U.S. Policies Continue to Fail in 2018

As of this writing, the Russian military has had three of their bases attacked by drones. They destroyed six of them and captured another seven. The significance: the drones are of a quality that could not have been made by the ISIS “rebels,” and had to come from a technologically-advanced nation. The drones were multidirectional and able to be controlled by satellite through GPS coordinates.

[Schwarzenegger, in “Predator”]: “Heat seeker, Dillon. Pretty sophisticated for a bunch of half-assed mountain boys.”

Exactly. The U.S. (via Tillerson) released a statement that the U.S. was not involved in the drone strike and was unaware of who supplied the drones. Not only does that not hold any water, but as it turns out, a U.S. intelligence aircraft was monitored in the theatre while these drone attacks were taking place. Syria is still being hotly contested between Assad and the “rebels” who are none other than Al Qaeda that “morphed” several times to become the ISIS we all know and uphold in the manner of Emmanuel Goldstein, the bogeyman of Orwell’s “1984.”

On the front with Eastern Ukraine, the Russian-backed separatists are about to receive a present…bequeathed by Obama, and allowed to be delivered by President Trump, certified by the Senate and all on the taxpayer’s dime. This being antitank weapons in the form of Javelins and other antitank missiles to the tune of about $47 million. Now the President is thinking of tripling that amount. So much for “détente,” and the reset that was supposed to happen with Russia.

Domestically, as disturbing as our foreign policy (and in some ways more so) is the project to create a domestic “spy” service to complement the alphabet agencies. One of the individuals considered to head it is none other than Eric Prince, the former Navy SEAL and CEO of the same Blackwater that the U.S. government gave “carte blanche” in Iraq with limited ROE (Rules of Engagement) and almost no accountability.

Internally, the same draconian measures that were emplaced by Obama to circumvent the Constitution are still in place. The police forces are growing throughout the U.S., and via the Fusion Centers and CCTV networks steadily germinating across the nation the local, state, and federal police forces are coming beneath one umbrella. The sled is still traveling downhill. A slower rate than before; nevertheless, it’s still moving in the direction it did prior to the election.

The belligerent and imperialistic foreign policy of before is still in place, with relations souring instead of improving. In the meantime, we are watching a form of “creeping Statism” that is domestically moving almost too slowly to be noticed, but making headway. We have an Attorney General who selectively enforces the law, and has a “hands-off” policy for prominents such as Mueller, Comey, and Hillary Clinton.

The North Korean threat has not dissipated: it persists. They will soon launch Kwangmyongsang-5, a satellite that will be able to map positions with advanced technology to be utilized for a nuclear strike. From this and other problems we are constantly distracted by the MSM (Mainstream Media) with Harvey Weinstein’s escapades and the “witch hunt” in progress against every male in the U.S. We are distracted by NFL players taking a knee, by Oprah Winfrey considering being a candidate for president in 2020 (would her campaign be managed by Harpo productions?), and other items that are nonsensical and nonproductive.

Other nations are making their move, such as China with a gold-backed Yuan attempting to supplant the Petrodollar. If our country doesn’t take some drastic steps with foreign policy and domestic agendas, it may realize a few lighter moments, but that is not enough. This period is the calm before the storm. Those midterm elections will be along in no time, and the next presidential election is right around the corner. Hope that we last long enough as a nation to make it that far.

---

Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne).  Mr. Johnson is also a Gunsmith, a Certified Master Herbalist, a Montana Master Food Preserver, and a graduate of the U.S. Army’s SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape).  He lives in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with his wife and three cats. You can follow Jeremiah’s regular writings at SHTFplan.com or contact him here.

This article may be republished or excerpted with proper attribution to the author and a link to www.SHTFplan.com.

Apple Doesn’t Think You’re Mature Enough to Know Truth About U.S. Drone Strikes

(ANTIMEDIA) “At its core was a question: do we want to be as connected to our foreign policy as we are to our smartphones? My hypothesis was no. Americans don’t care about the drone war because it is largely hidden from view.”

That’s how Josh Begley, writing for The Intercept on Tuesday, described the concept behind an app he created five years ago. The app, he says, was a simple one. It merely sent users an alert every time a U.S. drone strike was reported in the news.

Apple rejected the app three times on the grounds that it was “excessively objectionable or crude content,” but Begley didn’t give up on the project.

We"re revolutionizing the news industry, but we need your help! Click here to get started.

“Over the years, I would occasionally resubmit the app, changing its name from Drones+ to Metadata+,” he wrote. “I was curious to see if Apple might change its mind. The app didn’t include graphic images or video of any kind — it simply aggregated news about covert war.”

He went on to tell how, after five rejections, Apple finally accepted the app in 2014. It remained in the App Store for a year and was downloaded by over 50,000 people. But then, the following September, Apple removed the app, once again citing “excessively objectionable or crude content.”

Begley persisted. The reason he was writing the post this week, in fact, was because that day — March 28, 2017 — Apple had once again accepted the app. He wasn’t writing to talk about his ordeal with Apple, though. He was writing about the issue that motivated him to create the app in the first place:

“As an artist who works with data, I think the story of this app is about more than a petty conflict with Apple. It is about what can be seen — or obscured — about the geography of our covert wars.”

He pointed out that over the past 15 years, people have worked tirelessly to document what’s happening on the ground where these drone campaigns are being waged. And that work is certainly praiseworthy. But Begley went further, pointing out what he calls the “difficult truth” of drone warfare — that at the end of the day, we don’t really know who these missiles are killing.

Again, rather than focusing on his spat with Apple, Begley stayed with the issue that inspired him and talked about the end product of that inspiration:

“Because the particulars of drone wars are scant, we only have ‘metadata’ about most of these strikes—perhaps a date, the name of a province, maybe a body count. Absent documentary evidence or first-person testimony, there isn’t much narrative to speak of.

“The name ‘Metadata’ has a double meaning: the app both contains metadata about English-language news reports, and it refers to the basis on which most drone strikes are carried out.”

The only time Begley questioned Apple’s earlier decisions to refuse his app was in his summation.

“Smartphones have connected us more intimately to all sorts of data,” he wrote. “Yet information about drone strikes — in Apple’s universe — had somehow been deemed beyond the pale.”

He used the past tense, of course, because Apple had, that very day, re-accepted Metadata. But as it turned out, the party was short-lived. Hours after Begley’s post ran at The Intercept, Apple pulled his app once more.

Highlighting the suddenness of Apple’s move, here’s how Reason opened its coverage of the news on Tuesday:

“This was supposed to be a post about how anybody who wants to easily keep track of U.S. drone strikes overseas can do so through an app on their iPhone. But never mind. They can’t anymore.”

Josh Begley chose not to go after Apple in his article when he easily could have. He took the high road and stuck to the far greater issues — the nature of drone warfare itself and how we, as a society, are responding to it in an age of instant communication.

This writer will follow Begley’s lead and not speculate on the myriad possibilities of why Apple seems afraid of his app. That’s the far less important aspect of what’s happening here. It all goes back to the core of the Metadata project and the question that drove Begley to get started: Given the option, would we really want to be as connected to U.S. foreign policy as we are to our smartphones?

Or, in other words, would we really want constant updates on all the killing?

Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo

Obama’s Drone Program Called “The Most Extreme Terrorist Campaign Of Modern Times”

Andrea Germanos
January 21, 2015

Famed linguist takes aim at western hypocrisy on terrorism.

(CommonDreams) World-renowned linguist and scholar Noam Chomsky (hyperlink added) has criticized what he sees as Western hypocrisy following the recent terror attacks in Paris and the idea that there are two kinds of terrorism: “theirs versus ours.”

In an op-ed published Monday at CNN.com, Chomsky notes how the deadly attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a supermarket last week sparked millions to demonstrate under the banner “I am Charlie” and prompted inquiries “into the roots of these shocking assaults in Islamic culture and exploring ways to counter the murderous wave of Islamic terrorism without sacrificing our values.”

No such inquiry into western culture and Christianity came from Anders Breivik’s 2011 attack in Norway that killed scores of people.

Nor did NATO’s 1999 missile strike on Serbian state television headquarters that killed 16 journalists spark “Je Suis Charlie”-like demonstrations. In fact, Chomsky writes, that attack was lauded by U.S. officials.

That civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams described the Charlie Hebdo attack as “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory,” is not surprising, Chomsky writes, when one understands “‘living memory,’ a category carefully constructed to include Their crimes against us while scrupulously excluding Our crimes against them—the latter not crimes but noble defense of the highest values, sometimes inadvertently flawed.”

Other omissions of attacks on journalists noted by Chomsky: Israel’s assault on Gaza this summer whose casualties included many journalists, and the dozens of journalists in Honduras that have been killed since the coup in 2009.

Offering further proof of what he describes as western hypocrisy towards terrorism, Chomsky takes at aim at Obama’s drone program, which he describes as “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times.”

It “target[s] people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby,” he writes.

---

This work was published by Common Dreams under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. h/t MintPressNews. Image credit: The White House

Obama Killed an American Teen in Yemen — Trump Just Killed His 8-Year-Old Sister

Washington, D.C. – While President Trump was publicly mourning the death of a SEAL Team 6 member, and several others wounded in the raid on a compound purported to harbor al-Qaeda officials, reports from Yemen indicate that as many as 10 women and children were also killed in the raid.

As usual, public reports in the corporate mainstream media failed to acknowledge any of the civilian deaths, after the U.S. military initially denied that any civilians were killed in the raid.

According to a report by the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald:

In a hideous symbol of the bipartisan continuity of U.S. barbarism, Nasser al-Awlaki just lost another one of his young grandchildren to U.S. violence. On Sunday, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, using armed Reaper drones for cover, carried out a commando raid on what it said was a compound harboring officials of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A statement issued by President Trump lamented the death of an American service member and several others who were wounded, but made no mention of any civilian deaths. U.S. military officials initially denied any civilian deaths, and (therefore) the CNN report on the raid said nothing about any civilians being killed.

But reports from Yemen quickly surfaced that 30 people were killed, including 10 women and children. Among the dead: the 8-year-old granddaughter of Nasser al-Awlaki, who was also the daughter of Anwar Awlaki.

This is the 8-year-old girl killed in US raid in Yemen, Arabic media reports https://t.co/nPlWh6LqE3
US killed her teen American brother too pic.twitter.com/QP0TsgdIfq

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 29, 2017

Award-winning investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill – who extensively interviewed the grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, in Yemen for his book and Oscar Award winning film “Dirty Wars” – tweeted that the child’s grandfather informed him that she was “was shot in the neck and killed,” with the child subsequently bleeding to death over the course of two hours.

Despite US claims no civilians were killed in Yemen raid, Dr. Nasser Awlaki says his 8 yr old granddaughter was shot in the neck & killed

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) January 29, 2017

In 2011, the now-deceased eight-year-old’s father, Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen never charged with a crime, was assassinated by a drone strike in Yemen. Although designated an al-Qaeda terrorist by the U.S., the killing of an American citizen without due process was extremely controversial and led to a lawsuit against the Obama administration that was subsequently dismissed by the court.

READ MORE:  While Americans Fight Over Which Clown to Elect, Russia Deployed Its Largest Fleet Since the Cold War

Only two weeks later after the killing of Awlaki, another CIA drone strike in Yemen killed al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, also a U.S. citizen – and not a suspected terrorist – in addition to his 17-year-old cousin and a number of other innocent Yemenis, reported Greenwald.

The U.S. claimed that the killing of an American teenager was simply “collateral damage,” with one official, former Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, incredulously blaming the teen for his own death by stating that he perhaps wouldn’t be dead if he “had a more responsible father.”

The New York Times reported that the raid was debated by military officials for months during the Obama administration, but ultimately left the decision up to the incoming Trump administration. Trump personally authorized the raids last week, with the “main target” being “computer materials in the house that could contain clues about future terrorist plots.” The Times report went on to note that Yemeni sources claimed that “at least eight women and seven children, ages 3 to 13, had been killed in the raid,” and that the attack also “severely damaged a school, a health facility and a mosque.”

Just last week, in a report for the Intercept, Matthew Cole noted that SEAL Team 6 is notorious for engaging in “revenge ops,’ unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities.” For all the campaign rhetoric about targeting the families of suspected terrorist, perhaps we may have just witnessed it in action in the death of this eight-year-old child.

Upholding Tradition: Suspected Drone Strikes Continue as Trump Takes Office

January 23, 2017   |   Darius Shahtahmasebi

(ANTIMEDIA) Just hours into Trump’s presidency, suspected U.S. drone strikes killed three alleged al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen’s southwestern Bayda province.

According to anonymous security and tribal officials, two strikes killed an area field commander by the name of Abu Anis al-Abi, along with two others. Considering the two others are identified merely as “alleged al-Qaeda operatives,” it seems more than apparent that Trump will continue Obama’s longstanding practice of classifying any military-age male in the strike zone as a combatant, whether or not they were actually al-Qaeda militants.

Before Obama left office last week, U.S. intelligence officials claimed 117 civilians had been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere during his presidency. This was the second public assessment issued in response to mounting pressure for more transparency regarding Obama’s counterterrorism programs, and it was ludicrously inaccurate. Regardless, the program shows no signs of stopping.

According to CNN, the U.S. military carried out drone strikes on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, killing a “handful of al Qaeda militants.” The strikes did not require Trump’s signature to be delivered, and in practice, the authority to order strikes has been passed down to a four-star commander.

Should Trump decide to allow these strikes to continue, he will be keeping Obama’s controversial program alive despite the fact the drone program has been documented as grounds for war crimes investigations, mostly due to its reliance on “signature strikes” and so-called “double tap” strikes. A “signature strike” is a strike that targets people suspected of being militants even when the exact identity of the target is unknown. The assessment is based on “behavioral characteristics” that could be classified as typical of militants. A “double tap” is where an initial drone strike is launched and followed by a second strike that targets those who come to aid and rescue the initial victims.

A signature strike is a clear violation of the international legal principle of distinction, namely that combatants and civilians are to be stringently distinguished to reduce the risk of civilian harm. If the identity of the individual is not known but an assessment is based solely on their behavior, almost any civilian could be killed as a result. A “double tap” would be illegal for the same reason; if the identities of those killed initially are unknown, those who jump to their rescue would also be unknown and could very well be civilians — or even aid workers.

So there we have it. The Trump administration appears to be continuing a highly controversial mode of warfare in Yemen — the poorest nation in the Arab world — at the same time the country faces a humanitarian crisis due to a brutal U.S.-backed, Saudi-led assault.

---

This article (Upholding Tradition: Suspected Drone Strikes Continue as Trump Takes Office) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Darius Shahtahmasebi and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.