An American teenager was murdered by the US government for nothing

The number of civilians who have been killed by the US government in other countries using drones now runs into the many hundreds at least. I have written about some of them, in particular the murder in a US drone strike of 16-year old American Abdulrahman Awlaki while he was eating with two cousins at an outdoor café in Yemen in 2011. He was the son of Anwar al Awlaki a once Bush-supporting but later pro-al Qaeda imam who was also killed in a drone strike in Yemen two weeks before. The father had been estranged from the son and the son had been living with grandparents in Yemen while trying to contact him. The son had never been accused of any links to terrorism
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US atrocities in Yemen claim more children as victims

Glenn Greenwald reports that a raid by the US Navy Seal Team 6 in Yemen has resulted in the death. among many other civilians including children, of Nawar al Awlaki, the 8-year old sister of 16-year old Anwar al Awlaki who was himself killed in 2011 by a US drone strike in Yemen. Both of them were the children of Anwar al Awlaki who was himself murdered in a drone strike two weeks before his son. It should be noted that the father and his two children were all US citizens, a fact that did not spare them from summary execution with no due process by Barack Obama then and Donald Trump now.
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Film review: Dirty Wars (2013)

The excellent book Dirty Wars that I reviewed yesterday is about 530 pages but is so well written that it was not hard to get through. What made it hard to take were the things the book described. For those who do not have the time to read it, the documentary of the same name covers the main points. But even those who have read the book will find the film well worth watching. It is one thing to read about the people and events described in the book, it is quite another to actually see the people and places involved and to hear from them first hand. [Read more…]

Book review: Dirty Wars (2013) by Jeremy Scahill

The book came out earlier this year and a documentary film with the same name was released in June and is available on demand on Netflix. Both cover the same ground but in different ways and are invaluable for anyone who wants to understand how the war of terror has evolved and where it is heading. In short, it is headed in the direction in which ‘the world is a battlefield’ (the subtitle of the book) and the US is now engaged in fighting eruptions of what it sees as terrorism in over 70 countries around the globe. [Read more…]

ACLU sues Obama administration over assassination secrecy

In October of last year, the ACLU filed a FOIA request to have the Obama administration release the legal and factual information relating to the killing of three American citizens: Anwar al Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, all killed by drone attacks. The administration not only refused to release any information, it would not even admit the existence of a targeted killing program. So yesterday the ACLU sued the government for the release of documents containing the “factual and legal basis” for these actions. As the lawsuit says [Read more…]

Losing the capacity for shame

Glenn Greenwald has the details of the drone killing that killed the 16-year old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, the son’s 17-year old cousin, and seven others while they were reportedly having a meal. The US government will no doubt spin some story to justify their action. The standard operation is to immediately put out some self-serving lies and not worry about them unraveling later, since few people worry about corrections once the initial impression has been made. Nowadays they don’t even have to bother doing that since the killing by a US drone of a US teenager by the US government aroused hardly any interest. Just another ho-hum event.
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