Posts Tagged ‘Assassinations’
Democracy Now’s interview of Jeremy Scahill: Assassinations, Drones, Dirty Wars, Asymmetric Warfare, and Africa’s Bleak Future
Monday, 29 April 2013 12:38
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via chycho
Jeremy-Scahill-DNstudio
To say that Democracy Now! is a powerhouse when it comes to tackling some of the most important issues of our time is an understatement. Since their inception in 1996 they have shared and provided a perspective that most mainstream media outlets have been restricted from reporting.

We were privy to an excellent example of such reporting on April 23-24 when Jeremy Scahill, “the National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine and author of the international bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army”, was interviewed by Amy Goodman. (Read more…)

The first part of the interview is focused on Scahill discussing the implications of Obama’s kill list and the details of the administration’s assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old Denver-born son Abdulrahman, two U.S. citizens killed by drones strikes in Yemen in 2011.

In part 2 Scahill talks about the documentary based on his new book, “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield”, and gives us a glimpse into what the future holds in regards to asymmetric warfare, pays tribute to the importance of Wikileaks, and explains the reasons why the future of Africa looks so bleak.

The relevance and significance of this interview will most likely only be apparent in retrospect so it is well worth noting and well worth the watch.

The post Democracy Now’s interview of Jeremy Scahill: Assassinations, Drones, Dirty Wars, Asymmetric Warfare, and Africa’s Bleak Future appeared first on disinformation.

 
Attorney General Eric Holder Says Drone Killings On U.S. Soil Are ‘Hypothetically’ Doable
Thursday, 07 March 2013 13:30
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Will lethal drone strikes someday come home? Business Insider reports:

Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter Tuesday that Obama administration believes it could “hypothetically” carry out drone strikes against Americans on U.S. soil, but “has no intention of doing so. (Read more…)” The letter was sent to Republican Senator Rand Paul in response to his question about the constitutionality of drone strikes on U.S. soil.

But what is truly alarming about Holder’s letter is not his position, but his vague, almost supercilious, dismissal of the drone question itself:

The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront. It is possible to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution…for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.

 
Assassinations of Environmental Activists Have Doubled Over the Last Decade
Sunday, 03 March 2013 17:00
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Picture: Sigurdas (CC)

Fred Pearce writes at the Guardian:

Where is Sombath Somphone? With every day that passes, the fate of one of south-east Asia’s most high-profile environmental activists, who was snatched from the streets of Laos in December, becomes more worrisome.

(Read more…)

His case has been raised by the State Department and countless NGOs around the world. But the authorities in Laos have offered no clue as to what happened after Sombath was stopped at a police checkpoint on a Saturday afternoon in the Lao capital of Vientiane as he returned home from his office. It looks increasingly like state kidnap — or worse, if recent evidence of the state-sponsored killings of environmental campaigners in other countries is anything to go by.

Personal danger is not what most environmentalists have in mind when they take up the cause of protecting nature and the people who rely on it in their daily lives. But from Laos to the Philippines to Brazil, the list of environmentalists who have paid for their activism with their lives is growing. It is a grim toll, especially in the last year.

One of the most grisly cases occurred last year in Rio de Janeiro on the final day of the Rio+20 Earth Summit. On the afternoon of June 22, delegates from throughout the world — me included — were preparing to leave for the airport as Almir Nogueira de Amorim and his friend João Luiz Telles Penetra were setting sail for a fishing trip in the city’s Guanabara Bay.

The two men, besides being fishermen, were leaders of AHOMAR, the local organization of seamen, which they had helped set up three years earlier to fight the construction of gas pipelines across the bay to a new refinery run by the Brazilian national oil company Petrobras. The pipelines, they said, would cause pollution, and the engineering works would destroy fisheries.

The issue they were raising — protecting the livelihoods of people who used natural resources — was at the heart of the Rio conference’s agenda for sustainable development. But someone in Rio saw it as a threat. Two days later, the bodies of the two men had been found. One was washed up on the shore, hands and feet bound by ropes. The other was found at sea, strangled and tied to the boat, which had several holes in the hull.

This was no isolated assassination. In the three years since AHOMAR was set up, two other campaigners had been murdered. To date nobody has been convicted of any of the offenses. The refinery is expected to open early next year.

Read more here.