• Bienvenue dans le monde merveilleux des drones...

    Coming Soon - The Drone Arms Race - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sunday-review/coming-soon-the-drone-arms-race.html?_r=1

    Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

    “Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”

    • Journalism 101: If a US Official Says It, Report It by Charles Davis — Antiwar.com
      http://original.antiwar.com/charles-davis/2011/10/09/according-to-us-officials-death-is-proof-of-guilt

      A number of things are noteworthy about the recent piece in The New York Times, excerpted above, on China getting into the unmanned killer drone game. First, there are some basic factual errors. Last month, for instance, was not “the first time” an American citizen was the target of a U.S. drone strike; back in May, Awlaki in fact survived an earlier such assassination attempt that left two of his companions dead. And since the list of Americans determined by the Obama administration to be eligible for due-process-free death by drone is classified, and since the drone strikes themselves are often not even acknowledged by U.S. officials, we really don’t know if — and the Times plainly can’t say with certainty — even that strike was the actually the first attempt on an American citizen’s life. 

      Most interesting, though, is what the piece shows about the willingness of the Times to print, unchallenged, claims by U.S. officials — and how readily it’s willing to ignore or downplay widely reported facts when they’re disputed by those in power. For example, we are told as a matter of unattributed fact that Awlaki was a terrorist “plotter,” despite the lack of any solid evidence for that assertion having been made public by American officials. Indeed, Reuters reports that those very officials acknowledge “the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki’s hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.” Experts on the ground in Yemen also report Awlaki “did not have any real role” in the organization he was accused of being a part of.

  • Tu peux arrêter de lire le New York Times : c’est devenu un repaire d’ultra-gauchistes soviéto-anti-capitalistes. Eurk. :-)

    Protesters Against Wall Street - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/protesters-against-wall-street.html

    No wonder then that Occupy Wall Street has become a magnet for discontent. There are plenty of policy goals to address the grievances of the protesters — including lasting foreclosure relief, a financial transactions tax, greater legal protection for workers’ rights, and more progressive taxation. The country needs a shift in the emphasis of public policy from protecting the banks to fostering full employment, including public spending for job creation and development of a strong, long-term strategy to increase domestic manufacturing.

  • Daughter of ‘Dirty War,’ Raised by Man Who Killed Her Parents
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/americas/argentinas-daughter-of-dirty-war-raised-by-man-who-killed-her-parents.html

    It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

    Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.