Skip to main content

Robert Maguire's Library tagged drones →  View Popular

The Associated Press: Blackwater Predator missile-load contract ending

  • CIA Director Leon Panetta has canceled a contract with the former Blackwater security firm that allowed the company's operatives to load missiles on Predator drones in Pakistan.
  • the work is being shifted to government personnel
04 Dec 09

About those civilian fatalities | The AfPak Channel

  • we read it with great interest and were struck by one of Shane's anonymous
    sources, a government official who claims that the more than 80 drone strikes
    in less than two years have killed "more than 400" enemy fighters and "just
    over 20" civilians.
  • A study we conducted in mid-October, based on a careful
    analysis of the most accurate media counts of the strikes, found
    that between some 370 and 540 militants were killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since the start of 2008. There have been a few more strikes since
    the study was released, bringing the total of militants killed to between 384 and 578. So that's
    close enough to be in the same range as the government official's estimate of
    more than 400 militants killed.
  • 1 more annotations...
05 Nov 09

Daily brief: U.N. evacuates more than half of international workers from Afghanistan | The AfPak Channel

  • In
    a landmark legal ruling, an Italian judge yesterday convicted 23
    Americans, most of them CIA agents, on charges related to the 2003
    rendition of a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan to Egypt, where
    Abu Omar claims he was tortured (New York Times, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Financial Times, ABC).
    The trial, which began back in 2007, is the first involving the CIA's
    alleged 'extraordinary rendition' program, and the CIA's Milan station
    chief at the time, Robert Lady, was sentenced to eight years in prison
    while the other 22 Americans convicted each received five years (BBC).

    During
    the three-year trial, the CIA refused to comment on the case or provide
    lawyers for the accused agents, who are not in custody and were tried
    in absentia (CNN, Telegraph, Los Angeles Times). A State Department spokesman said the U.S. was "disappointed" by the verdicts, which are likely to be appealed (New York Times, Bloomberg).
  • Militants
    blew up a girls' school in the northwestern Pakistani tribal district
    of Khyber earlier today, the second such attack in the last four days,
    demonstrating ongoing militant commitment to attacking education in the
    country (AFP, Dawn, Pajhwok). There were no reports of casualties in the attack (PTI).
    And Karachi police reportedly arrested a Taliban commander from
    Malakand, a northwestern district of Pakistan, earlier today (Dawn).
  • 5 more annotations...
02 Nov 09

Clinton in Pakistan encounters widespread distrust of U.S. -- latimes.com

  • At a televised town hall meeting in Islamabad, the capital, on Friday, a woman in a mostly female audience characterized U.S. drone missile strikes on suspected terrorist targets in northwestern Pakistan as de facto acts of terrorism. A day earlier in Lahore, a college student asked Clinton why every student who visits the U.S. is viewed as a terrorist.
  • Some of the most biting criticisms came from well-mannered university students and respected, seasoned journalists, a reflection of the breadth of dissatisfaction Pakistanis have with U.S. policy toward their country.
  • 4 more annotations...
23 Oct 09

On Drones | Center for a New American Security

  • I really think drone strike can be part of an effective, integrated CT and COIN strategy, but they cannot substitute for such a strategy, and I worry that the CIA is carrying out their own campaign in part because a) it's been getting kicked around so much since 9/11 that it is now overly focused on killing high-level al-Qaeda targets rather than gathering intelligence and that b) it's trying to justify and defend its budget through what it can claim is a successful program.
  • My worries have always centered around how the attacks are perceived on the ground, so it has been frustrating to read careless readers of our argument mistakenly assume we agree with open-source reporting out of Pakistan. To the contrary. I focus on Pakistani press reports because, in a war of perceptions, I am less concerned with how many civilians we are actually killing and more concerned with how many civilians the neutral population thinks we are killing.
  • 2 more annotations...
22 Oct 09

Igniting The Debate Over Obama's Secret War - The Atlantic Politics Channel

  • since the beginning of the Obama administration, Predator strikes have dramatically increased, as has the conviction among many analysts that the rate of civilian casualties is backstopping radicalism and engendering hatred against the United States.
  • the CIA's counter-terrorism center (CTC) has the authority to decide whether its target is legitimate -- and then authority, without consulting the White House, to launch the Predator's Hellfire missiles
  • 3 more annotations...

The risks of the C.I.A.’s Predator drones : The New Yorker

  • The C.I.A. remotely launched two Hellfire missiles from the Predator, and Mehsud and eleven others died. There was no controversy when, a few days after the missile strike, CNN reported that President Barack Obama had authorized it. However, there was widespread anger after the Wall Street Journal revealed, at about the same time, that during the Bush Administration the C.I.A. had considered setting up hit squads to capture or kill Al Qaeda operatives around the world.
  • The Predator program, as it happens, also uses private contractors for a variety of tasks, including “flying” the drones. The U.S. government runs two drone programs. The military’s version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets combatants in support of U.S. troops stationed there. The C.I.A.’s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in places where U.S. troops are not based. The program is classified as covert, and the C.I.A. declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.
  • 2 more annotations...
09 Oct 09

The redefinition of air power (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog)

  • Key points: no personnel lost and drones deliver great results at about 1/20th the cost of jets, according to the Israelis.
  • The spectacular benefit is the loitering capacity ("persistent stare" means you can find needles in haystacks because you can watch them being built) yielding real-time operational intell.
  • 3 more annotations...
05 Oct 09

Informed Comment: 8 US troops Killed in Nuristan; UN Official Says He was Pressured to Wink at Karzai Ballot Fraud; Abdullah Defiant

  • Peter Galbraith, who formerly served in the UN in Afghanistan, says that the UN collected evidence that one third of the ballots for incumbent Hamid Karzai cast last August 20 in the presidential election were fraudulent. If this is true, it would drop him from the current 54% of the vote he is said to have received to less than 50%, triggering a run-off. Galbraith charges that he was pressured to cover up the fraud in the interests of national peace. He was fired from his post and made to leave the country because of differences with his boss, Kai Eide of Norway. Some UN and US officials worried that a runoff election between Karzai, who is backed by Pashtuns, and his chief rival Abdullah Abdullah, who is backed by Tajiks, could throw the country into ethnic turmoil just as the US military was implementing a policy to pacify the Pashtun provinces.
  • But Galbraith's charges have stiffened Abdullah Abdullah's resolve to contest the results to the end, making him the Mir Hosain Mousavi of Afghanistan. In a news conference on Saturday, Abdullah pointed to Peter Galbraith's letter as proof that the UN is not an impartial watchdog of the elections. Besides, a conviction that Karzai was fraudulently elected would be far more damaging to Tajik-Pashtun relations than would a free and fair runoff.
  • 1 more annotations...
04 Oct 09

Anti-U.S. Wave Imperiling Efforts in Pakistan, Officials Say - washingtonpost.com

  • In recent weeks, Pakistan has rejected as "incomplete" at least 180 U.S. government visa requests. Its own ambassador in Washington has criticized what he called a "blacklist" used by the Pakistani intelligence service to deny visas or to conduct "rigorous, intrusive and obviously crude surveillance" of journalists and nongovernmental aid organizations it dislikes, including the Congress-funded International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute.
  • Tension has been fueled by widespread media reports in Pakistan of increased U.S. military and intelligence activity -- including the supposed arrival of 1,000 Marines and the establishment of "spy" centers in houses rented by the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Islamabad.
  • 2 more annotations...
02 Oct 09

CIA expanding presence in Afghanistan -- latimes.com

  • The CIA is also carrying out an escalating campaign of unmanned Predator missile strikes on Al Qaeda and insurgent strongholds in Pakistan. The number of strikes so far this year, 37, already exceeds the 2008 total, according to data compiled by the Long War Journal website, which tracks Predator strikes in Pakistan.
  • Mahsud's organization had become a major supplier of suicide bombers to other insurgent groups, training attackers that in some cases would be deployed to carry out strikes in Pakistan or Afghanistan.



    "He turned it into a business," the Defense Department official said. "Putting people through a process to indoctrinate them, prepping them to execute and then basically they can be bartered or sold."



    Though other U.S. officials said Mahsud did not appear to have been motivated by financial gain, they did confirm the supplier arrangement.



    "He didn't sell suicide bombers like a commodity for profit," said a U.S. counter-terrorism official. "He'd offer resources -- in this case human beings ready to die -- to his sympathizers in exchange for things he needed. These were deals among tribal figures, not outsourcing agreements among corporations."
  • 2 more annotations...
11 Sep 09

Matthew Yglesias » Successes in Pakistan

  • Meanwhile, Senate Armed Forces Carl Levin is joining Nancy Pelosi in expressing serious skepticism about the wisdom of deploying more forces to Afghanistan. Pelosi never seems to get any credit from anyone over this, but before she was Speaker she was Vice Chair of the Intelligence Committee and thus, like Levin, has the kind of background that normally gets you taken seriously as a national security policy thinker on the Hill.
1 - 20 of 21 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Sponsored Links

Ads by Google

Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »

Join Diigo