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The People’s Record Memorial Day Dedication (photo source)
This Memorial Day, reflect on the innocent civilian victims of the United States in Afghanistan. Those victims total more than 12,800 killed in the past six years and millions more in Afghanistan whose lives have been ravaged and destroyed by the United States imperialist war machine. The United States continues to inflict terror and human rights violations on the people of Afghanistan.
Click here for a complete list of The People’s Record’s Memorial Day dedications.
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From our 2012 Memorial Day posts.
(Source: thepeoplesrecord, via robert-cunningham)
The Pentagon’s army of space-age robot warriors is getting a lot more real with the PETMAN robot
April 8, 2013
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has released video footage of a project that’s been long in the works and really starting to now take shape. The Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin — or “PETMAN,” for short — is the subject of the latest clip, and very well could be all it takes to scare off any insurgents once it’s ready for the battlefield.
PETMAN is a bipedal robot that has been displayed during previous tests as having the ability to climb stairs and even do pushups. In the latest video, though, the experimental project is showcased as being more lifelike than ever before.
Scientists at Boston Dynamics have released a video that shows PETMAN, clothed head-to-toe in full-on camouflage, jogging in place on a laboratory platform. But unlike earlier videos in which PETMAN appeared to be nothing more than a pile of wires enclosed in metal, the newest footage shows the science project at its all-time most humanness.
PETMAN isn’t being tasked with running like a human being for simply the sake of being creepy, though. Boston Dynamics have outfitted the robot in high-tech protective camo clothing that is designed to keep soldiers — real, cyborg or other — safe from hazardous chemicals. “PETMAN has sensors embedded in its skin that detect any chemicals leaking through the suit. The skin also maintains a micro-climate inside the clothing by sweating and regulating temperature,” explains Boston Dynamics.
The robot, adds the scientists, can balance itself, move freely, walk and do a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics — all while being exposed to chemical warfare agents. “Natural, agile movement is essential for PETMAN to simulate how a soldier stresses protective clothing under realistic conditions,” adds Boston Dynamics. “The robot will have the shape and size of a standard human, making it the first anthropomorphic robot that moves dynamically like a real person.”
And yeah, PETMAN can walk the walk — but he doesn’t stop there either. Scientists have programed the robot to “simulate human physiology,” so that when being exposed to chemical agents, researchers can send signals to the robot that forces it to mimic human sweating and switch its body temperature like a real-life soldier might do while on the field. So with PETMAN being able to do all of that and then some, what does DARPA have planned next? That’s likely top-secret, but critics of the US Defense Department’s science lab say projects like this will lend themselves to changing the face of war from a human one to a robotic one.
“It’s going to be used for chasing people across the desert, I would imagine. I can’t think of many civilian applications - maybe for hunting, or farming, for rounding up sheep,” Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, told the BBC previously in regards to DARPA’s robot creations.
“But of course if it’s used for combat, it would be killing civilians as well as it’s not going to be able to discriminate between civilians and soldiers,” he said.
John Owen Brennan is chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama; officially his title is Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President. He supports drones and will not admit that water-boarding is torture. He was nominated to be the new CIA director and has supported water-boarding and drone-terror in his nomination hearing.
Lyrics to Torture Memos above, a song written & sung by Jonathan Mann in 2009 - lyrics were taken directly from official memos on torture. It was the 109th song in his song-a-day project, which is still on-going:
the detainee is lying on a gurney
that’s inclined at an angle: 10 to 15 degrees
a cloth is placed over the detainee’s face
cold water is poured on the cloth
the wet cloth creates
a barrier through which
it is difficult or in some cases not possible
for the detainee to breathe
if the detainee
makes an effort to defeat the technique
by twisting his head to the side and breathing
out the corner of his mouth
the interrogator may cup his hands around
the detainees nose and mouth
in which case it would not be posible for him to breathe!
As we explained
in the Section 2340A Memorandum,
“pain and suffering”
(as used in Section 2340)
is best understood as a single concept,
not distinct concepts
of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering”…
The waterboard,
which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever,
does not, in our view inflict “severe pain or suffering”.
Even if one were to parse the statute more finely
to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept,
the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe sufering.
The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.
Rebloggable version:
There are only about 5,000 signatures now, let’s try and get it to 20,000.
Here is the link to the petition.
We also shared it on our Facebook page, so feel free to do the same.
Nine killed in US assassination drone attacks in Yemen
January 23, 2013
At least nine people have been killed in two separate US assassination drone attacks in Yemen.
The first drone strike killed seven people travelling in a vehicle near the town of Khawlan, about 35 kilometers (20 miles) southeast of the capital Sana’a, on Wednesday.
On the same day, two other people died in another attack on a house in the town of Radda in al-Bayda province.
Three people were also reportedly injured in the second strike.
The United States has launched numerous drone attacks in Yemen that have killed many innocent civilians over the past few years.
Washington claims that its airstrikes target militants, but local sources say civilians have been the main victims of the non-UN-sanctioned airstrikes.
The United States has come under fire for increasing its drone attacks in the Arab country. Yemenis have held many demonstrations to condemn the United States’ violations of their national sovereignty.
A US drone strike killed between 14-35 people in Afghanistan on Monday, the day of President Obama’s inauguration.
US drone strike kills 14-35 in eastern Afghanistan on Monday
January 23, 2013
According to provincial officials in the eastern Afghan province in Nuristan, US drones fired multiple missiles against the Kamdish District late Monday, causing “around 35” casualties, with others reporting at least 14 deaths in the strike. Local officials termed all the slain suspects.
Oddly, NATO officials insisted they had no information about any operations ongoing in the region, and they declined to speculate whether there was a strike at all, though not all drone strikes are necessarily coordinated through NATO.
The Kamdish District borders Chitral, Pakistan, which is part of Malakand. The region is near Pakistani militant positions, but is not specifically associated with any militant groups nor US drone strikes against them.
Nuristan Province has been contested repeatedly by the Taliban, with the Taliban setting up its own government and being the de facto rulers off and on for years. The US has redeployed troops since the 2009 withdrawal from the region, but the Taliban maintains a significant presence.
Source
Obama fails to close Guantanamo prison; human rights violations continue
January 9, 2013
Human rights groups are denouncing President Barack Obama’s failure to veto a defense bill that will make it far more difficult for him to fulfill his four-year-old pledge to close the Guantanamo detention facility this year.
Obama had threatened to veto the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) precisely because it renewed, among other things, Congressional restrictions which he said were intended to “foreclose” his ability to shut down the notorious prison, which has been used for the past 11 years to detain suspected foreign terrorists.
But, for the second year in a row, he failed to follow through on his threat and instead signed the underlying bill, which was passed by both houses of Congress last month and authorizes the Pentagon to spend $633 billion on its operations in 2013.
“President Obama has utterly failed the first test of his second term, even before Inauguration Day,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “He has jeopardised his ability to close Guantanamo during his presidency.
“Scores of men who have already been held for nearly 11 years without being charged with a crime – including more than 80 who have been cleared for transfer – may very well be imprisoned unfairly for another year,” Romero added.
“The administration blames Congress for making it harder to close Guantanamo, yet for a second year, President Obama has signed damaging congressional restrictions into law,” noted Andrea Prasow, senior counter-terrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch (HRW). “The burden is on Obama to show he is serious about closing the prison.”
Obama’s signing of the law comes amid a growing debate – both within and outside the administration – about when and how to end the so-called “Global War on Terror” – especially its most controversial components – that Obama’s predecessor, George W Bush, initiated shortly after the al-Qaeda attacks on Manhattan’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on Sepember 11, 2001.
A ‘never ending’ conflict
Last month, the Pentagon’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, addressed precisely that topic in a speech to Britain’s Oxford Union, asking, “Now that the efforts by the US. military against al-Qaeda are in their 12th year, we must also ask ourselves, how will this conflict end?”
While he didn’t offer any specific answers, he indicated that a “tipping point” could be reached when Washington concluded that the group and its affiliates were rendered incapable of launching “strategic attacks” against the US
On taking office four years ago, Obama ordered an end to certain tactics, notably what the Bush administration referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques” that rights groups called “torture”, and “extraordinary rendition” to third countries known to use torture. He has since relied to a much greater extent on drone strikes against “high-value” suspected terrorists from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia.
Some former Bush officials have raised the question whether Obama’s use of targeted killings – which Bush also used but not nearly as frequently – was morally or legally more justifiable than their use of “enhanced interrogation”. Some have even suggested that the administration has preferred killing suspects to capturing them, especially if their capture would require it to send more prisoners to Guantanamo, something Obama pledged not to do.
The administration has sought to justify that tactic – which a growing number of critics consider counter-productive at best, and illegal under international law if carried out far from the battlefield – in general terms but has shied away from spelling out the specific circumstances under which it is deployed.
Drone strikes are believed to have killed more than 1,500 people in Pakistan and more than 400 in Yemen since Obama took office, according to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which claims that a not-insignificant proportion of the deaths have included civilians.
The administration is reportedly working to tighten rules regarding the use of drone strikes, particularly by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which has enjoyed greater freedom in deciding when to attack suspects in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia than the U.S. military has had in Afghanistan.
Particularly controversial was the targeted killing of a US citizen and alleged al-Qaeda leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen in 2011.
A federal judge in New York ruled Wednesday that she could not require the Justice Department to disclose an internal memorandum that provided the legal justification for that attack, but noted that such actions appeared on their face” to be “incompatible with our Constitution and laws”.
The ACLU, which brought the lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, denounced the ruling, insisting that “the public has a right to know more about the circumstances in which the government believes it can lawfully kill people, including US citizens, who are from any battlefield and have never been charged with a crime.”
Where the detainees will end up?
On the very first day of his presidency four years ago, Obama issued an executive order directing the closing of Guantanamo Bay, which he called a “sad chapter in American history”, within one year.
At the time, he ordered a review of the cases of the approximately 250 detainees who were still there – down from a high of around 800 shortly after it opened in January 2002 – to determine whether they could be prosecuted in civilian courts on US soil or released.
In 2010, an administration task force recommended repatriating 126 detainees to their homelands or a third country, prosecuting 36 others in federal court or before military commissions (which have nonetheless been harshly criticised by human-rights groups for lack of due-process guarantees), and holding 48 others indefinitely pending the end of hostilities.
Some were indeed repatriated; 166 detainees remain at Guantanamo today.
But the administration’s plan encountered heavy resistance in Congress, particularly from lawmakers who strongly opposed the transfer of any suspected terrorists to detention facilities or prisons in their jurisdictions or their trial before civilian courts.
By 2011, Congress attached amendments to critical defence bills restricting Obama’s ability to repatriate detainees and banning their transfer to the US mainland for any purpose, despite the fact that the yearly cost of holding a prisoner in a maximum-security US-based facility would be a fraction of the estimated $800,000 it costs to hold a detainee at Guantanamo.
Obama has taken the position that these restrictions encroach on his powers as commander-in-chief, but his signing of this most recent NDAA marks the second time that he has backed down from a veto threat.
“It’s not encouraging that the president continues to be willing to tie his own hands when it comes to closing Guantanamo,” said Dixon Osborn of Human Rights First. “The injustice of Guantanamo continues to serve as a stain on American global leadership on human rights.”
The NDAA also imposes curbs on the administration’s ability to transfer or repatriate some 50 non-Afghan citizens who are currently being held by US forces in Parwan prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Here are some of the most recent photoquotes uploaded onto our Facebook photostream. Please go like The People’s Record on Facebook and like & share some of our images!
Here you can find some previous photosets we’ve done focused on imperialism, capitalism, racism, mass incarceration, & human rights in Palestine.
The People’s Record Daily News Update - Whose news? Our news!
November 9, 2012
Here are some stories you may not otherwise hear about today:
- A mere two days after Obama’s reelection was announced, the Obama administration has rolled out a new round of sanctions against Iran, after accusing the country of trying to shoot down an American drone in international airspace.
- Seven NAVY Seals face disciplinary action after consulting for EA on the videogame ‘Medal of Honor: Warfighter’ and “disclosing classified information”. While these soldiers will face “disciplinary action” for selling classified information, alleged Wikileaks informant Bradley Manning remains imprisoned without conviction for more than 900 days for leaking human rights violations and war crimes committed by the United States military.
- Thousands of Tibetans in Western China are protesting today, demanding independence and a return of the exiled Dalai Lama. At least six Tibetans have set themselves on fire in protest this week alone.
- Yemeni Nobel Prize winner Tawakul Karma has publicly called on President Obama to stop drone strikes in Yemen. She urged her fellow Nobel laureate to stop aiding Al-quaeda by continuing the inhumane, popular-anger-inducing drone campaign.
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The People’s Record Daily News Update - Whose news? Our news!
November 1, 2012
Here are some stories you may not otherwise hear about today:
- Pakistani political figure Imran Khan was stopped in an airport this week by immigration and was interrogated about his criticism of the U.S. led drone strike campaign in Pakistan.
- Doctors are striking & held a march today in Cairo, Egypt in order to demand better health care. The April 6 Movement is among the many organizations who have expressed solidarity with the striking health care professionals.
- The Mayor and other officials in the city of Somerville, Massachusetts have officially agreed to stop referring to human beings as “illegal” and instead will begin using the correct term, ‘undocumented’ after a group of young activists came before the Board of Alderman and told their stories.
- A woman in Chapel Hill, North Carolina has filed a formal complaint after a police officer held her to the ground and senselessly beat her face. She now has a broken nose and a black eye but was charged with “resisting arrest” for not being docile enough while the police officer repeatedly punched her.
- A new law that passed yesterday (Halloween) in Canada dictates that anyone wearing a mask during a protest could face up to 10 years in prison.
- Both the Obama and Romney campaigns have been found to have leaked identifying data about users & campaign supporters to tracking firms.
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The People’s Record Daily News Update
October 25, 2012
Here are some stories you may not otherwise hear about today:
- The United Nations has announced that a subsection of the UN Human Rights Council is going to begin investigating the Obama administration’s drone strikes & extrajudicial killings. In related news:
On Wednesday, the Post revealed that the kill-list unearthed earlier this year is being updated to be included in a greater “disposition matrix” that helps the White House figure out how to carry clandestine strikes on insurgence and when and where they may require the help from outside agencies from allied nations.
- CNN has retracted a story posted on their website that questioned whether hormones drive women voter’s decision making or not after widespread backlash.
- Several hundred health industry workers protested outside of the Irish Health Department yesterday against the neoliberal austerity programs of privatization, budget cuts and outsourcing.
- A plan to bring two of the most dangerous technologies used in America today, side by side, in one Pennsylvania community is under way. The community will have to live with the dangers of a nuclear plant and a fracking site within a mile from each other. I guess the energy companies can save money by buying off all of the elected official in one area all at once.
- Julian Assange says he will not leave the Ecuadorian embassy until the United States ends its “investigation” and campaign of harassment against him.
- After being arrested at a Senata workers protest over lost jobs, Rev. Jesse Jackson has now been released.
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When you are tortured … they beat and beat you until everything is pain. Until there is so much pain that you give up thinking it will stop. In fact you stop hoping it will stop… . Then suddenly, one day, your cell opens and in comes a “nice” fellow who offers you a cigarette. For him you will do everything, anything.
[A Sinhalese] General told me that counter-insurgency is just like that except that instead of giving pain to a person you give pain to a whole community until it too stops hoping it will stop and starts only hoping for the lesser pain. Then you come in as the “nice fellow” and offer them a cigarette, or a constitution, and they will do anything for you.”5
What Sivaram described is strikingly reminiscent of the current situation in northwest Pakistan. Drones may have proven unreliable as tools of precision warfare, but they have yielded unexpected dividends as vehicles of state terror. Although the details of drone strategy remain secret, it appears that the US is consciously using “collectivized torture” as a means of coercing popular consent, not only in Pakistan but also in Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, North Africa, and other flashpoints of resistance to US domination.
From “Collectivized Torture”: Drone Warfare and the Dark Side of Counterinsurgency by Jacob Levich
US drones kill up to 80% civilians – Pakistan Interior Minister
October 18, 2012
The absolute majority of the people killed by American UAVs in Pakistan are innocent civilians, claims Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik. If given the drone technology, Pakistan can do the job better, he argued earlier.
Malik revealed that according to Islamabad calculates, the number of drone attacks in recent years totaled to 336 episodes, of which 96 were launched from Afghanistan.
There are no exact statistics of people killed in drone strikes in Pakistan. Estimates vary from about 2.500 to over 3,000 victims. Reportedly as many as 174 of them were children.
The latest US study claimed that only 2 per cent of drone strike casualties in Pakistan are top militants.
The researchers at Stanford and New York University also claimed that the American drone strike policy in Pakistan has not helped Washington achieve its goal of curbing terrorism in the region. The civilian deaths that mark practically every drone strike on terror suspects in Pakistan’s tribal regions have achieved the opposite goal: locals hate the US because of the unceasing fear that death may come from above at any moment.
Most of the strikes have been made in North Waziristan province, a militant stronghold against which Islamabad is considering a fully-fledged military operation. Civilian deaths have been causing outcry in Pakistan, which ultimately forbade the US military transit to Afghanistan for months as a result. Pakistani government has repeatedly demanded Washington to cease drone strikes, but the program continues despite all the odds.
A Foreign Office spokesman on Thursday said that a protest had been lodged by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the US Embassy in Pakistan on drone strikes inside Pakistani territory that took place on October 10 and 11.
October 11, 2012
The Foreign Office spokesman, in a statement, said that the United States Embassy was informed that the drone strikes on Pakistani territory were a clear violation of International Law and Pakistan’s sovereignty.
These attacks are unacceptable to Pakistan, he added.
Earlier today, a US drone attack killed 16 suspected militants and injured six others in the Orakzai agency of Pakistan’s tribal region on Thursday.
Four missiles were fired in the Buland Khel area of the Orakzai agency, which is close to the borders of the North and South Waziristan tribal regions in Fata.
“The attack was aimed at the compound of Maulana Shakirullah, who is the commander of the Hafiz Gul Bahadur group of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP),” officials said.
It should be noted that the definition of “militant” under the Obama Administration is any male over the age of 18 who is in a drone strike zone. So as we’ve pointed out before, if you’re a 76 year old male shop owner killed by a drone strike, the White House automatically reports your death as the successful assassination of a “militant”. If you’re a 19 year old student on your way home from class and you’re killed in a drone strike, the U.S. dismisses your death as the death of a militant. It’s a disgusting and unjust way to conduct foreign policy.
BREAKING: Pentagon deploys military forces to Jordan-Syria border
October 10, 2012
US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has confirmed that US troops have been dispatched to the Jordan-Syrian border “to help bolster the former’s military capabilities in case violence escalates” in the volatile region.
“We have a group of our forces there working to help build a headquarters there and to insure that we make the relationship between the United States and Jordan a strong one so that we can deal with all the possible consequences of what’s happening in Syria,” Panetta said.
Panetta’s comments came during a NATO conference of defense ministers in Brussels, where he said the US had been working with Jordan to monitor chemical and biological weapons sites in Syria and help the country deal with Syrian refugees crossing over the border.
The US has previously used Jordan as a base for other Syria-related military activities. In May of this year, Washington held military drills in Jordan dubbed ‘Operation Eager Lion,’ which saw around 12,000 troops from several nations participate in undisclosed training exercises.
A US defense official in Washington said the forces were composed of 100 military planners and other personnel who had stayed on in Jordan after attending the annual exercise in May. Several dozen more had subsequently been flown in, and they are operating from a joint US-Jordanian military center north of the capital, the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AP.
The Obama administration denied accusations in the Syrian media that the exercises were a threat against President Assad, and maintained that the action focused on the treatment of refugees, anti-terrorism tactics and naval interception of smuggling vessels.
Following the operation, a small US contingent stayed behind to establish the center in Amman, paving the way for the arrival of more personnel.
“We have been working closely with our Jordanian partners on a variety of issues related to Syria for some time now,”Pentagon Press Secretary George Little said. Citing Washington’s concern over Syria’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, he said that the US has been planning “various contingencies, both unilaterally and with our regional partners.”
The Syrian conflict took an unexpected turn last week when mortar fire struck across the border at neighboring Turkey, sparking outcry from the Turkish government who subsequently returned fire. Turkey deployed 25 new F-16 fighter jets to reinforce its borders this week as NATO pledged support if the conflict spills into the country again.
Since uprisings against the embattled President Assad began last year, the UN estimated that more than 20,000 people were killed in the conflict and some 700,000 fled Syria to seek refuge in neighboring countries.
