Majorities in many countries disapprove of U.S drone strikes

The survey can be found here. Europeans and Japanese remain largely confident in Obama although this confidence has declined in most countries since 2009. Most Muslim countries remain critical of his leadership.

Some of the results show that many of those surveyed must not pay any heed to actual statistics. For example in Europe 62 per cent of Germans think that China not the U.S. is the top economic power. 58 per cent in Britain and 57 per cent in Spain think the same. However measured by GDP the U.S. is about twice as powerful as China. See this site. No doubt China is growing more quickly than the U.S but that is quite a different matter.

On U.S. use of drone strikes in the war on terror there is widespread disapproval except in the U.S. The U.S, is the only place where more approve then disapprove their use.

In the U.S. 62 per cent approve of the strikes. The percentage approval is greatest among Republicans (74 per cent), Independents (60 per cent) and there is even a majority among Democrats (58 per cent)

In the other 19 countries surveyed the best approval rate is the UK with 44 per cent approving but 47 per cent disapproval. After the UK majorities disapprove of the attacks. Germany is 59 per cent disapproval and 38 per cent approval. France has an even higher disapproval rate at 63 per cent with37 per cent approval.

In Asia China has a 55 per cent disapproval and 25 per cent approve. Next door to the U.S. Mexico has 73 per cent disapproval and 24 per cent approval.

In South America Brazil has 76 per cent disapproval and only 19 per cent approval. Russians disapprove by 68 per cent with only 17 per cent approving.

Arab countries such as Egypt have high disapproval rates. Egyptians disapprove by 89 per cent to only 6 approving. The highest disapproval rate is in Greece with 90 per cent disapproving and only 5 per cent approving. For more see the full poll results.

The Age of U.S. Shadow Power: Juan Cole

In an article published recently in the NATION and also available here. Juan Cole a prof. at the U. of Michigan and well know commentator on Middle East politics writes of what he calls "The Age of American Shadow Power".

Cole notes that covert actions have long been part and parcel of U.S. policies to project power world-wide. However within the last decade he argues that these actions are becoming a more important part of U.S. power supplementing or even replacing conventional military action in many cases.

Among the new shadow power tools are drone strikes, electronic spying, secret operations by military units such as the Joint Special Operations Command. The government also now uses many more corporate contractors and mercenaries for security and even some terrorist groups.

As Cole points out these new tools can lead to operations that may put the U.S. in peril and create blow back. They also make the U.S. very unpopular in areas where they are unemployed. Drone attacks, and CIA operatives in Pakistan are a good example as well as the antics of private security contractors,. This is just a short introduction to the article for much more detail see the full article. Cole claims that if the use of shadow power is not rolled back it could hurt U.S. diplomacy and the blow back from the practices could make the U.S. actually less secure.

Ron Paul speaks out against Obama's drone attacks

   Paul has been consistent in his attack on counter-terror methods which violate basic human rights. He has also taken a strong anti-war stance in the face of the fact that many Republicans are hawks.
    In a campaign speech in Iowa Paul noted that even Nazis after World War II got trials. Now even a U.S. citizen such as Anwar al-Awlaki can be assassinated  without any trial, or even being charged. Both Awlaki and also his son a 16 year old were both killed in Obama ordered drone strikes.
   Of course, the Obama defenders will simply say that there is a state of hostilities between Al Qaeda and related groups and the U.S. and just as in warfare one can target and kill the enemy without trial. At the same time the Obama administration does not even regard the term "war on terror" as politically correct while employing the notion of  hostilities as a means to place any suspected terrorist beyond the reach of any basic legal rights.

    Some in the crowd booed Paul as he brought up the drone issue without prompting. However, Paul's position on this matter has been consistent. Many in the American populace are fed up with politicians who pander to them and then go their own merry way after they are elected. Even if people do not like many of Paul's policies they realize that he is different and respect him for that. I have included  a You Tube video with Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks which shows even some liberals give him respect. For more this article..

Dead terrorists often turn up alive.

In the case of drone attacks very often intelligence about who is killed is suspect. Those reporting to US intelligence know what the intelligence officers want to hear. Militants and militant leaders were killed. So that is what they verify. I expect that often the militants themselves may play along especially when leaders are reported killed. If the leaders are dead they will not be targeted any more. I often wonder when the militants themselves verify killings whether that is not just a ruse. This is from Washington Times.

Wanted: Accurate intel on 'dead' terrorists




Ashish Kumar Sen

Taliban leader Qari Hussain? Killed in January 2008 ... until he appeared at a news conference a few months later in Waziristan.

Al Qaeda official Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri? Annihilated in a drone attack in September ... but still able to give an exclusive interview in October.

Taliban honcho Hakimullah Mehsud? Wiped out in a missile attack in January ... or was he?

Reports on Thursday that Mehsud was only wounded in that U.S. drone attack have prompted questions about the quality of intelligence emerging from Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Bruce Riedel, a CIA veteran currently with the Brookings Institution, described the latest reports as "a useful reminder that claims of the drones' successes need to be judged with caution."

"Intelligence is not a science experiment," Mr. Riedel said. "It is a difficult task of resolving conflicting data over time."

According to an Associated Press dispatch, four intelligence officers said Pakistan's main spy agency now thinks Mehsud is alive, citing electronic surveillance and reports from sources in the field, including from inside the Taliban.

U.S. officials privately have expressed frustration with the level of cooperation from Pakistani officials in the fight against militant groups.

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency helped create the Taliban in the 1990s. Despite pressure from the U.S. to sever links with the militants in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. officials and analysts say some elements in the Pakistani establishment remain sympathetic to terrorist groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"Our close relationship with the Pakistanis is based on common interests, particularly our shared commitment to fight terror," said a U.S. official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue. "They have people dying almost every day, after all. But there are some groups that at least some parts of the Pakistani state see differently than we do."

The official said that when it comes to fighting al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, "there's really no daylight" between the Washington and Islamabad.

Still, the premature announcement of the death or capture of a terrorist is far from uncommon.

In January, Pakistani authorities announced that they had arrested Adam Gadahn, an American al Qaeda spokesman wanted in the U.S. on a charge of treason, in Karachi. Days later, they announced they hadn't arrested him after all.

While Pakistan's military has acted against al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, both of which have carried out several attacks in Pakistan and are viewed as direct threats to the state, it has been less eager to take on the Afghan Taliban.

"To speak to the Taliban, you have to go through the Pakistani army and the ISI," Gilles Dorronsoro, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told a meeting this week, confirming links among the Pakistani army, the ISI and the Taliban.

"Pakistan is both playing with the radicals and trying to have a relationship with the Americans," he said. "It is too late to ask the Pakistani army to reverse its policy of supporting the Taliban."

On Feb. 10, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik confirmed reports of Mehsud's death, which the Taliban promptly dismissed as a lie and then insisted Mehsud was alive.

The CIA also never confirmed Mehsud's death.

However, a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mehsud had not been seen or heard from since the drone strike.

"If Hakimullah really is alive, let him prove it. He never had a problem going before the cameras. But, for the past few months, he's nowhere to be seen," the official said. "His group isn't one that traditionally led from the cave in silence."

The Taliban said it would not offer any evidence, such as a video recording, because doing so could help security forces hunt down Mehsud, the AP reported.

A Pakistani Embassy spokesman in Washington said he could not confirm reports that Mehsud was alive.

"His absence is the Taliban's problem, not ours. It's already been shown that he can be hit," the U.S. counterterrorism official said. "As Baitullah Mehsud learned to his peril, if you're a terrorist figure in that part of the world, you have to be smart ... and lucky," the official added, referring to the former leader of the Pakistani Taliban who was killed in a U.S. strike in August.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said he had seen "no evidence" that Mehsud "is operational today or is executing or exerting authority over the Pakistan Taliban, as he once did."

"So I don't know if that reflects him being alive or dead, but he clearly is not running the Pakistani Taliban anymore," Mr. Morrell told reporters.

The Taliban waited three weeks to confirm Baitullah Mehsud's death. That incident spawned reports that two likely successors - Hakimullah Mehsud and Waliur Rehman - had engaged in a gunfight in which one or both militants had been killed.

That report also proved to be inaccurate, and Hakimullah Mehsud later met with reporters to prove that he was in fact alive.

In January, he appeared in a video with a Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan in December.

Ayesha Siddiqa, a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, said he was not surprised that Mehsud could have survived the drone attack.

"It doesn't take rocket science to discover that if, as it was indicated in the news, he had died in Multan then somebody ought to have seen his dead body. None of that happened," Ms. Siddiqa said.

"His death and rebirth are part of the larger psy-ops. At this point, it is tough to determine truth from lies, which makes fighting very difficult," she said.

Kucinich speaks out on extrajudicial killings

There seems to be a willingness to mute any criticism of policies which under George Bush would have led to huge liberal outcries. Cogent criticism of these policies have been left to people such as Ron Paul on the right and Kucinich on the left while mainstream liberals are silent. This is from the nation.

Kucinich: White House Assassination Policy Is Extrajudicial killings.

by JEREMY SCAHILL

April 15, 2010

There has been almost universal silence among Congressional Democrats on the Obama administration's recently revealed decision to authorize the assassination of a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen, has been accused of providing inspiration for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged "underwear bomber," and Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter. In recent weeks, there has been a dramatic surge in US government chatter about the alleged threat posed by al-Awlaki, with anonymous US officials accusing him of directly participating in terror "plots" (his family passionately disputes this).

Several Democrats refused, through spokespeople, to comment on the assassination plan when contacted by The Nation, including Senator Russ Feingold and Representative Jan Schakowsky, both of whom serve on the Intelligence Committees. Representative Jane Harman, who serves on the Homeland Security Committee, said recently that Awlaki is "probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No. 1 in terms of threat against us."
One of the few Democrats to publicly address the issue of government-sanctioned assassinations is Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich. "I don't support it--period," he said in an interview. "I think people in both parties that are concerned about the Constitution should be speaking out on this. I can't account for what anyone else doesn't do."

Kucinich told The Nation he has sent several letters to the Obama administration raising questions about the potential unconstitutionality of the policy, as well as possible violations of international law, but has received no response. "With all the smart people that are in that administration, they've got to know the risks that they're taking here with violations of law," he says.

Targeted killings are not a new Obama administration policy. Beginning three days after his swearing in, President Obama has authorized scores of lethal drone strikes, including against specific individuals, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, surpassing the Bush era numbers. The elite Joint Special Operations Command maintains a list of individuals, including US citizens, which it is authorized to assassinate. In January, Dana Priest reported in the Washington Post that the CIA had US citizens on an assassination list, but the Post later ran a correction stating that only JSOC had "a target list that includes several Americans." The policy of the CIA targeting al-Awlaki, a US citizen, for assassination, therefore, appeared to be a new development, at least in terms of public awareness of approved government assassinations.

"In the real world, things don't work out quite so neatly as they seem to in the heads of the CIA," says Kucinich. "There's always the possibility of blowback, which could endanger high-ranking US officials. There's the inevitable licensing of rogue groups that comes about from policies that are not strictly controlled and that get sloppy--so you have zero accountability. And that's not even to get into an over-arching issue of the morality of assassination policies, which are extra-constitutional, extra-judicial. It's very dangerous from every possible perspective."

He added: "The assassination policies vitiate the presumption of innocence and the government then becomes the investigator, policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner all in one. That raises the greatest questions with respect to our constitution and our democratic way of life."

Kucinich says the case of al-Awlaki is an attempt to make "a short-cut around the Constitution," saying, "Short-cuts often belie the deep and underlying questions around which nations rise and fall. We are really putting our nation in jeopardy by pursuing this kind of policy."

About Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!. more...
Copyright © 2009 The Nation

America's new Electronic, Troop-less Wars

While the trend may in the direction of more robots, drones, and smart missiles and bombs, plenty of troops and civilian contractors are still needed and casualties will continue. In Afghanistan in particular General McChrystal's strategy is bound to bring more casualties for all sides in the conflict. The article is much longer I have just copied the abstract. This is from Global Research.

Towards America’s Electronic, Troop-less Wars
Future U.S Wars will involve Massive Use of Drones

by Prof. Marc W. Herold






Global Research, March 1, 2010




Abstract.

Future U.S wars in the Third World will involve massive use of drones to police the territory, employ local satrap[1] forces (like those of Karzai’s Afghan Army) and once the territory has been pacified sufficiently, the deployment of “Government Ready-to-Rule (GRR)” kits. The drones provide the critical and the weak link: critical insofar as they represent the ultimate American-style war where only the “Others” (opponents and civilians) die but weak insofar as this type of warfare only works against an opponent without any anti-drone/aircraft capability. In other words, this type of technological warfare can only be carried out upon weak opponents lacking independent industrial capacities (not against China, Russia, and India). This approach represents the culmination of disconnecting the delivery of deadly force – the rain of Hellfire missiles - upon the Others and incurring no human (physical or psychological – PTSD) costs. Or put in other terms, it represents the quintessential American way of “solving” problems with technological short-cuts, a military effort begun in 1942 with the Allied fire-bombing of German cities.[2] The current American war in Afghanistan is a harbinger of what is to come, America’s electronic, troop-less war.

Prophetically the first victims in 2010 of Obama in his Afghan war were a teacher in a government school, Sadiq Noor, and his nine-year old son, Wajid as well as three other persons. Both were killed on Sunday night, January 3, 2010 in a U.S. drone strike involving two missiles fired into the home of Sadiq Noor in the village of Musaki, North Waziristan in Pakistan.[3] During January 2010, a record number of twelve deadly missile strikes were carried out on Pakistan’s tribal areas. Three Al-Qaeda leaders were killed and 123 innocent civilians.[4] During 2009, 44 U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan killed 708 people but only five Al Qaeda or Taliban; that is for each enemy fighter 140 civilian Pakistanis had to die.[5]

Those who pull the gray trigger to fire are located in Nevada, Kandahar, or Pakistan.[6] As Philip Alston points out, “Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life?”[7] In early 2010, the U.S. Air Force had more drone operators in training than fighter and bomber pilots.[8]

13 killed as US drone hits Pakistan Civilians

One can imagine the uproar among many in the US left if Bush had continued with these type of strikes. Pakistan now seems to approve the attacks and even encourage attacks against Baitullah Mehsud and his followers who are mounting terror attacks in Pakistan in reply to earlier drone attacks. This is a great recipe for disaster and more civil unrest in Pakistan. The US manages to set itself up as judge jury and executioner and kill people even the innocent without so much of a murmur from most that this might just violate international law.







13 Killed as US Drone Hits Pakistan Civilians
Foreign Militants Were in Home at the Time
Posted April 3, 2009
US drones launched a missile attack against a home in North Waziristan on Saturday morning, killing at least 13 and wounding at least eight others. Officials say that civilians were among the casualties caused by the two missiles. One intelligence official said that foreign militants were staying in the home at the time of the attack.
That attack occurred in the Datta Khel area, at around 3 AM. It was the latest in a growing number of attacks launched by the Obama Administration over the past two months.
The attacks have largely centered around followers of TTP chief Baitullah Mehsud, and Mehsud says the terror attack in Lahore earlier this week was retaliation for the US attacks. Mehsud has also threatened to launch “an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world.”


Find this article at: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/04/03/us-drones-kill-at-least-13-in-north-waziristan



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