the Disposition Matrix

July 11, 2014

Just a few weeks ago, during a commencement address to West Point's graduating cadets, President Obama spoke to the importance of greater transparency “about both the basis of our counter-terrorism actions and the manner in which they are carried out.”

President Obama also made similar comments about drone transparency last year, but the Obama administration hasn't yet matched the president's words with action by publicly disclosing meaningful information about its targeted operations and its use of drone strikes.

Sign the petition: Demand transparency on U.S. drone strike targets.

The U.S. secret drone war is damaging our reputation abroad and arguably inspiring new terrorists instead of thwarting them. Human rights and civil rights groups have uncovered evidence of hundreds of civilian deaths unreported by the U.S. government in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.^1,2 Our government must be transparent about whom it is targeting with drones, and why, in order to shed light on whether or not the U.S. government is violating international law.

Even CIA Director John Brennan has said, the United States “need[s] to acknowledge publicly” any mistaken killings and should “make public the overall numbers of civilian deaths resulting from U.S. strikes targeting al-Qa’ida.”

With the Obama administration currently considering the use of drone strikes in Iraq, which would undoubtedly lead to civilian casualties, now is the perfect time to demand transparency on the civilians killed by previous U.S. drone strikes abroad.

The public has an inalienable right to know whom their government is targeting and at what collateral cost. Now is the time to have a national conversation about the U.S. drone strike program and to demand far greater transparency from the Obama administration.

Will you join me and add your name to my petition urging President Obama to be far more transparent about the United States' drone strike program?

Thank you for your support.

Rick Rosenthal, CREDO Activist

Add your name:

Learn more about this campaign

1. "Everything We Know So Far About Drone Strikes," ProPublica, February 5, 2013
2. "The Toll Of 5 Years Of Drone Strikes: 2,400 Dead," Huffington Post, January 23, 2014

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David Rohde Oct 27 2013, 9:55 AM ET

(The Atlantic) -Two new reports issued this week by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch detailed dozens of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. Classified documents obtained by the Washington Post suggest that CIA officials who carry out the strikes make little effort to track civilian deaths.
“There is a lot more pressure building” on President Barack Obama, Sarah Holewinski, head of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, a group pushing for greater transparency in drone strikes, told me this week. “He’s going to have to look at these legal questions.”

Drones

CIA drone strikes

3 November 2013 Last updated at 00:07 GMT

The US has responded to accusations from Pakistan that a drone strike that killed Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud had destroyed the country's nascent peace process.

A state department official said talks with the Taliban were an internal matter for Pakistan.

The statement insisted Pakistan and the US had a "shared strategic interest in ending extremist violence".

It also said it could still not confirm that Mehsud had been killed on Friday.

Pakistan has summoned the US ambassador to protest over Friday's drone strike that killed Mehsud.

U.S. Drone Program

Edited time: October 29, 2013 20:58

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The victims of a drone strike alleged to be launched last year by the United States spoke to members of Congress on Tuesday and urged the US government to stop killing civilians with weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles.

Rafiq ur Rehman, a primary school teacher from North Waziristan, Pakistan, spoke through an interpreter on Capitol Hill on Tuesday along with his two children, ages nine and 13.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Florida) invited Rehman to speak in Washington about the strike last October that killed Momina Bibi, his 67-year-old mother who was recognized around the region as a midwife, not a militant. Regardless, a weaponized drone purported to be under the control of the US Central Intelligence Agency executed Bibi in front of her grandchildren on Oct. 24, 2012. The US has not formally acknowledged the attack, nor taken responsibility.

"Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day,” Rehman said during the Tuesday morning panel. "All media reported three, four, five militants were killed. But only one person was killed that day. A mom, grandma, a midwife.”

“The string that holds the pearls together. That is what my mother was,” Rahman said. “Since her death, the string has been broken and life has not been the same. We feel alone and we feel lost.”

Barry O’Bomber

Posted by Lesley Clark on October 11, 2013

"I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees," she said in the statement. "I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact."

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakastani girl who was shot in the head on her school bus by Taliban gunmen for criticizing their rule, including banning education for girls.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/11/205176/obama-and-first-lady-meet-with.html

war in Afghanistan

KABUL | Sun Oct 13, 2013 6:38am EDT

(Reuters) - An Afghan man wearing an Afghan army uniform shot at U.S. soldiers in eastern Afghanistan, killing at least one serviceman on Sunday, local officials and the NATO-led coalition said.

“casualty averse” public opinion

Using more mercenaries, unmanned vehicles and elite forces could make the British public more willing to support future wars, given such losses do not rile the press as do deaths of regular soldiers, a strategic unit of the Ministry of Defence suggests. In an internal discussion paper on how to sway “casualty averse” public opinion, the MoD development, concepts and doctrine centre (DCDC) also recommends lessening the public profile of repatriation ceremonies for war casualties.

The document, written in November 2012 and obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act, regards how public opinion of wartime casualties can be manipulated. It also recommends the Ministry of Defence (MoD) have “a clear and constant information campaign in order to influence the major areas of press and public opinion.”

RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft in Iran

Iranian TV has shown the first video footage of an advanced US drone aircraft that Tehran says it downed 140 miles (225km) from the Afghan border.

Images show Iranian military officials inspecting the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which appears to be undamaged.

US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned.

However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the intact condition of the Sentinel tends to support their claim.

Iran's Press TV said that the Iranian army's "electronic warfare unit" brought down the drone on 4 December as it was flying over the city of Kashmar.

Brig General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards' aerospace unit, told Iranian media that the drone "fell into the trap" of the unit "who then managed to land it with minimum damage".

He said Iran was "well aware of what priceless technological information" could be gleaned from the aircraft.

Nato said at the weekend that an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week when its operators lost control of it.

Pentagon officials have said they are concerned about Iran possibly acquiring information about the technology.

Iranian media said on Thursday that the foreign ministry had summoned the Swiss envoy to express its "strongest protest over the invasion of a US spy drone deep into its airspace".

Washington has no diplomatic relations with Iran and US affairs in the country are dealt with via the Swiss embassy in Tehran.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian media reported on Sunday that their country's military had shot down a U.S. reconnaissance drone in eastern Iran, but a U.S. official said there was no indication the aircraft had been shot down.

NATO's U.S.-led mission in neighbouring Afghanistan said the Iranian report could refer to an unarmed U.S. spy drone that went missing there last week.

The incident comes at a time when Tehran is trying to contain foreign outrage at the storming of the British embassy on Tuesday, after London announced sanctions on Iran's central bank in connection with Iran's nuclear enrichment programme.

Iran has announced several times in the past that it shot down U.S., Israeli or British drones, in incidents that did not provoke high-profile responses.

"Iran's military has downed an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran," Iran's Arabic-language Al Alam state television network quoted a military source as saying.

"The spy drone, which has been downed with little damage, was seized by the Iranian armed forces," the source said. "The Iranian military's response to the American spy drone's violation of our airspace will not be limited to Iran's borders."

Iranian officials were not available to comment further.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan said in a statement: "The UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) to which the Iranians are referring may be a U.S. unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week.

"The operators of the UAV lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status."

A U.S. official, who asked not to be named, said: "There is absolutely no indication up to this point that Iranians shot down this drone."

In January Iran said it shot down two unmanned Western reconnaissance drones in the Gulf. In July Iran said it had shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane over the holy city of Qom, near its Fordu nuclear site.



(Additional reporting by Ramin Mostafavi in Tehran, Caren Bohan and David Alexander in Washington and Missy Ryan in Bonn; Writing by Parisa Hafezi; Editing by Peter Graff)

Global Disappointment in Obama

Juan Cole

The [pdf] Pew Charitable Trust Global Attitudes Survey finds that most publics abroad have experienced substantial disappointment in Barack Obama. Indeed, Middle Eastern Muslims are hoping Obama will be defeated next November. But, the rest of the world isn’t experiencing buyers’ remorse about Obama for the same reasons as the American public. Not even.

Global disappointment with Obama focuses on three areas, according to the poll, with the Middle East respondents more disappointed than the Europeans.

They had expected him to seek the cooperation of others rather than launching unilateral policies.
They had expected him to do something about the declining situation of the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he did not.

They had expected him to address the problem of climate change, and from their point of view, he did not.
Aside from not meeting their expectations, he also disappointed them with a new policy, that of throwing drones down on other countries without so much as a by-your-leave.

That these genuinely important issues are the basis of global disappointment with Obama shows how divorced from reality the great American Bubble Island has become, where the bubble-headed spew complete nonsense on the airwaves on certain channels 24/7.

Most Americans don’t believe in man-made climate change! Some will allow as how it seems a mite warmer around here, but they cain’t be sure as to the whys and wherefores of it, apparently not having passed 8th grade chemistry. (The Tea Party, which doesn’t believe in climate change at all, effectively controls the House of Representatives).

Americans think the Palestinians (most of them having been made refugees or stateless or both by the Israelis) should be screwed over even more than they have been, so that Jay-sus will descend sooner from the sky in his Aryan glory.

They think ‘multilateral’ sounds suspiciously French. Bein’ French ain’t exactly a compliment in these parts, what with them havin’ turned socialist ‘n all.

And, unilaterally landing an American drone on an unidentified group of suspicious-looking brown people in another country with a funny name is just about the greatest thing in their eyes since the invention of the traveling gun show.

American disappointment with Obama took the form of the Tea Party, which was formed to make sure that white people don’t have to pay anything toward medical care for minorities, even if that means white people themselves have to go without medical care. That’ll show them.

You see the difference?

The US is peculiar in its attitudes toward reality because it is one big Company Town, where the corporations actually buy and sell politicians, where a handful of them control the major media, and where basic freedoms such as public assembly for protest and petitioning (especially against corporations like those on Wall Street) have de facto been abrogated by aggressive and militarized police tactics. It has a bizarre inheritance in racial attitudes that make the public easily divided and ruled. In short, the US is peculiarly corrupt and peculiarly authoritarian among industrialized democracies, making it possible to pull the wool over a lot of peoples’ eyes. One thing wrong with the famous Lincoln quote is that it is possible and sufficient for the plutocracy to fool most of the people most of the time.

The Pakistani government has demanded the U.S. vacate an air base

ISLAMABAD (AP) — The Pakistani government has demanded the U.S. vacate an air base within 15 days that the CIA is suspected of using for unmanned drones.

The government issued the demand Saturday after NATO helicopters and jet fighters allegedly attacked two Pakistan army posts along the Afghan border, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Islamabad outlined the demand in a statement it sent to reporters following an emergency defense committee meeting chaired by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

Shamsi Air Base is located in southwestern Baluchistan province. The U.S. is suspected of using the facility in the past to launch armed drones and observation aircraft to keep pressure on Taliban and al-Qaida militants in Pakistan's tribal region.