Pakistan earthquake causes new island to rise from the sea

Officials said 238 deaths had been confirmed so far, 208 in Awaran district, and the toll is expected to rise as rescue teams reach more villages in the remote area.

"We have started to bury the dead," said Abdul Rasheed Gogazai, the deputy commissioner of Awaran, the most affected district in Baluchistan province. He said at least 373 people were wounded.

The 7.7-magnitude quake hit in the Awaran district of Baluchistan province on Tuesday afternoon, destroying scores of mud-built houses and prompting a new island to rise from the sea just off the country's southern coast.

The earthquake was so powerful that it caused the seabed to rise and create a small, mountain-like island about 600 meters (yards) off Pakistan's Gwadar coastline in the Arabian Sea. Read more >>

One in Five Killed in CIA drone strikes are civilians

Exclusive: Leaked Pakistani report confirms high civilian death toll in CIA drone strikes

A secret document obtained by the Bureau reveals for the first time the Pakistan government’s internal assessment of dozens of drone strikes, and shows scores of civilian casualties.

The United States has consistently claimed only a tiny number of non-combatants have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan – despite research by the Bureau and others suggesting that over 400 civilians may have died in the nine-year campaign.

The internal document shows Pakistani officials too found that CIA drone strikes were killing a significant number of civilians – and have been aware of those deaths for many years.

Of 746 people listed as killed in the drone strikes outlined in the document, at least 147 of the dead are clearly stated to be civilian victims, 94 of those are said to be children.

The confidential 12-page summary paper, titled Details of Attacks by Nato Forces/Predators in FATA was prepared by government officials in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

The numbers recorded are much higher than those provided by the US administration, which continues to insist that no more than 50 to 60 ‘non-combatants’ have been killed by the CIA across the entire nine years of Pakistan bombings. New CIA director John Brennan has described claims to the contrary as ‘intentional misrepresentations‘. Read more >>

New York Mayor: Domestic Drones and Face Recognition Inevitable

Michael Bloomberg - Cartoon (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

"It's scary, but what's the difference whether the drone is up in the air or on the building," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today during his weekly appearance on the John Gambling radio show, when Gambling asked him his thoughts on the use of domestic drones by the NYPD or any other entity.

"I mean intellectually I'd have trouble making a distinction. And you know, you're gonna have face-recognition software. People are working on that. ... You can't keep the tides from coming in. We're gonna have more visibility and less privacy. I don't see how you stop that."

In December, the New York Times editorial board warned that "the unmanned aircraft that most people associate with hunting terrorists and striking targets in Pakistan are on the brink of evolving into a big domestic industry," and urged Congress to protect Americans' right to privacy. Read more >>

Ban 'killer robots,' rights group urges

Hollywood-style robots able to shoot people without permission from their human handlers are a real possibility and must be banned before governments start deploying them, Human Rights Watch warned Monday.

The report "Losing Humanity" -- co-produced by Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic -- also raises the alarm over the ethics of the looming technology.

Calling them "killer robots," it urges "an international treaty that would absolutely prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons."

The US military already leads the way in military robots, notably the unmanned aircraft or drones used for surveillance or attacks over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere. But these are controlled by human operators in ground bases and are not able to kill without authorization.

Fully autonomous robots that decide for themselves when to fire could be developed within 20 to 30 years, or "even sooner," the 50-page report said, adding that weapon systems that require little human intervention already exist. Read more >>

'US drone attacks are counter-productive and terrorize civilians'

CIA drone attacks are counter-productive as they kill civilians and rescue workers and increase recruitment by militant groups, a new report concludes.

Civilians are being "terrorised" 24 hours a day by CIA drone attacks that target mainly low-level militants in north-west Pakistan, a report by Stanford and New York Universities says. It claims that follow-up strikes are also killing rescuers who set out to treat the injured.

The report, made up of interviews with victims, witnesses and experts, pins blame on US President Barack Obama for the recent increase in "signature strikes" which target groups selected through "pattern of life analysis" and which have resulted in large, innocent groups attending weddings and funerals being killed.

It states: "US drones hover 24 hours a day over communities in north-west Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. "Their presence terrorises men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. Read more >>

Drones Over the Americas

Like the School of the Americas, the weaponized drone perpetrates terrorism. As Predator drones come to Ft. Benning, some SOA Watch activists are applying our SOAW experience to “outing” the Predator and Reaper drones already in our midst.

Syracuse’s Hancock Air National Guard Base has become one of the national hubs for piloting — via computer screen and satellite — the Reaper over Afghanistan. For three years upstate New York activists have been trying to educate our public and Hancock personnel about the war crimes being committed by these robotic killers [www.upstatedroneaction.org].

The Reaper, a higher-tech offspring of the Predator, is the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s instrument for aerial surveillance and assassination in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other nations “over there.” Now with those US/NATO wars somewhat winding down, the Reaper – and a slew of its robotic cousins — are coming home to roost in the Western Hemisphere. Also driving this trend are the US and Israeli drone manufacturers eager to expand their markets. Read more >>

Air Force Drones Can Now (Accidentally) Spy on You

Heron 1 (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) (Photo credit: chooyutshing)

As long as the Air Force pinky-swears it didn’t mean to, its drone fleet can keep tabs on the movements of Americans, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. And it can hold data on them for 90 days — studying it to see if the people it accidentally spied upon are actually legitimate targets of domestic surveillance.

The Air Force, like the rest of the military and the CIA, isn’t supposed to conduct “nonconsensual surveillance” on Americans domestically, according to an Apr. 23 instruction from the flying service. But should the drones taking off over American soil accidentally keep their cameras rolling and their sensors engaged, well … that’s a different story.

In other words, if an Air Force drone accidentally spies on an American citizen, the Air Force will have three months to figure out if it was legally allowed to put that person under surveillance in the first place. More...

Every Warrant Submitted by the Feds to Spy on Americans Was Approved

An annual government report showed that every warrant submitted by the Feds to spy on Americans was approved by the secret FISA court in 2011.  The 1,745 total number of applications and warrants approved was a 10.5% increase over 2010. An anonymous counterterrorism official said the increase was "in response to materials seized in relation to the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and the resulting investigations."

Although the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) is secretive and does not reveal the type of surveillance that was approved, it may be the most transparent surveillance program the Feds admit to.  At least the warrants are issued and can be counted. FISA has only been one of the tools used to spy on the communications of Americans.

Despite Obama's 2008 campaign rhetoric to end the practice of "warrantless surveillance," he not only continued the practice but fought to do so in court in a case where his Administration's only defense of claiming "state secrets" (so much for his government transparency rhetoric too) was slapped down by a judge in 2010. More...

US Has Become "Nation of Assassins"

At a speech, journalist Jeremy Scahill, who has done in-depth reporting on the US drone program in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, questioned the Obama Administration's policy of assassination.

"What is happening to this country right now?" asked Scahill after noting that recent legislation in the US Congress opposing the assassination of US citizens abroad without due process received only six votes in the House of Representatives.

"We have become a nation of assassins. We have become a nation that is somehow silent in the face of -- or embraces, as polls indicate -- the idea that assassination should be one of the centerpieces of US foreign policy. How dangerous is this? It's a throwback to another era  -- an era that I think many Americans thought was behind them. And the most dangerous part of this is the complicity of ordinary people in it." [Note: Part 4 at the 5:30 mark].

U.S. Predator Drones Sanitize Killing on the Cheap

I'm continually amazed by those -- especially democrats who recuse republicans for being war happy -- seemingly oblivious to Obama's intense escalation of war on numerous fronts after campaigning on a bogus antiwar platform. 

Besides signing the bone chilling NDAA into law, since he took office, Nobel Peace Prize winning Obama has intensified killer U.S. drone activity in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya (killing thousands of innocent civilians), and has sent US troops to Uganda and other parts of Africa. 

Obama has increased U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, massing forces on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, continues to maintain 50,000 US troop in Iraq, and has sent US assassination death squads to dozens of areas around the globe.


Steve Lendman reports on Obama's doubling down on its use of air power and drones, which are swiftly becoming the primary focus of Washington’s counterterrorism operations.

Steve Lendman

Predator drones sanitize killing on the cheap compared to manned aircraft and ground troops. Teams of remote warriors work far from, and at times, closer to battlefields.

Drone pilots operate computer keyboards and multiple monitors. Sensor staff work with them. They handle TV and infrared cameras, as well as other high-tech drone sensors. Faceless enemies nearby or half a world away are attacked. Virtual war kills like sport.

At day's end, home-based operators head there for dinner, relaxation, family time, then a good night sleep before another day guiding weapons with joysticks and monitors like computer games.

Dozens of drone command centers operate worldwide. Dozens more are planned. Pentagon and CIA personnel run them. Some are bare bones. Climate-controlled trailers work fine. They operate effectively anywhere. They maintain constant radio contact with command centers. More...

Commodity price surge sets stage for global food crisis in new year

Barry Grey
The price of traded food staples such as wheat, corn and rice soared 26 percent from June to November, nearing the peaks reached during the global food crisis of 2008, according to the Food Price Index kept by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.

The price surge has continued in December, with foodstuffs and basic commodities hitting new highs and expected to climb further in 2011.

The new explosion in commodity prices is being fueled by the cheap credit policies of governments and central banks in Europe, Japan and, above all, the United States, where core short-term interest rates remain near zero. These policies, most critically the renewed turn by the US Federal Reserve to so-called “quantitative easing,” are designed to boost national stock markets and business profits by providing the banks and corporations with virtually free credit.

The Federal Reserve in November announced that it would purchase $600 billion in US Treasury securities by, in effect, printing dollars. This cheap-dollar policy has the effect of debasing the world’s primary trading and reserve currency, thereby fueling inflationary tendencies around the world and increasing the flow of hot money to emerging economies with faster growth and higher interest rates.

The impact is vastly destabilizing and exacerbates global economic imbalances. It also provides banks, hedge funds and corporations with wide vistas for speculation on commodity prices.

In the US alone, corporations and banks are sitting on some $3 trillion in cash which they refuse to invest in production and hiring. A good portion of the global surfeit of cash is being used to ramp up the prices of commodities―from oil, copper, cotton, gold and silver to food staples such as wheat, corn, rice and soybeans. More...

Iran Nabs Top NATO Terrorist with Help from Pakistan

Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
February 25, 2010
The Battle for Baluchistan: Iran Nabs Top NATO Terrorist with Help from Pakistan

On Tuesday Feb. 23, Iran announced the capture of Abdulmalek Rigi, the boss of the terror organization Jundullah, which works for NATO. The capture of Rigi represents a serious setback for the US-UK strategy of using false flag state-sponsored terrorism against Iran and Pakistan, and ultimately to sabotage China’s geopolitics of oil. The Iranians claim to have captured Rigi all by themselves, but the Pakistani ambassador to Teheran is quoted in The Dawn as claiming an important role for Pakistan. The Iranians say that Rigi was attempting to fly from Dubai to Kyrgystan, and that his plane was forced to land in Iran by Iranian interceptors. This exploit recalls Oliver North’s 1985 intercept of the accused Achille Lauro perpetrators, including Abu Abbas, forcing their Egyptian plane to land at Sigonella, Sicily. But other and perhaps more realistic versions suggest that Iran was tipped off by the Pakistanis, or even that Rigi was captured by Pakistan and delivered to the Iranians.

Jundullah, otherwise known as the Rigi organization, is a clan-based Mafia organization that has long infested the Iran-Pakistan border. The Rigis are traditionally smugglers and drug pushers of royalist persuasion, and now they have branched out into terrorism. Jundullah is mounting a Sunni rebellion against the Shiite Iranian regime in Iranian Baluchistan. They have blown up a Shiite mosque, killing 25, and managed to kill 50 in a bombing in Pishin last October, where their victims included some top commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, against which Mrs. Clinton has now declared war. There is no doubt that Jundullah is on the US payroll. This fact has been confirmed by Brian Ross of ABC News, the London Daily Telegraph, and by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Hersh noted that Jundullah has received some of the $400 million appropriated by the US Congress in the most recent Bush-era regime change legislation targeting Iran.

Jundullah is a key part of the US-UK strategy of fomenting ethnic and religious civil war in both Iran and Pakistan. Jundullah is a twofer in this context, since it can help destabilize both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border. Baluchistan has special importance because any oil pipeline linking Iran with China must go straight across Baluchistan. Jundullah’s false flag jihad is a means to make sure that strategic pipeline, which would help solve China’s energy problem, is never built.

There is also no doubt that Jundullah functions as an arm of NATO, a kind of irregular warfare asset similar in some ways to the KLA of Kosovo. Rigi is reported by the Iranians to have met with Jop de Hoop Scheffer when he was NATO Secretary General. Rigi has also met with various NATO generals operating in Afghanistan. Who knows — he may have met with McChrystal himself, a covert ops veteran from Iraq.

This capture comes at a moment when Baluchistan is the object of intense US-UK exertions. The current US-NATO offensive in southern Afghanistan targets Marjah and the rest of Helmand province, which directly faces Baluchistan. Many observers were puzzled when the US and NATO publicized the Marjah offensive in advance. Militarist talking heads like General Barry McCaffrey responded that the main goal of the Marjah offensive was not to destroy the Taliban, but to drive them out of the province. It was thus clear from the beginning that the real goal was to drive the Helmand Taliban fighters into Pakistani Baluchistan. Why?

A statement from the Afghan Taliban covered on the RIA Novosti web site suggests that the real goal of the US-NATO offensive in Marjah-Helmand is to attack Chinese economic interests in Pakistani Baluchistan, and especially the port of Gwadar, one of China’s largest overseas projects. If the US can push the Taliban into Pakistani Baluchistan and into the area around Gwadar, they will have a pretext for militarization – perhaps through Blackwater mercenaries, who are already operating massively in Pakistan, or perhaps through direct US military involvement in the zone. US jackboots on the ground in Baluchistan would interfere mightily with Chinese economic development plans. They would also allow the US to commandeer Gwadar as the home port of a new NATO supply line into southern Afghanistan, allowing the avoidance of the Khyber Pass bottleneck. The US could also use Baluchistan as a springboard for bigger and better terror ops into Iran, electronic surveillance of Iranian activities, and so forth.

The US and NATO had evidently planned a double envelopment of Baluchistan, with Taliban fighters from Helmand arriving from the north, while the Jundullah escalated their own activity on the ground. Now that Rigi has joined his brother in Iranian jails, Jundullah has been decapitated, and the NATO strategy has consequently been undermined. Iran has bagged a dangerous terrorist foe. Another winner is Pakistan, where The Dawn celebrated the capture of Rigi as “a godsend” and “a lucky break” for Pakistan. By helping Rigi to fall into Iranian hands, Pakistan may have finally found an effective way to counter the US-UK strategy, which notoriously aims at the breakup and partition of Pakistan. The coming Iranian trial of Rigi may go far towards exposing the real mechanism of terrorism in today’s world, with the CIA sitting in the dock next to Rigi.

"Yes, There’s Racism in the Pentagon"

Hersh/Image via Wikipedia

Neil Offen
DURHAM — The U.S. military is not just fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most renowned investigative journalist says.

The army is also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have [President] Obama boxed in,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh told several hundred people in Duke University’s Page Auditorium on Tuesday night. “They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”

In a speech on Obama’s foreign policy, Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraqi war, said many military leaders want Obama to fail.

“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.

“If he gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically.”

The journalist criticized the president for “letting the military do that,” and suggested the only way out was for Obama to stand up to them.

“He’s either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon,” Hersh said. If he doesn’t, “this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency.”

Hersh called the “Af-Pak” situation — the spreading conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan — Obama’s main challenge.

The war in Afghanistan has destabilized Pakistan, which has 80 to 100 nuclear weapons, said Hersh, who recently returned from a visit to South Asia. “And the nuclear situation [in Pakistan] is more dire than you could know. It sucks.”

The only way for the U.S. to extricate itself from the conflict, Hersh said, is to negotiate with the Taliban.

“It’s the only way out,” he said. “I know that there’s a lot of discussion in the White House about this now. But Obama is going to have to take charge, and there’s no evidence he’s going to do that.”

While critical of the president on Afghanistan, Hersh, who travels to the Middle East three or four times a year, did praise his foreign policy initiatives toward Iran.

“When it comes to Iran, he’s changed the paradigm,” he said. “[President] Bush always said we’ll negotiate with those duty Iranians about their nuclear enrichment plans when they stop enriching nuclear material. Obama understands there is some room there to maneuver. That’s a huge change.”

He also praised Obama for also changing the paradigm with his decision to shelve plans for a missile defense system in Eastern Europe. Doing that, he said, would help U.S. relations with Russia.

“It’s about time we realize we have a lot in common with the Russians, like worrying about China and global terrorism,” Hersh said.

The missiles, he added, were just a continuation of the Cold War, and “it’s about time for us to capture some of the benefit we were supposed to get from ending the Cold War.”