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?

Half of ‘Deported’ Refugees Never Left Germany, Report Reveals

Islamization - Germany's amazing migrant mess;

an amazingly expensive mess

© Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters

The number of unsuccessful deportations from Germany has increased by more than 200 percent, as every second deportable migrant stayed in the country by not appearing for their expulsion appointment.

An internal evaluation by the federal police found that, as of the end of May, only 11,100 scheduled deportations had been successful out of a planned 23,900, according to the report by Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten.

Some 11,500 refugees were listed as “not found” on their appointed day, with the remaining 1,300 cases abandoned for various other reasons. Around 150 people stayed because pilots refused to take them, and in more than 500 cases, deportation was stopped because of “active or passive resistance.”

The highest level of deportation resistance came from immigrants from Nigeria and Guinea, with 60 people each, followed by Somalia, Syria, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Morocco, Iraq and Eritrea, according to German federal police.

“It creates an enormous amount of work for the federal police that every second person to be deported is ultimately not delivered by the responsible state and local authorities,” Ernst Walter, chairman of the German police union, told Welt am Sonntag. He added that the only way to prevent them from disappearing is to “make much greater use of deportation detention.”

Germany's migrant costs approaching $100 bn

Germany has seen an influx of more than 1.6 million asylum seekers since 2014, mainly from the Middle East and Africa. Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing increasing political pressure from the public to stem the flow, as estimated migrant-related costs reach €78 billion ($91 billion).

Argentine ‘Death Flight’ Pilots get Life for 100s of Junta Opponents Thrown into Ocean

Images of junta victims at ESMA Museum in Buenos Aires © espaciomemoria / YouTube

Judges in Argentina have given life sentences to the former ‘death flights’ pilots after hundreds of people opposing the country’s 1976-83 military junta – including a close friend of Pope Francis – were thrown into the ocean.

A military junta ousted Isabelle Peron in 1976. She had authorized the liquidation of opposing  (read left-wing, Marxist) factions, but the practice barely began before the military took over and ramped up the killing on a spectacular scale. Between 7 and 30 thousand people disappeared in the next 7-8 years, and many more were tortured and imprisoned.

According to Wikileaks, Henry Kissinger congratulated the junta for their excellent job of dealing with the left-wing insurgency.

A major ruling on Wednesday marked the “first” such Argentinian judgment against pilots involved in the notorious ‘death flights,’ local media reports. During the operations, opponents of Argentina’s military regime that ruled the country from 1976 until 1983 were thrown into the waters of the Atlantic.

According to the verdict, the announcement of which lasted almost four hours, 29 former service members were sentenced to life imprisonment, 19 were sentenced to eight to 25 years, and six were acquitted, local media report.

There are 54 defendants in the major trial. It also involves cases of 789 victims of a secret detention center – known as the Navy Mechanics Higher School (ESMA) – where up to 5,000 people opposing the repressive junta regime are believed to have vanished.

The five-year trial – called the ‘mega cause’ in Argentina – exposed the chilling practices of systematic torture and the killing of thousands of people, including left-wing opponents of the regime and members of Argentina’s urban guerrilla groups, but also human rights activists and relatives of those forcibly disappeared by junta forces. 

In a series of hearings, it emerged that numerous victims were drugged, loaded onto ‘death flight’ aircraft, and thrown into the freezing waters of the southern Atlantic Ocean. Among ESMA victims was Esther Careaga, a close friend of Jorge Bergoglio, who later became Pope Francis. Careaga was thrown to her death from a plane one night in December 1977, along with two French nuns and nine others.

“Careaga was a good friend and a great woman,” Beroglio said when the body was identified in 2003. The future pontiff met Careaga, a biochemist and his boss at the time, when he worked as an apprentice at a pharmaceutical laboratory in Buenos Aires in the early 1950s.