The Pakistani police have arrested three US diplomats in the city of Peshawar for possession of illegal arms.
Police officials told Dawn TV that the diplomats, along with three Pakistani nationals, were stopped at a routine checkpoint at the entrance to the Peshawar Motorway on Monday but they refused to allow the police to search their vehicles.
The police checked the “suspicious cars” anyway and discovered several assault rifles, pistols, and ammunition.
US Consul General Mary Richard visited the police station where the US nationals are being held for questioning and told the police they could keep the weapons but asked them to release the US diplomats.
In January 2011, Raymond Davis, a CIA agent operating under the cover of a diplomat, shot and killed two Pakistanis in Lahore, triggering a diplomatic crisis.
Pakistan charged him with murder, but Washington insisted that he was an “administrative and technical official” attached to its Lahore consulate and had diplomatic immunity.
Davis was finally allowed to leave Pakistan in March 2011 after a $2.4 million diyya (a form of monetary compensation or blood money) was paid to the victims’ families.
After the Davis incident, Islamabad ordered all CIA agents to leave the country, but according to local sources, there are still scores of CIA agents working in Pakistan.
June 4, 2012
Posted by aletho |
False Flag Terrorism | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Mary Richard, Pakistan, United States |
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What agenda lies behind the latest defense of “enhanced interrogation”?
Former CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jose Rodriguez has written a book with the assistance of former Agency press officer Bill Harlow. Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives is largely a defense of Rodriguez’s role in the CIA’s use of torture on suspected terrorists in the aftermath of 9/11. Rodriguez argues that what he describes as “enhanced interrogation techniques” were necessary to obtain information on terrorist activities. His employment of the euphemism underscores his argument that these procedures were found to be legal by Bush administration lawyers and that they do not constitute torture, which is a war crime.
In November 2005, Rodriguez, who was a classmate of mine at CIA, ordered on his own authority and contrary to Agency general counsel advice the destruction of 92 videotapes that recorded interrogation sessions in a secret prison in Thailand. This was done, he says, to protect the identities of CIA interrogators from possible reprisals by terrorists, not to cover-up waterboarding being used to obtain information, a procedure he claims was both an acceptable interrogation technique and one that was subject to congressional oversight before it was employed. He does not explain exactly how terrorists could obtain the tapes or be able to make identifications from them; perhaps the idea is that someday the recordings might leak to the public. Whatever its plausibility, or lack thereof, his argument might just as well be a deliberate deception if the primary purpose of his actions was to eliminate evidence of what many would consider a war crime. I leave it up to the reader to decide what explanation is most likely. For what it’s worth, Amazon reviews are running about five to one in praise of the book rather than condemning what it describes.
To promote Hard Measures, Rodriguez has been appearing on a number of television programs. I have seen him on “60 Minutes” with Lesley Stahl and on Bill O’Reilly’s program. He has also appeared with Sean Hannity. Stahl failed to push Rodriguez on the illegality of torture and frequently allowed him to drift into the kind of mumbo-jumbo tradecraft language that we former spies use when we don’t want to answer a question. Rodriguez stated that we (CIA) are part of the “dark side — that’s what we do.” That was the end of the story for “60 Minutes.”
O’Reilly’s interview was somewhat different. Rodriguez seemed unsure of himself, sometimes inarticulate, and was helped along to make the point that the information obtained from enhanced interrogation could not have been obtained any other way. O’Reilly walked him through his assertion that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew all about the waterboarding, but then brought up the account of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah presented by FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan. Soufan, a member of the interrogation team and Arabic speaker, maintains, with considerable credibility backed up by documents, that the only good information obtained came through established interrogation techniques employed before any torture took place. Rodriguez denied that was so to O’Reilly and became hung up on a discussion of who played the lead role in the interrogation, the CIA or the FBI, before questioning Soufan’s personal history and his reliability as a source.
Agency operations in Afghanistan in 2001-2 were superbly conceived and executed by its Counterterrorism Center, where Rodriguez was deputy, but his book inevitably focuses on trying to defend the indefensible practices that followed. There has been considerable speculation over why the book, with its attendant media blitz, has come out now, in light of the fact that the manuscript had to be approved by the Agency’s Publications Review Board. Was there CIA collusion in its release? Though the review is only supposed to prevent security violations, the Agency tends to be very friendly and helpful to books depicting it in positive terms and hostile to anything perceived as critical. Given the upcoming presidential elections, Hard Measures is also being seen by some as a preemption of any attempt to turn the torture issue into a political football, particularly as Mitt Romney has explicitly approved of the practice. Rodriguez (and the Agency) might be attempting to backstop the Romney position, which otherwise could be difficult to defend.
Another theory is that the long-awaited Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on CIA interrogation techniques is about to come out and will conclude that the enhanced procedures were, in fact, ineffective. Rodriguez’s account might be intended to stake out a position in advance implying that the Senate report, written by a Democratic majority committee, is politically motivated and therefore “flawed.”
What is most disturbing to me about the book and the interviews is that Rodriguez is apparently seen by some in the media as the “new normal” and even some kind of hero. CIA officers overseas are indeed operating on the “dark side,” in that spying overseas is illegal in the countries where one is operationally engaged. But that does not mean all gloves are off in terms of international and U.S. law, especially in the case of war crimes. It is worth noting that Japanese Army officers were executed in 1946 for waterboarding Allied prisoners, while the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution explicitly forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.” The United States is also a signatory to the International Convention on Torture and to the Geneva Conventions. And then there is the War Crimes Act of 1996, which requires the United States Justice Department to prosecute anyone involved in torture, no exceptions. President Obama has refused to permit justice to be served, making him as complicit in war crimes as his predecessor was.
Rodriguez presents himself and his “dark side” persona as representative of CIA thinking about the proper way to fight terrorism, but that is just not so. The assumption that there is broad support inside the Agency for the use of torture presumes that anyone working there was ever actually asked for an opinion. The CIA undoubtedly has a peculiar culture that breeds an us-against-them mentality, but I would guess that few employees would have supported waterboarding if they had known it was occurring. The procedure was top secret inside the Agency, a clear indication that even the upper echelons of CIA management knew that it was at best questionable. The impression that CIA, which has something like 20,000 employees, marches in lockstep as some kind of secret army is ridiculous. Nobody checks his or her conscience at the door when entering the building. Agency analysts resisted endorsing the false intelligence used to justify war with Iraq, and they continue to hold the line against a conflict with Iran. I would also note the large number of former intelligence officers who have become outspoken in the antiwar movement: Ray McGovern, Michael Scheuer, Paul Pillar, Bill and Kathleen Christison, and Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.
Rodriguez might find comfort in his apologia pro vita sua, but I rather suspect his is a voice in the wilderness. Thankfully, I do not know anyone inside the intelligence community who considers torture morally acceptable under any circumstances, and most intelligence officers would regard its use ipso facto as an egregious failure. Secret prisons, renditions, and enhanced interrogations are characteristic of police states, not constitutional republics. Thirty-six years ago Rodriquez and I together took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Today he would be well advised to remember that moment.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
May 26, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ali Soufan, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Enhanced interrogation techniques, Jose Rodriguez, Lesley Stahl, Nancy Pelosi |
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Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have become the centrepiece of the allied military strategy in the “war on terror.”
In 2011 they were deployed in Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine and Turkey.
According to the Economist, drone strikes have increased by 1,200 per cent since 2005. This is equivalent to one strike every four days.
Modern warfare is transforming and could lead to the deployment of military robots that make attack decisions independently.
Termed as “automatic deletion,” human operators would be taken out of the loop and preprogrammed robots would carry out missions guided by artificial intelligence.
According to Teal Group, a US aerospace and defence analysis firm, investment in the industry is projected to rise to $89 billion over the next 10 years.
Author of the study and director of Teal’s corporate analysis Philip Finnegan predicted that “the UAV market will continue to be strong despite cuts in defence spending.
“UAVs have proved their value in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and will continue to be a high priority for militaries in the US and worldwide.”
Israel is the leading global exporter of UAVs, while other key players in the industry include Canada, France, Italy and South Africa. There are currently 40 companies selling and manufacturing drones, and 50 countries have acquired the technology.
In recent years Britain has been using Israeli drones in Afghanistan which it has rented on a pay by the hour basis from the company Elbit Systems.
British soldiers have also received training in Israel on how to operate the weapons.
Proponents of drone warfare claim that UAVs bring down the costs of war. They argue that civilian casualties are reduced due to higher-precision strikes.
Furthermore, they highlight that robots could make war more ethical, as they cannot act out of malice or hatred which can lead to war crimes or other abuses of human rights.
While the Economist asserts that “claims that drones are constantly blowing up Afghan weddings is wrong,” the fact remains that civilian casualties are rising and protests against their use are intensifying worldwide. In response, savvy industry leaders have mobilised to discuss “how to stop the public hysteria surrounding UAV operations in the 21st century?” and the MoD has committed to implementing a communications strategy to counter negative publicity.
The Bureau for Investigative Journalism has reported that between 2004 and August 2011, 2,347 people were killed by US drones. Between 392 and 781 were civilians, and of these 175 were children.
Other sources state that at least one of these victims was disabled and confined to a wheelchair.
Additionally, six of these victims were British nationals, but the British government has not investigated their deaths.
Meanwhile, of the two US citizens killed in strikes, one was alleged by the CIA to have been al-Qaida’s leader in the Arabian Peninsula.
In September 2011 Anwar al-Awlaki was assassinated in Yemen by a US drone. Two weeks later, in a separate attack, his 16-year-old son was one of nine people killed.
Concerns have been raised by lawyers about the legality of Awlaki’s assassination as a US citizen with no criminal charge.
Against this background the American Civil Liberties Union said: “If the constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have the unreviewable authority to summarily execute any citizen who it concludes is an enemy of the state.”
In November 2011, 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his 12-year-old cousin Waheed Khan were both killed by US drone strikes in Northern Waziristan. Just days before his death, Tariq had attended a meeting organised by the British charity Reprieve.
Tariq had agreed to assist the organisation by taking pictures of the aftermath of Allied strikes.
Mounting civilian casualties and the lack of accountability for these deaths is fuelling anger globally. In November 2011, 2,000 people staged an anti-drone demonstration outside the parliament building in Islamabad, and for the first time Yemeni citizens came together to voice their outrage in Sana’a.
Human rights lawyer Shazad Akbar is suing the CIA for the killing of Pakistani civilians.
Furthermore, legal action taken by human rights groups against Foreign Secretary William Hague could lead to his prosecution for war crimes. He is accused of providing intelligence that assisted CIA-targeted killings in Pakistan.
In April last year a civil disobedience action was staged at Hancock Air National Guard Base in the US. Thirty-eight anti-drone protesters were arrested and some have been put on trial.
Meanwhile at RMT University in Melbourne, protesters disrupted a meeting organised by UAV manufacturers. They urged attendees to reject technological innovations which enable killing from great distance and condemned the use of the weapons as immoral.
Drone Wars UK has demanded the classification of drones as “too cruel to use, like cluster munitions and landmines.” This has been backed by critics who warn that the use of robots to achieve military objectives could amount to a disproportionate use of force.
In future, drones could be developed that achieve superhuman levels of accuracy, reaching a 100 per cent rate of effectiveness. However such capability would break rules of proportionality under international humanitarian law (IHL).
Overseen by the International Red Cross, IHL bans weapons that cause more than 25 per cent mortality on the battlefield and 5 per cent mortality in hospitals.
The question of the legality of targeted killing remains unanswered. The US and British governments either refuse to disclose information about when this policy is applied or deny outright that it is happening. Lawyers state that targeted killings contravene the rule of law and argue that this amounts to state-sanctioned assassination.
Criticising the EU’s silence on targeted killing in Pakistan, analyst Nathalie Van Raemdonck contends that drone warfare could be illegal, and that the EU’s failure to put pressure on the US to explain the legal basis of its policy is due to a lack of consensus caused by vested interests among member states.
She warns: “Even though the analysis of the US’s targeted killing makes it clear that it is a legally and morally controversial practice, it is possible that the EU finds advantages of avoiding the subject to be greater than those of living up to its moral obligation of urging the US to comply with international law.”
Agreeing with Van Raemdonk’s warnings against a backlash, critics argue that robotic warfare could destabilise global security and deepen hostility towards British and US peacekeeping or military interventions overseas.
Robots, they say, would make war easier to wage, as the safety of remote operators thousands of miles away from their targets would make them less concerned about killing.
An adviser to the CIA and expert on robots has emphasised the need for continued human diplomacy to avoid fuelling resentment.
Highlighting Iraq, he said: “Sending in robot patrols into Baghdad to keep the peace would send the wrong message about our willingness to connect with residents. We still need human diplomacy for that. In war this could backfire against us, as our enemies mark us as dishonourable and cowardly for not willing to engage them man to man. This serves to make them more resolute in fighting us and leads to a new crop of determined terrorists.”
As has occurred with all war technologies in the past, the risk of UAV proliferation is high.
Noting this danger, UN Special Rapporteur on Extra Judicial Killing Christof Heyns warned: “The use of such methods by some states to eliminate opponents around the world raises the question why other states should not engage in the same practices.
“The danger is one of global war without borders, in which no one is safe.”
May 21, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | American Civil Liberties Union, Anwar al-Awlaki, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Pakistan, UAV, United States, Unmanned aerial vehicle |
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A German citizen, who says was abducted in Macedonia by the CIA and taken to a prison in Afghanistan and tortured, has demanded justice from Europe’s human rights court.
Khaled El-Masri of Lebanese descent says he was brutally tortured and interrogated at a secret CIA-run prison in Afghanistan for more than four months after being kidnapped from Macedonia in 2003, the Associated Press reported.
On Wednesday, Masri took his case to the European Court of Human Rights.
“Mr. El-Masri has spent the last eight years seeking legal redress for the crimes that were committed against him,” said James Goldston, who is the executive director of the Open Justice Initiative, a rights group that campaigns against the US extraordinary rendition practice.
Extraordinary rendition is a practice enabling the US apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one state to another.
He noted, “There is abundant evidence, including data on CIA flights to and from [Macedonia’s capital] Skopje.”
Masri was eventually released after the CIA realized it had mistaken him for another suspect.
He is also suing the Macedonian government for its role in the kidnapping, an accusation that the authorities in Skopje deny.
The court will consider whether Macedonian agents actually kidnapped Masri, and, if they did, whether they knew what would happen to him after they handed him over to US authorities.
May 16, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, European Court of Human Rights, Khalid El-Masri, Macedonia |
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Although President Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser says caution is exercised when making drone attacks, official US announcements often state that suspects are killed. This very word betrays the fact that every drone attack is a crime because it is illegal in any civilized society to kill suspects. The Pentagon and CIA killings are murder, pure and simple. (Only last week, Washington announced it killed four “suspected militants” by drone attack in Pakistan, resulting in a formal protest from Islamabad “strongly condemning” the killings. “Such attacks are in total contravention of international law and established norms of interstate relations,” the Pakistan statement underscored.)
Moreover, the Washington Post quoted a Pakistani government official who reminded: “When a duly elected democratic Parliament says three times not to do this, and the U.S. keeps doing it, it undermines democracy.”
Presidential adviser John Brennan told a group of academicians at the Woodrow Wilson Center, “We only authorize a strike if we have a high degree of confidence that innocent civilians will not be injured or killed, except in the rarest of circumstances,” Charlie Savage of The New York Times reports in the April 30th edition.
But Brennan acknowledged “instances when — despite the extraordinary precautions we take — civilians have been accidentally injured, or worse, killed in these strikes. It is exceedingly rare, but it has happened. When it does, it pains us and we regret it deeply, as we do any time innocents are killed in war.”
Exceedingly rare? As Juan Cole of the University of Michigan observed in The Nation magazine, the Britain-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism(BIJ) found “not only are civilians routinely killed by U.S. drone strikes in northern Pakistan” but “often people rushing to the scene of a strike to help the wounded are killed by a second launch.” Presumably, some of these victims may include medical personnel and relatives.
The BIJ estimates the US has killed some 3,000 people in 319 drone strikes. Of these, 600 were civilian bystanders and approximately one in four of those were children.
“At the very time Brennan made his speech, there emerged further confirmation of CIA “signature strikes’ that were launched at people who allegedly may be engaged in a pattern of activity that could somehow suggest their involvement in some form of terrorism on the basis of dubious intelligence,” said Francis Boyle, the distinguished professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign.
“These “signature strikes’ are indiscriminate and thus illegal and war crimes. And the fact that all these drone strikes constitute widespread and systematic war crimes mean they also constitute Crimes against Humanity as defined by the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court and customary international criminal law,” Boyle added.
“Obama, Brennan, Petraeus and the CIA operatives involved must be held criminally accountable for these war crimes and Crimes against Humanity in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, inter alia,” said Boyle, author of “Tackling America’s Toughest Questions” (Clarity).
Obama, who presents himself as the doting father of two daughters, is systematically and criminally taking the lives of other parents’ children in his blind passion to destroy his enemies. He has radically stepped up drone attacks over his predecessor, George W. Bush, and makes no apologies for their commission. The drones are now so “hot” in the Pentagon arsenal that manufacturers cannot keep pace with the demand for them. The US has 7,000 unmanned aerial vehicles, Cole writes, which it has deployed in strikes in six countries under direction of the CIA and Pentagon.
Cole points out the drone strikes are largely carried out in places where no war has been declared; neither has any Status of Forces Agreement been signed. “They operate outside the framework of the Constitution, with no due process or habeas corpus, recalling pre-modern practices of the English monarchy, such as declaring people outlaws, issuing bills of attainder against individuals who offend the crown and trying them in secret Star Chamber proceedings.”
“The only due process afforded those killed from the air is an intelligence assessment, possibly based on dubious sources and not reviewed by a judge,” Cole writes. “There is no consistency, no application of the rule of law. Guilt by association and absence of due process are the hallmarks of shadow government.”
Of the 3,000 slayings in Pakistan by drone strikes, writes Bill Van Auken, only 170 victims have been identified as “known militants.”
According to Van Auken, Brennan told his Woodrow Wilson Center audience, “The constitution empowers the president to protect the nation from any imminent threat of attack” but that assertion “is a lie.” Van Auken explained, “As US officials acknowledged, Sunday’s attack in Pakistan was directed at elements who were allegedly preparing not to attack the US, but rather to resist the US military occupation of Afghanistan.”
The accelerating drone strikes are only one aspect of the emerging covert operations that were once a minor arrow in the national security quiver, The Nation writer Cole states, but today are “the cutting edge of American power.”
“Drone strikes, electronic surveillance and stealth engagements by military units such as the Joint Special Operations Command, as well as dependence on private corporations, mercenary armies and terrorist groups, are now arguably more common as tools of US foreign policy than conventional warfare or diplomacy,” Cole writes.
May 7, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Central Intelligence Agency, Francis Boyle, Joint Special Operations Command, Pakistan, Pentagon, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars |
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In his memoir coming out this month, the Central Intelligence Agency officer who ordered the destruction of the CIA’s torture tapes defends his actions, saying he was erasing “some ugly visuals.”
Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former director of the CIA’s secretive interrogation and detention program during the George W. Bush administration, had 92 tapes destroyed in 2005 after the media exposed the controversial program targeting ‘al-Qaeda’ and other ‘suspected terrorists.’
“I wasn’t going to sit around another three years waiting for people to get up the courage,” Rodriguez wrote in his book, Hard Measures.
He adds that he was “just getting rid of some ugly visuals.” Rodriguez was concerned with protecting the identities of the agents who could be seen in the videos and with the negative effect on the reputation of the CIA if the truth came out. He continues to seem clueless about the intent of the United States Constitution.
He even went so far as to write that “I cannot tell you how disgusted my former colleagues and I felt to hear ourselves labeled ‘torturers’ by the president of the United States.” The irony of torturers being upset at being called torturers seems to have escaped Rodriguez.
Made at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, the tapes showed the waterboarding of ‘terrorists’ Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri.
President Barack Obama ordered an investigation of the program and the tapes. But the U.S. Department of Justice decided to not pursue charges against Rodriguez or any other CIA agent.
Glenn Greenwald:
… Destruction of these tapes was so controversial because it seemed so obviously illegal. At the time the destruction order was issued, numerous federal courts — as well as the 9/11 Commission — had ordered the U.S. Government to preserve and disclose all evidence relating to interrogations of Al Qaeda and 9/11 suspects. Purposely destroying evidence relevant to legal proceedings is called “obstruction of justice.” Destroying evidence which courts and binding tribunals (such as the 9/11 Commission) have ordered to be preserved is called “contempt of court.” There are many people who have been harshly punished, including some sitting right now in prison, for committing those crimes in far less flagrant ways than was done here. In fact, so glaring was the lawbreaking that the co-Chairmen of the 9/11 Commission — the mild-mannered, consummate establishmentarians Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean — wrote a New York Times Op-Ed pointedly accusing the CIA of “obstruction” (“Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation”). …
April 28, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Abu Zubaydah, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Jose Rodriguez, United States |
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A major case in the British High Court has revealed fresh evidence of civilian deaths during a notorious CIA drone strike in Pakistan last year.
Sworn witness testimonies reveal in graphic detail how the village of Datta Khel burned for hours after the attack. Many of the dozens killed had to be buried in pieces.
Legal proceedings were begun in London recently against British Foreign Secretary William Hague, over possible British complicity in CIA drone strikes.
Britain’s GCHQ – its secret monitoring and surveillance agency – is reported to have provided ‘locational evidence’ to US authorities for use in drone strikes, a move which is reportedly illegal in the United Kingdom.
Sworn affidavits
The High Court case focuses in particular on a CIA drone strike in March 2011 which killed up to 53 people.
Sworn affidavits presented in court and seen by the Bureau offer extensive new details of a strike the CIA still apparently claims ‘killed no non-combatants’.
Ahmed Jan (pictured) is a tribal elder in North Waziristan. On March 17 2011 he was attending a gathering with other village elders, to discuss a mining dispute.
‘We were in the middle of our discussion when the missile hit and I was thrown about 24 feet from where I was sitting. I was knocked unconscious and when I awoke I saw many individuals who were dead or injured,’ he says in his affidavit.
Most of those who died in Datta Khel village that day were civilians. The Bureau has so far identified by name 24 of those killed, whilst Associated Press recently reported that it has the names of 42 civilians who died that day.
Pakistan’s president, prime minister and army chief all condemned the Datta Khel attack. A recent Bureau investigation with the Sunday Times quoted Brigadier Abdullah Dogar, who commanded Pakistani military forces in the area at the time.
We in the Pakistan military knew about the meeting, we’d got the request ten days earlier. It was held in broad daylight, people were sitting out in Nomada bus depot when the missile strikes came. Maybe there were one or two Taliban at that Jirga – they have their people attending – but does that justify a drone strike which kills 42 mostly innocent people?
Yet the US intelligence community has consistently denied that any civilians died.
Last year an anonymous US official told the New York Times: ‘The fact is that a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with AQ [Al Qaeda] -linked militants, were killed.’
The sworn affidavits seen by the Bureau offer a very different perspective. Imran Khan’s father Ismail was another of the elders who died that day. Imran says of his father: ‘He always did the right thing for the community and the tribe. He opposed terrorism and militancy and was not himself in any way connected to these things.’
Khalil Khan’s late father Hajji Babat was a local policeman who was ‘not an enemy of the United States of America or any other country.’ His son describes in his affidavit how he rushed back to his village to find his father dead, the bus station and surrounding buildings still burning six hours after the drone strike.
And Fateh Khan, who once worked for British Telecom, lost his 25-year old nephew Din Mohammed in the CIA attack. He reports that his nephew’s body had to be buried in pieces, and that ‘he left behind four children, all of whom now live in my house. His eldest child is currently only five years old.’
‘Absolute lie’
The most senior tribal elder to die that day was Daud Khan. Initially he was claimed to have been a senior Taliban figure. His son Noor told the Bureau that this was ‘an absolute lie’.
‘My father was not a militant but an elder who was working day and night for his people. There have been many children who have been killed in drone strikes. I ask the US if they think those children were militants and combatants and dangerous enough to be killed in such a manner?’
The CIA declined to comment when asked whether it still believed it had killed no ‘non-combatants’ in Pakistan since May 2010, or that no civilians died in Datta Khel last year.
In London, legal campaigners are seeking a judicial review in the High Court – a process by which senior judges can question and even overturn any government policy on aiding US drone strikes.
The case is being brought by legal charity Reprieve, and by the Islamabad-based lawyer Shahzad Akbar and the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, which focuses on civilian victims of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan.
The British government is understood to have firmly challenged the grounds of the case on a number of fronts.
Follow @chrisjwoods on Twitter
April 26, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | al-Qaeda, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Imran Khan, London, Pakistan, United States |
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By Sherwood Ross | Blacklisted News |March 19, 2012
How shall the world view the apology by President Obama for the massacre of 16 Afghan villagers allegedly by a lone U.S. serviceman in Kandahar Province when the President is himself personally responsible for the extra-judicial killing of hundreds of civilians by means of drone aircraft strikes whose crime he defends? Army Staff Sgt., Robert Bales, of Lake Tapps, Wash., is being held in prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Mr. Obama is free to travel the campaign trail.
“We’re heart-broken over the loss of innocent life,” the president said of the Kandahar massacre. His seeming expression of contrition rings hollow, though, particularly if one considers how Mr. Obama goes about his daily routine ordering drone strikes and seemingly is unaffected by the “loss of innocent lives” they cause, as well as by the hated companion night raids on Afghan homes, also the result of his policy.
As The New York Times reported March 17th, President Hamid Karzai said “many civilians have died in the (night) raids,” adding, “This has been going on for too long. It is by all means the end of the rope here. This form of activity, this behavior, cannot be tolerated.”
Obama is more than willing to investigate anyone other than himself for war crimes. “I can assure the American people and the Afghan people that we will follow the facts wherever they lead us, and we will make sure that anybody who was involved is held fully accountable with the full force of the law.” To “follow the facts” the president need look no further than his own mirror. Not surprisingly, he termed the drone strikes “very precise, precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates.” Given the facts, this is a falsehood.
As investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill writes in the March 5/12 issue of The Nation, “President Obama’s first known authorization of a missile strike on Yemen, on Dec. 17, 2009, killed more than 40 Bedouins, many of them women and children, in the remote village of al Majala in Abyan.”
And the Bureau of Investigative Journalism based at City University, London, put the number of Pakistani children killed in drone strikes at 168. In one raid directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, a drone was dispatched to kill the headmaster of a school, which it did—but 60 children attending classes there were killed as well. “Even one child’s death from drone missiles or suicide bombings is one child too many,” a UNICEF spokesperson said. President Obama takes a very different view. He claims drones have “not caused a huge number of civilian casualties” and it is “important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash.”
Since 2004, the U.S. has made nearly 300 drone attacks just in N.W. Pakistan alone, killing between 1,700 and 2,800 individuals, of whom an estimated 17 percent were said to be civilians, not so-called “militants,” according to the New America Foundation of Washington, D.C.
In Somalia, last October 14th alone, U.S. drones killed 78 and injured 64 in one raid and killed 11 civilians and wounded 34 more the same day in another. And from March 3-12, the U.S. killed 64 people in Yemen by drone strikes. The government called them “militants” but local residents countered they were civilians.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon reportedly is building 60 drone bases across the world and its clamor for more planes is so great that contractors cannot keep up with demand. Rather than halt the use of these indiscriminate killing machines, indications are the Pentagon sees them as the future weapon of choice, and by some accounts they have now been used in six countries.
On the website of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the AP reports, organizer Aaron Hughes declared that Afghan war veterans “believe that this incident is not a case of one ‘bad apple’ but the effect of a continued US military policy of drone strikes, night raids, and helicopter attacks where Afghan civilians pay the price.’’
Mr. Obama has continued and expanded the criminal drone policies begun by his predecessor George W. Bush and both warmongers are eminently qualified to stand trial for their crimes.
#
Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
March 19, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Central Intelligence Agency, Fort Leavenworth, George W. Bush, Obama |
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On Friday, the ACLU appeared before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York to argue that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires the CIA to release documents describing its use of waterboarding. The simple question at the heart of the hearing was this: is waterboarding an “intelligence method” that can be protected from disclosure under FOIA? We argued that the answer — of course not — is easy because even the president himself has declared that waterboarding is illegal. Exposing official misconduct to public scrutiny is the chief purpose of FOIA. But it cannot serve that purpose if even officially confirmed illegality is protectable.
The CIA disagreed and offered a truly astonishing view of what our laws on transparency were meant to protect from the public’s view. Under its theory, the agency may protect just about any type of activity — legal or illegal — as an “intelligence method,” and thus conceal such activities from the public. It does not matter that President Obama has declared waterboarding to be illegal, and it does not matter that the United States has prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime in the past. Even the most egregiously unlawful interrogation techniques could be kept secret as “intelligence methods” of the CIA.
Was the CIA really making this argument? We would soon find out that even the CIA’s lawyer seemed uncomfortable with the extraordinary breadth of the claim, resorting to smoke and mirrors to distract the court’s focus. Toward the end of the hearing, the three judges and the CIA’s lawyer recessed for a 40-minute classified session to discuss the documents we are seeking. When the public hearing resumed, the CIA’s lawyer made the mystifying claim that the CIA “does not concede or not concede” that waterboarding is illegal.
We scratched our heads trying to understand what exactly this meant. President Obama declared waterboarding to be illegal shortly after releasing the Bush administration’s torture memos in 2009. And the CIA never once disputed the unlawfulness of waterboarding in its filings in this case. The only possibility was that the government was trying to have it both ways. It wants to win this case without having to argue publicly that illegal conduct can be a protectable “intelligence method.”
At its core, the CIA’s argument is that the agency should be permitted to decide for itself which information should be released, and which should be suppressed. The agency believes that courts should simply defer to its decisions about secrecy. There is a time and place for that kind of deference, of course, but when it comes to public disclosure of the CIA’s illegal conduct, the CIA’s claim to immunity is fundamentally at odds with our system of checks and balances. Only through public scrutiny of official wrongdoing can the governed hold the government accountable. And only through robust judicial enforcement of our transparency laws will the public have access to the information necessary to do so.
March 14, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Subjugation - Torture | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, FOIA, Freedom of Information Act, Obama |
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A rights group and a law firm are set to take legal action against British Foreign Secretary William Hague over his alleged the contribution of intelligence in assisting US assassination drone strikes in Pakistan.
The London-based charity Reprieve and the law firm Leigh Day & Co. confirmed on Monday that they will issue formal proceedings at the High Court on behalf of Noor Khan, a Pakistani man whose father was killed by a US strike.
The law firm says it has credible evidence that Hague oversaw a policy of passing British intelligence to American forces planning attacks in Pakistan.
Lawyers claim that civilian staff at Britain’s electronic listening agency (GCHQ) could be liable as “secondary parties to murder” as they provided “locational intelligence” to the CIA in directing its drone attacks.
Malik Daud Khan was killed by a drone strike in northwest Pakistan in March 2011 while attending a gathering of elders. More than 40 other people were also killed in the attack.
“What has the government got to hide? If they’re not supplying information as part of the CIA’s illegal drone war, why not tell us?” Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith said.
The British Foreign Office and GCHQ have refused to comment on the case, saying they could not speak about ongoing legal proceedings or intelligence matters.
The US regularly carries out attacks by unmanned aircraft on Pakistan’s tribal regions, claiming the airstrikes target militants allegedly affiliated to the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorist groups.
This is while locals say civilians are the main victims of the strikes. Pakistanis say drone attacks violate their sovereignty.
March 12, 2012
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Clive Stafford Smith, Leigh Day & Co, Pakistan, William Hague |
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The Pentagon has for the first time confirmed that US forces are operating inside Yemen, after a group of American officers came under attack in south of the Arab country.
Yemeni militia claimed on Friday that they had killed a CIA officer in an exchange of fire in the southern city of Aden “after tracking him and determining he was cooperating with the Sana’a government.”
A pentagon spokesman in Washington denied the report of the death but confirmed that a US security team in Aden had been attacked, claiming the team members suffered no injuries.
A Yemeni security official had also confirmed that a gunman had fired several shots at a vehicle carrying US security officers without injuring anyone.
The admission by the US Department of Defense came following numerous previous claims by the US government which denied the deployment of ground troops to Yemen.
The US had for decades propped up the regime of Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh who recently handed presidency to his deputy Abdrabbuh Mansur al-Hadi after a single-candidate election shored up by Washington and Riyadh. Hadi is a UK-trained field marshal.
Protesters in Yemen continue to demand the removal of the regime which abounds with officials from the Ali Abdullah Saleh-era.
March 4, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Ali Abdullah Saleh, Central Intelligence Agency, United States, Yemen |
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Not even a week after Barack Obama declared that not too many civilians die in the CIA’s drone strikes in Pakistan, a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that “at least 50 civilians” have been killed in rescues attempts, 20 in strikes on funerals, with at least 282 total civilians killed since Obama took office.
That much you learn from the New York Times report by Scott Shane (2/6/12):
WASHINGTON — British and Pakistani journalists said Sunday that the CIA’s drone strikes on suspected militants in Pakistan have repeatedly targeted rescuers who responded to the scene of a strike, as well as mourners at subsequent funerals.
The report, by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, found that at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile. The bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals. The findings were published on the Bureau‘s website and in the Sunday Times of London.
For some reason the Times felt it necessary to get an anonymous U.S. official–again–to smear the people trying to count the dead:
A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s’ findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions–there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al-Qaeda succeed.”
For the record, the Times’ policy on the use of anonymous sources:
We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack. If pejorative opinions are worth reporting and cannot be specifically attributed, they may be paraphrased or described after thorough discussion between writer and editor. The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source.
February 7, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | al-Qaeda, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Central Intelligence Agency, New York Times, Pakistan, Sunday Times |
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Ahmed Jan (pictured) is a tribal elder in North Waziristan. On March 17 2011 he was attending a gathering with other village elders, to discuss a mining dispute.
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