organization:u.s. military

Why is the U.S. Military Pushing K-12 Students to Build Drones in Dayton?
By: Seth Kershner
▻http://antimili-youth.net/articles/2014/10/why-us-military-pushing-k-12-students-build-drones-dayton

As a journalist and researcher, I’ve spent the last several years investigating the expanding network of links between public #education and the U.S. military. With my colleague Scott Harding, I’ve also been researching the grassroots response to this phenomenon: the counter-recruitment movement.

Activists along with outspoken scholars and education writers like Henry Giroux, Kathy Barker and Amy Hagopian have all questioned the propriety of placing recruiters and other types of military personnel into close contact with children, which the United Nations defines as anyone under the age of 18. In a 2012 resolution, the American Public Health Association called for the demilitarization of schools, citing the creepy way that recruiters, acting as little more than trained salesmen, ingratiate themselves to win the trust of teens.

Over the past ten years, the military presence in schools has also been condemned by the New York Civil Liberties Union, Rutgers School of Law and Child Soldiers International, among other organizations. Reading trade publications like the Army’s Recruiter Journal, I’ve become accustomed to seeing extreme examples of military collaboration with public schools. Still, I was surprised when I read an edweek.org article last month about high school students in Dayton, Ohio, who are learning how to solve military problems using unmanned aerial vehicles – more commonly called #drones.

#Etats-Unis

U.S. halts missile transfer requested by Israel -
Wall Street Journal reports supply of Hellfire missiles canceled, U.S. officials demanding to review Israeli requests on individual basis.
By Barak Ravid | Aug. 14, 2014 | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.610493

The White House has instructed the Pentagon and the U.S. military to put on hold a transfer of Hellfire missiles that Israel had requested during its recent operation in the Gaza Strip, the Wall Street Journal reports.

According to the report, during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, White House officials were dismayed to discover how little influence they wield over the topic of Israeli arms shipments, against the backdrop of the U.S. government’s unhappiness with the widespread damage inflicted upon Palestinian civilians.

During the Gaza war, the report said, White House officials came to realize that large amounts of weaponry are being passed to Israel via direct channels to the Pentagon, with little oversight by the political arena.

In light of that, and against the backdrop of American displeasure over IDF tactics used in the Gaza fighting and the high number of civilian casualties caused by Israel’s massive use of artillery fire rather than more precise weapons, officials in the White House and the State Department are now demanding to review every Israeli request for American arms individually, rather than let them move relatively unchecked through a direct military-to-military channel, a fact that slows down the process.

According to a senior U.S. official, the decision to tighten oversight and require approval of higher-ranking officials over shipments, was intended to make clear to Israel that there is no “blank check” from Washington in regards to the U.S.-made weapons the IDF makes use of in its Gaza operations.

The United States is Israel’s strongest friend, a senior official in the Obama administration told the Wall Street Journal, but “[t]he notion that they are playing the United States, or that they’re manipulating us publicly, completely miscalculates their place in the world.”

Senior U.S. officials did not mince words when discussing what they called the “reckless and untrustworthy” conduct of Netanyahu and his advisors during the Gaza operation, the Wall Street Journal reported, and American officials quoted in the report described a recent telephone conversation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama as “particularly combative.”

Israeli officials, on the other hand, told the paper that in light of the backing he received from congress, Netanyahu remains unworried by talk of a crisis in relations with the White House, and is mindful of the fact Obama’s tenure will be over in two and a half years.

The officials said Netanyahu, having pushed the U.S. government aside, now seeks to receive security-related assurances in exchange for the signing of a long-term cease-fire agreement in the Gaza Strip.

“The allegations are unfounded,” Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer was quoted as saying by the WSJ, in response to the Wall Street Journal’s description of a “fraying of relations” between the two nations’ leaders. “Israel deeply appreciates the support we have received during the recent conflict in Gaza from both the Obama administration and the Congress for Israel’s right to defend itself and for increased funding of Iron Dome.”

Ah flûte, la nouvelle belle guerre humanitaire qui a commencé il y a deux jours ne fonctionne déjà plus très bien : Pentagon : ISIS Adapting to Air Strikes, Targeting Becoming ‘More Difficult’ (et tu sais ce que ça signifie pour les gens qui se trouvent du côté du « targeting », quand l’« acquisition de cibles » devient « plus difficile ») :
▻http://news.usni.org/2014/08/11/pentagon-isis-adapting-air-strikes-targeting-becoming-difficult

The U.S. military has launched more than a dozen air strikes against Iraq and Syria Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) forces in northern Iraq, but the terrorists are adapting to operating while under attack from American air power.

“One of the things that we have seen with the ISIL forces is that where they have been in the open, they are now starting to dissipate and to hide amongst the people,” said Lt. Gen. Bill Mayville, director of operations at the Pentagon’s Joint Staff during a Pentagon briefing on Monday.

“The targeting in this is going to become more difficult.”

Games of #Drones: The Uneasy Future of the Soldier-Hero in Call of Duty: Black Ops II

In this article, I argue that the first-person shooter video game, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, reflects the U.S. military‟s transition as it reimagines the soldier‟s role in war. In the age of drone technology, this role shifts from a position of strength to one of relative weakness. Although video games that feature future combat often “function as virtual enactments and endorsements for developing military technologies,” Black Ops II offers a surprisingly complex vision of the future of drones and U.S. soldiers (Smicker 2009: 107). To explore how the game reflects a contemporary vision of the U.S. military, I weave together a close textual reading of two levels in Black Ops II with actual accounts from drone pilots and politicians that illuminate the nature of drone combat. Although there are moments in Black Ops II in which avatars combat enemies with first-hand firepower, the experience of heroic diegetic violence is superseded by a combat experience defined by powerlessness, boredom, and ambiguous pleasure. The shift of the soldier from imposing hero to a banal figure experiences its logical conclusion in Unmanned, an independent video game that foregrounds the mundane, nonviolent nature of drone piloting. Instead of training soldiers to withstand emotionally devastating experiences of death and violence first-hand (or to physically enact such violence), games like Black Ops II and Unmanned train actual and potential soldiers to tolerate monotony and disempowerment.

▻http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/hero

Plus de 400 drones de l’armée américaine se sont écrasés depuis 2001
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2014/06/21/plus-de-400-drones-de-l-armee-americaine-se-sont-ecrases-depuis-2001_4442699

Plus de 400 drones américains Predator, Reaper ou encore Global Hawks se sont écrasés dans le monde depuis 2001, a rapporté vendredi 20 juin le Washington Post, qui met en avant les dangers potentiels de leur autorisation commerciale à l’avenir.
Au terme d’une enquête de plus d’un an, basée sur plus de 50 000 pages de rapports d’accidents, le quotidien affirme que 418 accidents majeurs ont été recensés par l’armée américaine, aucun n’ayant provoqué de perte humaine.

L’article du WaPo
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/06/20/when-drones-fall-from-the-sky
avec l’incontournable infographie interactive, dont voici une vue statique

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/drone-crashes/database/images/db-promo-1170.jpg

#USA Thrusts “Gay” Agenda Upon The World !
▻http://www.brujitafr.fr/article-usa-thrusts-gay-agenda-upon-the-world-123950152.html

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HHevVWQj_4k/U6CGrIWk3MI/AAAAAAABiYg/CyLNkOFEJ_A/s1600/obamagayagenda.jpg

Barack Obama has integrated promotions of homosexuality and other alternative lifestyle choices into his policy and practice since his election, successfully promoting the “gay” lifestyle in the U.S. military and forbidding the enforcement of the federal law called the Defense of Marriage Act that supported traditional marriage. The extent of the reach of his actions perhaps was epitomized by last week’s announcement that the U.S. Embassy in Israel was flying a rainbow flag – representing homosexual activism – along with Old Glory. But now a coalition in Congress, made up exclusively of Democrats, wants to take the effort further and make promoting LGBT “human rights” a “priority for the U.S. government worldwide.” (...)

The U.S. Military’s Campaign Against Media Freedom - NYTimes.com
By #CHELSEA_MANNING
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/opinion/sunday/chelsea-manning-the-us-militarys-campaign-against-media-freedom.html?_r=0

I understand that my actions violated the law.

However, the concerns that motivated me have not been resolved.

As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan. I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance.

If you were following the news during the March 2010 elections in Iraq, you might remember that the American press was flooded with stories declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers. The subtext was that United States military operations had succeeded in creating a stable and democratic Iraq.

Those of us stationed there were acutely aware of a more complicated reality.

Military and diplomatic reports coming across my desk detailed a brutal crackdown against political dissidents by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and federal police, on behalf of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Detainees were often tortured, or even killed.

Early that year, I received orders to investigate 15 individuals whom the federal police had arrested on suspicion of printing “anti-Iraqi literature.” I learned that these individuals had absolutely no ties to terrorism; they were publishing a scholarly critique of Mr. Maliki’s administration. I forwarded this finding to the officer in command in eastern Baghdad. He responded that he didn’t need this information; instead, I should assist the federal police in locating more “anti-Iraqi” print shops.

I was shocked by our military’s complicity in the corruption of that election. Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American media’s radar.

#terroristes #Etats-Unis

Nigeria’s Boko Haram isn’t just about Western education - The Washington Post
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nigerias-boko-haram-isnt-just-about-western-education/2014/05/16/d9bb5824-d9de-11e3-bda1-9b46b2066796_story.html

U.S. military officials have chosen their words carefully when describing American counterterrorism assistance in Nigeria. They have talked about the difficulty of finding units the United States can legally work with, given widespread human rights abuses during “indiscriminate” crackdowns on Boko Haram. So far, the U.S. military has remained sober.

Yet, neither Secretary of State John Kerry nor President Obama has been so circumspect. “We are . . . going to do everything possible to counter the menace of Boko Haram,” Kerry proclaimed on May 8. Obama was equally intense two days earlier, describing Boko Haram as “one of the worst regional or local terrorist organizations. . . . They’ve been killing people ruthlessly for many years now, and we’ve already been seeking greater cooperation with the Nigerians.”

Not a word from either of them about the government abuses that have driven young Nigerians into the extremists’ arms. In this regard, the U.S. reaction seems reminiscent of the intervention in Afghanistan: persistent collusion with the corrupt government, and then confusion as to why the insurgency was expanding.

Notorious Abu Ghraib Prison Shut Down Over Security Concerns - Muftah

▻http://muftah.org/notorious-abu-ghraib-prison-shut-security-concerns

On Tuesday April 16th, the Iraqi government ordered the closure of Baghdad’s Central prison, formerly known as the infamous Abu Ghraib prison where first Saddam Hussein’s regime and then the U.S. military were known to torture their opponents, many of whom were held captive without trial.

A rising number of children are dying from U.S. explosives littering Afghan land - The Washington Post
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/a-rising-number-of-children-are-dying-from-us-explosives-littering-afghan-land/2014/04/09/dea709ae-b900-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html

As the U.S. military withdraws from Afghanistan, it is leaving behind a deadly legacy: about 800 square miles of land littered with undetonated grenades, rockets and mortar shells.

The military has vacated scores of firing ranges pocked with the explosives. Dozens of children have been killed or wounded as they have stumbled upon the ordnance at the sites, which are often poorly marked. Casualties are likely to increase sharply; the U.S. military has removed the munitions from only 3 percent of the territory covered by its sprawling ranges, officials said.

Clearing the rest of the contaminated land — which in total is twice as big as New York City — could take two to five years. U.S. military officials say they intend to clean up the ranges. But because of a lack of planning, officials say, funding has not yet been approved for the monumental effort, which is expected to cost $250 million.

“Unfortunately, the thinking was: ‘ We’re at war and we don’t have time for this ,’ ” said Maj. Michael Fuller, the head of the U.S. Army’s Mine Action Center at Bagram Airfield, referring to the planning.

(...)

“If the Americans believe in human rights, how can they let this happen?”

#enfants #droits_humains #crimes #Etats-Unis

Climate Change and the Asia Pivot
▻http://fpif.org/climate-change-asia-pivot

... the response from the United States to the threat of climate change has not matched its rhetoric. U.S. institutions devoted to security threats have been some of the worst offenders. The U.S. military is the world’s largest non-state GHG polluter ▻http://www.serdp.org/Program-Areas/Weapons-Systems-and-Platforms/Fuels-and-Greenhouse-Gases. And given high-level U.S. government support for shale gas and record levels of coal exports—not to mention its evident reluctance to nix the Keystone XL pipeline—it would seem that the United States is more interested in increasing rather than decreasing the weapon of mass destruction known as climate change.

The security establishment is largely devoted to reacting to the effects of climate change—failed states, resource wars, humanitarian disasters—rather than preemptively addressing the cause. To use an analogy that military planners might understand, the United States is doing little more than treating some of the wounded rather than actually stopping the shooter. The failure of this approach is nowhere more evident than in the Asia-Pacific region, where the United States is attempting to execute its non-existent “pivot.”

Forget the NSA, the LAPD Spies on Millions of Innocent Folks
▻http://www.laweekly.com/los-angeles/forget-the-nsa-la-cops-spy-on-millions-of-innocent-folks/Content?oid=4473467

Militarisation (sur le mode « anti-insurrection ») de la police de Los Angeles alors que la criminalité a connu une forte baisse.

LAPD’s mild-sounding “predictive policing” technique, introduced by former Chief William Bratton to anticipate where future crime would hit, is actually a sophisticated system developed not by cops but by the U.S. military, based on “insurgent” activity in Iraq and civilian casualty patterns in Afghanistan.

With L.A. and most U.S. cities — including those that don’t use predictive algorithms and license-plate recognition — enjoying a huge drop in violent crime, some are indeed questioning this liberal city’s embrace of war and spy technology.

Ana Muniz, an activist and researcher who works with the Inglewood-based Youth Justice Coalition, says, “Any time that a society’s military and domestic police force become more and more similar, where the lines have become blurred, it’s not a good story.”

The military is supposed to “defend the territory from so-called external enemies,” Muniz says. “That’s not the mission of the police force — they’re not supposed to look at the population as an external enemy.”

L.A. residents may not yet grasp that more and more military technology is being aimed at them in the name of fighting routine crime. But Hamid Khan, an Open Society Foundations fellow who studies LAPD surveillance, warns, “Counterinsurgency principles are being incorporated on the local policing level.”

Report: Deadly drone strike in Yemen failed to comply with Obama’s rules to protect civilians - The Washington Post

▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/report-deadly-drone-strike-in-yemen-failed-to-comply-with-obamas-rules-to-protect-civilians/2014/02/19/46bc68f2-997d-11e3-b931-0204122c514b_story.html?hpid=z1

A U.S. drone strike in December that killed at least a dozen people in Yemen failed to comply with rules imposed by President Obama last year to protect civilians, according to an investigation by a human rights organization released Thursday.

The report by Human Rights Watch concluded that the strike, which was carried out by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, targeted a line of vehicles that were part of a wedding procession, and that evidence indicates “some, if not all those killed and wounded were civilians.”

#drones

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Calls on Computer Hackers to Unite Against NSA Surveillance | Democracy Now!
►http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/31/wikileaks_julian_assange_calls_on_computer?autostart=true
#surveillance
#snowden

Tribune de

SARAH HARRISON : Together with the Center for Constitutional Rights, we filed a suit against the U.S. military, against the unprecedented secrecy applied to Chelsea Manning’s trial. Yet through these attacks, we have continued our publishing work. In April of this year, we launched the Public Library of US Diplomacy, the largest and most comprehensive searchable database of U.S. diplomatic cables in the world. This coincided with our release of 1.7 million U.S. cables from the Kissinger period. We launched our third Spy Files, 249 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors, exposing their technology, methods and contracts. We completed releasing the Global Intelligence Files, over five million emails from U.S. intelligence firm Stratfor, the revelations from which included documenting their spying on activists around the globe. We published the primary negotiating positions for 14 countries of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a new international legal regime that would control 40 percent of the world’s GDP.
As well as getting Snowden asylum, we set up Mr. Snowden’s defense fund, part of a broader endeavor, the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund, which aims to protect and fund sources in trouble. This will be an important fund for future sources, especially when we look at the U.S. crackdown on whistleblowers like Snowden and alleged WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced this year to 35 years in prison, and another alleged WikiLeaks source, Jeremy Hammond, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison this November. These men, Snowden, Manning and Hammond, are prime examples of a politicized youth who have grown up with a free Internet and want to keep it that way. It is this class of people that we are here to discuss this evening, the powers they and we all have and can have .❞

Covert action in Colombia
U.S. intelligence, GPS bomb kits help Latin American nation cripple rebel forces
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2013/12/21/covert-action-in-colombia/?wpisrc=al_national

The secret assistance, which also includes substantial eavesdropping help from the National Security Agency, is funded through a multibillion-dollar black budget. It is not a part of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military aid called Plan Colombia, which began in 2000.

The previously undisclosed #CIA program was authorized by President George W. Bush in the early 2000s and has continued under President Obama, according to U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic officials. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program is classified and ongoing.

#Plan_Colombie, passeport pour la guerre
▻http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cahier/ameriquelatine/plancolombie

Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq With Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers
Qui sera jugé pour ces crimes ?
| NationofChange

▻http://www.nationofchange.org/ten-years-later-us-has-left-iraq-mass-displacement-epidemic-birth-de

In part two of our interview, Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail discusses how the U.S. invasion of Iraq has left behind a legacy of cancer and birth defects suspected of being caused by the U.S. military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus. Noting the birth defects in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Jamail says: “They’re extremely hard to bear witness to. But it’s something that we all need to pay attention to ... What this has generated is, from 2004 up to this day, we are seeing a rate of congenital malformations in the city of Fallujah that has surpassed even that in the wake of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nuclear bombs were dropped on at the end of World War II.” Jamail has also reported on the refugee crisis of more than one million displaced Iraqis still inside the country, who are struggling to survive without government aid, a majority of them living in Baghdad. Click here to watch part 1 of the interview. [includes rush transcript]

The Business of America Is War : Disaster Capitalism on the Battlefield and in the Boardroom
▻http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19530-the-business-of-america-is-war-disaster-capitalism-on-the-battlefie

There is a new normal in America: our government may shut down, but our wars continue. Congress may not be able to pass a budget, but the U.S. military can still launch commando raids in Libya and Somalia, the Afghan War can still be prosecuted, Italy can be garrisoned by American troops (putting the “empire” back in Rome), Africa can be used as an imperial playground (as in the late nineteenth century “scramble for Africa,” but with the U.S. and China doing the scrambling this time around), and the military-industrial complex can still dominate the world’s arms trade.

If war is combat and commerce, calamity and commodity, it cannot be left to our political leaders alone — and certainly not to our generals. When it comes to war, however far from it we may seem to be, we’re all in our own ways customers and consumers. Some pay a high price. Many pay a little. A few gain a lot. Keep an eye on those few and you’ll end up with a keener appreciation of what war is actually all about.

je repense tout à coup à cet article lu ce matin en regardant ce reportage sur l’affaire Karachi (où l’on apprend que Conseil constitutionnel ne sert à rien)
L’argent, le sang et la démocratie
▻http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/046590-000/l-argent-le-sang-et-la-democratie?autoplay=1

Obama Warned on Syrian Intel | Consortiumnews
▻http://consortiumnews.com/2013/09/06/obama-warned-on-syrian-intel

Obama Warned on Syrian Intel
September 6, 2013

Exclusive: Despite the Obama administration’s supposedly “high confidence” regarding Syrian government guilt over the Aug. 21 chemical attack near Damascus, a dozen former U.S. military and intelligence officials are telling President Obama that they are picking up information that undercuts the Official Story.

C’est assez étonnant ! Traduction française ici : ▻http://www.legrandsoir.info/memorandum-d-anciens-du-renseignement-a-obama-la-syrie-est-elle-un-pie

Looking for Hashish in Cairo ? Talk to the Police - By Mark Perry | Foreign Policy
▻http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/23/the_hidden_power_of_egypt_s_drug_running_cops+?page=full

Le trafic de drogue dans le Sinaï, qui existe depuis l’ère Moubarak et que Morsi avait eu le malheur d’essayer de juguler, est assuré par le pléthorique corps des forces de sécurité égyptiennes, les « respectables » militaires recevant leur part des bénéfices au passage.

... while American journalists may be confused about what’s happening in the Sinai, a handful of senior officers in the U.S. military have been monitoring the trouble closely. One of them, who serves as an intelligence officer in the Pentagon, told me last week that Sinai troubles are fueled not only by disaffected “Bedouin tribes” but also by “Sinai CSF [Central Security Forces] commanders” intent on guarding the drug and smuggling routes that they continue to control nearly 30 years after Rushdie’s attempted crackdown. “What’s happening in Sinai is serious, and it’s convenient to call it terrorism,” this senior officer says. “But the reality is that’s there’s a little bit more to it. What Sinai shows is that the so-called deep state might not be as deep as we think.”

Now, nearly two months after the coup that unseated President Mohamed Morsy, the power of Egypt’s “deep state” — the intricate web of entrenched business interests, high-profile plutocratic families, and a nearly immovable bureaucracy — is more in evidence than ever. At the heart of this deep state is the Egyptian military, as well as the estimated 350,000 -member CSF, a paramilitary organization established in 1969 to provide domestic security — and crush anti-government dissent. Recruited from Egypt’s large underclass of impoverished and illiterate youths, the CSF is the source of tens of millions of dollars in off-the-record profits from the sale of drugs and guns, a percentage of which it shares with its allies in the more staid, and respected, Egyptian military. 

“None of this is all that shocking to me, or to most Egyptians,” says Robert Springborg, an Egypt expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “I’ve heard stories about the CSF all the way back into the 1970s. Do they control the drug trade? It’s almost a rhetorical question — it’s a veritable tradition with them.” Nor, Springborg says, is it a surprise that the security services control the smuggling routes into and out of Sinai: “This is their turf, it’s where they operate. Smuggling is a big business for them.”

The same testimony was given in a report to European Union officials by a U.S.-based private intelligence company with ties to the Egyptian military, but with this caveat: “The Israelis have to take some responsibility for this,” one of the firm’s senior consultants said. “The Sinai is flooded with contraband, with a lot of it hooked into the trade with Israeli mafia families. And a lot of that comes right out of CSF pipelines.”

(...)
 
(...) After an August 2012 attack that left 16 Egyptian soldiers dead, Morsy did just that: He replaced Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim (a holdover from the Mubarak days), sacked his military-approved chief of staff, appointed a new head of the military’s elite Republican Guard, forced the retirement of Egypt’s intelligence czar, dismissed the governor of North Sinai, secured Israel’s approval to deploy thousands of Egyptian soldiers to the Sinai border area, and launched air raids on “suspected terrorist strongholds” in the region.

Israel responded positively to Morsy’s moves: (...) Morsy also insisted that the leadership of Hamas more capably patrol its side of the border area separating Egypt from Gaza, bring smuggling under control, and move against Gaza’s network of criminal gangs. 

(...)

“I look at what has happened in Egypt over the last two months,” the senior security executive from the U.S. political intelligence firm concludes, “and I see a tragedy. I think that Morsy really tried to change things, really tried to reform the system, to overhaul it. That included the deeply entrenched CSF.” The official pauses for only a moment. “Maybe that was the problem ,” he says.

Back in Cairo , meanwhile, Ibrahim has pledged that he will restore the kind of security seen in the days of Mubarak. That’s bad news for Morsy’s supporters, but it’s probably good news for Cairo drug kingpins, who now have an opportunity to name the CSF-supplied hashish “Bye Bye Morsy.”

Bureau investigation finds fresh evidence of CIA drone strikes on rescuers: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
▻http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/08/01/bureau-investigation-finds-fresh-evidence-of-cia-drone-strike

A field investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in Pakistan’s tribal areas appears to confirm that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) last year briefly revived the controversial tactic of deliberately targeting rescuers at the scene of a previous drone strike. The tactic has previously been labelled a possible war crime by two UN investigators.

#double-tap_strikes #drones

#Al-Qaeda Backers Found With U.S. Contracts in #Afghanistan - Bloomberg
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-30/al-qaeda-backers-found-with-u-s-contracts-in-afghanistan.html

Supporters of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan have been getting U.S. military contracts, and American officials are citing “due process rights” as a reason not to cancel the agreements, according to an independent agency monitoring spending.
The U.S. Army Suspension and Debarment Office has declined to act in 43 such cases, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said today in a letter accompanying a quarterly report to Congress.
Attachment: Inspector General’s Summary
“I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters, but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract,” Sopko said.

voilà qui devrait plaire à @nidal :)

U.S. military drone surveillance is expanding to hot spots beyond declared combat zones - The Washington Post
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-military-drone-surveillance-is-expanding-to-hot-spots-beyond-declared-combat-zones/2013/07/20/0a57fbda-ef1c-11e2-8163-2c7021381a75_print.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/images/w-drones721.png

As the Obama administration dials back the number of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, the U.S. military is shifting its huge fleet of unmanned aircraft to other hot spots around the world. This next phase of drone warfare is focused more on spying than killing and will extend the Pentagon’s robust surveillance networks far beyond traditional, declared combat zones.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has amassed more than 400 Predators, Reapers, Hunters, Gray Eagles and other high-altitude drones that have revolutionized counterterrorism operations. Some of the unmanned aircraft will return home with U.S. troops when they leave Afghanistan. But many of the drones will redeploy to fresh frontiers, where they will spy on a melange of armed groups, drug runners, pirates and other targets that worry U.S. officials.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the U.S. Air Force has drone hubs in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to conduct reconnaissance over the Persian Gulf. Twice since November, Iran has scrambled fighter jets to approach or fire on U.S. Predator drones that edged close to Iranian airspace.

In Africa, the U.S. Air Force began flying unarmed drones over the Sahara five months ago to track al-Qaeda fighters and rebels in northern Mali. The Pentagon has also set up drone bases in Ethiopia, Djibouti and Seychelles. Even so, the commander of U.S. forces in Africa told Congress in February that he needed a 15-fold increase in surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering on the continent.

In an April speech, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said the Pentagon is planning for the first time to send Reaper drones — a bigger, faster version of the Predator — to parts of Asia other than Afghanistan. He did not give details. A Defense Department spokeswoman said the military “hasn’t made any final decisions yet” but is “committed to increasing” its surveillance in Asia and the Pacific.

In South and Central America, U.S. military commanders have long pined for drones to aid counternarcotics operations. “Surveillance drones could really help us out and really take the heat and wear and tear off of some of our manned aviation assets,” Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, chief of the U.S. Southern Command, said in March.

#surveillance #drones #africom

US Military Quietly Deploying Hundreds of Soldiers to Egypt | Common Dreams
▻https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/24-6

The U.S. military is quietly deploying more than 400 U.S. soldiers trained in riot control to Egypt.

Fort Hood news station KCEN shows the soldiers training in full riot gear on various crowd control measures, including responses to molotov cocktails.

The station reports that the soldiers will deploy soon.

While the White House has remained silent on the matter, Egyptian authorities insisted Saturday that the soldiers will not be deployed against Egyptian protests but will join other countries in a routine ’peacekeeping’ force in the Sinai...

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Robert McNamara and the Dangers of Big Data at Ford and in the Vietnam War | MIT Technology Review
▻http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514591/the-dictatorship-of-data

The use, abuse, and misuse of data by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War is a troubling lesson about the limitations of information as the world hurls toward the big-data era. The underlying data can be of poor quality. It can be biased. It can be misanalyzed or used misleadingly. And even more damning, data can fail to capture what it purports to quantify.

The dictatorship of data ensnares even the best of them. Google runs everything according to data. That strategy has led to much of its success. But it also trips up the company from time to time. Its cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, long insisted on knowing all job candidates’ SAT scores and their grade point averages when they graduated from college. In their thinking, the first number measured potential and the second measured achievement. Accomplished managers in their 40s were hounded for the scores, to their outright bafflement. The company even continued to demand the numbers long after its internal studies showed no correlation between the scores and job performance.
Google’s obsession with such data for HR purposes is especially queer considering that the company’s founders are products of Montessori schools, which emphasize learning, not grades. By Google’s standards, neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg nor Steve Jobs would have been hired, since they lack college degrees.

Big data will be a foundation for improving the drugs we take, the way we learn, and the actions of individuals. However, the risk is that its extraordinary powers may lure us to commit the sin of McNamara: to become so fixated on the data, and so obsessed with the power and promise it offers, that we fail to appreciate its inherent ability to mislead.

Guantánamo Hunger Strike Enters 100th Day ; 30 Prisoners Being Force-Fed

Headlines for May 17, 2013 | Democracy Now !
▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/17/headlines#5171

The hunger strike by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay has entered its 100th day. The U.S. military now says 102 out of 166 prisoners are on strike, while lawyers for the prisoners maintain the number is higher. Thirty hunger strikers are being force-fed through nasal tubes pushed into their stomachs. Three have been hospitalized. The prisoners launched their protest against indefinite detention in early February. Most have been held for more than a decade without charge or trial.