CIA Chiefs Face Arrest Over Horrific Evidence of Bloody “Video Game” Sorties by Drone Pilots
The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes.
The dossier has been assembled by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who works for Pakistan’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity Reprieve.
Filed in two separate court cases, it is set to trigger a formal murder investigation by police into the roles of two US officials said to have ordered the strikes. They are Jonathan Banks, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Islamabad station, and John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s former chief lawyer. Mr Akbar and his staff have already gathered further testimony which has yet to be filed.
We have statements from a further 82 victims’ families relating to more than 30 drone strikes,’ he said. ‘This is their only hope of justice.’
In the first case, which has already been heard by a court in Islamabad, judgment is expected imminently. If the judge grants Mr Akbar’s petition, an international arrest warrant will be issued via Interpol against the two Americans.
The second case is being heard in the city of Peshawar. In it, Mr Akbar and the families of drone victims who are civilians are seeking a ruling that further strikes in Pakistani airspace should be viewed as ‘acts of war’.
They argue that means the Pakistan Air Force should try to shoot down the drones and that the government should sever diplomatic relations with the US and launch murder inquiries against those responsible.
According to a report last month by academics at Stanford and New York universities, between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed since the strikes in Pakistan began in 2004.
The report said of those, up to 881 were civilians, including 176 children. Only 41 people who had died had been confirmed as ‘high-value’ terrorist targets.
Getting at the truth is difficult because the tribal regions along the frontier are closed to journalists. US security officials continue to claim that almost all those killed are militants who use bases in Pakistan to launch attacks on Western forces across the border in Afghanistan.
In his only acknowledgement that the US has ever launched such attacks at all, President Barack Obama said in January: ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans.’
But behind the dry legal papers seen by The Mail on Sunday lies the most detailed investigation into individual strikes that has yet been carried out. It suggests that the US President was mistaken.
How you like your lesser evil now?
1181
Yep. Romney is a racist, sexist, reactionary dolt.
And Obama is a smooth talker who knows all the right things to say.
While he orders drone hits on children, women, all people of color.
While he works to undermine the remains of the public education system and keep the schools-to-jails pipeline flowing.
Happy election 2012!
Word :/
520 years of resistance to racism, slavery and genocide!
We should all kick off Columbus day with an abundance of native american heritage information and struggles as well as discussions of general white washing of history.
To the Peoples of the World
To the Occupy Movement
To the Oakland Commune
To Our Sisters and Brothers in Struggle on the Other Side of the BorderWe don’t need to remind you of the deep connections between Wall Street, Gringo Capitalism and our Mexican misery. From Imperialist wars to the initial experiments in agrobiotechnology, Mexico has been the principal landscape for offensives by northern capital. We have participated and continue to, in the uprising of the Zapatistas against the neoliberal attack of NAFTA. The uprising which set the spark for the movement against neoliberalism. We met each other at the summits of Seattle, Prague, Genoa, Miami and Cancun. We met each other through a great global conversation.
It’s been a long time since we fought together in the movement against neoliberalism and the world has changed since those times. Today the narco war is devastating our society. As two sides of the same coin, on one side we have the narco and on the other the militarization of the country. These two faces are crushing us from both sides. Although it seems like they fight, they are both at the service of capital and in the modern world local capital is connected in a strong fashion to global capital. In the last few months we have learned these connections between Wall Street and narco money. According to one analysis, narco money was the liquid capital necessary to rescue the banking sector from the initial hits of the financial crisis in 2008 [1].
Further, the huge quantity of drug profits needs a laundromat just as large. Although we don’t have a detailed balance, we know that Wall Street facilitates this laundering. For example according to the US justice department, one bank, Wachovia, laundered $378 billion narco dollars from Mexico between only 2004 and 2007. This bank fell and ironically was acquired by Wells Fargo, the same bank which still has the salaries of our fathers and grandfathers who worked in the bracero program. The same bank which funds detention centers for immigrants where our brothers and sisters die only trying to provide for their families.
But in Mexico there isn’t only the cultivation of misery. Here we drew one of the first lines of struggle against global capitalism in our laboratory of resistance. With humility in front of you, our comrades, we would like to tell of our experience. Encampments and occupations are common in Mexico and comrades joke about the lack of space to put up more encampments. But this isn’t by chance and was won through struggle.
One recent example: in 2006, in the state of Oaxaca, the local teachers union setup an encampment in the center of Oaxaca City during their annual collective bargaining. One morning, on the 14th of June, the state police tried to take down the camp of the teachers and the city rose up, they not only retook the plaza but kicked the police out of the city. The Commune of Oaxaca was born on this day and the following 6 months transformed Oaxaca and the participants in the uprising.
Like you, they also had problems of repression and representation. Against the repression they put up thousands of barricades each night to protect the population from the murderous paramilitaries of Governor Ulises Ruiz, who they struggled to kick out. Against the lying representation of the media, they took over their television and radio studios, collectivized the resources and began to have conversations that had never been had by those means.
We are following closely everything that is happening in Oakland. The police kill youth like Oscar Grant [2] and gravely injure anti-war veterans such as Scott Olsen [3]. The media lies about the popular participation in the movement and they propagate superficial divisions. The self-defense and sefl-representation of our movements are essential to our collective struggle. We invite you to learn from our experiences and we hope to learn from yours. Together and in concert we are toppling this miserable system.
In our stories you will see your story.
We Walk by Asking, We Reclaim by Occupying.
From Mexico with total support for Occupy Oakland.
SIGNED:
jóvenes en resistencia alternativa
Universidad de la Tierra en Oaxaca, A.C.
Colectivo Radio Zapatista
Regeneración Radio
Colectivo Cordyceps
Colectivo Noticias de la Rebelion
Amig@s de Mumia de Mexico
Furia de las Calles
El Centro Cultural La Piramide
Marea Creciente México (Capítulo del red internacional por justícia climática Rising Tide)
Konvergencia Gráfica
Sublevarte Collective
Hacklab Autónomo
El Enemigo Común
Centro Social Okupado “Casa Naranja”Gustavo Esteva, Oaxaca, México
Bocafloja, DF, México
Patricia Westendarp, Querétaro, México
Alejandro Reyes Arias, Chiapas, México
José Rabasa, México
Cristian Guerrero, México
Troy Davis, the condemned inmate who convinced hundreds of thousands of people but not the justice system of his innocence, filed an eleventh-hour plea Wednesday asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Georgia authorities from executing him for the murder of an off-duty police officer.
His execution had been set to begin at 7 p.m., but Georgia prison officials were still waiting for the high court’s decision nearly two hours later.
Mr. Davis’s supporters staged vigils in the U.S. and Europe, declaring “I am Troy Davis” on signs, T-shirts and the Internet. Some tried increasingly frenzied measures, urging prison workers to stay home and even posting a judge’s phone number online, hoping people will press him to put a stop to the lethal injection. President Barack Obama deflected calls for him to get involved.
“They say death row; we say hell no!” protesters shouted outside the Jackson prison where Mr. Davis was to be executed. In Washington, a crowd outside the Supreme Court yelled the same chant.
The crowd outside the prison swelled to more than 500 as night fell and a few dozen riot police stood watch.
New York City: 9/11 Emergency Mobilization Against Racism, War & Anti-Muslim Bigotry. Rally and march at City Hall, Sept. 11, 2011.
Photo by redguard
Many Native Americans welcomed African Americans into their villages. Even as slaves many African Americans became part of a family group, and many intermarried with Native Americans - thus many later became classified as Black Indians
Che Guevara speaking on imperialism
“This Massacre Has Been Sponsored By…” by Emma Gascó
"With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?"
The riots that began in Tottenham and have spread across London over the past few nights are a predictable consequence of the breakdown in trust between large and growing numbers of alienated youth and the Metropolitan Police over recent years. A culture of corruption at the top has long been tolerated within the Met, which has infected the entire force with a gung-ho attitude and mindset when it comes to policing on the ground. This has reached the stage where nothing less than a root and branch structural reform will suffice if public confidence is to be restored.
In recent years we’ve witnessed the police execution of Jean Charles De Menezes at Stockwell tube station and the officers responsible being exonorated. Worse, in what was a low point for then mayor, Ken Livingstone, the existing Met commissioner, Ian Blair, kept his job while the commanding officer of the operation, Cressida Dick, not only kept her job but was later promoted.
The confrontational approach to policing the 2009 G20 protests, involving the kettling of large numbers of protestors for hours on end, and where Ian Tomlinson was killed as a direct result of an incident of police brutality as he attempted to make his way home, has since been joined by recent revelations surrounding the corrupt relationship that existed for years between Met officers and the Murdoch press, involving ranking detectives and officers accepting bribes for confidential information regarding ongoing criminal investigations.
Along with the myriad daily incidents of police brutality and corruption experienced by those living in low income communities around London, the shooting dead of Mark Duggan in Tottenham on Thursday in what is daily emerging were dubious circumstances, has resulted in an inevitable explosion of anger and violence.
For people to have confidence in the police the police must be accountable to the communities in which they operate. As things stand the Met are unaccountable and have been for far too long. In fact increasingly the Met has appeared more akin to an organised militia intent on enforcing its writ via confrontation rather than consensus and cooperation with the public it is meant to be policing and protecting, especially young people living in low income and working class communities.
The ongoing economic crisis and the increased level of social and economic injustice it has presaged as a direct result of the government’s response is another factor in these events that cannot be ignored. The blatant and callous disregard for the human cost of the swingeing cuts to the welfare system is made worse by the lack of pain being endured by those responsible for the recession, the banks and the rich.
Law and order without justice is impossible to maintain for long in any society, and the outburst of rioting and anger London is currently witnessing will have come as no surprise to anyone living in the communities concerned.
Time and again events prove that where there is no justice there can be no peace.
