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Snuffysmith

Apr 17 2009, 08:16 AM

Errant Drone Attacks Spur Militants in Pakistan
Predator Blowback

By GARETH PORTER

The U.S. programme of drone aircraft strikes against higher-ranking officials of al Qaeda and allied militant organisations, which has been touted by proponents as having eliminated nine of the 20 top al Qaeda leaders, is actually weakening Pakistan’s defence against the insurgency of the Islamic militants there by killing large numbers of civilians based on faulty intelligence and discrediting the Pakistani military, according to data from the Pakistani government and interviews with senior analysts.

Some evidence indicates, moreover, that the top officials in the Barack Obama administration now see the programme more as an incentive for the Pakistani military to take a more aggressive posture toward the militants rather than as an effective tool against the insurgents.

Although the strikes have been sold to the U.S. public as a way to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda, which is an explicitly counter-terrorist objective, al Qaeda is not actually the main threat to U.S. security emanating from Pakistan, according to some analysts. The real threat comes from the broader, rapidly growing insurgency of Islamic militants against the shaky Pakistani government and military, they observe, and the drone strikes are a strategically inappropriate approach to that problem.

"Al Qaeda has very little to do with the militancy in the tribal areas of Pakistan," said Marvin Weinbaum, former Afghanistan and Pakistan analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence Research at the U.S. Department of State and now scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute.

John McCreary, a senior intelligence analyst for the Defence Intelligence Agency until his retirement in 2006, agrees with Weinbaum’s assessment. "The drone programme is supposed to be all about al Qaeda," he told IPS in an interview, but in fact, "the threat is much larger."

McCreary observes that the targets in recent months "have been expanded to include Pakistani Pashtun militants." The administration apparently had dealt with that contradiction by effectively broadening the definition of al Qaeda, according to McCreary

Ambassador James Dobbins, the director of National Security Studies at the Rand Corporation, who maintains contacts with a range of administration national security officials, told IPS in an interview that the drone strikes in Pakistan are aimed "in the short and medium term" at the counter-terrorism objective of preventing attacks on Washington and other capitals.

But as they have shifted to Pakistani Taliban targets, Dobbins said, "To degree the targets are insurgents and are Pakistanis not Arabs it would be correct to assess that they are part of an insurgency." That raises the question, he said, whether the drone programme "is feeding the insurgency and popular support for it."

The drone program cannot even be expected to be a decisive factor in al Qaeda’s ability to operate, according to McCreary. "All you can do with drones is decapitate leadership," McCreary told IPS in a recent interview. "Even in relation to al Qaeda’s organisational dynamics, it has only limited, temporary impact."

McCreary warned that the drone strikes will cause much more serious problems when they increase and expand into new parts of Pakistan as the administration is now seriously considering, according to a New York Times article Apr. 7. "Now al Qaeda is fleeing to other cities, "said McCreary. "The programme is escalating and having ripple effects that are incalculable."

McCreary said one of the longer-term consequences of the attacks is "the public humiliation of the Pakistan Army as a defender of the national patrimony". That effect of striking Pakistani targets with U.S. aircraft is "the least understood dimension of the attacks, the most discounted and most dangerous". McCreary said the attacks’ "ensure that successive generations of Pakistani military officers will be viscerally anti-American."

Administration officials have defended the drone strikes programme as necessary to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda to prevent terrorist attacks, and officials have leaked to the media in recent weeks the fact that the programme has killed nine of 20 top al Qaeda leaders.

But the Pakistani government leaked data last week to The News in Lahore showing that only 10 drone attacks out of 60 carried out from Jan. 29, 2009 to Apr. 8, 2009 actually hit al Qaeda leaders, while 50 other strikes were based on faulty intelligence and killed a total of 537 civilians but no al Qaeda leaders.

The drone strikes have been even less accurate in their targeting in 2009 than they had been from 2006 through 2008, according to the detailed data from Pakistani authorities. Of 14 drone strikes carried out in those 99 days, only one was successful, killing a senior al Qaeda commander in North Waziristan and its external operations chief. The other 13 strikes had killed 152 people without netting a single al Qaeda leader.

Dobbins, speaking to IPS before the Pakistani data on drone strikes was released, said it was difficult for an outsider to evaluate the benefits of the programme but that "we can assess that there is a significant price that is being paid" in terms of the impact on Pakistani opinion toward U.S. efforts to stem the tide of the insurgency.

Dobbins said one of the reasons for the continuing drone attacks, despite the high political price, is that "it is an incentive aimed prodding the Pakistani government." He said he believes the United States would be happy to trade off the strikes in return for a more effective counterinsurgency campaign by the Pakistani government.

Further bolstering that interpretation of the objective of continued drone strikes is a report, in the same story in The News, that the most recent strike took place only hours after U.S. officials had reportedly received a rejection by Pakistani authorities Apr. 8 of a proposal for joint military operations against militant organisations in the tribal areas from U.S. South Asia envoy Richard Holbrooke and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, who were visiting Islamabad.

Other analysts suggest that the programme has acquired bureaucratic and political momentum because it a politically important symbol that the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are against al Qaeda and because the United States has no other policy instrument to demonstrate that it is doing something about the growth of Islamic groups that share al Qaeda’s extremist Islamic militancy.

McCreary believes that the programme is related to the fear of the Obama administration that it would be unable to get support for operations in Afghanistan if it didn’t focus on al Qaeda. "I think it was a way to link Afghanistan operations to al Qaeda," he said.

"That suggests to me that the tactic for motivating domestic support is influencing the policy," said McCreary. The former senior DIA analyst added that the drone strike programme "has acquired its own momentum, which is now having immense consequences."

Weinbaum told IPS in an interview that the drone attacks are being continued, "primarily because we’re enormously frustrated, and they represent the only thing we really have."

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
http://www.counterpunch.org/porter04162009.html

rla

Apr 17 2009, 08:49 AM

WE JUST KEEP DIGGING A DEEPER HOLE!

believe_it

Apr 21 2009, 06:15 AM

QUOTE

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/14/peac...r_protesting_us

Peace Activists Arrested After Protesting US Drones in Nevada
April 14, 2009

US drone bombings have reportedly killed 687 Pakistani civilians since 2006. During that time, US Predator drones carried out sixty strikes inside Pakistan, but hit just ten of their actual targets. Last week, a group of peace activists last week staged the first major act of civil disobedience against the drone attacks in the United States. Fourteen people were arrested outside the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where Air Force personnel pilot the unmanned drones used in Pakistan. We speak with longtime California peace activist Father Louis Vitale, who was among those arrested, and with Jeff Paterson of Courage to Resist. [includes rush transcript]

GUESTS:
Father Louis Vitale, legendary Bay Area social justice activist, active for more than four decades. Has racked up hundreds of arrests and more than a year in jail time for his involvement in a number of local and international causes. For twelve years he was pastor of the St. Boniface Catholic Church in San Francisco.
Jeff Paterson, program director of Courage to Resist, an organization that supports troops who refuse to fight.

AMY GOODMAN:We turn to a new focus of some in the antiwar movement here in the US. According to the Pakistani newspaper The News, US drone bombings have killed 687 Pakistani civilians since 2006. During that time, US Predator drones carried out sixty strikes inside Pakistan but hit just ten of their actual targets. The most recent attack came last Wednesday, just hours after Pakistani officials rejected a US proposal to conduct joint operations in tribal regions near the Pakistani border with Afghanistan. According to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, Pakistani officials have also asked the US to hand over control of the drone missions in response to growing public outrage. Their request came as Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced he would seek a more than 100 percent increase in funding for the drones.

Well, last week a group of peace activists staged the first major act of civil disobedience against the drone attacks in the United States. On Thursday, fourteen people were arrested outside the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where the Air Force tests the unmanned drones used in Pakistan. The activists were arrested after holding a ten-day vigil dubbed "Ground the Drones."

I'm joined now by a longtime California peace activist who was among those detained. Father Louis Vitale has been active in social justice movements for over four decades. During that time, he has racked up hundreds of arrests and over a year in jail time for his involvement in a number of local and international causes. Last year, he ended a five-month prison term for staging an anti-torture protest at a military intelligence training center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. For twelve years, he was pastor at the St. Boniface Catholic Church in San Francisco, co-founder of Pace e Bene, a group committed to nonviolent action for social justice. Father Louis joins me here in San Francisco.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: Thank you, Amy. [inaudible] to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this last action in Nevada.

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: Well, I was very excited to do it, Amy. As you can kind of sense, I kind of sense out—ever since I got out of the military and kind of turned things around, the '60s and all that, I've always kind of sensed out where the frontiers were, from being with Cesar Chavez and King and all of the different movements that have gone on, and we have been out there in that very desert stopping nuclear testing for over thirty years now.

And right down the road is the testing range where, actually, it's all connected, Nellis Air Force Base, where the planes going to Afghanistan and the Middle East, and before that, Vietnam, etc., train and discharge. In fact, I was in a prison camp there for protesting at Fort Benning, when they all left right from that place to go to Iran six years ago.

And all of a sudden, we noticed down the street, which was just a little base supplying the target range there, all of a sudden all these drones start flying. And so, we're just thinking, well, they're practicing drones and flying drones. And then we find out that they're bombing and bombing and bombing in Afghanistan. And I started talking to the chaplain, was talking to people out there and talking about the effect it's having on even the—not only in Afghanistan, but on those who are flying the drones.

Meanwhile, Kathy Kelly, who you know very well, from Voices for Creative Nonviolence, they have very much been tracking what's going on on the other side, knowing very well the situation in Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc., etc. So we came together, and we started figuring out—we had started going and already just doing some vigiling there, holding up signs how—something like "The drones drown out the groans that come from the people; they don't hear the cries, and neither do we," and getting reactions from some of the crews, the pilot and the sensor operator, the two that are in these little booths, just like arcades, and are actually operating them.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait, I want to talk more about this.

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: I actually—I said "testing" the drones in Nevada, but it's actually running the drones.

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: Oh, absolutely. They fly them from there.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain what you mean.

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: So, someone goes to work in the morning. They drive up from their family.

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: I'll tell you exactly what the colonel, the commander, or the vice commander from Nellis Air Force Base, exactly as he described it to me. He says, "Well, you know, it works out rather nicely. They live with their families in Las Vegas. They drive out and drop the kids off at school, drive out in the morning, fly their missions, drop their bombs. They can go home and have dinner with their family in the evening."

In the meanwhile, what he doesn't quite cover is that, meanwhile, they blew up a school, remember, in Afghanistan. And from what you see from YouTube—in fact, you had P.W. Singer on your show, and he talked about somebody sent him a clip of one of those drones dropping a missile that later—and he saw, you know, the collateral damage right in his face, because the drone hangs around. And they are in that booth for twelve hours. And so, they're all day long monitoring what they're doing and seeing it. Then you go home.

They have interviews with them and the commanders that have been particularly in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, in which they talk about—they've got about forty minutes or so on the way home to kind of shift. You don't get rid of PTSD, instant PTSD, in twenty, forty minutes. In one way, they say it's kind of intriguing, because it's just like an arcade. They learn real fast. The pilots are old-stock pilots, you know, and they're used to flying, you know, F-14s, F-16s. But the sensor operator is—was originally there for the cameras. They were basically doing surveillance, intelligence work. But they also carry four Hellfires on the early Predators and much more on the Reaper, not only more missiles, but also bombs, hundred-pound bombs. And so, they guide them in with the lasers right in there, and they see what they do. And then they've got to live with that. And that's a terrible thing to live with.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe exactly what the action was last week in Nevada?

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: Sure. We had been there for ten days, and every day—actually, we had a wonderful reaction from the guys, even though we had signs that were challenging them. I also mostly held up one that says, "Support the troops. End the war." And they waved. Sometimes they'd stop and talk. You know, we got—only one in the whole week did we get a negative sign. But really, they were very approachable.

And there's 270 people working to man the drones that are there, the drone crews. So what it is is like—as you were saying, it's like a trailer, an arcade. You have the pilots station, and you have the sensor station, and then you might have an intelligence person there. But they're right there in Nevada, forty miles from Las Vegas. And it's just like—and it bounces off a satellite. Actually, the plane has to be taken off and landed in Afghanistan by pilots that are right close there, direct line of sight, because there's two-second lag bouncing off a satellite, and they would crash if they tried to make an instant correction.

AMY GOODMAN: What was the local reaction to the protest that you held last week?

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: The reaction in Las Vegas? Of course, you're pretty far from Las Vegas. The local is really this little Indian Springs.

AMY GOODMAN: Or even the military.

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: Well, they were, as I say, I mean, all these people are driving in, and I would be there by 6:30 in the morning, and they all wave. I mean, we'd wave and give signs, and they'd wave, smile.

We had one tiny little protest group led by a seventeen-year-old boy whose father is a retired Air Force veteran, who is in Afghanistan, though, servicing the planes, and he's gung ho to support his country and all that. Of course, his mother was there parked across the street, and she kept kind of encouraging him, and his sister came out with her cheerleader friends: "Yea for the USA!" But we said, "Well, we support the USA, too, but, you know, we don't support the"—so we got talking to him about his desire to immediately enter the military.

We had a motel room for—at Indian Springs for our kind of—our coming togethers. And the rest of the motel was completely filled with Marine—Marine, Air Force types, and we got to be pretty friendly with them, too. So we got in some very good conversations with them.

AMY GOODMAN: You were arrested?

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: But we were arrested. The local military were not too friendly. They were really nervous, and I think they just came back from Iraq, a couple of them. They had their M-16s out, and they were very nervous and very—it's the kind of scene that unfortunately we have seen go down rather quickly. And I was quite nervous. We had very eager people. One elderly woman who's been arrested a hundred times more in Washington, D.C., and she's running up to them. I said, "Don't do that. When they say stop, stop." And so, it got tense for a while.

But then, when the troopers came in—the state troopers know us very well from our many years in Nevada, and they were actually very friendly, very considerate. "Is your cuffs too tight?" Old man like me with broken shoulders. "Can I move them around, help you?" And they were very positive. So I think the reaction was very good.

I think there's a shift going on in America, as you've been—I saw Mr. Chomsky talked about just yesterday on your show, there is a movement going on, and I think a lot of people are sensitive to that. But we've got to help, try to help these young people that are getting kind of pulled in by something that seems so familiar to them. Right out of boot camp, where they were doing arcade games, here they are on the—it's real.

AMY GOODMAN: In addition to Father Louis, we're joined here in San Francisco by Jeff Paterson from Courage to Resist to address the growing resistance among troops to fighting the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Jeff, talk about what you're doing.

JEFF PATERSON: Well, our group is—came together about three-and-a-half years ago to support the people inside the military who are risking imprisonment and bad discharges in order to voice what they've actually seen in Iraq, and now a growing number of those people are voicing their opposition to what's going on in Afghanistan. And they're risking jail. Some of them are going to Canada in order to avoid returning to these occupations over and over again. And we're seeing a marked increase, actually since President Obama took office, to people straight up refusing to be called up to deploy to Afghanistan after they've been deployed to Iraq a number of times already. I think people are expecting a little bit more from President Obama, as far as drawing down the troops in Iraq quickly, but that's not happening.

So, in order to funnel—to feed the surge that he's implementing in Afghanistan, we are seeing a marked increase in the number of inactive Ready Reserve call-ups. And these are people that have served their four years inside the military and often have done a number of deployments already to Iraq, and they've survived that. Some of them have PTSD, and some of them have some minor medical issues, and—but they've gone off, they've gotten a job, which is not easy today. They're usually married and have a kid. And they're just simply receiving letters in the mail saying, you know, "You're ordered to report" in x number of days and for—to ready for yourself for deployment. And these people are, in large numbers, simply refusing that call up. And we are working with them to help them refuse that call up and give them all the options available to them.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell your own story, Jeff Paterson?

JEFF PATERSON: Well, I was in the Marine Corps for four years leading up to the first Gulf War. And basically, I chose to resist that war based on my experiences, what I saw that was going on at that time in the Philippines, in Okinawa and in South Korea. And I realized that our intervention in Iraq would not bring any good to the Iraqi people, and in my artillery unit, I was pretty certain we were not going to be able to distinguish between hostiles and friendlies in Iraq. And that's almost twenty years ago now. And I feel pretty vindicated that we have not brought anything good to the people in Iraq to that time. But, you know, that history allows me, I think, to better serve the war resisters to the Iraq and Afghan occupation today, of being able to provide—I could tell them, while this, you know, it's actually—it's not so bad going to military prison compared to fighting in a war that you don't believe in, you know.

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: In fact, one of his clients is a drone pilot. You want to tell them about that, Jeff?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, that's interesting, because the drone pilots are people who don't go to Iraq or Afghanistan.

JEFF PATERSON: No, he's stationed right here, near Sacramento, California. And based on—I believe he was a sensor operator, and based on watching his missiles zoom into the target and realizing at the very last second that he made a mistake but not having enough time to do anything about it, he has seen many, many civilians killed. Now, from a few hundred feet, they look like a military target, and they were pretty certain of that, but at the last second they realize they're wrong. So this is a young man that's refused to do that anymore. He's attempting to be discharged as a conscientious objector based on just the trauma that he's inflicted and the post-traumatic stress disorder that, you know, he's probably going to live with for the rest of his life in some way.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see a difference in approach by the Obama administration to resisting soldiers than from the Bush administration?

JEFF PATERSON: I think there's—a lot of people in the military, I think, have a relatively naive kind of outlook. They see George Bush as one thing and Obama as a completely different thing. But I don't think we've seen any difference at all as far as how the military is dealing with war resisters. The US is still moving to prosecute those members that are being kicked out of Canada. And we're looking at general court-martials. We're still looking at years in imprisonment.

I think it really is up to us to create a movement to change that. I think there is a movement that attempted to do that with George Bush that fell on deaf ears. I think that if a people's movement can be created, I think there's a possibility of a victory down the road, but it's not going to happen without us sort of forming our collective people power to force that change.

AMY GOODMAN: Thousands of soldiers have resisted going to war, to Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you know the number overall?

JEFF PATERSON: Well, the military stopped counting at around 25,000 or 30,000. That was—

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty-five or thirty thousand?

JEFF PATERSON: And that was about three years ago. Now, many of those people went AWOL for extended amounts of time, up to a year or so. I would say the majority of those people have returned to the military, and some of them have been court-martialed. Many of them have been administratively discharged. So, but they stopped counting. All I can say is, you know, our organization Courage to Resist is—you know, people in the military call us. A couple people a day call us, and we're a pretty self-selecting group of people.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do they call?

JEFF PATERSON: Well, they call our office here in Oakland. You know, they look at our website. They hear word-of-mouth. Oftentimes when we have a person who refuses on a particular base, his story becomes the talk of the town or the talk of the base.

AMY GOODMAN: What's your website?

JEFF PATERSON: Well, couragetoresist.org.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us.

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Paterson with Courage to Resist in Oakland and Father Louis Vitale, a longtime peace activist, has been arrested—oh, how many times?

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: I don't know. Two, three hundred, I forget—stopped counting.

AMY GOODMAN: What did Martin Sheen say when he shows up in court to bear witness? He says, "You're increasingly looking like Gandhi." Father Louis Vitale and Jeff Paterson—

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: We invite anybody to come and join us, because with Kathy Kelly now, we're really trying to get a movement going, especially to go at something—this is a new threshold we've crossed again, and we don't want to keep doing this, depersonalizing war. We did it with high-altitude bombing, as Dr. Lifton pointed out many years ago; now we're doing it all away. When you're continents away, it seems like kind of fun. And Colonel Warren Langley told me this on the phone the other day, that he's just afraid that it's going to seem too much like a game to people and not real enough. And it will destroy other lives there, and their lives, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Father Louis's last arrest was just last week in Nevada, protesting the attacks by drones.

FATHER LOUIS VITALE: Join us. Join us.

.

believe_it

Apr 21 2009, 06:19 AM

edit

believe_it

Apr 21 2009, 06:42 AM

QUOTE

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/20/long...ivist_john_dear

Longtime Anti-Nuclear Activist John Dear Arrested 75+ Times Protesting War and Nuclear Weapons
April 20, 2009

We speak with longtime anti-nuclear activist and Jesuit priest, Father John Dear, who coordinates the annual Hiroshima Day peace vigil at Los Alamos on August 1st. Dear has been arrested more than seventy-five times for acts of civil disobedience against war and nuclear weapons, including last week while protesting the US drone warplanes at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. He has written over twenty-five books, and his most recent book is his autobiography, A Persistent Peace. Last year, Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. [includes rush transcript]

GUEST:
Father John Dear, longtime Jesuit peace activist. He is the former director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and has written over twenty-five books on peace and nonviolence. His most recent book is his autobiography, A Persistent Peace. He has been arrested more than seventy-five times for acts of civil disobedience against war and nuclear weapons, including last week while protesting the US drone warplanes at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, President Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons, soon after North Korea test fired a long-range rocket. Speaking in Prague, Obama called for an immediate end to nuclear tests.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.

AMY GOODMAN: The previous week, President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had agreed on fast-track negotiations to slash their stockpiles [of] 23,000 nuclear weapons by about a third from the end of this year.

New Mexico, home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Sandia National Laboratories, is closely tied to the history of the nuclear bomb in this country. These labs were founded to coordinate the Manhattan Project’s nuclear weapons research during World War II, and the very first nuclear weapon, named “Trinity,” was test-fired in Alamogordo, New Mexico. In fact, I just passed there yesterday.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu visited the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories last week. He lauded the diverse non-nuclear weapons research that they’re engaged in, but added, quote, “As long as other countries have nuclear weapons, we must have a nuclear stockpile.”

Well, my next guest is a longtime anti-nuclear activist and Jesuit priest who coordinates the annual Hiroshima Day peace vigil at Los Alamos. Father John Dear has been arrested more than seventy-five times for acts of civil disobedience against war and nuclear weapons, including last week while protesting the US drone warplanes at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. He has written over twenty-five books. His most recent book is his autobiography. It’s called A Persistent Peace: One Man’s Struggle for a Nonviolent World. Well, last year, Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Father John Dear joins me here in Albuquerque.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Thanks for having me, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s start with what President Obama said, talking about the abolition of nuclear weapons, though he said it wouldn’t be in his lifetime.

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Well, it’s a great breakthrough to have a president even speak about a nuclear-free world. And we all rejoice in that he said that, but that’s the key sentence for me, that he said, “Alas, this won’t happen, probably, in our lifetime.” And we have to say—the activists around the country, the peace and justice movement—not only does it have to happen in our lifetime, it has to begin and happen this year or next year, that we can’t have a thousand nuclear weapons, which is what the rumors are that he’s going to propose—we go down to a thousand nuclear weapons. We have to abolish all nuclear weapons. And it has to begin here in New Mexico. And so, I think the movement around the country has to push the Obama administration harder than ever, as it’s beginning to talk about a nuclear-free world, and really demand it now.

AMY GOODMAN: Give us the map of New Mexico, the nuclear map. I don’t think many people realize—someone once joked that if New Mexico were to secede from the nation, it would be the fourth greatest nuclear power in the world.

FATHER JOHN DEAR: The third.

AMY GOODMAN: Third, excuse me.

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Yeah. It’s a serious statement, actually. You know, and that’s what brought me to New Mexico. According to the last census, it’s the poorest state in the country. It’s number one in nuclear weapons, number one in military spending. And you see everything: it’s number one in drunk driving, domestic violence, suicide, one of the worst education systems in the country. The land is—it’s like a radioactive waste dump. And here in Albuquerque, there are more nuclear weapons at the airport than any other place on the planet.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean at the airport? I’m just about to go there to fly out.

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Well, right. And you’ll see it as you fly out of the airport. If you look carefully, in those mountains, those little white buildings, those are nuclear bunkers, at Kirtland and Sandia. More than any other place on the planet, except perhaps one city in remote northern Russia. And at Los Alamos, the birthplace of the bomb, especially under the Bush administration, business has been booming. He’d been pouring billions down there, he said, “to build a whole new generation of nuclear weapons.” And he was going to start new pit production. The good news—

AMY GOODMAN: What is pit production?

FATHER JOHN DEAR: The core of the nuclear bomb, which is what Los Alamos does. And they send them elsewhere.

The good thing, and it hasn’t gotten much coverage, is that Obama has stopped that. But 70 percent of the work at Los Alamos is still war and destruction of the planet, and that is continuing, as you heard the Secretary of Energy just say last week.

Our position is, we want Los Alamos, Sandia and Kirtland to be completely disarmed. We’ve got to get rid of these weapons and change it into a place—get all those scientists to work on alternative energy sources, and so forth and so on. And that’s been my work here as part of a grassroots movement for the disarmament of Los Alamos through vigils and demonstration. I’m trying to raise the conversation that we should not continue to work on the manufacture and development of nuclear weapons. And that’s our future.

AMY GOODMAN: I’ve been traveling through the state over the last few days, went to Santa Fe and Taos, both very near Los Alamos, and then yesterday to Mesilla, to the border, then up to Silver City. We passed near where the drone tests are taking place, not only in Nevada, where you were just arrested, but is that right? Right here in New Mexico?

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Well, the drones are flying, as I understand, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and New Mexico and Arizona on the border, flying nonstop to, you know, monitor who’s crossing into the country and then to assist in their arrest.

So, what’s so amazing about New Mexico is you see everything is connected, all these issues of injustice and war, including the drones. And so, we’re trying to say, the future of New Mexico—it’s really a symbol of the country. It’s really stopping all of this and moving toward a new land of nonviolence.

AMY GOODMAN: John Dear, what kind of dialogue have you had with scientists at Los Alamos? I have met many in my travels here.

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Well, not too much, sad to say. And there are many groups have met with scientists over decades. I’ve been talking to people around the state. I’ve talked to students at Los Alamos, and we do these public demonstrations.

You hear a lot of things behind the scenes, for example, that many are against the predominant work of nuclear weapons up there, and they’re hoping that they would transfer Los Alamos to—I’ve heard from scientists—to down to 20 to 30 percent of their work being for nuclear research and development. I’m saying it’s got to be zero. You know, more of them want to use their energies for pro-human and energy development.

The thing that’s in New Mexico is, to my experience, is that it’s the classic thing. This is just a job. And, you know, the economy is basically—revolves around the military and nuclear weapons here, and that is not a long-term way to develop the economy here or anywhere. It’s a dead-end, putting all these resources into that research. I think some of the scientists get it, but they say, “Hey, it’s a job.”

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting that J. Robert Oppenheimer, right, the head of the Manhattan Project, who developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, afterwards said, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, “I am the shatterer of worlds.”

FATHER JOHN DEAR: And then turned against it and was clearly ostracized here in New Mexico from the whole nuclear establishment. And so, they don’t want to go through what he went through.

And that’s why we need—like we abolished the death penalty here in New Mexico, we need to abolish the nuclear industry, nuclear weapons, and that’s only going to happen through a movement involving everybody: the politicians, the scientists, the church people. And I think the whole country has to continue to put—the whole movement has to continue to put pressure on our government, on the military and the scientists, saying this doesn’t work anymore, it’s not making us more secure, it’s the ultimate threat of terrorism, it’s bad for the economy, and help everyone move away from this kind of security of a job in building these weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: Father John Dear, in 2003 in November, an entire battalion of the National Guard marched on your—was it rectory?

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Yeah, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Well, as I wrote about this in my book, A Persistent Peace, I came here and was speaking out against nuclear weapons, speaking out against the war in Iraq, got kicked out of one of my parishes in the remote desert. And as I say, it’s quite a state here, where all the issues are upfront in the desert.

And one morning—you know, I didn’t know this was going to happen—I was shocked to find the entire battalion of the National Guard for northeastern New Mexico marching around the block in my small desert town and the church and the rectory, chanting war slogans. They were about to leave for Iraq one week later. And then they stopped right at my front door. Seventy-five young kids, all under twenty-one, chanting “Kill, kill, kill.”

It was, we found out later, the leadership of the National Guard harassing me as a, you know, outspoken voice against war and nuclear weapons and harassing me. And it’s really an indication of what’s happened these last ten years, that you could have a unit of the national US military march and harass a private citizen at his home. I mean, this is like you might expect in the Wild West 150 years ago.

What I did, as I wrote in the book, was I went right outside, told them to be quiet, and said, “In the name of God, I order you not to go to Iraq, not to kill anyone, not to be killed, and to quit the US military and to, you know, work for peace and justice through nonviolence.” They all laughed at me, and they left, but—and later, the governor, Bill Richardson, told me that he was appalled by it. And he spoke to the head of the National Guard and threatened to fire the whole top echelon if they ever came close to doing anything like that again. So—

AMY GOODMAN: You were kicked out of a church?

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Yeah, for speaking against the Iraq war. I had five parishes, four of them very poor and one a kind of a middle-upper-class parish of retired military families near a ski resort. And the war was starting, and naturally I was saying, “Hey, you cannot be a Christian and claim to follow the nonviolent Jesus who said ‘love your enemies’ and support the bombing of children in Iraq or nuclear weapons or the whole culture of war.” Well, they were appalled and kicked me out.

And I think that should be the future of every Christian minister, priest and bishop—getting kicked out for speaking out against war and nuclear weapons—so that all the churches become communities of nonviolence, which is what the gospel of Jesus was about. And so, that was, you know, a very hard experience, but a good experience. And it needs to happen more and more, that we get church people to return to the heart of, I think, nonviolence at the heart of every religion and be instruments of peace in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Your assessment of President Obama, who said he will end the war in Iraq and expand the war in Afghanistan?

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Well, I’m very disappointed. You know, I want him to end the war in Iraq today and bring back all the troops and pursue nonviolent alternatives and pursue a kind of global Marshall Plan to rebuild Iraq through food and aid. And war doesn’t work. And he’s continuing the same old legacy of war by bombing Afghanistan and Pakistan. So, that’s why, you know, actually, Archbishop Tutu and I tried to meet with him, and we were going to say this to him, and a meeting almost happened a few weeks ago, and then it was abruptly canceled.

AMY GOODMAN: What happened? You were in Washington?

FATHER JOHN DEAR: No. We were working with the White House, and they told us it was going to happen, but it just was canceled. And maybe it’s because Obama is not meeting with anybody, which is a real shame. He’s refusing to meet with Tutu, who was going to speak especially on this question of Afghanistan and Pakistan and saying war doesn’t work there, and we’re just going to continue to breed more terrorism. But I think he was threatened by what we were going to say, and he’s not listening to other voices there. So, that’s why I went to Creech, and that’s why I’m saying we have to continue to put pressure on the Obama administration through the movement and say, don’t bomb Afghanistan, Pakistan, and so forth and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: When we were in San Francisco just a few days ago, we had Father Louis Vitale on—

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —who was also arrested at Creech.

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain why you went there.

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Well, learning from your show and—like everybody in the country—that this is the future of war, along with nuclear weapons still existing, but that we have developed these unmanned bombers that are trained out of Creech in Nevada that are then used to monitor, fly permanently over, Pakistan, Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, and bombing hundreds of civilians. And ours was the first demonstration ever there, maybe the—and the first civil disobedience, as far as I can tell. And so, we walked onto the base, trying to say, “No, we shouldn’t have these weapons. We shouldn’t have drones. We shouldn’t be bombing the children of Afghanistan and Pakistan.” And we were trying to take our message there. And then we’re going to have a trial, probably later this summer or the fall, or in the fall, and we’re going to take our message into the court.

AMY GOODMAN: Father John Dear, you have been arrested more than seventy-five times. In this last minute and a half, a few of those protests that are most memorable for you, that had the most meaning?

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Well, they’re all meaningful, and they’re all scary, especially the Plowshares disarmament action, for me, in 1993 with Philip Berrigan, when we hammered on an F-15 nuclear fighter bomber, for which I faced twenty years in prison as—

AMY GOODMAN: Where?

FATHER JOHN DEAR: In North Carolina at the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base—as part of the Plowshares movement.
But my experience with that is that if you look at the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, civil rights movement, in the end, the change always happens when good people break bad laws and accept the consequences, that some people actually have to engage the law through the grassroots movements of nonviolence. And so, that’s why I’m trying to continue this tradition, with our friends, of Gandhi and King, of using the weapon of civil disobedience to get into the courts and say, “War is illegal, nuclear weapons are illegal, and our future is a future of nonviolence.” And so, some of us are continuing that tradition.

AMY GOODMAN: You worked in Salvador under the Jesuit priests who were killed.

FATHER JOHN DEAR: Yes. That was in 1985, and I write about it in my book. And it was really at the height of the civil war there and a terrible experience. And these guys, the six Jesuits who were killed twenty years ago this fall, were spectacular people and assassinated for poignantly demanding their government end war. And it was a powerful experience to have known and worked with these great martyrs of justice and peace. And I’m trying to apply what I learned from them here in the United States, and that means speaking out publicly, all of us, for an end to war and the end of war itself and poverty and nuclear weapons and the working of a new culture of nonviolence.

AMY GOODMAN: Father John Dear, I want thank you very much for being with us here in Albuquerque. His new book is called A Persistent Peace: One Man’s Struggle for a Nonviolent World.

believe_it

Apr 22 2009, 01:51 PM

QUOTE

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LM674603.htm

REUTERS OPINION COLUMN
Killer robots and a revolution in warfare
Bernd Debusmann 22 Apr 2009 14:04:33 GMT
Source: Reuters

(Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

By Bernd Debusmann

WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) - They have no fear, they never tire, they are not upset when the soldier next to them gets blown to pieces. Their morale doesn't suffer by having to do, again and again, the jobs known in the military as the Three Ds - dull, dirty and dangerous.

They are military robots and their rapidly increasing numbers and growing sophistication may herald the end of thousands of years of human monopoly on fighting war. "Science fiction is moving to the battlefield. The future is upon us," as Brookings scholar Peter Singer put it to a conference of experts at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania this month.

Singer just published Wired For War - the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, a book that traces the rise of the machines and predicts that in future wars they will not only play greater roles in executing missions but also in planning them.

Numbers reflect the explosive growth of robotic systems. The U.S. forces that stormed into Iraq in 2003 had no robots on the ground. There were none in Afghanistan either. Now those two wars are fought with the help of an estimated 12,000 ground-based robots and 7,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the technical term for drone, or robotic aircraft.

Ground-based robots in Iraq have saved hundreds of lives in Iraq, defusing improvised explosive devices, which account for more than 40 percent of U.S. casualties. The first armed robot was deployed in Iraq in 2007 and it is as lethal as its acronym is long: Special Weapons Observation Remote Reconnaissance Direct Action System (SWORDS). Its mounted M249 machinegun can hit a target more than 3,000 feet away with pin-point precision.

From the air, the best-known UAV, the Predator, has killed dozens of insurgent leaders - as well as scores of civilians whose death has prompted protests both from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Predators are flown by operators sitting in front of television monitors in cubicles at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, 8,000 miles from Afghanistan and Taliban sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. The cubicle pilots in Nevada run no physical risks whatever, a novelty for men engaged in war.

TECHNOLOGY RUNS AHEAD OF ETHICS

Reducing risk, and casualties, is at the heart of the drive for more and better robots. Ultimately, that means "fully autonomous engagement without human intervention," according to an Army communication to robot designers. In other words, computer programs, not a remote human operator, would decide when to open fire. What worries some experts is that technology is running ahead of deliberations of ethical and legal questions.

Robotics research and development in the U.S. received a big push from Congress in 2001, when it set two ambitious goals: by 2010, a third of the country's long-range attack aircraft should be unmanned; and by 2015 one third of America's ground combat vehicles. Neither goal is likely to be met but the deadline pushed non-technological considerations to the sidelines.

A recent study prepared for the Office of Naval Research by a team from the California Polytechnic State University said that robot ethics had not received the attention it deserved because of a "rush to market" mentality and the "common misconception" that robots will do only what they have been programmed to do.

"Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to the time when computers were simpler and their programs could be written and understood by a single person," the study says. "Now programs with millions of lines of code are written by teams of programmers, none of whom knows the entire program; hence, no individual can predict the effect of a given command with absolute certainty since portions of programs may interact in unexpected, untested ways."

That's what might have happened during an exercise in South Africa in 2007, when a robot anti-aircraft gun sprayed hundreds of rounds of cannon shell around its position, killing nine soldiers and injuring 14.

Beyond isolated accidents, there are deeper problems that have yet to be solved. How do you get a robot to tell an insurgent from an innocent? Can you program the Laws of War and the Rules of Engagement into a robot? Can you imbue a robot with his country's culture? If something goes wrong, resulting in the death of civilians, who will be held responsible?

The robot's manufacturer? The designers? Software programmers? The commanding officer in whose unit the robot operates? Or the U.S. president who in some cases authorises attacks? (Barack Obama has given the green light to a string of Predator strikes into Pakistan).

While the United States has deployed more military robots - on land, in the air and at sea - than any other country, it is not alone in building them. More than 40 countries, including potential adversaries such as China, are working on robotics technology. Which leaves one to wonder how the ability to send large numbers of robots, and fewer soldiers, to war will affect political decisions on force versus diplomacy.

You need to be an optimist to think that political leaders will opt for negotiation over war once combat casualties come home not in flag-decked coffins but in packing crates destined for the robot repair shop.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

(Editing by Sean Maguire)

believe_it

Apr 22 2009, 04:41 PM

QUOTE

http://counterpunch.org/solomon04102009.html

Weekend Edition
April 10 / 12, 2009

Forget About It!
Getting a Death Grip on Memory
By NORMAN SOLOMON

A headline in the New York Times announced a few days ago: “Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory.” This news ran above the fold on the front page.

“Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain,” the article began. Readers quickly learned that it’s starting to happen: “Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory...”

Big deal.

American media outlets have been pulling off such feats for a long time.

The scientists trying to learn how to wipe out “specific types of memory” are lagging way behind.

Don’t need to remember the vast quantities of napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs that the U.S. military dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s? Or the continuing realities of burn victims, dioxin poisoning and unexploded warheads?

Don’t want to consider the many thousands of civilians killed by Salvadoran death squads, Guatemalan troops and Nicaraguan contra guerillas during the 1980s, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers?

Don’t care to recall the Pentagon’s estimate that the Gulf War in early 1991 killed 100,000 Iraqi people during a six-week period?

Forget about it! That’s what selective memory is for.

Prefer not to recollect how the U.S. government trained and armed President Reagan’s beloved “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan -- including the likes of Osama bin Laden and other fundamentalist mujahedeen -- for their insurgency against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s? Rather not remember how those “freedom fighters” became “terrorists”?

Hate that particular gray? Then wash it away!

Enough bleach in the spin cycles will do the trick. There’s more than one way to be “editing memory.”

“So far, the research has been done only on animals,” the Times reported in its April 6 story. “But scientists say this memory system is likely to work almost identically in people.”

The Times account managed to balance enthusiasm for the advances of scientific research with some potential downsides: “Millions of people might be tempted to erase a severely painful memory, for instance -- but what if, in the process, they lost other, personally important memories that were somehow related?”

Dominant media have blotted out countless painful memories -- national or personal -- if only by treating them as irrelevant or incidental to news and concerns that really count. All in a day’s work: part of the mix of organized forgetting.

“The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing,” Aldous Huxley observed. “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”

And, of equal relevance to the brave new world of U.S. mass media in 2009: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

With constant media prompts, the widely replicated screens end up screening us, from ourselves and from each other.

Now we know the names of the Pentagon’s drones -- Predators and Reapers -- but not the names of the people they’re killing.

Easy enough to approve of bombing people when they’ve been rendered unreal. Forgetting becomes a simple matter.

Is some memory not worth remembering? Of course, we could always let the market decide.

.

believe_it

Apr 26 2009, 02:52 PM

FOX interviewer raises issue that Obama administration's authorization of drone attacks might be investigated in the future as war crimes if precedent is established by investigating Bush administration on torture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wvwi73DNfA
Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) on torture prosecutions
Posted on YouTube: April 26, 2009

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