One might think that three wars—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya—would be enough. Apparently, for the United States military apparatus, it’s not. Last month we noted that Congress is trying to amend the War on Terror authorization so as to include conflicts that have no direct relationship to attacks on US soil. Now, there’s word from the Pentagon that cyber attacks on US interests could be grounds for armed retaliation too. Reports the BBC:

In future, a US president could consider economic sanctions, cyber-retaliation or a military strike if key US computer systems were attacked, officials have said recently.

The planning was given added urgency by a cyber-attack last month on the defence contractor, Lockheed Martin.

A new report from the Pentagon is due out in a matter of weeks.

“A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response. All appropriate options would be on the table,” Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters on Tuesday.

AntiWar.com points out that, by this logic, the Iranians are already justified in attacking the US with missiles, considering all the hackers the Pentagon has pointed at them.

When they come, the Pentagon seems to be assuming, we’ll be ready for ‘em. That’s why it has also just announced a plan to vastly expand its fleet of unmanned arial vehicles—armed, remote-controlled drones. These are the same weapons that have made it possible to carry on a shadow war for years now on the Pakistani frontier without need to officially declare that it is happening. With every new gizmo, apparently, it becomes easier and easier to justify killing.

It is a common hope that the latest technologies—smart bombs, stealth bombers, drones, cyber-attacks, and more—will save lives. In the short term, and in a narrow view of whose lives we’re concerned about, this may be true. But each makes violence easier to justify politically, by promising victory at the expense of fewer lives on one’s own side, and therefore each has the effect of bringing us closer to—if we’re not there already—a dystopian scenario of perpetual war. Opposing weapons like this is ostensibly tougher than opposing, say, nuclear weapons; there’s no instant cataclysm, no blinding light. What they promise, instead, is the dull hum of tit-for-tat killing—manageable, profitable, ignorable, almost sustainable, and yet a total, indefensible waste.

• President Ali Abdullah Saleh has agreed to a proposal from Gulf Arab mediators that calls for him to transfer power and resign within 30 days. But thousands of angry demonstrators have rejected the 30-day succession plan, with huge crowds taking to the streets in the capital Sanaa to demand Saleh’s immediate resignation.

• In Syria, at least 20 people were killed yesterday in the city of Daraa after thousands of troops backed with tanks opened fire on protesters. On Sunday, at least 13 civilians were shot dead in the town of Jableh. And at least 112 people were killed in Syria on Friday in the deadliest day since anti-government protests began last month.

• Thousands of demonstrators gathered in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul Sunday to protest any extension of U.S. military presence in the country. The protesters also denounced corruption and pressed for the release of detainees.

• The main supply route for NATO troops in Afghanistan was temporarily closed on Sunday after thousands of people blocked a key highway in Pakistan to protest against US drone strikes.

• Some 3,000 protesters took to the streets after Friday prayers in Oman’s southern port of Salalah in one of the biggest pro-reform demonstrations since scattered unrest began in the sultanate two months ago.

• Senegalese fishermen staged a one-day strike Thursday to protest at a decision by the Dakar government to allow foreign boats to fish in their coastal waters.

• Over 1,500 Armenian-American and anti-genocide activists flooded the streets of Culver City, California on Thursday to protest President Obama’s failure to honor his pledge to recognize the Armenian Genocide.

By Gary Waits, for the Syracuse Post-Standard.

On Friday, during a protest against the use of armed drones at Hancock Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, New York, some activists chose to violate the conditions of their permit and lie down on the road, blocking entrance to the base. 37 were arrested. Syracuse’s YNN network gives just one short paragraph to explain the protesters’ point of view, but it does give considerable space to the military and law-enforcement side of things:

Anthony Bucci, the 174th Fighter Wing Public Affairs Officer, countered, “While it is disappointing because we do think the MQ[-]9 is a great weapons platform, it is part of what we do wearing the uniform is to protect their constitution and their right to do exactly what they’re doing.”

As the permit expired, people refused to leave and began laying down in the street to represent the people killed by [R]eaper drones, blocking the entrance to the Air National Guard Base.

“They were given numerous instructions to get up. They refused to. Again, they were asked to get up. They refused to. At this point, the commanding officer made a decision to arrest them,” said William Gabriel, an Onondaga County Sheriff’s Deputy.

Kevin Walsh, the Onondaga County Sheriff, added, “People want to make a point. Part of making their point is the fact that they’re willing to be arrested. And we accommodated that.”

How accommodating. Read the full text and watch the video at YNN’s site.

Protesters included Retired Colonel Ann Wright and Waging Nonviolence contributor Kathy Kelly. Says Wright, on Democracy Now!:

As a former colonel, as a retired colonel, as a former government official who has been with the government 40 years, I think my greatest public service is now challenging the government and challenging these things called drones. These drones—and you might as well just call them assassination machines, that’s what these drones are used for: targeted assassination, extrajudicial ultimate death for people who have not been convicted of anything.

One person’s “great weapons platform” is another’s “assassination machine.”

I was on Russia Today (RT), Russia’s 24/7 English-language news channel, on Friday to discuss the use of drones in Libya, the growing financial cost of the war and its impact on oil prices.

On Wednesday, Code Pink, Foreign Policy In Focus and Pax Christi staged a mock drone attack in Washington DC’s Dupont Circle. To watch what transpired, check out the above video.

This type of street theater – which reminds me of the Iraq Veterans Against the War’s brilliant Operation First Casualty – is a creative way to give passersby just a hint of what people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been living through as the Obama administration dramatically escalates the use of unmanned drones in our many wars. (Over the month of September, for example, there were a record 21 drone strikes in Pakistan. And this at the same time that the country is reeling from the flooding that has affected at least 18 million people.)

If this type of action is to be replicated, which I hope it is, I have one recommendation. To make the experience more real for those who accidentally walk into such an protest, I think there needs to be a more realistic drone that is actually flying in the sky.

One thought off the top of my head would be to have a kite in the shape of a drone that can be flying high enough that you just might at first glance mistake it for a real aircraft. The person flying the kite would need to be out of view, if possible, so that people didn’t know where it was coming from. Combine that with the sound of a drone, which they had playing on a stereo, and people shrieking and pointing to the sky, and you’ve created an experience that make take people a little more by surprise – and hopefully get them to think about what it would be like to live under the drones.

• An estimated 175,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday to participate in the One Nation Working Together rally to promote job creation, diversity and tolerance.

• Twenty-three Mapuche activists ended their 82-day long hunger strike late Friday evening after Chile’s government agreed to withdraw terrorism charges against the jailed activists and promised a series of reforms to the nation’s much questioned terrorism law.

• Thousands of tribesmen took to the streets in tribal region of North Waziristan on Thursday to protest against strikes by the US drone aircraft in the tribal region.

• In the UK, 7,000 marched through Birmingham on Sunday in response to cuts in public spending.

• As many as 200 workers, including Saudis, Sunday refused to work on a vital project under way in central Jeddah due to non-payment of their dues for the last four months. Another 200 workers remained absent from the work site in protest.

• On Friday, striking dock workers in France paralyzed the country’s main southern port of Marseille as part of a work stoppage that organizers said would last three days to protest pension reform. The disruptive action was spreading to other ports.

• Bonfires burned on Sunday on beaches around New Zealand’s North Island, as part of an ongoing campaign against offshore oil drilling.

In his weekly online column for the National Catholic Reporter, Fr. John Dear has a wonderful piece about what transpired in court last week when he and 13 others stood trial for protesting the use of drones last year at Creech Air Force Base, outside of Las Vegas.

At the start of the trial the judge stated that he would not allow testimony on international law, the necessity defense or the drones. He only wanted to hear about the charge of “criminal trespassing.”

While the defendants were expecting that the judge wouldn’t allow their expert witnesses to speak, they proceeded to call on Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson; Ann Wright, a retired U.S. Army colonel and one of three former U.S. State Department officials who resigned on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and Bill Quigley, legal director for the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights to testify. To their surprise, the judge let them all speak, and their testimony went on for hours.

Here is an excerpt from a powerful, spontaneous closing statement made by Brian Terrell of the Des Moines Catholic Worker:

Several of our witnesses have employed the classic metaphor when talking of a necessity defense. There’s a house on fire, and a child crying from the window and there’s a no trespassing sign on the door. Can one ignore the sign, kick down the door and rescue the child?It was a great privilege for us to hear Ramsey Clark, a master of understatement, who put it best. “Letting a baby burn to death because of a no trespass sign would be poor public policy.”

I submit that the house is on fire and babies are burning in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan because of the activities at Creech AFB.

The baby is burning also in the persons of the young people who are operating the drones from Creech AFB, who are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder at rates that even exceed that of their comrades in combat on the ground.

[...]

The house is on fire. And we fourteen are ones who have seen the smoke from the fire and heard the cries of the children. We cannot be deterred by a No Trespassing sign from going to the burning children.

John Dear describes what happened next:

As he finished, Brian burst into tears and sat down. Many in the courtroom wept. Then Judge Jansen stunned us by announcing that he needed three months to “think about all of this” before he could render a verdict. He marked twenty five years on the bench just the day before, he said, and this was his first trespassing case and he wanted to make the best decision he could. There is more at stake here than the usual meaning of trespassing, he noted. The prosecutors were clearly frustrated and disappointed. With that, we were assigned a court date of January 27, 2011, to hear the verdict. As he left, he thanked the fourteen of us and the audience, and then seemed to give a benediction: “Go in peace!” Everyone applauded.

Libby and Jerica are in the front seat of the Prius, and Mary and I are in back. We just left Oklahoma, we’re heading into Shamrock, Texas, and tomorrow we’ll be Indian Springs, Nevada, home of Creech Air Force Base. We’ve been discussing our legal defense.

The state of Nevada has charged Libby and me, along with twelve others, with criminal trespass onto the base. On April 9, 2009, after a ten-day vigil outside the air force base, we entered it with a letter we wanted to circulate among the base personnel, describing our opposition to a massive targeted assassination program. Our trial date is set for September 14.

Creech is one of several homes of the U.S. military’s aerial drone program. U.S. Air Force personnel there pilot surveillance and combat drones, unmanned aerial vehicles with which they are instructed to carry out extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan and Iraq. The different kinds of drone include the “Predator” and the “Reaper.” The Obama administration favors a combination of drone attacks and Joint Special Operations raids to pursue its stated goal of eliminating whatever Al Qaeda presence exists in these countries. As the U.S. accelerates this campaign, we hear from UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, who suggests that U.S. citizens may be asleep at the wheel, oblivious to clear violations of international law which we have real obligations to prevent (or at the very least discuss). Many citizens are now focused on the anniversary of September 11th and the controversy over whether an Islamic Center should be built near Ground Zero. Corporate media does little to help ordinary U.S. people understand that the drones which hover over potential targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen create small “ground zeroes” in multiple locales on an everyday basis.

Read the rest of this article »

“In other countries, the country has a military. In Pakistan, the military has a country.”

I arrived in Pakistan on May 4^th, traveling with Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier from Voices for Creative Nonviolence, based in Chicago. After traveling through Pakistan for about two weeks, I surely can’t claim to fully understand the country, but these words from I.A Rehman, Secretary General of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, seemed to summarize what I learned.

I learned that most of the combat troops in the pre-1948 Indian Army were Muslims. So the army “got a country” when East and West Pakistan were formed in 1947 from the former British colony of India.

One difficulty is that democracy and the military don’t mix well: the military is not a democratic institution. When it comes to running a country, this mis-fit becomes even more problematic. Kathy and Josh had been to Pakistan last year, and this year, as we went from place to place and interviewed person after person, we kept hearing about how the government was not representative of the people. Instead, we learned that a small ruling elite runs the country for its own benefit.

Here in the US, corporations are increasingly influencing US warmaking policy to fuel their consumption of resources. In Pakistan, however, the military actually owns profit-making corporations. As Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa, writes in her book Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy: “The military’s two business groups – the Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare Trust – are the largest business conglomerates in the country.” And the military’s investment in their own corporations leads them to use more and more government influence so as to stifle, or even take over, rival corporations.  That, in turn, entails an increasingly militarized and hence an increasingly undemocratic state.

Modeled by the federal government, this non-representation of the people’s interests extends down even to local police and courts, creating an “enfranchisement gap” between the people and their “leaders,” with the people of Afghanistan feeling more like subjects than citizens, as one professor told us.

When the people realize that the government is not guaranteeing their civil rights, sooner or later they will begin to act to secure those rights.

In Pakistan, that action by the people takes several forms. The first is in the growing number of civil rights demonstrations scattered across the country. Dr. Mubashar Hassan, a long-time and astute political activist and observer told us he believed that a some point, those isolated demonstrations will coalesce and form a national movement that will compel the ruling elite to change.

We can get glimpses of that movement toward unity among the demonstrators from the social media. For example, check out the newly formed Amn Tehrik (Peace Movement) out of Peshawar, or Voice for Peace out of Khar.

Read the rest of this article »

• Thousands of civil servants have marched through Athens, the Greek capital, as they went on a 24-hour strike in protest against the government’s plans to freeze wages, gather more taxes and reform pensions. The action left flights grounded and many schools and government offices closed, while public hospitals were expected to only take emergency cases. A two-million-strong federation of unions will also start a general strike Feb. 24.

• Ikea offered Wednesday to meet with labor union leaders after strikes shut down several stores in France — but only if six workers end a sit-in at its Paris office first. Workers walked off the job starting Saturday in protest over pay.

• Disneyland hotel workers  began a water-only fast Tuesday to protest what they describe as life-threatening safety issues on the job.  To show support for workers fasting outside the Grand Californian, over 300 people marched in front of Disney’s Paradise Pier Hotel in Anaheim yesterday.

• In Iran, numerous opposition figures reported police harassment on Thursday, including the firing of tear gas and paint balls at protests in the capital Tehran.

• Also in Tehran, workers of Tohid Tunnel gathered in front of the entrance of the tunnel they work for in protest of unpaid salaries. The gathering resulted in the closure of the connections between north and south Chamran Freeway from Milad tower to the entrance of Tohid tunnel.

• Syracuse Peace Council members protested outside the Syracuse Air National Guard base on Tuesday against unmanned drones that are now being operated from the site.

• In Texas, dozens of prisoners have gone on a hunger strike at a Los Fresnos immigration jail in protest of inhumane conditions. It’s at least the third hunger strike at the Port Isabel Detention Center in less than a year.

• Tomorrow, citizens of Florida and Destin will have the opportunity to show their opposition to oil drilling off Florida’s coastline. Hands Across the Sand encourages Florida residents concerned with pending drilling legislation to gather on beaches at noon and hold hands forming lines in the sand against oil drilling in coastal waters.

• Thousands of Australians will let their tastebuds do the talking when they sit down later this month for “Vindaloo Against Violence”, a mass dining event to protest attacks against Indians.