A US drone attack targeting a militant compound killed at least 10 people in a Pakistani tribal district along the Afghan border early Saturday, security officials said.

The Pakistani officials said two missiles hit and destroyed the compound in Shawal area, some 70 kilometers west of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan.

Waziristan is the most notorious militant stronghold in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous northwestern tribal belt.

“The death toll in the US drone strike has risen to 10. The drone fired two missiles at the compound,” a security official in the northwestern city of Peshawar told AFP. Officials had earlier put the death toll at six.

Saturday’s attack was the second strike since Pakistan’s parliament in March approved new guidelines on relations with the United States, which included demanding an end to drone attacks on Pakistani territory.

A call that falls on deaf ears:

The Obama administration has spent a great deal of time on outreach to Muslims worldwide, and on dialing down the volume and rhetoric of the prior administration in order to defuse al-Qaeda’s narrative of a clash of civilizations between Muslims and non-Muslims. So you have to wonder why in the world the president’s speech writers would think it was a good idea to throw a joke about predator drones into the president’s speech during the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, given that an estimated one-third of drone casualties, or between 289 and 378, have been civilians. It evinces a callous disregard for human life that is really inappropriate for a world leader, especially a president who is waging war against an enemy that deliberately targets civilians. It also helps undermine that outreach by making it look insincere. It’s already hard enough to convince Muslims that the U.S. isn’t indifferent to civilian casualties without having the president joke about it.

But the real game-changer embedded in the law is the opening of U.S. airspace to unmanned drones. Although Predator drones already patrol our border with Mexico, and some police forces have obtained smaller drones of their own, the legal ability of federal agencies to fly unmanned missions over civil space was unclear, unwritten. Now they’ve got a big green light, and “the only barrier to the routine use of drones for persistent surveillance are the procedural requirements imposed by the FAA for the issuance of certificates,” says Amie Stepanovich of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Eerily, the law also makes way for the use of commercial drones: it’s not clear what Google, GE, or General Motors would do with a drone, but it’s hard to imagine something benevolent. The FAA projects that there could be 30,000 drones in American skies by 2020.

Which dystopian novel is it where thousands of surveillance robots constantly monitor us from the stratosphere? The chilling effects this could have on protest, not to mention acts of more militant resistance, should be obvious. And it’s hard to imagine that, in terms of day-to-day policing, this will mean less police violence and fewer arrests. Add the Department of Justice’s secret memoranda giving the president power to declare U.S. citizens enemies of the state and have them assassinated, and the legal framework now exists to make all U.S. citizens Awlakis, which is to say, blown up by missiles fired from an invisible robot by executive fiat. Is there a moment when the transition to police state actually occurs, or if you’re asking that question has it already happened?

(via cultureofresistance)

Killing American citizens with drones is the most extreme action that the Obama Administration takes in secret. President Obama insists that he is empowered to secretly kill anyone whose name appears on a secret list he keeps. The guilt of the people on the list is presumed based on secret evidence assembled by a secret group of government officials who meet in secret. The strikes are subsequently carried out by secret agents in the Central Intelligence Agency. As if that Orwellian spectacle, bereft of checks and balances, weren’t invitation enough to abuses, the government won’t even reveal the legal reasoning that supposedly justifies its suspension of due process, even for American citizens. That too is deemed a secret.

On Wednesday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the status quo. It demands to know how the U.S. government adds names to its kill list; the standards under which Americans may be killed without due process; and the evidence that persuaded the government its protocols had been met in drone killings past. Perhaps most alarming is the possibility that the Obama Administration has killed American citizens and kept mum about it. There’s no evidence that they’ve done so. At the same time, they claim that right, without ever citing legal arguments to justify it.

Continue reading →

(via rockyanderson2012)