Many in the corporate press love to luxuriate over drones, those seemingly silent and deadly killers against America’s “enemies”. The reality is rather different, explains Nick Turse in TomDispatch: According to statistics provided to TomDispatch by the Air Force, Predators have flown the lion’s share of hours in America’s drone wars.… As of October 1st,…
Showing all posts tagged war on terror
Holding corporates to account for helping America torture
Centre for Constitutional Rights launches a necessary case: Last night, attorneys for Iraqi torture victims abused in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison and other detention centers in Iraq challenged two private military contractors’ claims to immunity from being sued on the grounds that their alleged torture occurred during wartime. Today, a coalition of groups, including…
The deadly risk of being a journalist in 2011
Committee to Protect Journalists offers a grim end of year report: Pakistan remained the deadliest country for the press for a second year, while across the world coverage of political unrest proved unusually dangerous in 2011, the Committee to Protect Journalists found in its year-end survey of journalist fatalities. CPJ’s analysis found notable shifts from…
This is how Western forces gather “intelligence”
Human Terrain Systems is the term with private companies increasingly hired by the US army (and Australia) to use anthropologists and other related fields to gather “intelligence” in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. 21st century warfare (privatised, of course): More about this film here.
Understanding humanity in the back of an ambulance
My friend Benjamin Gilmour, author of the wonderful new book Paramedico… – he works alongside ambulance workers across the world – speaks on commercial Australian TV and mentions US crimes with drones against the people of Pakistan:
America’s Gitmo problem
More than ten years after 9/11, the Obama administration remains determined to maintain flawed military trials for terror suspects but as this New York Times investigation reveals, housing people on the US mainland hasn’t caused the end of America: It is the other… Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away…
How Romania became key site for Washington’s torture plans
“Democratic” America post 9/11 (via Associated Press): In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the heart of the capital city, is a secret the Romanian government has long tried to protect. For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed “Bright Light” — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable…
