April 16: Historic Durbin hearing on drone strikes
Robert Naiman  Just Foreign Policy
For the first time since the US started conducting drone strikes ten years ago, there will be a prominent hearing in Congress devoted to the policy. The hearing is scheduled for April 16, 10AM ET. It will be broadcast on the web. If your schedule permits, please make plans to watch the hearing. Regardless of that, please do whatever you can to help raise the profile of the hearing.
In particular, if you have a Senator on the subcommittee which is holding the hearing – that is, if you live in Illinois, Minnesota, Delaware, Connecticut, Hawaii, Texas, South Carolina, Texas, or Utah, please
1) help make sure your Senator attends the hearing;
2) urge your Senator to publicly call in the hearing for a Congressional subpoena of the drone strike memos if the Administration won’t hand them over; 3) urge your Senator to ask questions in the hearing about the scale of civilian casualties and why government information about this is classified; whether the Administration is lowballing civilian deaths by automatically classifying “military age males” as “militants” when they are killed by US drone strikes; whether the US is conducting “secondary strikes” and whether this constitutes a war crime; what percentage of those killed have been “suspected terrorist leaders” and what this means for claims that the program is narrowly targeted on “suspected terrorist leaders.”
We will be sending an alert to people in the aforementioned states.
The members of the subcommittee are listed here:
http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/about/subcommittees/constitution.cfm
Cut Social Security & Veterans’ Benefits? Cut the Pentagon Instead
According to the CBO, Obama’s proposal to cut Social Security and veterans’ benefits using the chained CPI will save the government $163 billion over ten years. Three better ways to save $163 billion: end the war in Afghanistan; cut the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter by 10% (267 planes); cut Pentagon contracting and bring the work in-house.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/cut-social-security-veter_b_3040226.html