On Snowden: United States has no Functioning Democracy ~Jimmy Carter

Former US President Jimmy Carter lambasted the whitewashed US intelligence methods as undemocratic and described Edward Snowden’s NSA leak as “beneficial” for the country. Jimmy Carter was President of the United States from 1977 to 1981.

After leaving office, he founded the Carter Centre, an NGO advocating human rights. The ex-president’s human rights credentials won him Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. The Carter Centre or Foundation was very instrumental and active in assisting South Sudan when still under the grip and oppression of Sudan.

Carter lashed out at the US political system when the issue of the previously top-secret NSA surveillance program was touched upon at the Atlantic Bridge meeting on Tuesday in Atlanta, Georgia. "America has no functioning democracy at this moment," Carter said, according to Der Spiegel. Carter has also criticised America's use of drones heavily labelling it a notorious violation of rights.

He believes the spying-scandal is undermining democracy around the world, as people become increasingly suspicious of US internet platforms, such as Google and Facebook. While such mediums have normally been associated with freedom of speech and have recently become a major driving force behind emerging democratic movements, fallout from the NSA spying scandal has dented their credibility.

It’s not the first time Carter has criticized US intelligence policies. In a previous interview with CNN, he said the NSA leaks signified that “the invasion of human rights and American privacy has gone too far." He added that although Snowden violated US law, he may have ultimately done good for the country.  

"I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive, so I think that the bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial." Jimmy Carter also opined upon the election of Barack Obama that America's democratic standard is somehow intolerant. He said "the basic problem among whites in this country is that they can't just figure out why a black man should be President".

Obama and Bush to meet in Tanzania on Tuesday

Barack Obama wraps up his week long African tour in Tanzania after visiting Senegal where he promised Africa the United States' supports on democracy and food security. South Africa was his next stop where he showered accolade on Nelson Mandela.

He also met with his family members. In South Africa, Obama pledges US support to boost power and energy in Africa. He met African students where he also spoke on commitments to education.

Trade and Investments are likely to feature prominently centrally in Tanzania. President Obama is to be joined by America's former President, George W. Bush who is to attend a conference on African women.

The two Presidents are to visit the American embassy where terrorists bombed in 1998. They are to pay homage and respect to the fallen heroes. Laura Bush and Michelle Obama will also be attending a summit on women empowerment and gender matters.

Obama's foreign policy are also in consonance with that of George Bush according to some experts. The two presidents are 'aggressive' in terms of war. Bush believed in dropping American boots on the ground while Obama is a specialist in drone wars.

'America is our worst enemy': Pakistani victim of US Drone strikes speaks out

Drone strikes in Pakistan have killed 1,000 civilians, activists say, while the US maintains they only target terrorists. Victims of drone warfare and their families live in constant fear of another strike, and say they are “angry and want revenge.”

A review of classified US intelligence records has revealed that the CIA could not confirm the identity of about one-quarter of those killed by drone strikes in Pakistan during a period spanning 2010 and 2011. In a review of 14 months of classified records, 26 out of 114 attacks designate fatalities as “other militants,” and in four other attacks those killed are described as “foreign fighters.”

The CIA is reluctant to reveal information on its drone programme, Chris Woods of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism told RT.

“With so many civilians reported killed, and yet the CIA reporting that it’s killed no more than 50 or 60 civilians, I think there is need for an open, not only an open inquiry, but also for the CIA to share the information it has on who it believes it’s killed in places like Pakistan. President Obama’s speech the other week did seem to promise more openness but unfortunately we’re not seeing signs of that just yet,” Woods said.

In his post-election address to parliament, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called for an end to US drone attacks in the country’s northern tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

"This daily routine of drone attacks, this chapter shall now be closed," Sharif said to enthusiastic applause. "We do respect others' sovereignty. It is mandatory on others that they respect our sovereignty."

“Most of the strikes in Pakistan these days are really not related to Al-Qaeda or those terrorist activities but really to the war across the border in Afghanistan. The drone war has changed quite significantly over the ten years or so it’s been running. We see the US talking about using drones in Syria for example; we have had calls from Iraq and Rwanda recently for the US to use drones there. So there’s a concern among some that the US wants now to use these drones as an easy plank in their view of foreign policy,” Woods explained.

Residents of Pakistan say they are living “in constant fear of another strike.” Amin Ullah was on his way to work at a mine near his village when a drone struck the area. He lost his leg in the attack, and three other miners were killed. "The Americans should be able to tell an ordinary person from a Taliban leader. They should know who they're killing. What did we do to deserve this?" Ullah told RT.

“We are simple villagers who are stuck in a war that we didn’t ask for. It’s a hopeless feeling. Death is above our heads all the time,” he added.

Another victim of the drone attack, Nek Bahadar, lost part of his hearing and nearly his foot: “The drone’s shockwave was so intense that it threw us outside far from the place where we were sleeping. After several minutes there was another strike and it killed many more people.”

“Of course this has made me hate the Americans. We are angry and want revenge. They’ve destroyed our lives. My parents, my wife my children – we all see America our worst enemy now,” Bahadar said.

Pakistani human rights lawyer Shahzad Mirza Akbar has sued both the US and Pakistan on behalf of civilian victims in Waziristan, a mountainous region in northwestern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.

“I simply call it a concentration camp, that you've built a wall of military and militants, and behind this wall you are keeping more than 800,000 people who are not allowed to come out and no one from the rest of the country is allowed to go in. And that is kind of laboratory that US is using to use test its drone program,” Akbar told RT’s Lucy Kafanov.

Evidence of drone strikes is difficult to gather; fragments of the attacks were collected by a local journalist Noor Behram, who spent years documenting the civilian toll of drones, especially on children.

“Whenever my 3-year-old daughter hears the plane she runs inside and won’t sleep that night. The children here have been traumatized by the drones. The sound of a door banging shut is enough to terrify them,” Behram said.

There are fears that the US campaign to eliminate terrorists could end up creating more. “By carrying out drone strikes, killing innocent people who are not part of the conflict, you are just widening the conflict. You are giving the reason to people who were not part of the conflict here to become part of the conflict,” Akbar explained.
 
Breakthrough advances in unmanned aircraft technology have also sparked concerns at the UN. The UN’s rapporteur for extrajudicial killings, Christof Heyns, is calling for a worldwide ban on "killer robots" that could attack targets autonomously, without a human having to pull the trigger.

According to the report, the US, Japan, South Korea and Israel have developed various types of fully- or semi-autonomous weapons.

“It’s important to say there’s no particular day we’ll be able to say, now we have fully autonomous robots. But there are already very high levels of autonomy available, and full autonomy may be available within a few years. It’s important to emphasize the distinction between drones and lethal autonomous robots (LARs). With drones you have a human in the loop with somebody sitting behind the computer and taking the decision to pull the trigger. With robots there’s no human being in the loop, it’s a computer that takes a decision,” Heyns explained.

Courtesy: Russia Today

Classified documents reveal CIA drone strikes often killed unknown people

A review of classified US intelligence records has revealed that the CIA could not confirm the identity of about a quarter of the people killed by drone strikes in Pakistan during a period spanning from 2010 to 2011.

According to a purportedly exclusive report by NBC News that mirrors findings of an April analysis by McClatchy, between September 3, 2010 and October 30, 2011 the agency’s drone programme over Pakistan routinely designated those killed as “other militants,” a label used when the CIA could not determine affiliation, if any.

The review by NBC News paints both a confusing and troubling picture of the CIA’s reported drone strike success, which three former Obama administration officials feared could have missed or simply ignored mistakes.

Of the 14 months worth of classified documents reviewed, 26 out of 114 attacks designate fatalities as “other militants,” while in four other attacks those killed are only described as “foreign fighters.”

Even more irregular are the cases when entry records conflict on the number of those killed, with one such example indicating a drone attack had killed seven to 10 combatants, and another estimating 20 to 22 fatalities.

By comparison, McClatchy’s April review of drone strikes revealed that at least 265 of up to 482 people that the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior al-Qaeda leaders, but were instead “assessed” as Afghan, Pakistani and “unknown extremists.” Corroborating media accounts show that US drones killed only six top al-Qaeda leaders during the same period.

One key term in analyzing drone strike records are what are known as “signature” strikes, when drones kill suspects based on behaviour patterns but without positive identification, versus “personality” strike, which is when drone targets are known terrorist affiliates whose identities are verified.

According to an anonymous senior intelligence official who spoke to NBC, at the peak of drone operations in Pakistan in 2009 and 2010 as many as half of all kills were classified as “signature” strikes.

One former senior intelligence official said that at the height of the drone programme in Pakistan in 2009 and 2010, as many as half of the strikes were classified as signature strikes.

Retired Admiral Dennis Blair, the former Director of National Intelligence from 2009 to 2010, addressed NBC’s report with the claim that the precision of drone strikes was superior to those of traditional battlefield weapons.

“In Afghanistan and Iraq and places where you have troops in combat ... you know better with drones who you’re killing than you do when you’re calling in artillery fire from a spotter [or] calling in an airplane strike,” he said.

“This is no different from decisions that are made on the battlefield all the time by soldiers and Marines who are being shot at, not knowing who fired the shot, having to make judgements on shooting back or not. This is the nature of warfare,” added Blair.

As to just how analysts arrive at determining unverified, “signature” drone targets, that system relies on data which draws connections between the unidentified individuals and known militants. That might entail monitoring everything from the frequency that a suspect visits a particular location, meets certain individuals, or makes phone calls and sends emails.  

During a key speech defending his administration’s use of targeted drone killings in May, President Obama defended the CIA’s drone programme as a “legal,” “lethal” and “effective” counterterrorism tool, while at the same time acknowledging some civilian casualties.

A report entitled “Living Under Drones,” jointly released by Stanford University and New York University in 2012, is far less muted on civilian casualties, and argues that the civilian death toll in drone strikes over Pakistan is far higher than is reported.

In the classified reports reviewed by NBC News, for example, of the 600 some killed only one is listed as a civilian, a statistic which Micah Zenko, a drone expert at the Council on Foreign Relations described as “incredible.”

The Stanford-NYU report, for its part, bases its conclusions on 130 interviews, as well as a review of media reports, though the methodology employed can itself be a subject of debate.

Separately, an Associated Press investigation in 2012 reported that out of 10 drone strikes over a period of 18 months, Pakistani villagers claimed that only 70 per cent of those killed by US strikes were militants, with the rest either civilians or tribal police.

The new Pakistani Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif has called for an end to drone strikes in Pakistan.

Courtesy: Russian Times

Newly elected Pakistani PM, Sharif demands end to US drone strikes

Nawaz Sharif after his swearing in faced the most contentious issue in Pakistan, noticeable in its political campaigns and other facets of its society; activities of US drones on its soil. The US drones have allegedly killed more innocent civilians than militants. Upon the return of Pervez Musharraf to Pakistan, he was booed and looked askance at because he instituted and signed the drone menace.

Pakistan’s parliament elected Nawaz Sharif as prime minister Wednesday. He received 244 votes in the 342-seat parliament, returning him to the Prime Minister’s office for an unprecedented third term. In his first address since taking office, Sharif called on the US to end its campaign of drone attacks in the country’s tribal northwest.

“We respect the sovereignty of others and they should also respect our sovereignty and independence. This campaign should come to an end,” AFP quoted him as saying. Sharif, who was deposed in a military coup in 1999, won the May 11 elections as part of his Pakistan Muslim League-N party.

United States Deploys Forces to Niger; Nigeria to host Drone Base

It is no longer a surprise that energy drove France to Mali because of Niger's Areva. Though France had an ulterior motive of her own to be in Mali, she however received massive accolades for the intervention. On getting to Mali, she deployed troops to Areva in Niger. Now, it is the US' turn.

The US military deployed about 100 troops in Niger to help coordinate intelligence sharing with the French, whose forces are currently fighting to seize Islamist-controlled territory in Mali, President Obama announced Friday.

The US forces are armed with “weapons for the purpose of providing their own force protection and security,” Obama said in a letter to Congress, adding that Niger officials consented to their deployment. The president said the troops will operate out of Niger to help gather intelligence information about the conflict in Mali, but did not elaborate on any specific plans that will be assigned to them.

The announcement comes just a few weeks after the Nigerian Defence Ministry revealed their approval to host an airbase for unarmed American spy drones, which could be used in Mali to monitor Islamists.