Tag Archives | War On Terror

Private Contractors Will Conduct Our War On Drugs In Afghanistan For Years To Come

By on November 27, 2012 in News 11

Wondering what exists at the center of the War on Drugs vs. War on Terror Venn diagram? Wired reports that well into the foreseeable future, our military will be pumping billions of dollars into the pockets of Blackwater-esque private contractors in a battle against Afghanistan’s drug economy:

The U.S. war in Afghanistan is supposed to be winding down. Its contractor-led drug war? Not so much. Inside a compound in Kabul called Camp Integrity, the Pentagon stations a small group of officers to oversee the U.S. military’s various operations to curb the spread of Afghanistan’s cash crops of heroin and marijuana, which help line the Taliban’s pockets. Only Camp Integrity isn’t a U.S. military base at all. It’s the 10-acre Afghanistan headquarters of the private security company formerly known as Blackwater.

Those officers work for an obscure Pentagon agency called the Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office, or CNTPO. Quietly, it’s grown into one of the biggest dispensers of cash for private security contractors in the entire U.S.

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No Sailors Witnessed Osama Bin Laden’s Burial At Sea

By on November 23, 2012 in News 9

Osama death strangeness via the Washington Post:

Internal e-mails among U.S. military officers indicate that no sailors watched Osama bin Laden’s burial at sea from the USS Carl Vinson and traditional Islamic procedures were followed during the ceremony.

The e-mails, obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act, are heavily blacked out, but are the first public disclosure of government information about the al-Qaida leader’s death. The e-mails were released Wednesday by the Defense Department.

In a response to separate requests from the AP for information about the mission, the Defense Department said in March that it could not locate any photographs or video taken during the raid or showing bin Laden’s body.

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Hit Pakistani Pop Song About Deadly Drone Strikes

By on November 13, 2012 in News 0

Dance songs reflecting the new reality. The Guardian provides context:

In the long history of love songs the attention of a beautiful woman has been compared to many things – but perhaps only in Pakistan’s tribal belt would it be likened to the deadly missile strike of a remotely controlled US drone. [It's] a sign of how the routine hunting down and killing of militants by unmanned CIA planes has leached into the popular imagination.

The repeated chorus: “My gaze is as fatal as a drone attack”. The hit for singer Sitara Younis follows her success last year with another love ballad, which warns a besotted man to keep his distance: “Don’t chase me, I’m an illusion, a suicide bomb.”

Maas Khan Wesal, a Pashtu music veteran who wrote the accompanying music, said the song had proved popular because it reflected the lives of Pashtu speakers on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

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Did The Republican Party’s Vilification Of Muslim Americans Just Cost It The Presidency?

By on November 7, 2012 in News 16

You reap what you sow. It seems hard to believe in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and widespread conservative hostility towards Muslims in the United States, but prior to 9/11, American Muslims were a solidly Republican voter demographic. Via Ray on the Royals, baseball blogger Rany Jazayerli pointed out yesterday that, fascinatingly, ex-Republican Muslim voters would have won the election for Mitt Romney:

In the 2000 election, approximately 70% of Muslims in America voted for Bush; among non-African-American Muslims, the ratio was over 80%. Four years later, Bush’s share of the vote among Muslims was 4%.

There is simply no way that I can justify voting for a party that denies the very legitimacy of my identity as an American. Nor can most other members of the American Muslim community, who just happen to be clustered in swing states like Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. If Nate Silver is right, not only will Romney lose the election, but it can be safely said that if the Muslim community had voted the same way they had in 2000, he would have won.

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NYPD Has Spied On Muslim Residents For Years, Hasn’t Generated A Single Terrorism Lead

By on November 2, 2012 in News 17

The Mercury News on the frustrating lack of insidious plots by the city’s residents:

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday.

[The NYPD had] help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames. Police hoped the Demographics Unit would serve as an early warning system for terrorism.

But in a June 28 deposition as part of a longstanding federal civil rights case, Assistant Chief Thomas Galati said none of the conversations the officers overheard ever led to a case. “Related to Demographics,” Galati testified that information that has come in “has not commenced an investigation.”

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The 300th Drone Strike Of Obama’s Presidency Approaches

By on October 29, 2012 in News 13

Amnesty International on the secret new form of war on civilian populations:

In the words of the recent report compiled by NYU and Stanford University:

“Drones hover twenty four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan striking homes, vehicles and public spaces their presence terrorizes men, women and children giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.”

Even as the Presidential candidates sparred on October 11, 2012, President Obama had already authorized his 297th drone strike since taking office, it was the deadliest one in 2012, killing 17 people, the second strike in less than twenty four hours in the area.

Less than a week later, on October 19, 2012 the CIA, that runs the covert drone program, announced it would ask the White House to approve a significant expansion of the agency’s fleet of armed drones so that it could sustain its lethal campaigns in Pakistan and step up campaigns in Yemen and Somalia.

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Familiar Faces On NYC Wanted Posters

By on October 12, 2012 in News 23

Crime-stoppers fliers, spotted this morning adorning New York city lampposts:

THE SUSPECTS ARE WANTED ACCORDINGLY FOR THE CRIMES OF UNCONSTITUTIONALLY MURDERING A U.S. CITIZEN WITHOUT DUE PROCESS THAT OCCURRED IN AL-JAWF PROVINCE, YEMEN ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2011 AND CONSPIRACY TO FURTHER CHALLENGE AND REVOKE AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTIES USING PREDATOR DRONES AGAINST INNOCENT POPULATIONS BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC.

ANYONE WITH INFORMATION REGARDING THE ABOVE SUSPECTS PLEASE NOTIFY LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT IMMEDIATELY.

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The Next Generation Of Drones Will Decide For Themselves Whom To Kill

By on October 9, 2012 in News 16

The Global Post writes that in the near future, drones will be smarter and more “autonomous,” using algorithms to determine whom to terminate on the ground below. What could go wrong?

In all, a minimum of 2,800 people have died in no fewer than 375 US drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2004, according to a count by the UK Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Many hundreds of those killed were probably innocent bystanders.

Standard procedure is for one crewman to control the drone’s sensors, potentially including daytime and night-vision video cameras and high-resolution radars. The robot does essentially nothing without direct human input. But if a host of government and private research initiatives pan out, the next generation of drones will be more powerful, autonomous and lethal … and their human operators less involved.

“In the future we’re going to see a lot more reasoning put on all these vehicles,” Cummings says.

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Congressional Report: Homeland Security Centers Haven’t Uncovered Any Terrorist Plots

By on October 4, 2012 in News 16

Billions of dollars have been poured into a surveillance and information-sharing network connecting the Department of Homeland Security with state and local law enforcement, nothing resembling a domestic threat has been uncovered. The New York Times reports:

One of the nation’s biggest domestic counterterrorism programs has failed to provide virtually any useful intelligence, according to Congressional investigators.

Their scathing report, to be released Wednesday, looked at problems in regional intelligence-gathering offices known as “fusion centers” that are financed by the Department of Homeland Security and created jointly with state and local law enforcement agencies.

The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

More broadly, the flaws uncovered by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations raise questions about the role of the Department of Homeland Security in the nation’s fight against terrorism, and whether the department can ever live up to its original purpose of “connecting the dots” to prevent another surprise like the Sept.

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The Guantanamo Bay Museum Of Art And History

By on October 3, 2012 in News 1

Visible in Google Maps, the Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History exists hypothetically rather than physically, predicated on an alternate reality in which Barack Obama shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center earlier this year and converted it into a historic site and cultural institution:

The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History, located at the former site of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba, is an institution dedicated to remembering the U.S. prison which was active between 2002 and 2012 before it was permanently decommissioned and closed. The museum offers free guided talks and discussions on both the history of the detention camp, its closure, as well as the processes that brought the museum into existence.

 

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