Category: Terra Terra Terra!

‘Not A Bug Splat’

~ susie

bugsplat

A stunning art project in Pakistan:

A new project, initiated by a collective of artists from around the world includingthe French JR, has tried to reach the people pulling the trigger in America’s drone wars—the drone operators themselves.

It’s called “Not A Bug Splat,” and its gets its name from the term drone operators use for a successful “kill,” because—in the pixelated grayscale of the drone camera—ending a human life looks like squashing a bug.

The collective created a huge poster of a child whom organizers say lost his family to drone strikes in the Pakistan’s heavily bombed province, Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa. “Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face,” reads the project’s website.

In the last decade, drone operators have killed as many as 3,600 people in northwest Pakistan alone. Those people—they include as many as 951 civilians and 200 children—died without trial or jury. They were specks on the screen, and then they were dead.

Not a Bug Splat isn’t only for drone operators, though. It also addresses itself to other eyes in the sky:

The installation is also designed to be captured by satellites in order to make it a permanent part of the landscape on online mapping sites.

The torture will happen again and again

~ susie

Senators Wyden and Merkley discuss oil train safety

I like Ron Wyden, but what he says here is bullshit. Nothing will stop this from happening again if no one goes to prison over it — and I’d say the odds are really small:

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden explained today why he voted to declassify the Senate Intelligence Committee’s apparently scathing 6,200-page report on the CIA’s detention and brutal interrogation of overseas terrorism suspects.

“I believe the American people will be profoundly disturbed by the contents of this report,” the senior senator from Oregon wrote in a news release. “Though I can’t provide any details until that declassification process is finished, I can say that the American people will see that much of what CIA officials have said about the effectiveness of coercive interrogations was simply untrue.”

[…]”I have spoken about the intelligence leadership’s culture of misinformation before and it continues to be a problem to this day,” Wyden said in his news statement. “I have also been asking questions publicly for years about the role that outside contractors played in the interrogation program and I hope the American people will soon get some answers to those questions.”

[…]”It is going to make many people uncomfortable,” he wrote, “but getting the facts about torture out to the American people will keep these mistakes from being repeated and make our national intelligence agencies stronger and more effective in the long run.

You’re on Candid Camera

~ susie

March 24, 2014 at 12:20PM

They are never, ever, EVER going to get rid of the data. Ever.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to figure out what the LAPD is doing with the mountains (and mountains) of license-plate data that they’re harvesting in the city’s streets without a warrant or judicial oversight. As part of the process, they’ve asked the LAPD for a week’s worth of the data they’re collecting, and in their reply brief, the LAPD argues that it can’t turn over any license-plate data because all the license-plates they collect are part of an “ongoing investigation,” because every car in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing criminal investigation, because some day, someone driving that car may commit a crime.

As EFF’s Jennifer Lynch says, “This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity.”

This reminds me of the NSA’s argument that they’re collecting “pieces of a puzzle” and Will Potter’s rebuttal: “The reality is that the NSA isn’t working with a mosaic or a puzzle. What the NSA is really advocating is the collection of millions of pieces from different, undefined puzzles in the hopes that sometime, someday, the government will be working on a puzzle and one of those pieces will fit.” The same thing could be said of the LAPD.

Coalition of the shilling

~ susie

deadening

This reminds me of the old days of Operation Mockingbird, except now reporters get paid right out in the open for shilling for the military/intelligence complex:

On February 25 journalist Thomas Ricks published an important scoop on his blog at ForeignPolicy.com: Army Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top US commander in Iraq, had requested keeping a brigade in northern Iraq beyond President Obama’s deadline for the withdrawal of combat forces. The timing of the story was intriguing. Just two days earlier, Ricks had published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for US troops to remain in Iraq long term. “I think leaders in both countries may come to recognize that the best way to deter a return to civil war is to find a way to keep 30,000 to 50,000 United States service members in Iraq for many years to come,” he wrote. The op-ed coincided with a policy brief by Ricks issued by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the Washington think tank where he is a senior fellow.

Ricks, a longtime military correspondent for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and author of the bestseller Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, had been a prominent critic of US policy in Iraq. Recently on his blog, he called the decision to invade “one of the biggest blunders in American history.” But his op-ed, along with the rollout of the policy brief and the news story, was selling the idea of a long stay in Iraq.

CNAS, like most think tanks, bills itself as “independent and nonpartisan”; its leadership says that it takes no positions as an institution. But it played a key role in selling the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and now it could help prepare the ground for the president to reverse course on Iraq and keep a large force in the country.

It’s part of a new influence game in Washington. Think tanks, once a place for intellectuals outside government to weigh in on important policy issues, are now enlisted by people within government to help sell its policies to the public, as well as to others in government. Institutions like CNAS are also heavily funded by major weapons manufacturers and Pentagon contractors, creating potential conflicts of interest rarely disclosed in the media.
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You didn’t really want to know about U.S. torture, anyway!

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Thank God our betters are protecting us!

It emerges from the USA that 9,000 documents proving direct involvement of the White House in cases of brutal torture are being withheld from the Senate Committee by the Obama administration. This should surprise nobody, as Obama has done everything in his power to protect George W Bush and the many in the administration, diplomatic service and CIA involved in the whole secret web of torture and murder. The entire programme was on a scale and of an order of brutality much greater than anything that has been yet understood by the public. All of those foreign nationals rendered to Uzbekistan, for example, were killed during or following torture and buried in the desert.

It seems that Obama and the Republicans are combining to make sure that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the subject – which by all accounts will be damning enough – is never going to be made public in any way that reveals anything not already known. The Republicans – and Fox News – have already united behind the extraordinary assertion that the CIA were entitled to spy on the Committee’s activity on its computers, because the physical computers had been provided by the CIA.

Thanks to Price Benowitz LLP, DC Car Accident Attorneys.

Oscar-nominated ‘Dirty Wars’ aims to make a covert war more ‘real’

~ susie

I wrote earlier that I finally saw “Dirty Wars” this weekend, and it was impressive. I strongly urge everyone to see it:

Oscar-nominated ‘Dirty Wars’ aims to make a covert war more ‘real’ (via PBS News Hour)

“Dirty Wars” director Richard Rowley talks to chief arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown about the dangers of investigating covert American wars in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. Richard Rowley and Jeremy Scahill are both war reporters who have been…

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The snow was a bust

~ susie

Discussing "Dirty Wars"

Thank God. Most of it went to South Jersey, Delaware and Maryland.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to stay awake enough to watch “The Act of Killing,” the Oscar-nominated documentary, today. Here’s a Mother Jones piece about it.

I did manage to watch “Dirty Wars,” the Jeremy Scahill documentary. (I kept falling asleep and had to watch it twice, but I did get through it.) Jeremy Scahill’s voice is very much (ironically) a drone, but push through that and watch. It’s worth it.

The older I get, the more I learn about wars and how they’re run, the more disgusted and skeptical I become. It surprises and frustrates me that people keep falling for the sales pitch, again and again.