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Who's Being Targeted for Assassination by Drone?
Spiegel reports this week that drug dealers and low-level Taliban members were targeted for death by drone:
NATO didn’t just target the Taliban leadership, but also eliminated mid- and lower-level members of the group on a large scale. Some Afghans were only on the list because, as drug dealers, they were allegedly supporting the insurgents.
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The operations were based on the lists maintained by the CIA and NATO — Obama’s lists. The White House dubbed the strategy “escalate and exit.” McChrystal’s successor, General David Petraeus, documented the strategy in “Field Manual 3-24″ on fighting insurgencies, which remains a standard work today. Petraeus outlined three stages in fighting guerilla organizations like the Taliban. The first was a cleansing phase …. Behind closed doors, Petraeus and his staff explained exactly what was meant by “cleansing.” German politicians recall something that Michael T. Flynn, the head of ISAF intelligence in Afghanistan, once said during a briefing: “The only good Talib is a dead Talib.” Under Petraeus, a merciless campaign began to hunt down the so-called shadow governors and local supporters aligned with the Islamists.
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According to the NSA document, in October 2008 the NATO defense ministers made the momentous decision that drug networks would now be “legitimate targets” for ISAF troops. “Narcotics traffickers were added to the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) list for the first time,” the report reads. In the opinion of American commanders like Bantz John Craddock, there was no need to prove that drug money was being funneled to the Taliban to declare farmers, couriers and dealers as legitimate targets of NATO strikes. In early 2009, Craddock, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe at the time, issued an order to expand the targeted killings of Taliban officials to drug producers.
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The documents, [attorney Jennifer Gibson] notes, also show that the “war on terror” was virtually conflated with the “war on drugs.”
We’ve previously noted that even the architect of America’s drone assassination program says it’s gone too far … creating terrorists rather than eliminating them. And that drone attacks are a war crime (more here and here). And that there is widespread murder of innocent civilians as “collateral damage”. For example, American University Professor Jeff Bachman reports:
Strikes focused on the Kill List “killed on average 28 other people before they actually succeeded in killing their target.”
Indeed, even the process for deciding who to put on the “kill list” is flawed. People are often targeted by the metadata on their phones, a process which a former top NSA official called the drone assassination program “undisciplined slaughter.” And people are targeted for insanely loose reasons. As the New York Times reported in 2012:
Mr. Obama had approved not only “personality” strikes aimed at named, high-value terrorists, but “signature” strikes that targeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by militants.
But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.
And then there are “double taps” … where the family members, friends or neighbors who try to rescue someone hit by a drone missile are themselves targeted for assassination. The bigger picture is that anti-terror laws are being used for all sorts of purposes besides stopping terrorists:
- Mass surveillance is being used to prosecute drugs and other petty crimes
- Military tactics have been deployed against drug dealers and other petty criminals
- Everything outside of the status quo is now considered terrorism
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Hillary Clinton and then-president Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser have both admitted on the record that the U.S. previously carried out regime change in Afghanistan in the 1970s by backing Bin Laden and the Mujahadin … the precursor to Al Qaeda.
If we hadn't regime changed the old guys, the Taliban wouldn't have gotten in.
Same with Iran, Iraq, Libya, etc.
Bad logic George. No one knows what would have happened. That is why arm chair quarterbacking is so easy.
While I agree with you that the US shouldn't be complicit in such situations, you can't say the situation would be better or worse. No one knows the future. We only know the present and live with the past.
Incorrect. It's not armchair quarterbacking. It's unveiling the truth, which is the most noble and important enterprise one can pursue. These are all steps on the path to totalitarianism taken by the CIA/NSA/MIC/wall street criminals, and has been going on since the end ot WWII. The coup of 1963 only solidified their grip on power, and we are now in the midst of the endgame, where these power-mad psychopaths will push the limits with Russia and possbily begin WWIII. Happy New Year!!
The path to totalitarianism is being made by the head choppers of ISIS.
Geo Wash has an affinity for the group of goat screwers.
Yes George, and the plan was to provoke the soviet invasion of the Graveyard of Empires.
Only to follow the same misstep thru' imperal hubris.
Prolly not bloggers and commenters who criticise the drone assasinations.
ROFL "Drug Money" tag
Keep 'em steady BS.
Happy New Year.
Drone slaughter
not just any drug dealers, competition ! The targets are other tribes, independents, true believers, the not employed.
You best be careful. Do you own a nailgun or a Mercedes?
"Who's Being Targeted for Assassination by Drone?"
People.
Than banksters need to repay us.
KCriscorino,
Keep them true dog.
Happy New Year.
We can always depend on you George, for a happy puppies and glitter article. Happy New Year; you paranoid maniac.
SAT at least 825
Happy New Year
Happy new year, SAT! Even though you always defend TPTB, I wish you and yours a joyous new year filled with happiness, family friends and prosperity.
The thing about technological innovation ... you can copy it and where there is a will there is a way to "produce your own drones".
Once accomplished those same weapons "because everybody now knows it is possible" get targeted in the opposite direction.
If anything all the US has done through indiscriminate use of drones is place in the mind the need, will and soon the way for all those targeted to retaliate in kind.
http://privat.bahnhof.se/wb907234/killuav.htm
I would love to build this...
All war is retaliation in kind, regardless of technological innovation.
If you lose, you are a terrorist. If you win, you are the freedom fighter
I agree except that as the UN doctrine defines, all forms of aggression are criminal, and not all forms of agression constitute the dimensions UN defines as "war". Full Spectrum War includes espionage, subversion, treason, theft, deception, seduction, fraud, propaganda, use of all drugs that impact cognitive function, including non-chemical forms of delusion and control, systematic abuse of children for political objectives - conditioning and blackmailing Some of their abusers and manipuilating the rest, all false advertising and mental conditioning and all efforts to remediate these positions to maintain them where they are the status quo = Everywhere. War includes denying populations basic priviliges, including potable water, access to arable land, reproduction rights (for this alone this definition of full spectrum warfare defines David Rockefeller as a war criminal against the United States and not the only, and not limited to US), and a voice in affairs that concern their fates. Its a terrible shame that the UN is the direct opposite of what its charters claims, making anyone with an IQ > 60 wholly cognicent of this fact, and Ted Turner an all time top ten criminal against humanity, instead of the coat-tail riding good guy he spent his money to be.
The western word for Karma is Ignorance, Ted. I hope you have gotten that out of your system.
The western word for Dharma is Experience. Stew in your Karma forever, Jerry Brown.
I do truly hope this short life is a classroom for a spectrum of a greater intelligence discovering itself. But as the number of cannibals has exceded any possible redemption of this model, either we - collectively, as in the expression of self aware organisms in a dead universe on this orb - are terminal in the Universal Mind, are a dead end, or this idea is tapped and we are all just mutant chimps.
You too, Il.
Thanks for trying. Play again.
Until the sun dies.