As peace activists prepare for the first national demonstration at the UK’s new drone base in Lincolnshire on 27 April, new information has emerged regarding British complicity in US drone strikes in Africa, and the UN has condemned the CIA’s deadly drone warfare in Pakistan.
In mid-March, Ben Emmerson QC, the UN special rapporteur for counter-terrorism and human rights, made a three-day trip to Pakistan.
On 15 March, Emmerson issued a statement…
On 19 December, the Daily Telegraph reported that British Tornado fighter-bombers and armed Reaper drones could continue to fly after the official British ‘withdrawal’ from Afghanistan in 2014.
British military sources told the paper that it would be easy to overfly Afghanistan with aircraft and drones based in the Gulf states or elsewhere in the region.
In mid-January, a NATO rocket strike killed 14 villagers in Hasan Khel in Wardak province, Afghanistan, according to a report in the Sunday Times, quoting an Afghan army officer, second lieutenant Mohammad Jawed, who lost his father, two brothers and an unborn child in the attack.
Villagers believe they heard a rocket-like whooshing sound, indicating a drone strike.
On 11 December 2012, as MPs in London prepared to debate British involvement in drone warfare, Wrexham Peace & Justice Forum (WPJF) held an information stall about drones – unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Hundreds of leaflets were handed out to passing shoppers, workers and Yale College students.
Two leaflets focused on Welsh concerns over drones, which are being developed and tested at Parc Aberporth. The airspace above 40,000 people living in 500 square miles of West Wales…
As PN headed to the printers, Brian Terrell was heading to prison for a drone protest at Whiteman air force base on 15 April with Ron Faust and Mark Kenney. The three were arrested at the base while trying to deliver an indictment to the base commander, brigadier general Scott A Vander Hamm, charging everyone involved in drone operations with extrajudicial killings, wars of aggression and other crimes.
Mark Kenney served a four-month sentence ending on 11 November, and Ron Faust was…
On 13 October, the eight-day 90-mile Drones Peace Walk reached RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, to be met by campaigners from around the UK, all protesting against the opening of the first armed drone base on British soil.
The RAF's pilotless killer drones in Afghanistan are currently operated from a base in Nevada, USA – they will soon be operated from RAF Waddington.
The walk, which was…
While campaigning against drone strikes reached new heights this autumn, including the Imran Khan convoy in Pakistan, the last two months were dominated by two drone-related reports.
The British government has spent or committed £2bn towards developing and deploying pilotless military drones, and it plans to spend at least another £2bn on developing and deploying an armed drone called 'Scavenger',…
Given the current debates about the legitimacy of the use of drone strikes to eliminate suspected 'terrorists' in Pakistan and 'insurgents' in Afghanistan, this timely book aims to illuminate the story of the land and the people subjected to these Western onslaughts.
However, despite its title, this is not a book about drone strikes or their effects, and its actual contents – a collection of scholarly essays concerning the history, ethnography and anthropology of the Afghanistan-…
The Drone Campaign Network has launched a ‘Lift the Veil’ petition, aiming to collect 20,000 signatures calling for an end to the secrecy surrounding the use of British drones in Afghanistan. UK forces are known to have carried out around 300 drone strikes in Afghanistan since 2008. Former director of public prosecutions Ken Macdonald says there is ‘pretty compelling…
In addition to killing hundreds of civilians and fuelling anger and terrorism directed against the West, US and British airstrikes by pilotless drones could also be a major obstacle to negotiating an end to the war in Afghanistan, according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
Based on interviews with ‘four senior Taliban interlocutors’, the September 2012 briefing paper reports: that the Taliban ‘would be open to negotiating a ceasefire as part of a general…
‘Not again, not ever!’
In Rhymni (Rhymney), the United Valleys Action Group are bracing themselves for another environmental campaign on behalf of local communities.
UVAG who, with the support of Friends of the Earth Cymru, have just defeated plans for a ‘monster incinerator’ in the area, expect the Miller Argent consortium to apply for planning permission for an open-cast coal mine at Nant Llesg on Merthyr Common.
Nant Llesg is very close to Miller Argent’s infamous Ffos-y-…
Roughly the same proportion of the British public ‘approves’ of US drone strikes as ‘disapproves’, according to a new poll by Pew Global Attitudes.
The international survey, polling 20 countries around the world, found that while 47% of the British public ‘disapprove of the [US] conducting missile strikes from pilotless aircraft called drones to target extremists in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia’ (arguably a leading question), almost as many (44%) ‘approve’ of such…
In Britain 47% disapprove of US drone strikes, against 44% who approve. Along with the US and India, Britain is an outlier on this: witness the "disapprove" rates for Greece (90%), Egypt (89%), Jordan (85%), Turkey (81%), Spain (76%), Brazil (76%) and Japan (75%). (It may be worth pointing out that the question asked - with its reference to "target[ing] extermists" - was somewhat leading: "Do you approve or disapprove of the United States conducting missile strikes from pilotless aircraft…
As if the peace movement hasn’t enough on its plate already, the military-industrial complex invents a new and easier way to wage war: the unmanned drone.
For the busy activist trying to grapple with the growing development of the drone wars, what’s needed is a well-written, easy-to-read book, coming from a committed nonviolent perspective, that lays out the issues in an accessible but not simplistic way. Thankfully, long-…
A US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone waits out a sandstorm at Joint Base Balad, Iraq, 8 September 2008. Photo: Jason Epley © US Defense Department
Introduction
The present document must be read immediately by its named recipient. The reasons for such urgency will become obvious before the reading is completed.
In accordance with the Seventy-Third Amendment of the Constitution…
