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Search: drones

29 Nov

...view 'being paid to die and that too such a small amount' as an affront to honour. On the other hand, because the government or military get the most rents from foreign aid or military aid (by using it for their own purposes), they will respond much more to economic incentives. Hence, there is great mistrust because the costs are imposed on the population (dead from drone strikes, economic losses, insecurity etc) whilst the economic benefits go to a corrupt government - Raymond Davis and drones would provide a salient...
29.11.11 | |

09 Jan

...governed by IHL (the Criminal Procedure Law of 2006, for example, allowed Israel to incarcerate Palestinians from the Gaza Strip suspected of criminal offences in detention facilities in Israel and to prosecute them in Israeli civil courts). Gaza (unilateral) withdrawal was a disengagement and not an end of accupation (Israeli drones monitor Gaza from the air, Israeli naval ships prevent Gazan fishermen from sailing more than 4 kilometers from shore..). On top of this, the wall and the evacuation of the ground settlements in Gaza were parts of the same...
09.01.14 | |

05 Feb

...4) Some are crying hypocrisy for people being upset with torture under Bush but not being upset about the drones. This line of attack is another of the relentless efforts to get us to acquiesce in the torture that was done and which remains central in the military commissions that are going on in Gitmo. It is possible and some have complained about Bush crimes and Obama crimes at the same time. For me, what is more interesting is to see the continuous thread across both – these were both...
05.02.13 | |

06 Sep

...see this post by John Robb at Global Guerillas. Robb also wonders how the ubiquity of such new surveillance tech (especially once it gets hacked and adapted) may affect "open source warfare." By the way, regarding the relationship of the Parrot to actual military drone technology, it's worth noting that while the for the Parrot uses an iPhone as a controller, MIT's Human Automation Lab has recently done a "proof of concept" for using iPhones to control new light-weight military drones. An app for military air operations? Top that, Blackberry!...
06.09.10 | |

10 Jan

...to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured. In this war, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite. Almost all the...
10.01.09 | |

16 Jul

...not have in advanced military technology, asymmetric warfare, and international law. “Reports” from HRW and Amnesty claiming to dissect complex battlefield events are a mix of unverifiable “eyewitness” allegations and speculation based on a few scraps of questionable (at best) information. Look at HRW’s latest bogus “report” on IDF use of drones or Amnesty's 127-pager on Gaza. A few people collecting "testimony" and looking at damage after a battle cannot possibly be able to reach the conclusions claimed by the authors. And the obsessive focus on Israel gets HRW and...
16.07.09 | |

17 Jan

...recognition that drones 'enable a State to perform targeted killing without exercising effective control over territory and without having the individual in custody.' In so many words, the Heyns report argues that the United States cannot escape the purview of human rights law (the ICCPR included) by arguing that the jurisdictional scope of the treaties do not capture drone strikes. The same could be said for overseas surveillance. Of course, the Heyns report is hardly the last word on the subject, but there is a big push for the extra-territorial...
17.01.14 | |

25 Sep

...is the former Acting General Counsel of the CIA John Rizzo using the term "murder" to describe some of these drone strikes last summer. That struck me as he would hardly be a person who would not know the meaning of that word in this context. I cited to this in a posting last summer over at SALTLAW.ORG/Blog - http://www.saltlaw.org/blog/2011/07/20/bringing-light-to-dark-matter-drones-torture-illegal-wars/ Second, it is not the concept of signature strikes per se, but rather the criteria that are being used to determine a signature strike. My sense from what I read...
25.09.12 | |

08 Aug

..."collateral damage." All of this helped remove the sting of barbarity from air power (unless, of course, you happened to be one of those "collateral" people under a "surgical" strike). This effort to dehumanize the victims was made easier by the fact that the dangers facing the bomber pilots themselves were generally minimal. War from the air was becoming a one-way street of destruction. At an extreme, with the arrival of fleets of Hellfire-missile-armed unmanned Predator drones over Iraq, the knight of the air suddenly found himself 7,000 miles away...
08.08.06 | |

18 Nov

Mihai Martoiu Ticu What it strike me is that the discussion is about the success of punishing the guy, not about due process and innocence. In those discussions one would consider it a full success if the guy gets a death penalty, less success if he gets life without parole, even if the guy is innocent. The only thing one cares about is that one legitimizes the Guantanamo, the Abu Ghraib, the renditions, the drones and all the rest, that the U.S. gets its will imposed on the rest of...
18.11.10 | |

12 Sep

...attacks and in an effort to stop continual attacks on our nationals (mixed motives do not obviate permissibility of lawful measures of self-defense). The measures of self-defense may take weeks and some may be relatively "silent" (and may or may not involve use of drones for more than intel). These are not matters for "amateurs." Stay tuned. M. Gross I'm not sure we have any recourse we really wish to pursue, since the Libyan government doesn't seem to have intentionally committed the offense. Jordan is no doubt correct about what...
12.09.12 | |

23 Aug

Joshua Hughes Thanks for the interesting post. About your question on whether remote-controlled robots make one more likely to use force, the US Army War College did a study about whether using drones lowered the threshold of conflict. They found out that it did, at least in the eyes of the public. Here's the link: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=1289 Jordan Check here to prove that you are not a robot...
23.08.16 | |