Turse: Africom and the Pentagon jealously guard information about their outposts in Africa, making it impossible to ascertain even basic facts — like a simple count — let alone just how many are integral to JSOC operations, drone strikes, and other secret activities.
Devereaux: During his years of research, what Lewis uncovered in his examination of U.S. airstrikes, particularly those delivered by machines thought to be the most precise in the Pentagon’s arsenal, was dramatic. He found that drone strikes in Afghanistan were 10 times more likely to kill civilians than conventional aircraft.
Lt. General Michael Flynn: “Our entire Middle East policy seems to be based on firing drones. That’s what this administration decided to do in its counterterrorism campaign. They’re enamored by the ability of special operations and the CIA to find a guy in the middle of the desert in some shitty little village and drop a bomb on his head and kill him.”
Currier: The study, carried out by the Pentagon’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force, illuminates and in some cases contradicts the administration’s public description of a campaign directed at high-level terrorists who pose an imminent threat to the United States. It admits frankly that capturing terrorists is a rare occurrence and hints at the use of so-called signature strikes against unknown individuals exhibiting suspicious behavior.
Bernabe: It’s a sad state of affairs when the Western media provides humanitarian cover for the U.S. and NATO to fuel a brutal civil war — which has taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people — simply to create economic advantages for NATO states and allies while undermining stability in the Middle East — creating the greatest humanitarian catastrophe since World War II.
Blumenthal: So the Dahiya doctrine aims to, by attacking civilians, aims to demoralize the civilian population until they assent to the West Bank model. And the people in the Gaza Strip are incredibly resilient. They almost unanimously support resisting the occupation.
Begley: The first bomb dropped from an airplane exploded in an oasis outside Tripoli on November 1, 1911. grenade. ... One hundred years later, the bombing is done by pilotless planes. They are controlled remotely, often half a world away. We have come to call them “drones.” On the inside, people call them “birds.”
Scahill: The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government.
Secret military documents expose the inner workings of Obama's Drone Wars truthdig.com October 15, 2015 jules 2000 / Shutterstock Targeted killings carried out by unmanned drones, though still very controversial, have become a fixture of U.S. foreign policy. On Thursday, The Intercept published a report, “The Drone Papers,” which gives the public a close look More
Op Ed: We fear that opposing arguments in favor of national sovereignty will probably not be discussed much during this conference. And yet, the European Union has served as an experimental laboratory testing what happens when a large and growing number (now 28) of sovereign states turns over a major part of their rights to supranational governance.
Van Auken: The NATO ministers, including US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, seized upon Moscow’s airstrikes in Syria against Islamist militias seeking the overthrow of the government of President Bashar al-Assad as the pretext for more aggressive deployments of military forces on Russia’s border.
Anderson: The fact that there is popular dissatisfaction with corruption and cronyism, and that an authoritarian state maintains a type of personality cult, does not negate the man’s genuine popularity.
