Military Madness - Dramatic Increase in Drone Strikes in Afghanistan - What did it Accomplish?

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‘Killing for the sake of killing’: Disillusioned US drone pilots

leak footage of air strikes against unarmed Afghans, media says

25 Aug, 2021 13:54 / Updated 2 hours ago

FILE PHOTO. The US military in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold, are using high-tech Predator drones against their enemy. © Getty Images / Veronique de Viguerie; (inset) A U.S. Air Force MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). © Getty Images / John Moore

American drone pilots have leaked video of “punitive” and “nihilistic” strikes in Afghanistan in 2019 that led to the killing of civilians, including at least one child, as the US looked for an exit strategy in the two-decade war.

The footage, published on Tuesday as part of an investigation by military news outlet Connecting Vets, reportedly reveals how successive US administrations and defense strategists relaxed the rules of engagement in Afghanistan – as part of a policy to pressure the Taliban to the negotiating table.

However, drone operators interviewed by the outlet claimed the loosened rules around air strikes served “no point” and did not “make a difference” – with one pilot stating that it was “killing for the sake of killing.” The strikes also reportedly killed far more civilians than the Pentagon has admitted.

An unidentified pilot, who worked with the Marines as part of ‘Task Force South West’ in the country’s Helmand province in 2019, said he had been traumatized by one mistaken killing and shared a journal account of the incident with the site.

My productivity today was derailed. We killed two innocent men and a charger [military slang for a child]. They were on a motorcycle and by dumb luck drove into the same intersection as our target as the hellfire [missile] struck.

The operator said the target was an Afghan man on a bike who had been using a two-way radio – which were commonly used in Helmand after cellular towers were downed.

However, the target “rode right through the blast and kept going,” the pilot wrote, adding that he “watched a passerby load the bodies into a truck and drive them to a hospital. They are all dead.”

The account was corroborated by a military official involved in the operation who spoke to the site on condition of anonymity. While the Afghan on the radio – whose name or connection to the Taliban was never discovered – drove off through the smoke like a “Bond villain,” the official said the “two adults and a toddler on the other motorcycle ... were killed right off.”

But the Connecting Vets report noted that the Department of Defense (DoD) recorded only one civilian casualty on the date of the strike, which was “likely the toddler,” while leaving out the two adult males who “just happened to be there.”

US Central Command, which had jurisdiction over military operations in the area, did not respond to questions submitted by the site.

Drone operators told the site about being disillusioned with the task force, whose Marines had apparently already given up on Helmand. By 2019, the province was largely under the control of the Taliban, with “virtually no American ground patrols ... and not many Afghan military ones”.

According to the outlet, the military had “transitioned from intelligence-driven targeting to using a target engagement criteria” such as holding a rifle, but the threshold for coming under suspicion could be easily crossed by unarmed adult men.

Last year, the DoD released air power summaries for Afghanistan that showed a six-fold increase from less than a thousand strikes in 2015 to 7,423 strikes in 2019.

And what did they accomplish except to keep the 'hellfire' inventory moving?

According to a 2017 report by the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, Barack Obama “vastly [expanded] and [normalized] the use of armed drones for counterterrorism” to the tune of 542 strikes, killing roughly 3,797 people in various countries.

Under Donald Trump, authorization for drone strikes was delegated to field commanders as part of a National Security Council strategy to get the Taliban to agree on an exit strategy for US forces.

How did that work?

Whistleblowers and The Criminal Activities of The US Military and The Insecurity Industry

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US drone whistleblower Daniel Hale sentenced to 45 months in prison

27 Jul, 2021 17:42

A Predator drone is prepared for operations in this November 9, 2001 file photo at an undisclosed location.

©  US Air Force/Handout

Daniel Hale, a former US Air Force intelligence analyst who leaked information about civilian deaths caused by drone strikes overseas, has been sentenced to almost four years in prison under the Espionage Act.

US District Judge Liam O’Grady passed the sentence on Tuesday in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, saying that the 45-month sentence was needed as a deterrent to others from disclosing government secrets. O’Grady told Hale he had other options than to share classified documents with a reporter.

Hale, 33, pleaded guilty in March to one count of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, admitting to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. The documents were leaked to the Intercept, which published them in October 2015 as ‘The Drone Papers’.

Under the plea deal, Hale faced up to 10 years in prison – far less than the 50 years the original charges would have carried, had he gone to trial.

Other whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, Daniel Ellsberg and WikiLeaks have advocated on Hale’s behalf, but prominent human rights organizations such as the ACLU and PEN have mostly remained silent. Freedom of the Press Foundation called his punishment “shamefully excessive.”

The ACLU reacted after the sentencing, saying Hale "helped the public learn about a lethal program that never should have been kept secret. He should be thanked, not sentenced as a spy."

As Kiriakou told RT in April, prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act robs them of the opportunity to explain their motivations. 

“He did it because he was exposing a war crime. He is not allowed to say that. And he really doesn't have any chance of acquittal,” Kiriakou said.

While working as a private contractor, Hale leaked a number of documents to the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, showing the extent to which President Barack Obama’s drone warfare program in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen resulted in civilian casualties. 

Documents showed that, of the 200 people killed between January 2012 and February 2013, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period, nearly 90% of those killed were innocents, who were nonetheless classified as “enemies killed in action.”

Hale is the third Intercept source to be arrested and put on trial by US authorities. The FBI’s Terry Albury and the NSA’s Reality Winner – only recently released on parole for good behavior – were both caught due to errors on part of the outlet’s staff. It wasn’t clear whether the same happened to Hale, but his attorney blamed “failure of source protection” for his 2014 arrest.

Snowden skewers Big Tech, ‘amoral’ capital firms for enabling

‘Insecurity Industry’ & calls for urgent action before it’s too late

27 Jul, 2021 12:00

Warning that companies that claim to protect national security are the “greatest danger” to it, Edward Snowden has urged the dismantling of this ‘Insecurity Industry’ by banning trade in intrusive software and penalizing enablers.

In a searing post on his blog, ‘Continuing Ed’, the NSA whistleblower pointed to the Pegasus scandal as a “turning point” that exposed the “fatal consequences” of private-sector companies like the NSO Group that are part of this “out-of-control” industry – whose “sole purpose is the production of vulnerability.”

“The phone in your hand exists in a state of perpetual insecurity, open to infection by anyone willing to put money in the hand of this new Insecurity Industry,” Snowden noted, adding that its clients range from countries to “sex-criminal Hollywood producers who can dig a few million out of their couch cushions.”

The entirety of this industry’s business involves cooking up new kinds of infections that will bypass the very latest digital vaccines (security updates) and then selling them to countries that occupy the red-hot intersection of a Venn Diagram between ‘desperately craves the tools of oppression’ and ‘sorely lacks the sophistication to produce them domestically.’

As news of the Pegasus scandal broke last week, it emerged that over 50,000 phones were infected by Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group’s flagship malware. Many of the numbers on the leaked list reportedly belong to political opponents of these client countries.

The former US intelligence contractor described the mobile ecosystem as a “dystopian hellscape of end-user monitoring and outright end-user manipulation.” Similarly, he stated that the world is “in the midst of the greatest crisis of computer security in computer history.”

This is partly because, he noted, software developers and device manufacturers like “Apple, Google, Microsoft (and) miserly chipmakers who want to sell...not fix things” are still writing code in “unsafe” programming languages because it is easier and more cost-effective than modernizing.

In recent years, both Google and Microsoft engineers have said that roughly 70% of all serious security bugs in the Chrome codebase and Microsoft products respectively are related to memory safety problems – that Snowden puts down to the lack of incentive to switch to a safer programming language.

“The vast majority of vulnerabilities that are later discovered and exploited by the Insecurity Industry are introduced, for technical reasons related to how a computer keeps track of what it’s supposed to be doing, at the exact time the code is written,” he noted.

As examples of “incentivizing change,” Snowden suggests that “defining legal liability for bad code in a commercial product” would give Microsoft a “heart attack.” As well, he noted, make Facebook legally liable for any leaks of its users’ “unnecessarily collected” personal records and “Mark Zuckerberg would start smashing the delete key.”

Similar liability clauses needed to be applied to “amoral” global capital firms that bankroll companies like the NSO Group. Without these funds, Snowden noted, neither the scale nor the global consequences of ‘Insecurity industry’ activities would be possible.

However, the “first digital step” must be to “ban the commercial trade in intrusion software.” By “eliminating the profit motive” there would be a reduction in the risk of proliferation by private companies while preserving avenues for genuine research.

“If we don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets: It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect,” Snowden noted, warning of a future where “people (are) too busy playing with their phones to even notice that someone else controls them.”

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The Best Candidate in the Race for President Slams Trump for Pimping the Military

‘We are not your prostitutes!’ Tulsi Gabbard slams Trump for

‘pimping out’ US soldiers to Saudi Arabia

© Reuters / Carlos Barria

Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard has doubled down on her attacks on President Donald Trump’s ‘disgraceful’ allegiance to Saudi Arabia, eviscerating his ‘betrayal’ of her fellow soldiers and the US Constitution.

Singling out Trump’s statement that the US was “locked and loaded” but “waiting to hear from the Kingdom … under what terms we would proceed,” Gabbard slammed the US president for “offering to place our military assets under the command of a foreign country.”

Tulsi Gabbard✔

@TulsiGabbard

.@realDonaldTrump Despicable. Offering to place our military assets under the command of a foreign country—Saudi Arabia—is a disgrace and betrayal of my patriotic brothers and sisters in uniform and to our Constitution. We are not your prostitutes. You are not our pimp.

Gabbard called out the “betrayal of my brothers and sisters in uniform, the American people, and the Constitution” in a video posted to Twitter on Monday, reminding her Commander-in-Chief that she and her fellow soldiers took an oath to defend the Constitution - which doesn’t allow the president to offer up the country’s military on a silver platter to any foreign nation willing to pay for the privilege.

We are not your prostitutes. You are not our pimp.

The clip echoed an earlier tweet in which she reminded Trump that “having our country act as Saudi Arabia’s bitch is not ‘America First,’” and triggered an outpouring of support – and scorn – on social media.

“Every day I’m like ‘I can’t possibly like Tulsi more than I already do,’ then I’m proven wrong,” gushed one commenter. “In fact you’re even cooler than #WonderWoman cause you’re the real deal with real battlefield experience,” tweeted another.

Terrence Daniels (Captain Planet)

@Terrence_STR

Replying to @TulsiGabbard

Even a few disaffected Trump fans were onboard with Gabbard’s criticisms.

John Bishop 🇦🇺

@Crow30Darkness

Replying to @TulsiGabbard and 2 others

Donald Trump in 2019 should listen to Donald Trump in 2014. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/506198852933013504 …

Donald J. Trump✔

@realDonaldTrump

Saudi Arabia should fight their own wars, which they won't, or pay us an absolute fortune to protect them and their great wealth-$ trillion!

Everything is for sale in Trump's America, it appears.

Others pointed out some logical flaws in her thinking. “This take reduces US imperialism to a myth & makes it seem as though KSA is forcing an otherwise benevolent US to plunder the Global South & wage war on anti-imperialist states,” one user tweeted. “Israel pretty much runs the show when it comes to the ME and they get their support free from US taxpayer, KSA at least pays $billions for what they get?” pleaded another.

The US Military is not fighting Israel's battles. They may be contributing hardware, but I haven't heard of an American soldiers dying in Israel, ever.

“This video is a violation of Article 88 of the UCMJ,” pointed out another, highlighting the part of the US military code that forbids soldiers from “using contemptuous words” against officials. 

Would using nice, pleasant words make any difference?

Trump said earlier on Monday that “it certainly would look like” Iran was behind the attack this weekend on Saudi Arabia’s largest oil processing facility, a strike which Yemen’s Houthi rebels have claimed as their own, but also said he “doesn’t want war with anybody.”

I believe him; he just wants to sell arms and US military presence all over the world. 

Migrants, Protests & Aid Cuts: Legacy of US-Backed 2009 Coup in Honduras

As with Europe in Africa, the USA in Central America literally raped the countries of their natural resources leaving them in poverty and with dictators who are cruel and brutal. Then America builds walls to keep them from migrating. I know they can't all come to America, but America needs to be working to improve conditions in Central America giving the people hope and a reason to stay.

FILE PHOTO: A migrant holds flags of Honduras and the United States next to US-Mexican border

© Reuters / Kim Kyung-Hoon

As caravans of migrants stream toward the US border and protesters in Honduras demand the president’s resignation, a coup in Tegucigalpa exactly 10 years ago is now making for strange political allies in Washington.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) thus found herself on the same wavelength as US President Donald Trump when she advocated cutting off the aid to the government of President Juan Orlando Hernandez in March, and tweeted out a photo with the daughter of the slain Honduran activist Berta Caceres on Friday.

Ilhan Omar✔
@IlhanMN

 In 2016, Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered by US-trained Honduran special forces.

The next year, I had the honor of meeting her daughter, Bertha.

Today marks 10 years since the coup in Honduras. We in the US must stop funding its brutality.

Trump also wants to cut US funding to Honduras, but for a completely different reason: along with Guatemala and El Salvador, the country is a major source of migrant “caravans” that have been streaming across the US border over the past year. All three Central American nations have experienced Washington’s meddling throughout their history.

On June 28, 2009, the Honduran military raided the home of President Manuel Zelaya and led him away at gunpoint. He was replaced by Porfirio Lobo Sosa, leader of the National Party, who held the office until 2014, when he handed it over to Hernandez.

The administration of Barack Obama – specifically, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – was involved in planning and executing the coup, it later emerged. Clinton herself admitted it in her memoir “Hard Choices,” first published in 2014. After public scrutiny, however, the part of the book detailing her involvement in Honduras was removed from the paperback edition. 

In the decade since, Honduras has become a human rights nightmare, according to organizations such as Amnesty International, which accused state security forces of routinely engaging in torture and extrajudicial killings. 

Caceres, for instance, was murdered in 2016 in attack widely believed to have been in retaliation for her activism against the construction of the Aguas Zarca dam in the Gualcarque river.

Over the last several months, public anger at Hernandez’s rule has turned into widespread unrest. Riots first began in April, in protest over his plans to privatize the education, healthcare and pension systems of Honduras. In May, demonstrators set fire to the US embassy in Tegucigalpa, and later attacked containers belonging to the Dole Fruit Company. 

Fruit companies are a symbol of US military and political meddling in Central America, which gave rise to the term “banana republic.”

On Tuesday, state security forces opened fire on a group of student protesters, injuring four people. Activists are no longer calling for merely reversing the privatization, but also for  Hernandez to step down.

While Hernandez’s economic policies have created a favorable environment for US multinational corporations, they brought ruin to the small farmers of Honduras, who are fleeing to the US in droves in search of work. 

The political establishment in Washington, however, has considerable interest in keeping Hernandez in power, as he has promised to keep open the US military base at Soto Cano. 

Good grief! How cheaply we sell our soul!

US Military is World’s ‘Single Largest Producer’ of Greenhouse Gases – Report

© US Army / Ryan Hallock (via Reuters)

The Pentagon is the “single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world,” according to a new study about climate change that accuses the Trump administration of being in “various modes of denial” about it.

The report, from Brown University’s ‘Costs of War’ project, focuses specifically on "post-9/11 wars" and their impact on emissions. It estimates the US military has been responsible for 1,212 million metric tons of greenhouse gases between 2001 and 2017. Emissions from “overseas contingency operations” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria accounted for more than 400 million metric tons of CO2. In 2017 alone, the report says, “the Pentagon's emissions were greater than all emissions from Sweden or Denmark.”  

Of course, the Pentagon can fix that problem; they can just obliterate Sweden or Denmark, or both. They will be Muslim countries and consequently, enemies of the USA long before global warming becomes a catastrophe. (I am just kidding).

The effects of climate change will soon be “feeding political tensions and fueling mass migrations and refugee crises,” the report says, noting that the military has already added climate change to its list of national security concerns.

This is a theory that has little or no basis in fact, but is the politically correct position to have.

The researchers criticized the Pentagon for acknowledging the threat of climate change to national security, but failing to acknowledge "that its own fuel use is a major contributor.” They also accused "some elements" within the Trump administration of being "in various modes of climate denial.”

Of course, it would be no different if the Democrats were in the White House. Deep State will protect the military from any attempt to downsize or diminish its capability.

While the military received praise for making some effort to decrease its energy consumption, including by gradually replacing some non-tactical fleet vehicles with hybrid, plug-in or alternative fuel vehicles, reducing idling, and developing solar installations at some bases, the report says there is “room for more reductions.”

The study found seven major sources of greenhouse gas emissions relating to US military activities, including from installations and non-war operations, war-related emissions and emissions from the production of weapons. Emissions caused by the reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure in war zones and the deliberate burning of oil wells and refineries by all parties to war have also been factored in.

The authors also question whether the huge US presence in the Persian Gulf is necessary, since the US itself is less dependent on the region's oil than in the past and does not necessarily need to “protect the global flow” of oil.

One of the recommendations was that the Pentagon should report its fuel consumption to Congress annually, information which is currently “explicitly withheld.”

I just calculated that a 1.5 hour flight by an F-35 uses an amount of fuel equal to all the gasoline I have used in 55 years of driving. Ground one F-35 for an hour and a half and you negate one entire lifetime of pollution.

The researchers also recommended that each military installation should draw up plans to reduce energy consumption by 10 percent by 2022, and advised increased use of alternative fuels, hybrid vehicles and renewable energy. The Pentagon should also identify which military and national guard bases could be closed, whether due to climate change impacts or diminished threats.

The US military must urgently "reduce their role" in creating greenhouse gas emissions as a matter of national security, the report urged, concluding that if it takes bold actions to reduce fossil fuel use, there could be “enormous positive implications” for the climate.

Britain and Ecuador Discuss Wikileaks Founder's Fate

Time's running out on the Whistle Blower-in-Chief

By Sommer Brokaw

British and Ecuadorean leaders are holding talks on the fate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who may soon have to leave an embassy in Britain after staying there six years. File photo by Hugo Philpott/UPI | License Photo

UPI -- Officials in Britain and Ecuador are discussing the fate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in Ecuador's British embassy for six years.

Assange, 47, who has rarely seen daylight in the years he's been held in asylum, could face expulsion soon from the embassy, a source told The Times.

Government officials in both countries are pondering the eviction of Assange, who gained notoriety for publishing thousands of U.S.-classified documents on the website, WikiLeaks, from Ecuador's London embassy, where he has been in asylum since 2012 and gained citizenship late last year.

Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno told the BBC Friday that he was never "in favor" of Assange's activities, and that both countries were holding talks.

The British government has become more concerned about his welfare as Ecuador cut off his internet connection in March over concerns about his use of social media interfering with diplomatic relations and cut back extra security in May after spending $5 million on protection costs.

"It is our wish that this is brought to an end, and we would like to make the assurance that if he were to step out of the embassy, he would be treated humanely and properly," British Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan told parliament last month.

"The first priority would be to look after his health, which we think is deteriorating."

Ecuador granted political asylum to Assange in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations. Assange faced a count of unlawful coercion and two counts of sexual molestation, which expired in 2015 due to statutes of limitations under Swedish law, while the investigation for one remaining rape allegation, which had an expiration date of 2020, was dropped in May 2017.

Although the Swedish investigation has been dropped, Assange fears an arrest for bail breach in the sexual assault case would allow him to be extradited to the United States for publishing the classified documents on Wikileaks. 

The website grabbed worldwide attention in April 2010 when it released footage of U.S. soldiers fatally shooting at least 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq.

Perhaps Assange should have allowed himself to face American justice before Trump began loading the Supreme Court with right-wing cronies. He might have had a chance to be pardoned as a whistle-blower. I doubt that chance exists anymore.

I think Britain would demand assurances that he not face the death penalty for treason before handing him over to the US, but I seriously doubt that he would get a fair trial in America.