded guilty to misleading Congress (though he was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush and was brought into President George W. Bush’s National Security Council to oversee Middle East policy, including the invasion of Iraq).
The New Republic’s pattern of playing fast and loose with the facts would eventually cause the magazine some embarrassment in 1998 when it was caught publishing a number of fabrications by writer Stephen Glass. But TNR never was held accountable for its support for atrocities in Central America, its pushing for illegal wars in the Middle East or its smearing of honest journalists and human rights investigators.
Though Peretz finally lost control of the magazine’s content in 2010, The New Republic has remained an important vehicle for pushing the neocon agenda. Earlier this year, TNR published a long exaltation to American interventionism by neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a leading proponent for the Iraq War.
In the essay, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” Kagan “depicted President Obama as presiding over an inward turn by the United States that threatened the global order and broke with more than 70 years of American presidents and precedence,” wrote Jason Horowitz in the New York Times. “He called for Mr. Obama to resist a popular pull toward making the United States a nation without larger responsibilities, and to re-assume the more muscular approach to the world out of vogue in Washington since the war in Iraq drained the country of its appetite for intervention.”
President Barack Obama, who remains hypersensitive to criticism from well-placed and well-connected neocons, responded by inviting Kagan to lunch at the White House and shaping his foreign policy speech at West Point’s graduation in May to deflect Kagan’s criticism.
So, when you read the endless laments from the mainstream U.S. news media about the tragedy of having some Silicon Valley barbarians violating the sacred journalistic temple of The New Republic, you might reflect on all the suffering and death that the magazine has rationalized and intellectualized away.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
5 not-so-peaceful Obama actions since nabbing Nobel Prize
RT | December 10, 2014
Five years on from President Barack Obama scooping a Nobel Peace Prize, and the White House has taken anything but a Zen approach to foreign policy under his watch. Here are the top 5 not-so-peaceful moves the laureate has made in the past half-decade.
1. Afghan Surge
Obama didn’t start the war gin Afghanistan, but he certainly took a page from his predecessors playbook in trying to finish it. He recognized his precarious position at prize time.
“But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he said after accepting the Nobel Prize in Oslo, Norway, on December 9, 2009.
While he said the war in Iraq was “winding down,” things in Afghanistan were just starting to heat up. A week before accepting the prize, Obama announced he was sending 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan as part of his “surge policy,” intended to beat back the Taliban and train Afghan security forces to take the country into their own hands. The following years would become the deadliest for both US troops and Afghan civilians. Again, it wasn’t Obama’s war. But then came…
2. Military strikes in Libya
Following UN Resolution 1973 on March 17, 2011, which called for “an immediate ceasefire” in Libya and authorized the international community to set up a no-fly zone to protect civilians, Obama, along with his NATO allies, would soon launch military strikes to turn the tide of the 2011 Civil War in the North African state. NATO conducted 9,700 strike sorties and dropped over 7,700 precision bombs. A Human Rights Watch report would go on to detail eight incidents where at least 72 Libyan civilians died as a result of the aerial campaign.
But the real damage to overthrowing the Gaddafi regime came in the ensuing years, with the country descending into a civil war between Islamist forces and the weak post-revolutionary government. In August, Obama admitted his Libyan policy was a failure, but not because he chose to intervene militarily. Rather, he says the problem was that America and its European partners did not “come in full force” to take Gaddafi out. Although his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to rejoice in his death, wryly noting “We came, we saw, he died.”
3. Drone Wars in Yemen, Pakistan
Since the US first started targeting Yemeni militants in 2002, Obama has launched all but one of the 15 airstrikes and 101 drone strikes in the country. According to the web portal New America.net, which has meticulously complied data on the strikes, up to 1,073 people have been killed in the strikes. An estimated 81-87 of those killed were civilians, while the identity of another 31-50 remains unknown. But Yemen was just one prong in Obama’s so-called Drone War, though, as we shall see, it was the site of a game-changing incident.
Unlike in Yemen, drone strikes in Pakistan were in favor long before Obama came to power. A report conducted by Stanford and New York Universities’ Law schools found that between 2,562 and 3,325 people were killed by drone strikes in Pakistan between June 2004 and mid-September 2012. Anywhere between 474 and 881 of those were civilians, and 176 were children. While Obama didn’t start the Pakistani drone war, he aggressively expanded it.
Between 2004 and 2007, only 10 drone strikes were launched in Pakistan. The following year saw 36 such strikes, and 54 were launched in 2009.
But 2010 would be the deadliest year by far, with 122 strikes launched and 849 people killed. He would go on to authorize 73 and 46 strikes in 2011 and 2012 respectively.
Following widespread opposition at home and abroad, in May 2013, Obama promised a new era of transparency to protect civilians, saying control of the program would be transferred from the CIA to the Pentagon. But…
4. Obama has a secret kill list
In February 2013, the Obama administration’s internal legal justification for assassinating US citizens abroad came to light for the first time. According to the Justice Department document, the White House has the legal authority to kill Americans who are “senior operational leaders,” of Al-Qaeda or “an associated force” even if they are not actively engaged in any active plot to attack the US.
In September 2011, a US drone strike in Yemen killed two American citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. The following month, a drone strike killed al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, who was born in Colorado.
The concept of the US president exercising the right to kill US citizens without the benefit of a trial has resonated throughout American culture.
In the comic-book-inspired film ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’, the issue of targeted killings and “kill lists” features prominently in the plot.
5. Redrawing red lines
President Barack Obama drew a red line around Syria’s use of chemical weapons, pushing the international community to punish Damascus with military strikes following the August 21 Ghouta Attack.
After the UK balked at airstrikes, Moscow and Washington took the diplomatic route, resulting in a historic deal that has seen Damascus abandon its chemical weapons stockpiles.
But US-led airstrikes on Syria were only postponed. On August 8, 2014, the United States started bombing so-called Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq to protect embattled Kurds. The following month, the US would launch airstrikes against IS militants in Syria as well. Of all the US military interventions in recent years, the battle against the IS has been met with widespread approval. Still, Syria was the seventh country Obama has bombed in six years.
Quite a feat for a Nobel Peace Prize-winner.
Israel resumes building museum on Muslim cemetery
Ma’an – 10/12/2014
JERUSALEM – Israeli authorities have resumed excavations in Mamilla graveyard in West Jerusalem as part of the “Museum of Tolerance” project, a local committee said Tuesday.
The head of the Islamic cemeteries preservation committee, Mustafa Abu Zahra, said large machinery was placed in the cemetery. It poured reinforced concrete in preparation for the building of the structure of the museum.
Abu Zahra added that the structure is scheduled to be built over the “remains of icons, martyrs, grandparents and parents,” and he said that the project is being implemented by a California-based center in cooperation with the Jerusalem municipality and other Israeli departments.
The project was started by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2001, and 12 dunams of the cemetery ground were seized including 70 percent which was transformed into “Independence Park,” he explained.
Abu Zahra said that the construction was a grave assault on Muslim heritage and history.
Journalist most recent victim of Israeli military violence at Kufr Qaddum
International Solidarity Movement | December 9, 2014
Kufr Qaddum, Occupied Palestine – Bashar, a journalist from Palestine TV, was shot in the left leg at Kufr Qaddum on Friday the 5th of December 2014.
The weekly demonstration aims to highlight the issue of the road that has been closed to Kafr Qaddum and demands for it to be reopened. The road is closed to Palestinians but connects several illegal Israeli settlements nearby. The road was once the Palestinians’ main route to the villages of Jit and Sarra, and to the city of Nablus. Residents of Kafr Qaddum and nearby villages must now use a 14 kilometer detour on badly paved roads through olive groves. This proves especially problematic in emergency situations when ambulances are trying to get patients to Nablus hospital. Kafr Qaddum villagers state that several people have died because of the longer ambulance trip.
Bashar has been going to the Kafr Qaddum demonstrations since they began four years ago. This particular one was a special demonstration in solidarity with Patrick, an Italian activist who was shot in the chest with a .22 caliber bullet the Friday before. The demonstration began peacefully with people holding Italian and Palestinian flags. A skunk water truck, a renowned demonstration repression technique, sprayed the people who were peacefully holding flags right at the beginning of the protest. Within ten minutes, Bashar had been shot in his left leg by an Israeli sniper.
The bullet used to shoot Bashar was an expanding bullet, often called a “dum-dum”. International law has declared their use illegal in war because they are so destructive. Bashar was shot by a sniper with a weapon that is only supposed to be used when soldiers are at mortal risk and skunk water, tear gas, rubber bullets, rubber coated steel bullets, and other nonlethal weapons have all proved ineffective. This is supposed to be the last weapon soldiers use before they shoot to kill with M16s. Witnesses say that Bashar was filming as he usually did when he was shot. He was no threat to the soldiers at all. Witnesses say that there were no people in front or behind him throwing stones.
Bashar was taken by ambulance to Nablus hospital. The X-ray showed that the dum-dum bullet did as it was designed to, breaking into many pieces when it entered his leg.
Bashar had an operation on the 6th of December, the day after he was shot, to take out most of the bullet fragments.
Doctors have decided to leavein some pieces for the time being because they are very close to veins and would be dangerous to remove. Bashar will be bed bound for two weeks until the decision is made, but his condition remains stable.
Within one week at Kufr Qaddum, three people were shot with lethal, live ammunition—two with .22 caliber bullets and one with a dum-dum. One was a journalist, another an international peace activist. None of them were any threat to the soldiers. So why, then, were they shot at? To create fear for all the people who are in solidarity with the Palestinians and who want to tell the world the story of what is happening here? To physically stop peaceful resistance using the most extreme repression techniques?
It will not work. Patrick and many other international, Palestinian and Israeli activists will continue to nonviolently resist the confiscation of their lands in Kufr Qaddum each week. Bashar will continue to report their stories to the world. The unnecessary use of violent repression techniques will only continue to delegitimize the illegal occupation of the Palestinian people.
FBI director refuses to rule out agents posing as reporters
By Robert Bridge | RT | December 10, 2014
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation left the door open to the possibility that officers may falsely represent themselves as journalists in the course of an investigation, so long as it’s done with “significant supervision.”
Despite last month’s furor following revelations that an FBI agent had posed as an employee of the Associated Press as part of a sting operation, James Comey said he was not willing to swear off the use of such ploys in the future.
“I’m not willing to say ‘never’,” Comey told a press roundtable discussion on Tuesday, AP reported. “Just as I wouldn’t say that we would never pose as an educator or a doctor or, I don’t know, a rocket scientist.”
The response will certainly reverberate through AP, which was furious after Comey revealed in a letter to the New York Times that an FBI agent had posed as an AP journalist in 2007 during an investigation of a 15-year-old who was believed to be delivering bomb threats at a high school in Olympia, Washington.
Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the AP, called the FBI’s covert activities “unacceptable.”
“This latest revelation of how the FBI misappropriated the trusted name of the Associated Press doubles our concern and outrage, expressed earlier to Attorney General Eric Holder, about how the agency’s unacceptable tactics undermine AP and the vital distinction between the government and the press,” Carroll said in a statement.
She said such activities serve to diminish public trust in AP’s “legacy of objectivity, truth, accuracy and integrity.”
Comey remained ambiguous about the future of such activities, saying they require “significant supervision, if it’s going to be done.”
This is not the first time the news collective has experienced problems with government agencies.
On May 13, 2013, the Associated Press said telephone records for 20 of their journalists during a two-month period in 2012 had been subpoenaed by the Justice Department. The agency never provided an explanation for its demand.
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