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US Drones: Afghanistan's Angels of Death |
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Saturday, 02 April 2016 08:41 |
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Feroz writes: "The vehicles were completely destroyed. So, too, was the body of one of the passengers, four-year-old Amir. In April 2013, a U.S. drone strike killed the child in Kunar, one of Afghanistan's eastern provinces, together with 13 other people."
A predator drone. (photo: Veronique de Viguerie/Getty)
US Drones: Afghanistan's Angels of Death
By Emran Feroz, TeleSUR
02 April 16
Afghanistan is the country most bombed by drones in the world. Nevertheless, it seems that the world is silent on its devastation.
 he vehicles were completely destroyed. So, too, was the body of one of the passengers, four-year-old Amir. In April 2013, a U.S. drone strike killed the child in Kunar, one of Afghanistan's eastern provinces, together with 13 other people.
25-year-old Abdul Wahid, Amir's uncle, was also among the victims. "I couldn't bear the news. I lost all sense in this moment. Suddenly, all the pictures of my son and my brother came to my mind while my tears couldn't stop", says Naqibullah, Amir's father.
In fact, Naqibullah took his son to the city of Asadabad for medical treatment. He told Abdul Wahid, his brother, to take his son back to their village while he stayed in the city. This was the last time he saw both of them alive.
When he telephoned home to find out if they had returned safely, he was told they had not. Locals told him that both of them have been killed by a drone strike. Later, government officials insisted that Amir and Abdul Wahid were Taliban fighters. According to Naqibullah, they also said the onus was on him to prove otherwise.
"It's so grotesque and detestable that they claim that my brother and my son, a four-year-old child, were armed militants", Naqibullah says outraged.
Until today, nobody knows why Amir, Abdul Wahid and the 12 other people, also civilians, were targeted. Nevertheless, since 2001, drone strikes have become part of the daily life in Afghanistan.
Unknown victims
According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based organization, Afghanistan is "the most drone bombed country in the world". Between 2001 and 2013, at least 1,670 drone strikes took place in the country.
Most times, it is not known who the victims of such strikes are. Accurate data about the impacts of the strikes, particularly casualty figures, do not exist. There are different reasons for this.
On one side, the media seems to largely ignore drone warfare and its victims – not just in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia. Apart from that, it often seems that there is no political will for transparency. In Afghanistan, this is especially the case since the so-called National Unity Government came to power in 2014.
Since then, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has not said a single word about drone strikes and civilian casualties. Instead, it was reported that the president regularly drinks tea with leading U.S. military officials. In the first days of his presidency, Ghani hurried to sign a Bilateral Security Agreement with the United States. Hamid Karzai, his predecessor, refused to sign the paper when it became clear that the agreement assured impunity for U.S. soldiers and foreshadowed ongoing American violence in the country, such as brutal night raids and drone strikes.
"President Karzai was strongly against the use of drones. Unlike with the current government, there was no agreement with Karzai on the use of weaponed drones in Afghanistan. Therefore, the former president has publicly condemned such attacks", says Aimal Faizi, who was a spokesman of Afghanistan's former president.
Although Karzai was a strong opponent of the "angels of death", as people in some areas of Afghanistan call the drones, the known data, regularly published by the U.S. military, proves that most of the attacks took place during his term in office.
Media spreads official line
However, during the last months, reports on drone strikes in Afghanistan are increasing. Like in the case of Amir or Abdul Wahid, Afghan government officials or representatives of the military repeatedly insist that the victims were Taliban fighters or Islamic State group and Al Qaida militants. In most cases, media outlets just quote these officials and spread a one-sided view of the events. Rarely, do they scrutinize the victim’s real identities.
"In my experience, police and army officials and provincial government officials are generally the main journalistic sources for this kind of information. But it is not often clear where they get their information", says TBIJ's Jack Serle, who has been observing drone strikes in Afghanistan for years. "There are so many different lines of communication and circles within circles, it makes it really difficult to be sure exactly who has been killed in Afghanistan. Often all you can be sure of is someone's perished. Sadly, as ever, the challenge is figuring out who they were and what they did."
According to a recent report of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, more than 11,000 civilians were killed or wounded in the country in 2015. While armed groups and the Afghan military are thought to have been responsible for 98 percent of these incidences, 2 percent of civilians casualties were attributed to international forces, mainly in the form of air strikes.
The report also makes clear that the rate at which civilians are being killed by U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan is at its highest point since 2008. Research by TBIJ shows that on average a civilian was killed by every fourth drone or jet strike in 2015. According to the U.N. report, civilian casualties caused by international military forces and Afghan air force increased by 83 percent in 2015, causing 296 civilian casualties, of which 149 were deaths. Fifty-seven percent of those were caused by international forces.
But the U.N. report does not focus on drone strikes. Also the U.S. government data itself does not differ between classical aerial strikes and drone strikes. For that reason, it is not clear how many drone strikes really took place in Afghanistan.
Besides, UNAMA counts in a very conservative way and requires at least three different sources for a single casualty. Thus, family members of drone victims, like Naqibullah, say that their relatives have not even made it into the count. Additionally, it must be considered that has become a common practice among the majority of media outlets to describe all victims as suspected militants or terrorists, and not as civilians.
Critics of the U.N. report say that without journalists or human rights activists present in the country's most war-torn areas, killings often go unreported, never making it into formal records.
"Most war-torn areas of Afghanistan, especially where drone strikes take place regularly, are not visited by journalists and activists. They are considered as too dangerous, as dead zones," says Waheed Mozhdah, a political analyst based in Kabul.
Besides, records of civilian casualties only begin from 2009, eight years after the West's war in Afghanistan started. For that reason, the huge majority of the victims will remain unknown.
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Human Landscapes: Turkey's Secret Trials of Journalists |
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Saturday, 02 April 2016 08:40 |
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Ali writes: "The assault on the Kurds and dissidents, the imprisonment of journalists, the closure of Radikal, the disintegration of the ruling elite, the fantasies of Erdogan fueled by the elixir of power, has created an extremely serious crisis."
A rally against the arrest of two prominent Turkish journalists. (photo: Ozan Kose/Getty Images)
Human Landscapes: Turkey's Secret Trials of Journalists
By Tariq Ali, CounterPunch
02 April 16
The secret trial of two Turkish journalists from the liberal mainstream daily CUMHURIYET—its Chief Editor Can Dundar and Erdem Gul—began this. They are charged with high treason for publishing material on a sensitive subject: Turkey’s collusion with ISIS and the US in the Syrian war.
 onfronted with the human landscapes of contemporary Turkey, what might the late and great Communist poet Nazim Hikmet (who even Erdogan used to quote in his speeches) have written? Some things would have been familiar: the never ending transportation of political prisoners; the continuing suffering and torture of the Kurds (Hikmet was sentenced to 15 years after the 1925 Kurdish revolt); the endless talk in prison, reinterpreting the past; life in what could become a one-party state where the government exercises a virtual monopoly of information. A limiting of liberties…
Hikmet would not have been surprised in the least by the collapse of Republicanism, but the success of the Islamists would have stunned him. After all as a leftist he thought the only alternative was socialism. He had been a guard of honor at Lenin’s bier in that ice-cold January of 1924. He could never have believed that history would be so cruel. He certainly would never have signed the supportive letter that some liberal, secular intellectuals drafted a few years ago offering broad support to Erdogan’s government, a list that sadly included names like Murat Belge. Hikmet would have meditated on why this had come to pass and done so as a poet who wrote of his own work that ‘it is never for me a question of form or content but of consciousness, of philosophic, economic and social conception.’
The assault on the Kurds and dissidents, the imprisonment of journalists, the closure of Radikal, the disintegration of the ruling elite, the fantasies of Erdogan fuelled by the elixir of power, has created an extremely serious crisis. NATO’s favorite Islamists split with Gulen’s faction detached itself from Erdogan. The emergence of the HDP as a progressive party of all Turks—Kurds and non-Kurds, and its electoral successes appear to have unhinged Erdogan. I refer to him because he is the first among unequals in a government desperately short of talent. Power appears to have blinded him to the realities of his own country and region. He behaves more and more like a dictator.
Once a friend of Assad in Syria, making friendly noises to Teheran, he changed when the West decided to take advantage of the Syrian uprising and topple Assad. Turkey was the obvious conduit for supplying rebels of every stripe with weaponry and ‘advisers’, i.e. CIA units who were guiding the ‘armed resistance’ to the embattled regime in Damascus . Erdogan did what he was required to do and thought that he could also gain some advantage at home by acting as NATO’s key point man in the region. Damascus countered by giving the Syrian Kurds virtually complete autonomy.
In response there is little doubt that Turkey became the centre of the ISIS initiative to crush both Rojava and Damascus. The supply routes were on Turkish territory. This is hardly a secret, so why arrest senior journalists for writing the truth? The real problem for Erdogan and the Saudis is that ISIS, who took arms and money from anyone and everyone, were not a force that could be fully controlled by either Riyadh or Ankara. They live their own fantasy, of reuniting the Arab world under an iron Sunni dictatorship they call the Caliphate. In Turkey they must have established links with Turkish intelligence and, indeed, the deep state in Ankara did not deny that the horrific bombing of a peaceful demonstration was an ISIS initiative. They admitted that some of the ISIS personnel in Ankara were under watch, but that they had no idea of what they were planning. Perhaps this is true, but I find it difficult to believe. I think some people averted their eyes to let the outrage happen and frighten away many supporters of the HDP prior to the last general elections.
In Hikmet’s poem, Halil (Hikmet himself) meets an egotistic middle-class physician represented as the voice of an isolated and neurotic bourgeoisie, who finally commits suicide while in a neighboring hospital ward a child is being born. I’m not sure that Erdogan knows this poem but I would strongly recommend he read it even though mirrors are sometimes frightening. I would suggest the same to Davutogulu, but I don’t want to tax his brains too much.
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A Bird, a Plane? No, It's Superdelegates! |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=22195"><span class="small">Michael Winship, Bill Moyers & Company</span></a>
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Friday, 01 April 2016 14:35 |
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Winship writes: "The Democratic Party's special class of entitled and unelected VIP delegates helps explain what's wrong with the way we choose our presidential candidates."
Confetti falls as Barack and Michelle Obama and Joe and Jill Biden gather at the end of the Democratic National Convention in 2008. (photo: Stan Honda/Getty)
A Bird, a Plane? No, It's Superdelegates!
By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company
01 April 16
The Democratic Party's special class of entitled and unelected VIP delegates helps explain what's wrong with the way we choose our presidential candidates.
 ast week, our suggestion that Hillary Clinton call for the resignations of her pals Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz got a big response. But a few people misunderstood what we were saying.
Some thought Bill Moyers and I were calling for Clinton herself to step aside (we weren’t). Others thought we somehow believed Clinton actually had the power to fire Emanuel (of course she doesn’t). Wasserman Schultz is a different story; the demand for her resignation as DNC chair grows by the day and Clinton doubtless will have a voice as to whether she stays or goes (on top of which, for the first time since she entered the House of Representatives, Wasserman Schultz’s Florida congressional seat is being challenged in a Democratic primary by attorney and former Bernie Sanders advisor Tim Canova).
Using the rhetorical suggestion that she and Rahm take a hike – each of them a symbol of the current tone-deaf and corporate-enslaved state of the Democratic Party — was a way of easing into the idea that the party’s elite is as clueless about the disillusionment of the party’s traditional base as the GOP establishment has been about Donald Trump’s ascent. At their peril, the muckety-mucks of both parties ignore the anger and resist the demand for change that have fueled not only Trump but the Bernie Sanders phenomenon as well, albeit the Sanders movement is as progressive as Trump’s is brutish.
One of the more troubling aspects of the Democrats and their nomination process is something we touched upon in last week’s piece: the 712 or so “superdelegates,” about 15 percent of the total (and 30 percent of the majority needed to win the nomination) who will cast ballots at the July convention in Philadelphia. They include President Obama and Vice President Biden, 239 Democratic members of the House and Senate, 21 sitting governors, 437 Democratic National Committeemen and women, and a category referred to as “distinguished party leaders” – former presidents and veeps, ex-congressional leaders and erstwhile presidential nominees.
These superdelegate VIPs are chosen not by the voters in this year’s primaries or caucuses but selected by the party solely for their status as members of the Democratic upper crust. As we wrote last week, Wasserman Schultz recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper that their appointment is necessary so entitled incumbents and party leaders don’t have to run for the position “against grassroots activists.”
(Just a few weeks later, though, in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business News, Wasserman Schultz swung her logic ’round 180 degrees. The superdelegates exist, she now declared, “to make sure that party activists who want to be delegates to the convention don’t have to run against much better-known and well-established people at the district level.” So which is it? Neither really makes total sense.)
This whole superdelegate thing started back in 1984, when, after the devastating presidential defeat of George McGovern in 1972 and President Jimmy Carter’s landslide reelection loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, it was determined that experienced party stalwarts should be made delegates to fend off fringe efforts to divert the mainstream. Of course, the introduction of the superdelegates that year didn’t keep Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale from being mauled by the congenial Reagan reelection juggernaut.
Nevertheless, the perceived wisdom has become that, “Lest those pesky Democratic grass-roots activists and loser-lover types be inclined to drive the party over a leftward-hanging cliff, the establishment is supposed to step in to ensure that we nominate the electable candidate.” Those are the words of Democratic establishment member Susan Estrich, who apparently coined the word “superdelegates” and opposed the idea back when she was supporting the presidential aspirations of Teddy Kennedy. Now that she’s part of the higher echelon, Estrich has reversed her position. “How time changes things,” she writes. You bet.
Technically, superdelegates are not officially bound to a candidate until that moment the first ballot roll call begins on the convention floor although the vast majority of them have announced their support for Hillary Clinton. (This is why up to now when tallies add up pledged delegates and superdelegates, Clinton seems to have such an unshakeable lead over Sanders.)
But as Susan Estrich would say, this can change. So it was in 2008 when superdelegates who had announced their support for Clinton changed their minds as Barack Obama notched up victory after victory. And theoretically, so it is this year as Bernie Sanders supporters, at the start virulently opposed to superdelegates as an obstacle to the will of the people, are now pursuing them as their candidate has achieved more success than anticipated.
(Sanders himself has described superdelegates as “problematic” and said they should vote for whichever candidate has carried their state’s primary or caucus, also noting, “I think I am a stronger candidate to defeat Trump than Secretary Clinton and I think many of the superdelegates understand that.”)
In truth, the existence of the superdelegates is rather like congressional filibuster rules or other arcane methods of manipulating the system – those they hurt are against, those they help are in favor – but when the roles are flipped, suddenly, those who were opposed find something to like in the rules as the shoe slips from one foot to the other.
But like so many of those rules, superdelegates symbolize something that has to go: the entrenched, inside-the-Beltway embrace of power and influence by the Democratic illuminati that does little for the poor and middle class and everything for the one percent that writes the big checks.
Just last week, Fredreka Schouten of USA Today wrote that through the end of February, “Fundraising in the presidential contest has zoomed past the $1 billion mark, fueled by the dozens of super-wealthy Americans bankrolling super PACs that have acted as shadow campaigns for White House contenders.”
And in late February, Jeff Naft at ABC News reported, “… When you remove elected officials from the superdelegate pool, at least one in seven of the rest are former or current lobbyists registered on the federal and state level, according to lobbying disclosure records. That’s at least 67 lobbyists who will attend the convention as superdelegates.” A majority of that 67 say they’re supporting Hillary Clinton.
Last summer, Wasserman Schultz’s Democratic National Committee lifted a ban on lobbyists making donations to cover the costs of convention-related events, a precursor to the DNC’s February rollback of Barack Obama’s ban on contributions to the party from political action committees and federal lobbyists.
Anyone who’s attended any of the recent Democratic Party national conventions can attest that amidst all the confetti, assorted hoopla and solemn testaments of democracy at work, there are outrageous displays of conspicuous consumption as law firms, lobbyists, consultants and their corporate clients manipulate the funding rules and compete to see who can create the swankiest, most excessive shindig. With the lifting of that lobbyist cash ban, Philadelphia could be bigger than ever.
It will be one giant blowout for sure, and a safe bet that the superdelegates will be whooping it up with many of their richest and most persuasive big wheel friends. No need to fight for your right to party, superdelegates. This is their gift to you. Just ignore the price tag attached.
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The Cowards' Wars |
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Friday, 01 April 2016 14:24 |
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Bohne writes: "Tell me one crime of aggression the 'international community,' the dogs of war, has not committed with impunity since the downfall of the Soviet Union in their unopposed quest for recolonizing the world?"
US soldier walks down street filled with Iraqi children. (photo: Getty)
The Cowards' Wars
By Luciana Bohne, CounterPunch
01 April 16
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.
They kill us for their sport
— Edgar in William Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
hey come; they see; people die. They laugh. Or say it was worth it. Their maps are not a territory inhabited by living beings; they are military targets. They bomb from safe altitudes, no lower than 15,000 feet (Yugoslavia, 1999, for example) to protect their own volunteer warriors. In 38,000 sorties and 22,000 tons of bombs in three months (Yugoslavia, 1999), they never lost a plane. They promise the people their bombs will not harm a hair on their heads; then, they bomb markets and bridges at noon, when people are at their thickest; the say they are as careful at noon as they are at midnight. They claim they have nothing against the people—only against their leaders; then they bomb water supplies, electrical grids, schools, hospitals, churches, libraries, museums. They hold civilians in their power, hostages to their air force, their cluster and phosphorus bombs. They poison the land with depleted uranium and raise whole crops of human cancers for generations. They send drones. They fund, train, and arm cutthroat armies. They terrorize civilians for their political ends. They are the humanitarians of the “international community,” and they have nothing to envy the conquistadores, the exterminators of native people, the enslavers, the imperialists of times gone by. They are the agents of collateral genocide.
They are the terror they claim to fight, and they dress it in noble words.
“Operation Iraqi Freedom” (9 March to 9 April 2003) claimed from 40,000 to 100,000 Iraqi military deaths. “Insurgent” deaths (April 2003 to January 2009) amounted to between 26, 320 and 27, 000. Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated from between 190,000 and one million. The death toll for “Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan” (2001-2014) adds up to 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan. By contrast, the NATO British contingent in Afghanistan, a total of 134, 780 troops, lost 447. At a conservative estimate the total deaths caused by the “war on terror” in these three war zones alone are 1.3 million (estimates from Iraqi Body Count, The Lancet, Physicians for Social Responsibilities). But these estimates include only deaths resulting from violent conflict. They do not include deaths resulting from the aftermath of war—destroyed infrastructure and support institutions. From sanctions: the regime of sanction in Iraq, August 6th (Hiroshima Day) 1991 to 2003, claimed 1.7 million Iraqi lives, according to UN data.
How do they get away with it? By thwarting, strong-arming, co-opting, bribing, rewriting, and abusing international law: the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1976 amended Geneva Conventions (on the laws and customs of war, which the US did not sign), the Charter of the United Nations, and their own constitutions. They wage wars of aggression in the name of abstractions or noble causes—“the war on terror,” R2P, “human rights,” and the prize, “genocide,” debasing the term, if convenient, to a street rumble between two ethnic groups.
What if the United Nations issued a resolution banning wars on abstractions? The “wars on terror” would become illegal (and, no, they didn’t end with Obama; they just became the “humanitarian wars”). The Security Council could order a “global police action” to sweep up and “neutralize” the army of cutthroats. So far, only Russia has shown, with actions in Syria, that it is willing to act to remove the terrorist scourge, whose atrocities proliferate and extend from the Middle East, through the heart of Africa, to European capitals. As I write, the Syrian Army, backed by Russian airstrikes, has retaken Palmyra, a significant strategic victory, opening the way to liberation of Raqqa, the IS stronghold, in the east of Syria.
But, in fact, there is no need for such a resolution. The UN Charter forbids wars of aggression. It specifies that breaking the peace to wage a “war of choice” is the “supreme international crime.” The provisions of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (ICC) include jurisdiction over crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes but exclude the “supreme international crime,” the crime of aggression. This exclusion resulted at the instigation of the US in 1998-99, just as it prepared to attack Serbia in the Kosovo War. The US signed (Clinton) and then unsigned (Bush) the statute, without ever intending to ratify it, but it meddled, bullied and coerced so as to make it clear who was in charge of writing and unwriting the laws, who had the right to impunity ad infinitum, based on its assumed altruistic morality of intervening to adjust the affairs of the world.
The US exercised every political muscle to subordinate the ICC to the authority of the Security Council, where it could exercise its veto power to deep-six any prosecution of crimes it opposed. It favored ad-hoc tribunals such as the International Tribunal for Crimes in Yugoslavia (ICTY), instituted by the Security Council in 1993, at the request of the US. A virtual kangaroo court, it abducted and tried Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague in a show trial for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes—without any substantial evidence, limiting time for cross-examination by the defense, using pseudo-legal pretexts to harass and obstruct it, treating the defense contemptuously, and in every way demonstrating that the tribunal was politically motivated, a feature contrary to the spirit and purpose of criminal law. The tribunal refused to investigate credible evidence charging NATO with war crimes, though it was charged with investigating crimes committed by all parties in the tragic secession wars of Yugoslavia. An example will suffice to demonstrate the political bias of the tribunal: Milosevic was indicted, among other spurious charges, for murdering 374 people; NATO killed 500 civilians. Only one of the two was investigated.
Failing to secure impunity for aggression by placing the ICC under the authority of the Security Council, the US insisted on an amendment, preventing the court from exercising that jurisdiction, until seven eights of ratifying states agreed on a definition of aggression and the means by which it could be prosecuted. Until the angels stop dancing on the pin of that prevarication, the US and its junior partners in the “international community” can freely exercise their right to crimes of aggression. This is how the ICC lists the crimes of aggression it is prevented from prosecuting:
*Invasion or attack by armed forces against territory
*Military occupation of territory
*Annexation of territory
*Bombardment against territory
*Use of any weapons against territory
*Blockade of ports or coasts
*Attack on the land, sea. Or air forces or marine and air fleets
*The use of armed forces which are within the territory of another state by agreement, but in contravention of the conditions of the agreement
*Allowing territory to be used by another state to perpetrate an act of aggression against a third state
*Sending armed bands, groups, irregulars, or mercenaries to carry out acts of armed force
Tell me one crime of aggression the “international community,” the dogs of war, has not committed with impunity since the unfortunate downfall of the Soviet Union in their unopposed quest for recolonizing the world? Do you wonder that Putin is garnering so much global popularity for insisting on acting within the law? How many Security Council resolutions have authorized actions by the “international community” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen—not to mention actions in martyred Africa or the underhanded counter-reform chicaneries in Latin America? None. This is a period of American absolutism, which is wiping clean the rule of law off the face of the earth. The result is creeping barbarism. No one is safe from Timbuktu to Brussels. Anarchy is indeed loosed upon the world.
Take Libya: now that it is not even a functional state, does any law there even apply? Why do the cowards who destroyed it bother to twist themselves into knots, like serpents in a pit, to justify a second intervention? Why don’t they maraud right in—like ISIS does? Because cowards cannot admit to cowardice, much less submit to judgment–and because the tatters they made of the law are the last cover for these scoundrels’ moral nakedness. They drag others into their bolgia of deepening Hell. Right now, for NATO member Italy, it’s a question of complying with US request, already approved in late February, to use the military base at Sigonella, Sicily, to send drones to Libya to protect American Special Forces while they clear out ISIS. Since when have Special Forces required the assistance of a mechanical Mary Poppins? They’re supposed to be in dangerous situation, by definition. It’s not conscience that “makes cowards of [them] all.” It’s criminality. If Qaddafi had not been sadistically and illegally removed (check list of crimes of aggression above) there would be no ISIS in Libya.
Never mind: Sigonella will be used for American drone raids in Libya. Opposition in the Italian Parliament and public opinion are vocally against this use, so the Italian government is presenting the project as “defensive,” just as in 1999 the formula of “integrated defense” was deployed to justify the use of Italian Tornadoes bombing Yugoslavia. Drones in this case will not be “defensive.” Contrary to the idea of protecting Special Forces, drones depend on precisely those forces on the ground to furnish the exact coordinates of the target the drone must hit and destroy. Precision attacks will be launched from Sigonella not “integrated defense.”
And then what? Retaliation— Paris, Istanbul, Beirut, Brussels in Rome or Milan? State of siege in Italy? Suspension of civil liberties? Hecatombs of dead civilians? Well may the Italian government resent the publicity the United States has bestowed on the accord over the use of Sigonella. They would have preferred to keep the accord secret, hoping that ISIS wouldn’t notice Italy’s collaboration with US forces in Libya. Fat chance, but cowards and gangsters think like that—make it look like an accident or construct “plausible deniability.”
“Your wars; our dead” is a popular poster in protests against wars in Italy. It expresses the consciousness of the ultimate cowardice of these wars, and, indeed, of all aggressive wars.
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