Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives by Tag 'drones'
US civilian and military employees regularly target and fire lethal unmanned drone guided missiles at people across the world. Thousands of people have been assassinated. Hundreds of those killed were civilians. Some of those killed were rescuers and mourners.
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On March 9th the Federal Aviation Administration requested comments from the public on drone test sites. On May 8th, lengthy comments were submitted by Not 1 More Acre! and Purgatoire, Apishapa & Comanche Grassland Trust. The FAA asked all the wrong questions, but...
“This is not a reflection of who we are or what we stand for.”
– Jeff Gearhart, Wall-Mart general counsel, on the firm’s Mexico bribery
[Torture] “is not the norm.”
– Mike Pannek, Abu Ghraib prison warden.
“T...
In the early fall of 1937, African American poet, Langston Hughes, arrived in Barcelona in the aftermath of an air raid that killed several dozen people. That summer, Hughes had joined a bevy of writers and artists from around the world who had convened in Spain to take...
Drones along the U.S. boundaries with Mexico and Canada are coming under criticism from an unexpected source: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—or, more specifically, the department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The critique helps open the door to t...
Lahore.
It’s been a decade when the US invaded Afghanistan with the world’s most modern and well-trained military force including troops of more than 40 countries equipped with latest weaponry. After spending a large span of ten years and billions of d...
“I want to make sure that people understand: actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties [in Pakistan]. For the most part they have been very precise precision strikes against Al Qaeda and their affiliates.”
President Obama...
The crash last week of a U.S. drone on the Seychelles Islands—the second crash of a U.S. drone on Seychelles in four months—underlines the deadly folly of a plan of U.S. national laboratory scientists and the Northrop Grumman Corp. for nuclear-powered drones.
T...
Over Holy Week, the days before celebrating the resurrection of Jesus on Easter, Christians are called to meditate on Jesus’ last days. On Good Friday, in churches and often in city streets, it is customary to retrace the “Way of the Cross,” symbolically following J...
The first step in examining the legality of assassinating known or suspected terrorists through the use of unmanned armed vehicles (UAVs) is to decide whether such killings could be classified as part of an armed conflict. If they are considered as part of an armed conf...
In 2010, the UN special representative on extrajudicial executions Philip Alston released a 29 page report on the growing use of deadly drone, or unmanned, aircraft by the United States. In a statement that accompanied the report, Alston described the political problem fo...
When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in troubl...
“Three major investigations were under way on Wednesday into the Koran burning at Bagram Air Base by the American military last week, the event that plunged Afghanistan into days of deadly protests…” So begins a New York Times report.
To read the New York Tim...
Fazillah, age 25, lives in Maidan Shar, the central city of Afghanistan’s Wardak province. She married about six years ago, and gave birth to a son, Aymal, who just turned five without a father. Fazillah tells her son, Aymal, that his father was killed by an American...
Lahore.
Relations between the Pakistani government and the military have been tense recently, even resulting in rumours of an impending military coup. A coup is not very likely at this stage, but the situation has created the environment for at least one n...
The attacks and attempted attacks this week on Israeli embassy personnel in Georgia, India and Thailand should serve as a serious warning to the people of both Israel and the US that there will be an increasingly heavy price to pay for the kind of government-sponsored ter...
In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence. The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it...
It’s all because of the little noticed annual report for 2010 from the United Stat...
TUCSON.
Arizona, already struggling to free itself from racist state officials, banned books and profiteering private prisons, is now targeted as the test site for private spy drones.
Arizona military profiteers are pushing for Arizona to beco...
The U.S. war in Afghanistan is testing so much futuristic detect and destroy weaponry that it can be called the most advanced all-seeing invasion in military history. From blanket satellite surveillance to soldiers’ infra-red vision to the remotely guided photographing,...
Here’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it):
Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world. Needs advice. Will pay. Pls respond qkly. PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC.
Here’s the way it actual...
Santiago, Chile.
Environmental activists in the rough Antarctic seas have launched a new tool in the fight to stop a Japanese operation to kill hundreds of whales – remote-controlled drones.
Every morning for the past week, a battery-powered drone with ...
Kabul
NATO/G8 meetings are scheduled to take place from May 19-21 next year in Chicago. Plans are ramping up everywhere. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen exulted over bringing NATO and the G8 to Chic...
“The UAVs, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, are coming.” So says Candice Miller, the Republican congresswoman from the Michigan borderlands near Detroit.
She should know. Miller chairs the Border and Maritime Security of the House Committee on Homeland Security, whi...
America’s wars are remote. They’re remote from us geographically, remote from us emotionally (unless you’re serving in the military or have a close relative or friend who serves), and remote from our major media outlets, which have given ...