#drone war

The Canadian military has quietly started deploying counter-drone systems around its major ports and air bases as it grapples with both the technology and the legalities of shooting down uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), CBC News has learned.  The idea is to prevent the kind of grey-zone warfare incidents that have recently paralyzed parts of northern Europe, and to avert the kinds of surprise attacks which have characterized the war between Russia and Ukraine.  The effort has largely gone on behind the scenes and is still a work in progress in some cases, mostly because of rapid advances in drone tactics and technology. 

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By Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J. S. Davies

Early that year, the C.I.A. and I began recommending more aggressive action.

We were confident that the intelligence was good enough to sustain a campaign of very precise attacks. To be sure, it was not, is not, always error-free. In late 2006, for instance, a strike killed a one-legged man we believed was a chieftain in the Haqqani network, a violent and highly effective group allied with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It turned out that the man was indeed affiliated with the Haqqanis, but he wasn’t the leader we wanted. With all the land mines in the region, there were many one-legged terrorists in South Asia.

I demanded a full explanation for the misidentification. There were no excuses. People were thoroughly, maybe even excessively, contrite.

By Scott Scheffer

On Aug. 26, a suicide bomb was detonated at the airport in Kabul amid the chaos of the U.S. troop withdrawal. Two hundred people were killed, including 13 U.S. soldiers. Reporters paid tribute to the U.S. troops that died, but barely mentioned the deaths of up to 170 Afghan people in the same attack.

From the New York Times obit:

He went beyond lawyering. In 1972, with the war in Vietnam dragging on, Mr. Clark met with Communist officials in Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, and publicly criticized American conduct of the war. That began a pattern: In 1980, months after Iranian revolutionaries had attacked the United States Embassy in Tehran and taken Americans hostage, he went to that city with nine other Americans, in violation of a travel ban, to help resolve the crisis and participate in a conference in which he criticized the United States for having supported Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi before he was deposed.

Six years later he met with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and denounced United States airstrikes against that country.

In November 1990, as the United States prepared for the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Clark, who had criticized the American deployment of forces in the gulf, consulted with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The next year he filed a complaint with the International War Crimes Tribunal accusing President George Bush of war crimes.

By Greg Butterfield

When I think of Vladik Shikhov being blown up by a Ukrainian drone strike, I also think of Adam Toledo, the 13-year-old boy killed by Chicago Police March 30. I think of the children in Flint, Michigan, poisoned by lead in their drinking water, and the thousands of migrant children in cages at the U.S.-Mexico border — first under Trump, and still today! I think of the kids as young as 2 months old deported back to Haiti under the Biden administration while that country is in turmoil because of decades and centuries of racist U.S. policy. I think of the kids in Yemen and Palestine who are dying in other U.S. proxy wars.

Jan. 8 (UPI) -- A judge in Iraq has issued an arrest warrant for President Donald Trump for the death of an Iraqi paramilitary commander who was killed last year in a U.S. drone strike assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

The warrant was announced Thursday in a press release from the Supreme Judicial Council of Iraq, stating it was issued following the completion of a preliminary investigation into the death of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandiss, the deputy head of the Popular Mobilization Forces, that considered statements from the deceased's family.