Chicago activist Jeremy Hammond, 28, was sentenced earlier today to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to participating in the hacking of the private intelligence firm Stratfor. Read More
Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni engineer whose nephew and brother-in-law were killed in a US drone strike in Yemen last year, has requested a meeting with President Obama during his visit to Washington, DC, this week. Read More
Faisal bin ali Jaber, a Yemeni man whose relatives were killed in a US drone strike, is traveling to the United States this week to tell his story to members of Congress and human rights activists at this weekend’s Drone Summit (which I’m covering for Truthout, FYI).
Jaber’s brother-in-law, 49-year-old Sheik Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, was killed in a covert drone strike on Hadhramout in August 2012. Salem was a Yemeni cleric and father of seven who preached loudly against the extremism exhibited by Al Qaeda, which his family feared would invite violent retribution from Al Qaeda linked militants. But in the end, it was US violence that ended Salem’s life as well as that of Waleed bin ali Jaber, a local policeman who was with Salem at the time of strike. Read More
According to Dearborn Heights police, the man who shot and killed Renisha McBride over the weekend is claiming that his .12-gauge shotgun discharged accidentally.
McBride died on his front porch from a gunshot wound to the face early Saturday morning after knocking on his door for help following a car accident.
Police released only vague details and have continued to withhold basic information about the incident, like the name of the shooter and the address where McBride was shot. Read More
Renisha McBride (Fox 2 News)
(There have been many developments since this story initially broke. See here.)
If you thought what happened to Jonathan Ferrell last month was horrific, wait until you hear about the slaying of 19-year-old Renisha McBride.
CBP agents practice fast-roping in border patrol training. (Flickr/CBP Photography) Rock throwers pose a deadly threat to these guys?
Border Patrol Chief Mike Fisher says his agents will continue to use lethal force against rock-throwers on the US-Mexico border because rocks are apparently “lethal weapons”. Read More
This infographic from Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) offers a revealing picture of US priorities.
The House of Representatives cut $40 billion from the food stamp program last month, which just so happens to be the same amount of money the US has promised Israel in military aid through 2027. Even as Congress endorses more and more austerity for Americans, it seems our representatives are always happy to throw buckets of money at the “Jewish and democratic” state. Just this summer, the House Armed Services Committee approved an additional $488 million funding package to Israel, not to be confused with the $3.1 billion in military aid the US had already allocated for the coming fiscal year.
Among other things (i.e. war, mass surveillance, corporate welfare, etc.), preserving Israel’s access to an endless supply of weapons is more important than preventing food insecure kids, who make up half of food stamp recipients, from going hungry.
“Chronic diseases have been the silent killer in the current crisis in Syria, taking the lives of an estimated 200,000 patients, much more than the 120,000 people killed by bombs, ballistic missiles and guns or the estimated 1,400 people killed by nerve gas,” writes Dr. M. Zaher Sahloul at Syria Deeply.
The insanely high toll is largely due to the Assad regime’s criminal use of food and medicine as weapons in his war against his own people. Certain rebel-held areas of Syria are under siege, with Assad regime soldiers confiscating even minuscule amounts of food from anybody trying to enter. As a result, Syrian children are literally starving to death. This callous method of warfare has been used by certain rebel factions as well, which “are blockading some government-held areas and harassing food convoys,” reports the New York Times.
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In violation of international law and medical ethics, US military physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists designed and facilitated the torture of detainees at US detention facilities around the world under both the Bush and Obama administrations, according to a study released today.
The findings are the result of a two year investigation carried out by the Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers, a body made up of 19 medical, military and ethics experts and formed by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations.
Based on an examination of publicly available Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA documents, congressional reports and independent investigations by journalists and human rights organizations, the report concludes that since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US military and intelligence agency health professionals collaborated with the CIA and defense department in “designing, participating in, and enabling torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of detainees. Read More
I managed to break into the mainstream for a few minutes yesterday on MSNBC’s Weekend’s With Alex Witt to talk about the drone strike victims who addressed Congress last week, which I wrote about here for Truthout.
(If you missed the historic drones briefing, which marked the first time victims of drone strikes told their stories directly to Congress, you can and should watch it here. FYI, only 5 members of Congress showed up.)
While I appreciate Witt having me on to talk about such an important and underreported issue, I was shocked when she asked me the following question (at the 2:18 mark):
Shouldn’t there be an expectation by now that civilians take a risk by staying in the [North Waziristan] region?
To be fair, Witt may have just been playing devil’s advocate here, though I’ve never heard anyone make that argument before. Either way, to suggest that it’s up to civilians in North Waziristan—the region of Pakistan hit hardest by US drone strikes—to move elsewhere to avoid being killed amounts to victim-blaming of the worst kind.
As Julia Davis put it on twitter, “By the same logic, anyone who doesn’t want to be shot should move out of LA & NY.”
There’s also the fact that entering and leaving North Waziristan is no easy feat.
Reprieve attorney Jennifer Gibson, who accompanied the Rehman family on their trip from Pakistan to the United States, travels to Islamabad every few months to work with Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani attorney who represents over 150 drone strike victims (he was blocked by the CIA from receiving a visa to attend the drones briefing). After the briefing, Gibson explained to me the obstacles drone strike victims face when they attempt to leave Waziristan:
It’s not easy to get from Waziristan to Islamabad. It may not be that far on a map, but they have to go through seven or eight checkpoints and they get harassed at every checkpoint. Everyone assumes that they’re doing something wrong. They don’t know Islamabad. It’s not familiar to them, it’s something different. But they come because they’re determined to tell their story. [The Rehmans] in particular didn’t just come to Islamabad. They came all the way to the United States.
Getting into Waziristan is no easier.
More importantly, the argument that civilians should leave their homes to avoid being killed by drone strikes absolves the US of its responsibility to not kill civilians, which is the opposite of how international law and basic human decency work.
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