Tuesday, December 18, 2012

More Than 2000 Children Are Murdered In The United States Every Single Day

http://www.infowars.com/more-than-2000-children-are-murdered-in-the-united-states-every-single-day/            
Here is a picture sent to me by Watcher Shawn; http://lamarzulli.wordpress.com/
This is why there are no shootings in Israeli schools.  Think about it.
18096_455867214470550_890034234_n
Posted by at No comments:

Mexican Drug War victims: US is responsible

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/26/mexican_drug_war_victims_us_is_responsible/ Wednesday, Sep 26, 2012 1:34 PM UTC

Mexican Drug War victims: US is responsible

Mexicans are determined to make America hear the truth about its role in their country's ongoing violence

By , Alternet
Topics: Mexican Drug War, AlterNet, New York, Mexico, Texas, Drugs, Immigration,
Mexican Drug War victims: US is responsibleTwo men believed to be bodyguards of the alleged leader of the Gulf drug cartel, Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sanchez, aka "El Coss." (Credit: AP/Dario Lopez-Mills)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
AlterNet In Mexico, where the authorities and the drug cartels are hard to separate, finding answers is often left to the survivors of drug war violence. Some survivors have dug through mass graves, turning over mutilated bodies, half-hoping to see the face of a loved one. Others have stared their children’s killers in the eye while hearing the brutal details of how their kids were murdered. They interview incarcerated drug traffickers, desperate for some kind of closure. Determined to speak for the victims who have lost their voices, some relatives of victims have joined a new movement, the Caravan for Peace with Jusice and Dignity. The Caravan has demanded justice for the dead in Mexico, and this summer, they delivered their message — a call for accountability — across the United States.
That is the story of Margarita Lopez Perez, the mother of disappeared 19-year-old Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena Lopez. Lopez Perez’s expensive journey to find the truth led her to incarcerated drug traffickers who admitted to killing her child. In great detail, they told her the horror Yahaira endured. “They told me that they kidnapped my daughter, that they had her alive for many days,” she said, “They were torturing her, raping her, before taking her to a faraway place, and decapitating her alive.” Then, they played with her head, kicking it around like a soccer ball and kissing her cold lips. “They told me she was innocent, that they made a mistake,” said Lopez Perez.
In Mexico, many of the drug war’s dead are innocents. In the six years of drug war that have ravaged the country, more than 60,000 are dead and more than 10,000 are missing. Because only 2 percent of cases are granted judicial review, families of the lost regularly become their own investigators. They find, too often, horrors tied to the authorities themselves.
Olga Reyes Salazar knows this truth too well. She is from a family of human rights defenders; her sister Josefina Reyes Salazar denounced military abuses in Chihuahua after the drug war deployed troops to her neighborhood. In 2008, Josefina’s 25-year-old son Julio Cesar Reyes was shot and killed near a military checkpoint, kicking off a string of demonstrations and suspicious murders occurring near active military. The family continued to protest against military abuses, demanding investigations into the murders of their relatives, but their efforts were not well-received. Death plucked off the Reyes family like the petals on a flower. When they protested for justice, their homes were burned, and more fell.
Olga lost six of her relatives by the end of 2011. Their bodies were left by highways. Flowers from a defaced Reyes grave appeared in a nearby military garden.  Molotov cocktails awakened them in the night. Now, the Reyes name is one of warning. “The family has become an example for the people of the town,” said Olga. There, signs warn troublemakers to leave or end up like the Reyes family.
The US backs, and even trains, Mexico’s military, despite allegations of human rights abuses. Eliana Garcia, a former political prisoner turned Mexican congresswoman who is an adviser to Mexican politicians, says the most deadly Mexican military force is the navy, and she is quick to note its training by US Navy SEALs.
“The US military are not [committing crimes] directly or openly,” said Garcia, adding that US influence goes beyond training and funding. Garcia says there is a widespread understanding, but no solid proof, that US forces dress and/or operate as Mexican military. “For instance, [this summer], two agents of the CIA were driving to a navy installation. Nobody knows what they were doing and then suddenly they were ambushed by policia federales,” said Garcia. US authorities confirmed that the two men ambushed by Mexican police were part of the CIA. “They were injured and then immediately they disappeared from Mexico. We don’t know their names. We know they were CIA agents, but what they were doing, why they were going to the navy base… We don’t know anything,” Garcia said.
Garcia says the drug war is an example of America imposing its “security agenda” to operate navy bases not just in Mexico, but El Salvador and Colombia.
The United States spends almost $500 million a year funding Mexico’s war against cartels that sell drugs to American consumers. As the US continues to consume drugs despite attempts at prohibition, unimaginable horror multiplies in Mexico. US and Mexican forces battle against the heavily armed cartels, which are so powerful they have been labeled an insurgency by US State Department officials and journalists alike. While authorities claim to target only drug traffickers, Mexicans say the war has only made the cartels more violent and the state authorities more corrupt. The result is that innocent bystanders are often caught up in the violence, with little or no access to justice.
The victims speak now through the voices of their survivors. Family members seek answers from locals, whether they are incarcerated cartel members or private investigators, to understand their loved ones’ last minutes. And as they seek justice for the people responsible for their loved ones’ deaths, their quest reaches beyond the murderers and across borders, up to the US and Mexican governments. Their government no longer represents their best interests, nor does its rhetoric reflect the reality of innocence lost. Thus, they have come to the United States to create, as one mother called it, “some citizen diplomacy,” and stand up for the victims.
The Caravan includes women whose young daughters were taken in the night (suspected to be victims of human trafficking), relatives of dead police and military, a teenage couple missing their family, a mother who lost four of her sons, famed Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, and more. United by tragedy and pulling strength from shared experience, the caravaners took time off from their search for their dead and came to America with goals and demands. They desperately want the United States to understand the truth about Mexico’s drug war victims, that the media is wrong to suggest the violence is only among and against the cartels. The sad truth is that the military intervention in Mexico has provoked a strong reaction from the cartels, and as the military keeps fighting back, the violence spirals out of control into the streets and homes of the citizens.
The Caravan aims to wake us up, to remind America that it is our policies and institutions that help to fuel their tragedy. Our tax dollars fund their war; our banks launder the cartel cash; our guns arm the insurgents; and our drug consumption drives the market fueling all of it. Peace, the Caravan says, will be a multinational movement of the people. But for it to arrive, Americans must understand not only the carnage that takes in place in Mexico, but also the role we play in it.
I caught up with the Caravan near the end of its crosscountry journey in New York, following them from the Big Apple to Baltimore and Washington, DC. Their stories are horrific, but their mission, like their slogan, is one of peace, justice and dignity for all.
Reeling in Banker Greed 
At a vigil in front of St. Cecilia Catholic church in Harlem, one of New York City’s most violent and drug war-ravaged neighborhoods, Teresa Carmona’s candle melted as she explained why HSBC bank would be targeted as retribution for her son’s death. Joaquin, 21, was studying architecture in Mexico City. “His dreams were coming true,” said Carmona. “And he had a lot of dreams.” In August 2010, he was murdered with a bullet to the head in his car in Mexico City. “He did not deserve to die,” said his mother. “He deserves justice. The banks, they’re criminals.”
This summer, a Senate investigation found that HSBC was complicit in allowing Mexican drug cartels to launder billions of dollars through its U.S. operations. The Senate report also says U.S. regulators knew that the bank had a poor system to defend against laundering, but did nothing to demand improvement. While US forces were training and arming the Mexican military to fight cartels, US bankers were cashing in on cartel profits.
On September 7, Carmona and the Caravan delivered a suitcase full of “blood money” to HSBC bank. But they know that HSBC was simply the bank that got caught, and their message to all of Wall Street coalesced with a march to Occupy Wall Street’s birthplace, Zuccotti Park.
Demanding the government put people over profits, the Caravan for Peace carries very much the same message as Occupy Wall Street. Institutions like the Drug Enforcement Agency, privately owned prisons, law enforcement, and even the military rely on drug war operations to stay relevant. Prohibition has not stopped the use of drugs, but has empowered perpetrators of violence. The caravaners demand the conversation about drug policy include alternatives, legalization or decriminalization, that treat instead of criminalize drug addicts. The harm elicited by the joint US-Mexican war on drugs has been so egregious that there simply must be something better. What’s stopping us from adapting to a more successful strategy, claims the Caravan, is profit.
The Caravan demands that the US put people before profit and take a series of steps to create a policy that will better protect them from violence. To stop money laundering, they say, the US must punish the banks cleaning the blood off cartel money. And to disarm the cartels the military is fighting, the Caravan demands the US change or enforce its gun policy to immediately end the illegal traffic of US assault weapons to Mexico. Resources spent on weapons and violence, they say, would be better spent defending life.
Javier Sicilia, a Mexican poet who put down his pen when his son was murdered, says, “It seems that what [the governments] understand is economic peace, a peace that benefits big capital, and the capital of death,” adding that US and Mexican drug policies “only benefit war.”
U.S. Weapons Used in Mexican Murders 
In Washington, DC., the Caravan presented to the Mexican embassy two dismantled firearms stuck in a concrete block. The symbol, said Sicilia, was of the need to protect peace. In 2009 and 2010, 70 percent of firearms recovered by authorities in Mexico came from the United States. At a gun show in Albuquerque, New Mexico, witnessing the ease with which Americans buy weapons was a great shock to the movement.
“It was easier for us to get a gun than a cell phone,” said Araceli Rodriguez. At a gun fair in NM, she was told she could have “all the weapons I want” as long as she had ID and “the money to buy them.” When it came to a cell phone, however, payment plans and red tape took “five days so we could activate it, because they kept asking us for information that we didn’t have.”
The Albuquerque gun show was a defining moment for many of the caravaneiros, who know too many killed by American weapons.
At the gun show, Rodriguez said, “I cried because I saw mothers with their children in strollers, passing through like it was a park, as if they were looking at butterflies. There were these assault weapons, these huge guns that kill our people in Mexico, and 9- and 10-year-old children running around.”
In November 2009, Rodriguez lost her son, a federal police officer. Luis Angel Leon Rodriguez had recruited a civilian to drive him to a dangerous location in Mexico because the police force did not provide him with a car. He had only a piece of paper and a gun, and police say he was shot with his own weapon.
Araceli Rodriguez never forgave the bosses who did not offer her son the necessary protection he needed to do his job, but she did forgive one of her son’s murderers. She looked him right in the eye as he told her that, after killing her son, he cut him into pieces and burned his remains. Rodriguez, like many family members of victims, interviewed incarcerated narcos in her search to find answers. Many caravaneiros have had better luck with the locked-up cartel members than they have turning over bodies in mass graves.
“I asked him how they could have done that, because he is a human being, and they were all brothers in that land,” she said, crying. “He said that he worked for a cartel and that he had been paid $3,000 pesos [a little over $250] to kill my son and his partners.”
Many of the women are quicker to forgive the murderers of their loved ones than the authorities who did not protect or help them find justice. The violence is structural, they say. They believe that circumstances and poverty can make people commit unimaginable crimes just to survive.
Rodriguez said that her son’s murderer had been beaten up in jail. When the authorities refused to treat him, Rodriguez took a painkiller out of her purse. “Take this pill in the name of my son,” she told him. Crying, he reached out to touch her, but the authorities would not allow it. “I told him I wouldn’t keep hate in my heart, but that there was a god and that one day there would be divine justice.”
Now, says Rodriguez, “I’m the voice of those who are not here, that are dead, who maybe their destiny was a common grave — and for the missing ones — I’m their voice. I’m the voice of the children that have been orphaned by the loss of their father or their mother, that will never be hugged again. I’m here to put my grain of sand,” she said. “This is what keeps me in this Caravan. Faith and illusion. That one day that I’ll wake up and I’ll realize that the nightmare of pain has ended, and that there is justice with dignity for all.”
Solidarity Across Borders 
While the Caravan pleads for the United States to have compassion for its struggle, it also found solidarity with communities devastated by the drug war on this side of the border. In Baltimore, the reality of the drug war’s violence at home was made clear. For many in the African-American community, their demands for peace, justice and dignity are the same as the caravaneiros.
There were 196 murders in Baltimore last year. Dominique Stevenson, director of the Friend of a Friend mentoring program for incarcerated youth, said the drug war in Baltimore looks like “conflicts that have taken place in other lands.”
“You basically have the equivalent of child soldiers here,” she said, “It looks like losing people almost every day. It looks like a tragedy. It looks like grief.”
Stevenson says the tragedy black, urban communities face on a daily basis is not a symptom of American capitalism, but intentional oppression that actually creates capital. She says change may not happen the way liberals envision, with well-intentioned, yet sideways initiatives that target symptoms of oppression, like poor education, without stopping the system itself.
“The uplift of those communities will come from the people in those communities,” she said, “Place the resources in the hands of the people that are attempting to do that work. That work is not going to look like liberal folks imagine. It might look revolutionary to them. To me, it would look like love.”
Ending prohibition, or considering alternatives to it, is nowhere near reaching the mainstream in the US. But while ending the drug war may seem revolutionary, to those who live within it every day, radical change is the only alternative to death and suffering.
Posted by at No comments:

Covert Drone War The Reaper Presidency: Obama’s 300th drone strike in Pakistan

Posted by at No comments:

Obama terror drones: CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terror-drones-cia-tactics-in-pakistan-include-targeting-rescuers-and-funerals/          

Obama terror drones: CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals

February 4th, 2012 | by | Published in Bureau Stories, Carousel, Covert Drone War, Drone strikes in Pakistan, Drones carousel
Please support our work - share this article
Hellfire missiles being loaded onto a US military Reaper drone in Afghanistan
Missiles being loaded onto a military Reaper drone in Afghanistan.
The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of  civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.
The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a ‘targeted, focused effort’ that ‘has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.’
Speaking publicly for the first time on the controversial CIA drone strikes, Obama claimed last week they are used strictly to target terrorists, rejecting what he called ‘this perception we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly’.
‘Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties’, he told a questioner at an on-line forum. ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists trying to go in and harm Americans’.
But research by the Bureau has found that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children.  A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.
Although the drone attacks were started under the Bush administration in 2004, they have been stepped up enormously under Obama.
There have been 260 attacks by unmanned Predators or Reapers in Pakistan by Obama’s administration – averaging one every four days. Because the attacks are carried out by the CIA, no information is given on the numbers killed.
Administration officials insist that these covert attacks are legal. John Brennan, the president’s top counterterrorism adviser, argues that the US has the right to unilaterally strike terrorists anywhere in the world, not just what he called ‘hot battlefields’.
‘Because we are engaged in an armed conflict with al- Qaeda, the United States takes the legal position that, in accordance with international law, we have the authority to take action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces,’ he told a conference at Harvard Law School last year. ‘The United States does not view our authority to use military force against al-Qaeda as being restricted solely to”hot” battlefields like Afghanistan.’
State-sanctioned extra-judicial executions
But some international law specialists fiercely disagree, arguing that the strikes amount to little more than state-sanctioned extra-judicial executions and questioning how the US government would react if another state such as China or Russia started taking such action against those they declare as enemies.
Related article: A question of legality
The first confirmed attack on rescuers took place in North Waziristan on May 16 2009. According to Mushtaq Yusufzai, a local journalist, Taliban militants had gathered in the village of Khaisor. After praying at the local mosque, they were preparing to cross the nearby border into Afghanistan to launch an attack on US forces. But the US struck first.
Not to mince words here, if it is not in a situation of armed conflict, unless it falls into the very narrow area of imminent threat then it is an extra-judicial execution.
Naz Modirzadeh, Harvard University
A CIA drone fired its missiles into the Taliban group, killing at least a dozen people. Villagers joined surviving Taliban as they tried to retrieve the dead and injured.
But as rescuers clambered through the demolished house the drones struck again. Two missiles slammed into the rubble, killing many more. At least 29 people died in total.
‘We lost very trained and sincere friends‘, a local Taliban commander told The News, a Pakistani newspaper. ‘Some of them were very senior Taliban commanders and had taken part in successful actions in Afghanistan. Bodies of most of them were beyond recognition.’
Related article: Witnesses speak out
For the Americans the attack was a success. A surprise tactic had resulted in the deaths of many Taliban. But locals say that six ordinary villagers also died that day, identified by Bureau field researchers as Sabir, Ikram, Mohib, Zahid, Mashal and Syed Noor (most people in the area use only one name).
Yusufzai, who reported on the attack, says those killed in the follow-up strike ‘were trying to pull out the bodies, to help clear the rubble, and take people to hospital.’  The impact of drone attacks on rescuers has been to scare people off, he says: ‘They’ve learnt that something will happen. No one wants to go close to these damaged building anymore.’
The legal view
Naz Modirzadeh, Associate Director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) at Harvard University, said killing people at a rescue site may have no legal justification.
‘Not to mince words here, if it is not in a situation of armed conflict, unless it falls into the very narrow area of imminent threat then it is an extra-judicial execution’, she said. ‘We don’t even need to get to the nuance of who’s who, and are people there for rescue or not. Because each death is illegal. Each death is a murder in that case.’

Waziristan residents hold up missile fragments from drone strikes in October 2010 / Noor Behram
The Khaisoor incident was not a one-off. Between May 2009 and June 2011, at least fifteen attacks on rescuers were reported by credible news media, including the New York Times, CNN, Associated Press, ABC News and Al Jazeera.
It is notoriously difficult for the media to operate safely in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Both militants and the military routinely threaten journalists. Yet for three months a team of local researchers has been seeking independent confirmation of these strikes.
Eyewitness accounts
The researchers have found credible, independently sourced evidence of civilians killed in ten of the reported attacks on rescuers. In five other reported attacks, the researchers found no evidence of any rescuers – civilians or otherwise – killed.
Because we are engaged in an armed conflict with al- Qaeda, the United States takes the legal position that, in accordance with international law, we have the authority to take action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces.
John Brennan, counterterrorism adviser to Obama
The researchers were told by villagers that strikes on rescuers began as early as March 2008, although no media carried reports at the time. The Bureau is seeking testimony relating to nine additional incidents.
Often when the US attacks militants in Pakistan, the Taliban seals off the site and retrieves the dead. But an examination of thousands of credible reports relating to CIA drone strikes also shows frequent references to civilian rescuers. Mosques often exhort villagers to come forward and help, for example – particularly following attacks that mistakenly kill civilians.
Other tactics are also raising concerns.  On June 23 2009 the CIA killed Khwaz Wali Mehsud, a mid-ranking Pakistan Taliban commander. They planned to use his body as bait to hook a larger fish – Baitullah Mehsud, then the notorious leader of the Pakistan Taliban.
‘A plan was quickly hatched to strike Baitullah Mehsud when he attended the man’s funeral,’ according to Washington Post national security correspondent Joby Warrick, in his recent book The Triple Agent. ‘True, the commander… happened to be very much alive as the plan took shape. But he would not be for long.’
The CIA duly killed Khwaz Wali Mehsud in a drone strike that killed at least five others. Speaking with the Bureau, Pulitzer Prize-winner Warrick confirmed what his US intelligence sources had told him: ‘The initial target was no doubt a target anyway, as it was described to me, as someone that they were interested in. And as they were planning this attack, a possible windfall from that is that it would shake Mehsud himself out of his hiding place.’
Up to 5,000 people attended Khwaz Wali Mehsud’s funeral that afternoon, including not only Taliban fighters but many civilians.  US drones struck again, killing up to 83 people. As many as 45 were civilians, among them reportedly ten children and four tribal leaders. Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud escaped unharmed, dying six weeks later along with his wife in a fresh CIA attack.

 A funeral for victims of a US drone strike.
Clive Stafford-Smith, the lawyer who heads the Anglo-US legal charity Reprieve, believes that such strikes ‘are like attacking the Red Cross on the battlefield. It’s not legitimate to attack anyone who is not a combatant.’
Christof Heyns, a South African law professor who is United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extra- judicial Executions, agrees. ‘Allegations of repeat strikes coming back after half an hour when medical personnel are on the ground are very worrying’, he said. ‘To target civilians would be crimes of war.’ Heyns is calling for an investigation into the Bureau’s findings.
One of the most devastating attacks took place on March 17 last year, the day after Pakistan had released American CIA contractor Raymond Davis, jailed for shooting dead two men in Lahore. Davis had been held for two months and was released after the payment of blood money said to be around $2.3m.
A case of retaliation?
The Agency was said to be furious at the affair. The following day when a massive drone strike killed up to 42 people gathered at a meeting in North Waziristan, Pakistani officials believed it to be retaliation.
Such strikes ‘are like attacking the Red Cross on the battlefield. It’s not legitimate to attack anyone who is not a combatant.
Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve
The commander of Pakistan forces in the area at the time was Brigadier Abdullah Dogar. He admits that in drone attacks in general ‘people invariably get reported as innocent bystanders’. But in that case he has no doubt. ‘I was sitting there where our friends say they were targeting terrorists and I know they were innocent people’, he said.
Related article: Get the Data: Obama’s terror drones
The mountains in the area contain chromite mines and the ownership was disputed between two tribes, so a Jirga or tribal meeting had been called to resolve the issue.
‘We in the Pakistan military knew about the meeting’, he said, ‘we’d got the request ten days earlier.’
‘It was held in broad daylight, people were sitting out in Nomada bus depot when the missile strikes came. Maybe there were one or two Taliban at that Jirga – they have their people attending – but does that justify a drone strike which kills 42 mostly innocent people?’
‘Drones may make tactical gains but I don’t see how there’s any strategic advantage’, he added. ‘When innocent people die, then you’re creating a whole lot more people with an issue.’
Growing tensions
Drone attacks have long been a source of tension between the US and Pakistan despite the fact that the Pakistan government gave tacit agreement, even allowing them to fly from Shamsi airbase in the western province of Baluchistan, while publicly denouncing the attacks.
In return the US made sure that some of the terrorists killed were those targeting Pakistan.
However the relationship has been stretched to breaking point, first with the raid to kill Osama bin Laden in May and subsequent US accusations of Pakistani complicity, then the NATO bombing of a Pakistani post in November, killing 24 soldiers. In December Pakistan ordered the CIA to vacate the Shamsi base. For a while drone attacks stopped but they resumed two weeks ago.
I was sitting there where our friends say they were targeting terrorists and I know they were innocent people.
Brigadier Abdullah Dogar, former commander Pakistan forces
The US claims the drones are a vital tool that have helped them almost wipe out the leadership of al Qaeda in Pakistan. But others point out they have stoked enormous anti-American sentiment in a country with an arsenal of 200 nuclear weapons.
Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Initiative at the Brookings Institution, points out the operation has never been debated in Congress which has to approve sending US forces to war.
So dramatic is the switch to unmanned war that he says the US now has 7,000 drones operating and 12,000 more on the ground, while not a single new manned combat aircraft is under research or development at any western aerospace company.
After a remarkable lack of debate, there is starting to be unease in the US at the lack of transparency and accountability in the use of drones particularly as the campaign has expanded to hit targets in Libya, Yemen and Somalia and until recently to patrol the skies in Iraq.
Three US citizens were killed by missiles fired from drones in Yemen last September. Anwar al Awlaqi, an alleged al Qaeda operative, was deliberately targeted in what some have described as the US government’s first ever execution of one of its own citizens without trial. His colleague and fellow citizen Samir Khan also died in the attack. Two weeks later Awlaqi’s 16 year old son Abdulrahman died in a strike on alleged  al Qaeda militants.
Such unmanned war is a politician’s dream, avoiding the inconvenience of sending someone’s son or daughter, mother or father, into harm’s way.
The fact that the operations are carried out by the CIA rather than the US military enables the administration to evade questions. The Agency press office responds to media inquiries on the subject with no comment and refusal to give names of those killed or who are on the target list.
Until Obama’s comments last week, the White House would not even confirm the programme existed.
‘We don’t discuss classified programs or comment on alleged strikes’, said a senior administration official in response to the findings presented by the Sunday Times.
Lawsuit
The ACLU filed a lawsuit last week demanding the Obama administration release legal and intelligence records on the killing of the three US citizens in in Yemen.
Privately some senior US military officers say they are extremely uncomfortable at the way the administration is carrying out these operations using the CIA which is not covered by laws of war or the Geneva Convention.
The use of drones outside a declared war zone is seen by many legal experts as setting a dangerous precedent. Aside from allies such as Israel, Britain and France, other countries have drone technology including China, Russia and Pakistan. Iran recently captured a downed US drone.
Heyns, the UN rapporteur, said an international legal framework is urgently needed to govern their use.
‘Our concern is how far does it go – will the whole world be a theatre of war?’ he asked. ‘Drones in principle allow collateral damage to be minimised but because they can be used without danger to a country’s own troops they tend to be used more widely. One doesn’t want to use the term ticking bomb but it’s extremely seductive.’
Additional reporting by Rahimullah Yusufzai in Peshawar, Pakistan
Christina Lamb is the Washington Bureau Chief of the Sunday Times
Posted by at No comments:

168 children killed in drone strikes in Pakistan since start of campaign As many as 168 children have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan during the past seven years as the CIA has intensified its secret programme against militants along the Afghan border.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8695679/168-children-killed-in-drone-strikes-in-Pakistan-since-start-of-campaign.html    

168 children killed in drone strikes in Pakistan since start of campaign

As many as 168 children have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan during the past seven years as the CIA has intensified its secret programme against militants along the Afghan border.

A boy stands at the site of suspected U.S. drone attacks in the Janikhel tribal area in Bannu district of North West Frontier Province in Pakistan, November 19, 2008
A boy stands at the site of suspected U.S. drone attacks in the Janikhel tribal area in Bannu district of North West Frontier Province in Pakistan, November 19, 2008 Photo: REUTERS
Rob Crilly
By , Islamabad
5:37PM BST 11 Aug 2011
In an extensive analysis of open-source documents, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 2,292 people had been killed by US missiles, including as many as 775 civilians.
The strikes, which began under President George W Bush but have since accelerated during the presidency of Barack Obama, are hated in Pakistan, where families live in fear of the bright specks that appear to hover in the sky overhead.
In just a single attack on a madrassah in 2006 up to 69 children lost their lives.
Chris Woods, who led the research, said the detailed database of deaths would send shockwaves through Pakistan, where political and military leaders repeatedly denounce the strikes in public, while privately allowing the US to continue.
"This is a military campaign run by a secret service which raised problems of accountability, transparency and you have a situation where neither the Pakistanis nor Americans are clear about any agreements in place and where the reporting is difficult," he said.
"All of this means that when things go wrong there is simply no redress for the families of those who have been mistakenly killed."
The research, culled from more than 2,000 news reports, leaked documents and witness statements, show how the drones gradually moved from a rarely used tool, beginning with a single strike in 2004, to a frontline weapon of war.
Notable successes include the death of Baitullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistan Taliban, in 2009. Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior al-Qaeda figure viewed as a possible successor to Osama bin Laden, is believed to have died in a drone strike in June.
However, under President Obama the strikes have been used to target low-level foot soldiers as well as senior commanders.
Today the attacks are running at a rate of one every four days, mostly centred on North Waziristan from where members of the Haqqani network launch cross-border attacks on international forces in eastern Afghanistan.
With Pakistan so far unwilling to bow to US pressure to launch a military offensive against the bases and with Islamabad ruling out any suggestion that American troops be deployed, that leaves the CIA's drones, said Imtiaz Gul, an analyst who has written extensively on the region.
At the same time, he added, they mean a president elected on a manifesto promising to close Guantanamo Bay does not have hundreds more detainees to process.
"As long as these peoples sit in jails they remain a problem, a living liability, so there seems to be a drive to kill them," said Mr Gul.
Human rights campaigners have long argued that drones represent extra-judicial killings.
Sam Zarifi, Asia-Pacific director of Amnesty International, said: "The Obama administration must explain the legal basis for drone strikes in Pakistan to avoid the perception that it acts with impunity.
"The Pakistan government must also ensure accountability for indiscriminate killing, in violation of international law, that occurs inside Pakistan." The US refuses to acknowledge the existence of its drones programme.
A spokesman for the US embassy in Islamabad declined to comment.
Posted by at No comments:

First they came for our Rights & we didn't speak out,Then they came for our GUNS & we didn't speak out !!!

        
First they came for the Communists but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists but I was not one of them, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews but I was not Jewish so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.
Martin Niemoeller
          
Posted by at No comments:

Libor scandal grows as the fathers of two mass murderers were to testify

http://northerntruthseeker.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-connecticut-elementary-school.html    

Monday, December 17, 2012

The Connecticut Elementary School Shooting: Is THIS The Real Reason For This Shooting? The LIBOR Scandal Link!

Ever since the shooting of 26 innocent people by a "crazed" autistic (!) "shooter" last Friday, I have been troubled... Nothing about this shooting makes any sense at all!   The Jewish controlled media has been feeding us nothing but lies, claiming it was done by a crazed "Lone Gunman" hooked on SSRI drugs.   I have long dismissed the criminals in the mainstream media as outright liars, so I began my own search for the REAL reason for this massacre, and I may have found one....

People have quickly forgotten that infamous "Batman" shooting in Aurora, Colorado, earlier this year, and the fact that that shooter's father, Robert Holmes, was set to testify against the criminal Jewish elite responsible for what may be the greatest financial scandal of all time... The LIBOR scandal.   Now, comes a very telling report from the Examiner Online news service, at www.examiner.com, entitled: "LIBOR Scandal Grows As The Fathers Of Two Mass Murderers Were To Testify", where information is now coming forward that the father of the alleged shooter, Adam Lanza, is also set to testify against the criminals responsible for the LIBOR financial swindle!   First, here is that Examiner article in its entirety, and I do have my own comments and thoughts to follow:

Libor scandal grows as the fathers of two mass murderers were to testify


In the wake of the mass murders that took place in Newtown, Connecticut on Dec. 14, information on the shooter, and his family, is slowly being discovered by law enforcement other sources. One interesting connection to the tragedy that took place at the Sandy Hook school is that the father of Adam Lanza has a connection to the theater shootings that took place in Aurora earlier this year by James Holmes.
Both fathers of the shooters were allegedly expected to testify in the Libor scandal that rocked the banking world in June.
The father of Newtown Connecticut school shooter Adam Lanza is Peter Lanza who is a VP and Tax Director at GE Financial. The father of Aurora Colorado movie theater shooter James Holmes is Robert Holmes, the lead scientist for the credit score company FICO. Both men were to testify before the US Sentate in the ongoing LIBOR scandal. The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is the average interest rate at which banks can borrow from each other. 16 international banks have been implicated in this ongoing scandal, accused of rigging contracts worth trillions of dollars. HSBC has already been fined $1.9 billion and three of their low level traders arrested.
Father of Connecticut shooter was to testify on Libor Scandal.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a motive and a link. This coincidence is impossible to overlook. Two mass shootings connected to LIBOR. - Fabain4Liberty via Before it's News
Libor is the internal banking interest rate that major financial institutions determine each day for lending purposes between each facility. This rate is then translated to the interest rates used for mortgages, student loans, credit cards, and nearly every interest bearing loan in the world. Manipulation of the Libor rate has resulted in hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars in fraudulent payments made by billions of customers throughout the financial world.

For similar events on the magnitude of both Aurora and Newtown to hold a connection to one of the greatest financial scandals in the history of finance is astronomically slim in regards to coincidence. In fact, neither shooter had a history with firearm proficiency, and the outcome of each shooting showed an expertise many trained military personnel could not achieve. This leaves the question of where they got their training, or if there was another plot involved which allowed these young men to perform the actions they did with such precision.

While the coming days will bring forth more pertinent information on the motives, access, and failures of both community and family to diagnose the events leading up to Adam Lanza's killing spree, one thing is becoming disturbingly clear. The connections between the Aurora massacre, and the one that took place in Newtown on Friday, may have far more ramifications to the people involved in the Libor scandal than anyone could imagine.

For more on finance and economics, you can follow Ken Schortgen Jr on Twitter, and listen to the weekly economic roundup segment of the Angel Clark radio show from 6-7 p.m. EST on Friday evenings.
Suggested by the author:


NTS Notes:  OK, THIS is absolutely beyond coincidence that the fathers of BOTH of these major shootings are linked to testimony against the group responsible for the LIBOR financial swindle.

Here is my take.   The father of Adam Lanza, Peter Lanza, is set to testify against the criminal Jews responsible for the multi-TRILLION dollar LIBOR swindle.   The criminals got desperate and figured they would have one of their American based hit squads perform the evil deed of mass murder at the school in Newtown Connecticut and have Peter's son, Adam, take the fall.   What people need to understand is that Adam Lanza did NOT do this mass killing.  He is the patsy and the person that was pre-arranged to take the fall!

Lets look at this killing as the usual criminal Jewish "Two-for-one" deal.... These criminals want the US Government to pass Gun Control legislation by having the 2nd amendment of the US Constitution repealed, and at the same time they want all criminal investigation into their multi-TRILION dollar LIBOR crime swindle stopped.  To perform this "two-for-one" deal, they send in one of their American based hit squads and massacred children in that elementary school.  The psychology of having children killed works wonders on the American public, who will scream for gun control!   At the same time, they set up Adam Lanza to take the fall as their "Lone Gunman", and make sure he dies in this massacre as well.   This is a horrible message for the father, Peter Lanza, that will most probably result in his unwillingness to testify against them at the upcoming LIBOR hearings..  Watch very shortly as Peter Lanza backs off on his testimony against the criminal Jews responsible for the LIBOR swindle, much the same way that Robert Holmes is no longer testifying against them after his son took the fall for the Aurora shooting!

What we are dealing with here is the greatest sickness that the world has ever seen.   These sick creatures want their world control, and they want to have the citizens of the world completely disarmed so that they cannot stand up against their criminality.   These massacres may be only the beginning, and will continue until people are either fooled into surrendering their guns, or finally are awakened to their crimes against humanity.  It is my hope that the latter prevails, and we put an end to their reign of terror forever.

More to come
Posted by at No comments:

TWO shadows running past GYM while police are heard saying ‘THEY are coming toward us. We got THEM’

Posted by at No comments:

Murder NRA Officials, Blame Survivalists, Repeal the 2nd Amendment, Regulate Bullets.

http://lamarzulli.wordpress.com/           
Here is a picture sent to me by Watcher Shawn;
This is why there are no shootings in Israeli schools.  Think about it.
18096_455867214470550_890034234_n
Posted by at No comments:

Gun Facts: Win every gun control debate!

Posted by at No comments:

Win every gun control debate using these facts

http://lamarzulli.wordpress.com/  
Here is a picture sent to me by Watcher Shawn;
This is why there are no shootings in Israeli schools.  Think about it.
18096_455867214470550_890034234_n
Posted by at No comments:

ALL THE EVIDENCE LEADS TO CONSPIRACY AT SANDY HOOK

Here is a picture sent to me by Watcher Shawn;  http://lamarzulli.wordpress.com/
This is why there are no shootings in Israeli schools.  Think about it.
18096_455867214470550_890034234_n
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)