Disappearing.

The Met Police has announced that it’s rolling out facial recognition cameras across the UK capital in the hopes of tackling ‘serious crime’ Mirror Jan. 24, 2020.

     There is no doubt that we live in the surveillance society, and the means of that surveillance is ever growing with the advances in technology, from face recognition technology to sophisticate drones, you are being watched. Greater detail of you and your movements are being gathered, whether you are aimlessly wandering around your city, on a peaceful protest, picnic or picket, it is all being logged and a profile of you is being built. Perhaps these details will find there way to some advertising agency, but most likely, onto some state register for further use.

     Obviously we would rather not be followed, logged and profiled, without our permission, by some corporate or state body. So disappearing from their myriad of prying eyes is a very desirable aim. So with the increase in drones what steps can we take?

You are being watched over from on-high!

    The following article is from The Conversation:

Law enforcement drone over demonstrators June, 5, 2020, Atlanta.

           Drones of all sizes are being used by environmental advocates to monitor deforestation, by conservationists to track poachers, and by journalists and activists to document large protests. As a political sociologist who studies social movements and drones, I document a wide range of nonviolent and pro-social drone uses in my new book, “The Good Drone.” I show that these efforts have the potential to democratize surveillance. But when the Department of Homeland Security redirects large, fixed-wing drones from the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor protests, and when towns experiment with using drones to test people for fevers, it’s time to think about how many eyes are in the sky and how to avoid unwanted aerial surveillance. One way that’s within reach of nearly everyone is learning how to simply disappear from view.
        Over the past decade there’s been an explosion in the public’s use of drones – everyday people with everyday tech doing interesting things. As drones enter already-crowded airspace, the Federal Aviation Administration is struggling to respond. The near future is likely to see even more of these devices in the sky, flown by an ever-growing cast of social, political and economic actors. Public opinion about the use and spread of drones is still up in the air, but burgeoning drone use has sparked numerous efforts to curtail drones. These responses range from public policies exerting community control over local airspace, to the development of sophisticated jamming equipment and tactics for knocking drones out of the sky. From startups to major defense contractors, there is a scramble to deny airspace to drones, to hijack drones digitally, to control drones physically and to shoot drones down. Anti-drone measures range from simple blunt force, 10-gauge shotguns, to the poetic: well-trained hawks. Many of these anti-drone measures are expensive and complicated. Some are illegal. The most affordable – and legal – way to avoid drone technology is hiding.
How to disappear
      The first thing you can do to hide from a drone is to take advantage of the natural and built environment. It’s possible to wait for bad weather, since smaller devices like those used by local police have a hard time flying in high winds, dense fogs and heavy rains. Trees, walls, alcoves and tunnels are more reliable than the weather, and they offer shelter from the high-flying drones used by the Department of Homeland Security.
      The second thing you can do is minimize your digital footprints. It’s smart to avoid using wireless devices like mobile phones or GPS systems, since they have digital signatures that can reveal your location. This is useful for evading drones, but is also important for avoiding other privacy-invading technologies.
     The third thing you can do is confuse a drone. Placing mirrors on the ground, standing over broken glass, and wearing elaborate headgear, machine-readable blankets or sensor-jamming jackets can break up and distort the image a drone sees. Mannequins and other forms of mimicry can confuse both on-board sensors and the analysts charged with monitoring the drone’s video and sensor feeds. Drones equipped with infrared sensors will see right through the mannequin trick, but are confused by tactics that mask the body’s temperature. For example, a space blanket will mask significant amounts of the body’s heat, as will simply hiding in an area that matches the body’s temperature, like a building or sidewalk exhaust vent.
       The fourth, and most practical, thing you can do to protect yourself from drone surveillance is to get a disguise. The growth of mass surveillance has led to an explosion in creative experiments meant to mask one’s identity. But some of the smartest ideas are decidedly old-school and low-tech. Clothing is the first choice, because hats, glasses, masks and scarves go a long way toward scrambling drone-based facial-recognition software. Your gait is as unique as your fingerprint. As gait-recognition software evolves, it will be important to also mask the key pivot points used in identifying the walker. It may be that the best response is affecting a limp, using a minor leg brace or wearing extremely loose clothing. Artists and scientists have taken these approaches a step further, developing a hoodie wrap that’s intended to shield the owner’s heat signature and to scramble facial recognition software, and glasses intended to foil facial recognition systems.
      These innovations are alluring, but umbrellas may prove to be the most ubiquitous and robust tactic in this list. They’re affordable, easy to carry, hard to see around and can be disposed of in a hurry. Plus you can build a high-tech one, if you want.

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New World.

          Obviously this pandemic has changed a lot of things, so as anarchists, we must change the way we think and act. This is new territory and will require new tactics and strategies, now is the time to debate them and try to form them into practice.

       The following article for debate is perhaps rather long, but an important subject can rarely but put into a few words, it's from Act for Freedom Now:

Porto, Portugal: Some thoughts on Covid and anarchists

PDF : Some thoughts on Covid and anarchists
        This text is born from the need to communicate and debate amongst comrades. It is born from the need to fight physical distance and the lack of face-to-face debate and it seeks to put onto paper some topics for discussion and analysis without any pretension of absolute truth. Most of all it’s a summary of certain discussions that happened within different groups and that, to us, seem important to share with a wider group of comrades.
        The process unleashed by the burst of corona virus has left the world, particularly the northern hemisphere, literally connected to machines; connected to machines at hospitals, connected to machines at home. Even Capital itself found its way of reproduction and sustenance through the machines.
       This text is an attempt to open a discussion starting from a concise and eventually mechanistic analysis on how the redefinition of life has been generated, how it is being politically managed through the introduction of a disturbing agent in the social body, and what the eventual consequences are, in daily life (many of which are already perceptible).
        We are interested in discussing how the declaration of a pandemic allowed for a set of freedom restraining processes and individual conditioning to be put into practice and what instruments have aided such a political program to be so efficient.
       We think that it’s in the passing, from the biological moment (the bursting of a virus), to the political answer given to it, that a whole architecture of fear is built. If in the past this construction was based on an external enemy, that in a way, was perceived as tangible (ie. “the terrorist”), nowadays it is based on an invisible and unpredictable enemy, that due to its biological characteristics, permits management based on physical imprisonment.
      Without wanting to debate the existence of the virus here, or its higher or lower levels of danger (we are not scientists and we don’t think that is the main issue anyway), it seems to us to be of extreme importance to discuss the political effects that arise from the response of the State and society, their immediate consequences in day-to-day life, and the changes that these will provoke in the way life is perceived and on the way social space is inhabited in the future.
      Since the very beginning of the so-called covid-19 crisis, one could witness the use of war-like speeches by the authorities, in the manner of a war that is created by the simple fact that is declared by alarmist speeches. This bellicosity of the speech seems to serve several, more or less obvious, functions besides the creation of fear in society. First of all this speech justifies the adoption of extraordinary measures that, in a so-called normal situation, would hardly be accepted. All the practice of confinement and restriction of life is justified by that exceptional moment of being at war with the virus.
       On the other hand, the perception of being at war leads society to congregate around the State and consequently around governments as the only pillars that can guarantee life on earth and protect the individual. It seems to us that this fact exists even when National Health Services collapse as was the case in Italy or Spain. Besides the catastrophic management of the situation, the State keeps on being the only cardinal point which society turns to.
        At last, the socialization of the warlike speech collectivized in the sentence “WE ARE at war against the virus”, also allows the perception of the one who revolts against the state of exception (lockdown) to be transformed and seen not as enemy of the State (by breaking its laws) but as an enemy of society and as a potential infectious agent. It is at this point that one can see the creation of a new internal enemy, not anymore as an enemy of the State but as an enemy of society and potentially of Life itself.
      Regarding the quarantine measures and the so-called “moral obligation of staying at home”, it seems to us that such procedures are only possible due to all the technological apparatus that surrounds us. The Internet and all the electronic gadgets make staying at home more bearable due to their ludic function and by allowing the individual to keep in contact with their loved ones and therefore to forget, to a certain point, their own isolation. These gadgets have also particularly been used to increase a collective feeling of panic. After going through the traditional media, it is through the social media networks and the Internet in general that a politics of fear manages to be implemented. All the “Stay at Home” speeches and the sentiments of policing one another, find in these apparatuses the perfect means for propagation, permitting a discourse created by official institutions to be felt as if they were something started by the general population and strongly defended by the ones “impacted” by such discourse.
      The quarantine and the so called State of Emergency provoke two kinds of movement: on the one hand, that of atomization through the reduction of the individual’s life to their more restricted space (home) and, on the other hand, that of a mass socialization of panic through the State’s war speech and through the amplifying of fear through the mass and social medias. It seems to us that it is in these two movements that the political project of fear put into circulation by authority is really played. When real life is based on the confinement of the individual and, simultaneously, social experience is managed by and lived through technological gadgets, this leads to a schizophrenic and paranoid existence.
      We think that it is in this duality that life will be based upon in the foreseeable future, even after the hypothetical end of the restrictive measures that are imposed on us now; the transformation of public space as a focus point of disease and, the atomization of daily life, no longer based on the classic capitalist atomism but in a new way of perceiving others, and space, as potential dangers to the individual’s life.
      We are not very interested in discussing here the technological hyper-surveillance that will follow the end of the covid-19 crisis because it seems to us that such surveillance and the means to put it into practice are already here. We also think that those discussions have been based more on a dystopic pessimism than on a will to analyse the causes and the mechanisms that are “injected” into the social body and that make individuals demand such vigilance or at least make them complacent with it. Surveillance and control have been around for a very long time and it was not the virus that created them. It is clear that there’ll be an increase of life’s robotization and an expansion of surveillance mechanisms, but it seems to us that these phenomenons would happen with or without a pandemic crisis and at most, crisis can only accelerate them.
       What we would like to discuss is the way anarchists perceived the crisis and the possibilities of action inside the social standstill that we were forced to live. Obviously panic and fear also hit us in one way or another, to some more than others, and maybe it was inevitable to be that way. As much as we would like it to be otherwise, anarchists are not a category apart from society and untouched by what happens outside our circles. It’s exceptional moments like the one we are now living in that better highlight our flaws as a movement and the lack of tools that we have in order to fight against what is imposed upon us. Proof of this is that, more or less everywhere, the majority of responses given by the different anarchist groups were nothing more that charitable actions. This critique is as valid for the groups that created structures of collection and distribution of food whose result is nothing more than the substitution of the charitable role of the State, as well as for all the other groups, in which we include ourselves, that due to inoperability didn’t manage to sketch or even debate strategies of action to confront the confinement. The incapacity to fight against a discourse that became the dominant discourse and to put out another version of things, another vision of the process, revealed once again our lack of coordination and how the absence of continuous debate and practice amongst comrades can become flaws that cost us a lot in moments like these.
       Lets take this exceptional situation as an opportunity to re-think our practices so far and to allow us to find more efficient ways of communication and political action in a way that, when the bill of the months of confinement starts to be charged, anarchists can intervene to demonstrate different paths and practices. Keeping our spaces going will be of extreme importance in the near future as well as the creation of production and consumption networks that move towards independence from the usual circuits of consumption and collective production and action that might spark revolt by creating political structures that would allow an attack to a new world that is already here; these are all proposals that, according to us, should start to be collectively worked on and this text is a call for that start.
       Because in a pandemic world, the only possible virus is Revolt. Some Anarchists from OPorto

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Obama, No Prince Of Peace, No Pope Of Hope.

       It is fascinating, but sad, how our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media shapes perceptions, how by selective reporting and exaggeration, and selective ignoring, they can create an alternative vision to the reality we live under. Now as Trump moves into the White House and Obama moves through the exit, there is a wave of sadness at losing a liberal rational president of peace. However, President Obama was no white dove, no prince of peace, his legacy is one of escalating state assassinations across the globe. Mr Obama was a president who was at war longer than any other American president in history. He authorised approximately ten times more drone strikes than George W. Bush.

       The independent, nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts the total number of people killed at roughly the same number, 2,753, but its estimate of how many of them were civilians six times higher than the Obama administration’s estimate. Even more chilling from a constitutional perspective is that the Obama administration has — with little to no complaint from the American people or the other two branches of government — deliberately targeted and killed US citizens in drone strikes, without those individuals ever having been given their constitutional right to due process of law.

        Obama played the populist card when he withdrew vast number of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, but fanned out the area in which he used the more surreptitious air-strikes. He took is silent assassinating drone strikes and expanded them outside the “war zone”, of Iraq and Afghanistan, to countries America had no war with, such as Pakistan and Yemen. Recent figures show that Obama had dramatically upped the number of bombings for the year 2016 to more than a staggering 26,000. Of course we are told by that babbling brook of bullshit, that these were all in the name of peace, and for the well-being of the people of those countries. It is estimated that the “coalition” who are involved in the Middle East have during 2016, drop almost 31,000 bombs, all in the name of peace and the well-being of the people, of course, of which the Obama contingent were responsible for 79%. The number of bombs is likely to be an under estimate as a strike can be multiple bombs. Apart from the horror, bloodshed, death and destruction from such numbers, look at each bomb as costing approximately, around £500,000, add that up, and think how else could that money have been spent bring peace, and helping the well-being of the people. 

       It is reported that “Incoming US President Donald Trump has said he will wage war on Isis, vowing to "bomb the s*** out of 'em". My heart goes out to those poor unfortunate people who happen to inhabit that area where ISIS is active. You can imagine what such a remark would do for the arms industry, yes, you are right, their shares have rocketed. In this society war is a very lucrative business, it is touted as creating jobs, but more important, creating even more wealth for the obscenely wealthy. So Obama will be applauded by the establishment for doing a great job.

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War Is The Crime.

     Yesterday, August 6th. marked the 69th anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, killing at least 80,000 people instantly, with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, dying of various forms of radiation illnesses the following years, 90% of the city was obliterated. A few days later, August 9th. the US dropped a second bomb, a plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki, instantly killing more than 40,000, and again leaving a legacy of radiation diseases for generations. We should add that the estimates of the immediate deaths vary as it is impossible to state accurately, these figures are at the bottom end of the estimates. 

        Targeting civilians is recognised internationally as a war crime, can anyone claim that obliteration an entire city in one fell swoop, is not targeting civilians? After WW2 we hung quite a few for war crimes, unsurprisingly, they were all on the other side.

      The victors write the history, and our history always tells us that what ever we do in war is honourable, and what ever our enemies do is barbaric. The fact that Nagasaki was a mainly civilian city, and ironically, a city with the highest Christian population in Japan, doesn't change that. Just like Israel today, we claimed that we were justified, no matter the cost, it was the honourable road to go.

      The entire history of capitalism, is one of deadly conflicts, with civilian casualties, seen merely as collateral damage. More and more it is the civilian population that suffers in war. Gone are the days when two vast armies faced each other across some waste land, and slaughtered each other until one could claim victory. In modern warfare the casualty rate is normally higher among the civilian population than in the military. Remember "Shock and Awe" visited on the Iraqi people, drones in Pakistan, and Somalia, and now Gaza. 

       This being the case, and targeting civilians being a war crime then it should follow that war itself, by its modern nature is one large war crime, and any state that enters into war is automatically guilty of a war crime.

Photo from Dresden after the Allies bombed the city, creating a fire storm, 1945.

         Wars are states way of cementing their power and wealth, what happens to the people is of little concern, and it will remain so, until we take control of our own lives. Until we decide that we the people should shape the world we want to live in, and base our societies on communities grounded in the fundamentals of mutual aid, co-operation, and seeing to the needs of all our people, we will be at the mercy of the power hungry, war mongering, profit seeking, greed driven capitalist system.  

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The State's Soldierless War.

       War is the state's method of defending and expanding its corporate empire, but becomes increasingly difficult to sustain as public opinion starts to rebel against the continuing line of young dead and injured returning for foreign lands. Enter the drone, the ideal state weapon, war with no casualties to the perpetrator. You can carry out your carnage from a comfortable office, the young people involved can lead a normal office life. No need to get dirty, no need to be fit, no need to risk your life as you kill the others. There is something sinister and immoral about young people sitting in an office, looking at a monitor and unleashing death and devastation on unsuspecting people in another country.

       Over the last ten years or so the use of armed drones has seen an very dramatic increase and an ever increasing spread across more countries, the most recent count is that ten countries in the world have been hit by drone strikes. For a while it was Afghanistan and Pakistan that received the majority of these strikes, but in recent years they have spread to Africa. Yemen being the country that now receives daily strikes, that not only kill, but create terror among the local population of innocent people including children and elderly.

        The state will not give up on war, though we have not declared war since the end of the second world war, we have never been at peace. The US and the UK have been involved in combat in different countries across the globe almost unceasingly. Now with the advent of the drone, that job is becoming easier for the state. We make drone strikes in foreign countries, killing and maiming its citizens, without any declaration of war, we often refer to these countries as friendly nations.

       Countries with drones are on the increase, this is the shape of war to come, no declaration, no troops on the ground, no dead or injured coming home, just death and carnage in a far away place, that we don't know too much about. We are supposed to get on with watching tele and shopping, while the various states squabble as they carve up the the world's resources by means of death and destruction. We can surely do better than this.
This from Watchdog.net:

      Over half of Yemen's 24.8 million citizens hear it every day — the sound of a robot plane bringing death from the sky.
      Drone strikes don't require troops on the ground. They happen off-screen, and out of Americans' minds. But for the people of Yemen, the constant terror of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of playing or working near a suspect of some unspecified crime, is what's breeding terrorists in an area crippled by fear.
     Enough of children's scarred skeletons, of cars reduced to melted metal, of the massacre of a foreign people without reason or mercy.
      Please, join us in demanding President Obama stop murder by drone, and stop breeding a new culture of hate, terror and trauma!
PETITION TO PRESIDENT OBAMA: Drone strikes in Yemen do nothing to stop Al Qaeda and everything to terrify civilians, kill innocents and traumatize generations. Stop this brutal practice now.

Click here to sign -- it just takes a second.
Thanks,
-- The folks at Watchdog.net

P.S. If the other links aren't working for you, please go here to sign: http://act.watchdog.net/petitions/4528?n=66047434.-3y5PV

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The Carnage Of The Drone.

       I first came across this article in that strange world of Facebook and felt that it had to have as much publicity as possible. I have posted several pieces on "drones" and how they are becoming the weapon of choice, and how politicians and that babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, tell us how clinical and accurate they are, but we are never given any details of the carnage they cause. This extract is from an article in The Guardian, by one who has seen it all, and lays it bare.

An Elbit Systems Hermes 450 drone. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

      Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them some questions. I'd start with: "How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?" And: "How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?" Or even more pointedly: "How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicle] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?"
     Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.

Read the full article HERE: 

       Politicians make the decisions on war, politicians never experience war first hand. Politicians are responsible for the carnage of war but never pull the trigger. They view the wars dressed in fine suits and discuss it over a glass of fine wine, justifying their own stupidity and greed. They are among the small group that gain from the carnage of war, we the people never gain, but we pay the price.

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She Never Saw It Coming.

     It's true, she never saw it coming. The soldierless war kills civilians, but it's far away, so we don't have to bother too much about that. Uniformed office workers doing the killing is the new war, killers with clean hands, who needs boots on the ground when you have drones?

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A Soldierless War Is Still Brutal.

    The American state is determined to push the soldierless war as its tactic of choice in its attempt to hold on to its position as the world's bully. No American casualties, no traumatised American soldiers to create problems at home, no horror stories from the battlefront. As far as the American people are concerned it is an invisible and painless war. However to those at the receiving end, it is a brutal and terrifying endless ordeal of death and destruction. Old, young, men, women and children killed and maimed. Children psychologically damaged for the rest of their lives after witnessing the brutal deaths of their family. This is the truth of the soldierless war with its "clinical strikes". A new phase of state killing, all done by office workers, sitting with their cup of coffee on their desk, pressing a button and ending the life of a family, or maiming them making them incapable of supporting themselves or their family. No matter how they try to sanitise it, it is a brutal, vicious war, it is terrorism inflicted on a community and  where the victims in most cases are innocent people trying to survive in an extremely harsh environment. Only the state has the facilities to continuously wage such a cold-blooded and brutal war.

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Robotic Bombing Of Friendly Nations.

     The soldierless war is here and in full swing and the innocent deaths are piling up. I say war but the deaths are inflicted by a country that has not declared war against the country which is suffering the innocent casualties. America, that defender of peace and freedom, is currently sending  drones into Pakistan and Yemen, with very little reporting on the results which include the deaths ever increasing numbers of children.

     This is a list of those children who are known to have been killed by drone attacks, the number of children injured and adults killed and injured would obviously create a much longer list. If these sort of numbers of children being killed was in any Western country there would be an outcry, and rightly so, where is our outrage? All this in countries that are not at war with America. Where is the International Community on this flagrant violation of a country's sovereignty? This list was taken from Drone Watch:

List of children killed by drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen

Compiled from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports
PAKISTAN
Name | Age | Gender
Noor Aziz | 8 | male
Abdul Wasit | 17 | male
Noor Syed | 8 | male
Wajid Noor | 9 | male
Syed Wali Shah | 7 | male
Ayeesha | 3 | female
Qari Alamzeb | 14| male
Shoaib | 8 | male
Hayatullah KhaMohammad | 16 | male
Tariq Aziz | 16 | male
Sanaullah Jan | 17 | male
Maezol Khan | 8 | female
Nasir Khan | male
Naeem Khan | male
Naeemullah | male
Mohammad Tahir | 16 | male
Azizul Wahab | 15 | male
Fazal Wahab | 16 | male
Ziauddin | 16 | male
Mohammad Yunus | 16 | male
Fazal Hakim | 19 | male
Ilyas | 13 | male
Sohail | 7 | male
Asadullah | 9 | male
khalilullah | 9 | male
Noor Mohammad | 8 | male
Khalid | 12 | male
Saifullah | 9 | male
Mashooq Jan | 15 | male
Nawab | 17 | male
Sultanat Khan | 16 | male
Ziaur Rahman | 13 | male
Noor Mohammad | 15 | male
Mohammad Yaas Khan | 16 | male
Qari Alamzeb | 14 | male
Ziaur Rahman | 17 | male
Abdullah | 18 | male
Ikramullah Zada | 17 | male
Inayatur Rehman | 16 | male
Shahbuddin | 15 | male
Yahya Khan | 16 |male
Rahatullah |17 | male
Mohammad Salim | 11 | male
Shahjehan | 15 | male
Gul Sher Khan | 15 | male
Bakht Muneer | 14 | male
Numair | 14 | male
Mashooq Khan | 16 | male
Ihsanullah | 16 | male
Luqman | 12 | male
Jannatullah | 13 | male
Ismail | 12 | male
Taseel Khan | 18 | male
Zaheeruddin | 16 | male
Qari Ishaq | 19 | male
Jamshed Khan | 14 | male
Alam Nabi | 11 | male
Qari Abdul Karim | 19 | male
Rahmatullah | 14 | male
Abdus Samad | 17 | male
Siraj | 16 | male
Saeedullah | 17 | male
Abdul Waris | 16 | male
Darvesh | 13 | male
Ameer Said | 15 | male
Shaukat | 14 | male
Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male
Salman | 12 | male
Fazal Wahab | 18 | male
Baacha Rahman | 13 | male
Wali-ur-Rahman | 17 | male
Iftikhar | 17 | male
Inayatullah | 15 | male
Mashooq Khan | 16 | male
Ihsanullah | 16 | male
Luqman | 12 | male
Jannatullah | 13 | male
Ismail | 12 | male
Abdul Waris | 16 | male
Darvesh | 13 | male
Ameer Said | 15 | male
Shaukat | 14 | male
Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male
Adnan | 16 | male
Najibullah | 13 | male
Naeemullah | 17 | male
Hizbullah | 10 | male
Kitab Gul | 12 | male
Wilayat Khan | 11 | male
Zabihullah | 16 | male
Shehzad Gul | 11 | male
Shabir | 15 | male
Qari Sharifullah | 17 | male
Shafiullah | 16 | male
Nimatullah | 14 | male
Shakirullah | 16 | male
Talha | 8 | male
YEMEN
Afrah Ali Mohammed Nasser | 9 | female
Zayda Ali Mohammed Nasser | 7 | female
Hoda Ali Mohammed Nasser | 5 | female
Sheikha Ali Mohammed Nasser | 4 | female
Ibrahim Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 13 | male
Asmaa Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 9 | male
Salma Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 4 | female
Fatima Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 3 | female
Khadije Ali Mokbel Louqye | 1 | female
Hanaa Ali Mokbel Louqye | 6 | female
Mohammed Ali Mokbel Salem Louqye | 4 | male
Jawass Mokbel Salem Louqye | 15 | female
Maryam Hussein Abdullah Awad | 2 | female
Shafiq Hussein Abdullah Awad | 1 | female
Sheikha Nasser Mahdi Ahmad Bouh | 3 | female
Maha Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 12 | male
Soumaya Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 9 | female
Shafika Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 4 | female
Shafiq Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 2 | male
Mabrook Mouqbal Al Qadari | 13 | male
Daolah Nasser 10 years | 10 | female
AbedalGhani Mohammed Mabkhout | 12 | male
Abdel- Rahman Anwar al Awlaki | 16 | male
Abdel-Rahman al-Awlaki | 17 | male
Nasser Salim | 19

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The Soldierless War Is Here.

       The soldierless war creeps ever closer and closer. We can now strike at the heart of communities from a comfortable office. Young people can sit at what would resemble a games console and mark up their score in hits, oblivious to the terror and carnage that is happening as they watch a screen and push an innocuous button. A family wiped out, a village destroyed and they didn't get off their backsides. Drones, for surveillance, drones for destruction, drones for home and drones for abroad. Control and carnage from an air conditioned office block near you. 

This from Stop The War Coalition, CND, War On Want, Drone Campaign Network:

      Last Saturday saw hundreds march to RAF Waddington against the UK government's use of Drones in Afghanistan, now controlled from the military airbase near Lincoln. The largest demonstration against drones to date brought together Stop the War, War on Want, the Drone Campaign Network and CND and more than 600 members of the public to launch a national campaign against drones.
       The pressure of our campaign has already been felt after the Ministry of Defence was forced to admit just two days before the protest that the Waddington control centre is now in operation. But much of the secrecy about how British drones are being used, and the threat of new interventions, remains.
      A comment in January by the Secretary of State for Defence showed just how easy a new intervention might be when he had turned down a request from France to send drones to Mali because of the "unacceptable impact on our operations in Afghanistan". The question of whether or not British people want a new war in Mali was not even raised.
    The widespread media coverage on drones that Saturday's demonstration has provoked has started an important debate about their use and showed just how important a strong anti-drones campaign will be in the coming months.

Stop the War would like to thank all those who participated in Saturday's successful demo

• Read the report from Common Dreams on the Ground the Drones demo, including TV reports from Sky and the BBC
• David Shariatmadari argues that drones might be changing more minds about war now that killing is conducted from our doorstep

Sign our petition and share with your friends

• Already signed by former archbishop Dr Rowan Williams, Dennis Halliday (former UN Assistant Secretary-General) and almost 4000 others. Please sign our petition to call on the government to abandon the use of drones as a weapon of war.

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Beheading And Other State Murders.

       With so many weird opinions floating around on the internet, I had to convince myself while reading this article on Jadaliyya, on the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, that it was indeed irony.

Even though “[t]he beheading issue has always been a source of tension between Saudi Arabia and the international community,” the international community is not satisfied with this new approach. Having a whole bunch of people stand in front of a man, look directly at him as others are watching, and fire directly at him, is just so passé and, in the final analysis, not just inhumane, but also (please don’t let any children who watch CNN read this next word) graphic. Why can’t the Saudi Government kill in a civilized manner like the U.S. government does, with drones. Let someone else clean up the mess. And you don’t have to face your victims (and their families/neighbors/walkers by) after killing them. The Mideast policy preferences of the two countries almost mirror each other, so why not take them a step further? After all, what can go wrong with killing criminals and terrorists?

Read the full article HERE.

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Those Office Killer Soldiers.

    Drones are hyped as the smart clinical method of dealing with the "really bad guys" of this world, but the truth is that they are weapons of terror. They create terror when ever they are sighted over an area and result in all sort of psychological problems for those who live in or near the area where they are used. This is over and above the sudden and brutal carnage caused by their devastating fire-power. These weapons of terror are used by Britain and the US to kill in other sovereign states without any declaration of war, illegal under international law. There is a feeling of helplessness, fear and hyper anxiety in men women and children when these killers fly overhead, for good reason. These are not surgical weapons, they can wipe-out a small village in one fell swoop and the perpetrators  will call it a success if among the many killed and maimed their appointed target lies dead.

      We are under the illusion that this is a solely America crime, but the UK is up to its armpits in this illegal, soldierless program of terror and assassination. It is no more than we should expect from any state. States will always use whatever means is at their disposal to maintain their power, no matter how fiendish, vile, brutal or how dubious its legality they may be, just as long as they can get away with it covertly or overtly. It is all part and parcel of their game of empire.

 

This from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

    Legal proceedings were begun in London recently against British Foreign Secretary William Hague, over possible British complicity in CIA drone strikes.
     Britain’s GCHQ – its secret monitoring and surveillance agency – is reported to have provided ‘locational evidence’ to US authorities for use in drone strikes, a move which is reportedly illegal in the United Kingdom.

Also this:

    One psychiatrist told researchers that many of his patients experience ‘anticipatory anxiety,’ a constant fear that they might come under attack. The report goes on to note that:

"Interviewees described emotional breakdowns, running indoors or hiding when drones appear above, fainting, nightmares and other intrusive thoughts, hyper startled reactions to loud noises, outbursts of anger or irritability, and loss of appetite and other physical symptoms. Interviewees also reported suffering from insomnia and other sleep disturbances, which medical health professionals in Pakistan stated were prevalent.’---"

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The Advance of the Soldier-less War.

     War is always a brutal nightmare, but the rapid advancement of the "soldier-less war" takes us into the realms of some science fiction horror movie. The idea of states controlling vast swaths of the planet by a bunch of youngsters sitting in a comfortable office near their home, in front of their console, boringly doing their 9-to-5 job, must be the nightmare of nightmares. Brutal death and devastation administered from a swivel-chair in an air conditioned office by people who have no conception of the death and destruction that they are implementing. It separates real bloodshed and death from the reality of those administering the devastation.

This appeal from Stop The War Coalition:

  Ground the Drones - sign the petition

    Stop Britain being a launchpad for killer drones. We call on the government to abandon the use of drones as a weapon of war.

     Signed by: Chris Cole (Drone Campaign Network); Jeremy Corbyn (MP for Islington North); Lindsey German (Convenor, Stop the War Coalition); Kate Hudson (CND); Rafeef Ziahdah (War On Want).

   

• Add your name to the petition
• Join us in Lincoln on the 27th April to protest against drones
  
• Share the event with your Facebook contacts

This spring, the UK will double its number of armed Reaper drones in Afghanistan and will for the first time begin operating drones over Afghanistan from a new facility at RAF Waddington near Lincoln.

    CND, Drone Campaign Network, Stop the War Coalition, War on Want and others will protest against the drones at RAF Waddington, Lincoln on the 27 April.

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Imperialist Office Warriors.

      President Obama's inaugural speech last month was the voice of hypocrisy, The Prince of Peace stated, and stated without a hint of embarrassment, that “A decade of war is now ending,” --”We, the people, still believe that enduring and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.” What that translates into is, “We will not be sending so many of you overseas to kill and maim, you will be able to do this from a comfortable office in Nevada and Saudi Arabia.

     We are now seeing foreign invading troops preparing to leave Afghanistan without having achieved their object, since nobody seems to be able to say what was the object. That doesn't mean the end of the military campaign, the war will continue from computer screens in the form of drones. According to a report from the area of North Waziristan, from 2008 to 1012, there have been around 147 drone strikes, killing 894 people with 211 injured. This year has seen an escalation in the number of drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen.

      The face of imperialist wars is changing, weapon laden armour plated boots will still be called on to do some of the dirty work, but this will be their cleaning up operations. The real slaughter will be done by young smooth faced office workers, sitting at their desks marking up scores on hits, just like any other computer game. Only this time it is for real, real bodies being blown to bits, real children dying, real homes being demolished. No need to be a battle hardened trained killer, you can make you way up the military ladder by having the highest score of hits in the office.

       Just to encourage those 9 to 5 office work killers and make them feel part of the “hero” brigade, they are considering creating a medal for the cyber-killers. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta recently announced that the Pentagon is creating a medal that can be awarded to troops who have a direct impact on combat operations, but do it well away from any combat zone.

     To those on the receiving end of drone warfare, the result is just as bloody, destructive and terrifying as any other type of warfare. There is no such thing as clean humane warfare. Drones of course sanitise it for the perpetrators of that destructive violence. You can kill from 9 to 5 and then go home to your family and have a night out. This is the new imperialist warfare. In an interview Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta. Asked by journalist Martha Raddatz whether the 2014 pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan would mean an increased reliance on drones, Panetta said: “ I think that's reality. We've done that in Pakistan. We're doing it in Yemen and elsewhere. And I think the reality is it's going to be a continuing tool of national defense in the future.”

     There is a ready trained army of computer literate kids, experts at computer games all well able to spend a few hours a day playing their game and getting paid and walking away as if it were “just a game”. It is a frightening thought, but it is our future, unless we do something to change the system.

 

 

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DRONES AND MASS KILLINGS.

   
  A relevant comment from "An Elegant Feast":

  

      The media has another sensationalist story about gun violence to push, and they are going to push it, hard.  And of course, anytime a child dies, it’s a tragedy.  When it occurs with violent, brutal force, it is especially repulsive.  But there is something even more disgusting than this.  When we only concentrate on the deaths of american children that are murdered by a mentally disturbed individual, we offer silent complicity to the scores of children that the US government murders in cold, rational, calculation.  According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the US government has killed 176 children with drone strikes in Pakistan.  Where is the outrage for those deaths?  I guess when it occurs at the hand of Obama and Clinton, it becomes convenient for the media and the so-called american left to look the other way.  The consummate celebrity, Obama had a press conference to show his tears to anyone who could stomach them.  If the sight of a crass, unrelenting killer is so upsetting for the president, someone needs to quickly remove every mirror from the white house.

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BOMBING THEM IN TO DEMOCRACY.

      One feature of Western foreign policy is that other countries can't create democracy without the might of the Western military and Western government intervention. The powers that be preach this idiotic message that for democracy to spread anywhere in the world, it needs the fire power of the West, of course ignoring the fact that we don't have democracy here. People across the world can't do that for themselves, the ordinary people of Pakistan and Yemen can't have democracy unless we go in with our drones and special forces. The West's big lie is that by its war on terror, it is spreading democracy, when in fact they are creating chaos in an attempt at permanent domination.

This from Freedom Socialist Party (US):

      Who knows how many die from these attacks, since they are carried out secretly by the CIA. And civilian casualties are falsely minimized by counting every male of military age an enemy combatant. I guess “Kill-them-all” is the policy at hand. Hundreds of non-combatants have died, including a good many little girls and boys.
Obviously, this didn’t just start with Obama. Pakistan, the sixth most populous country in the world and territorially home to several ancient cultures, was artificially created in 1947 by the British Empire. From the beginning, the country has been dominated by a right-wing military, backed first by Great Britain and then the United States.
Since the 1980s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, Pakistan’s state apparatus has been mixed up with the Islamic fundamentalists in both countries. In fact, the Taliban was nurtured and funded by the United States in Afghanistan. So much for the myth that the U.S. brings secular democracy and women’s equality to the Middle East.
      Only the people themselves can do that, and they are trying desperately. Before she was attacked, Malala said, “If the new generation is not given pens, they will be given guns by the terrorists. We must raise our voice.”
      Forty-four years ago (1968) Pakistanis, with women in the forefront, launched a stunning revolution. They forced a dictator to abdicate and ran society for 139 days. Workers occupied factories, peasants seized land, and students took over the schools and colleges. This can happen again and I have no doubt that Malala Yousafzai, and other determined young women and men like her, will be a part of that struggle.

Read the full article HERE:

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BIG BROTHER IS RELENTLESS.

     How long before we see them over head here, as we go about our normal business. Big Brother has all the best of technology.

From Polizeros:

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