Foreign Lawmakers Slam “Assassin” Obama Over Drone Strikes

President “Violating the principles of the Western world”

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
July 26, 2012

British and Danish politicians have spoken out in disgust at the US policy of drone strikes in Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, calling it targeted assassination.

“It’s terrible,” said Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the foreign policy spokesperson for Radikale, the Danish Social Liberal Party.

“The United States has no right to carry out these types of executions of suspected political adversaries. It contravenes international law.” Petersen said in an interview with the Politiken newspaper.

Peterson added that Obama was mirroring terrorist activity by adhering to the policy. ”It is tantamount to terrorism where you also kill people for political motives in someone else’s territory.” Peterson said.

Another Danish lawmaker, Soren Pind, of the Venstre party, Denmark’s opposition party, also blasted Obama. In an interview with Ræson magazine, Pind said “I criticised George Bush for combining the presidency with something we could view as torture. But what Obama is doing is combining the presidency with assassination. In reality it is much worse. Obama is completely ignoring the western world’s principles, and in the long run it will be detrimental,”

Officials from another far left party in Denmark, Enhedslisten, also weighed in, saying they would push the issue in the Danish parliament’s foreign policy committee.

Denmark’s foreign minister, Villy Sovndal was less critical but still intimated that the government was displeased with the US policy of drone strikes.“I am not prepared to comment further than saying that we do not use drones ourselves and that international rules must be adhered to,” said Sovndal.

Denmark has traditionally been a strong ally to the US. However, Ole Wæver, political scientist at the University of Copenhagen notes “Obama has used up his goodwill account…There has been until now broad political agreement that we stood shoulder to shoulder with the US, but people are slowly realising that the world order is changing.”

Neither the US government, nor the US Embassy in Denmark has responded to the criticism.

Meanwhile, in Britain, a group of twelve parliamentarians are reported to have penned a letter to Obama demanding that drone strikes in Pakistan are halted.

The International Herald Tribune reports that the officials contend that the strikes are only serving to fuel hatred of the US and provide justification for future terrorist activities and that too many innocent people are being killed as a result of the attacks. The letter also notes that the strikes are a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.

Earlier this week, it was reported that the incoming head of Pakistan’s intelligence network plans to demand that the US halt the drone strikes and let Pakistan deal with weeding out militants.

In related developments, a UN report released this week states that US drone aircraft over Somalia pose a significant danger to air traffic and may also violate an arms embargo against the country.

As we reported Monday, there is a huge growing movement in Pakistan speaking out against US aggression in the country.

One prominent voice is that of Imran Khan, the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) who recently slammed the US policy of targeting militants in Pakistan and elsewhere with unmanned drone strikes, calling the practice “immoral and insane”.

The Obama administration has been heavily criticized for moving to block the release of information relating to its overseas drone assassination programme, and will not even acknowledge that it exists, despite countless public references to the programme and the proven existence of an official “kill list”.

It is common knowledge that the Obama administration has exponentially increased the use of drone missile attacks in countries such as Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

The president has referred to the programme several times in public, as have officials such as counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan.

Earlier this year, the New York Times ran a major piece on the programme, revealing that the White House has asserted the right to carry out state-sponsored assassination anywhere in the world without having to provide any evidence or go through any legal process.

Furthermore, the Times revealed that Obama adopted a policy that “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”

The administration merely has to state that the target is a terrorist and it doesn’t matter whether they are an American citizen or not, as we saw in the case of American-born Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, who were both killed last year.

In December of last year, Obama administration lawyers reaffirmed their backing for state sponsored assassination, claiming that “U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets” and do not have the right to any legal protection against being marked for summary execution.

During a CBS 60 Minutes interview in January, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta revealed that Obama himself personally approves the policy to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial on a case by case basis.

Perhaps the real reason that the administration wants the details of the programme kept under wraps is that, as reported by Propublica recently, the programme is potentially much bigger in scope than anyone had previously thought.

The administration’s figures do not add up, they are chock full of contradictions and discrepancies, and there can be little doubt that there have been many many more civilian deaths as a result of drone attacks than have been publicly acknowledged.

Experts, including UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns, as well as Pakistan’s UN ambassador in Geneva, Zamir Akram, have described the drone assassination programme as a violation of the international legal system, saying that some attacks may constitute war crimes.

Akram, who noted that US drone strikes had killed more than 1,000 civilians in Pakistan, also said “We find the use of drones to be totally counterproductive in terms of succeeding in the ‘war against terror’. It leads to greater levels of terror rather than reducing them.

Many also contend that the attacks infringe the national sovereignty of Pakistan and constitute an act of war.

In 2010, a report by Washington think tank The New America Foundation found that 32% of the more than 1,200 people killed since 2004 in Pakistan, or around 1 in 3, were innocent bystanders rather than dangerous terrorists.

While the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has stated that the Pakistani government is actively facilitating the attacks by providing bases from which to launch the drones, Pakistani authorities have consistently voiced opposition to cross border missile strikes, which have been ongoing for years, but have accelerated since day one of Obama’s presidency. During Obama’s first year in office, there were 53 reported drone missile attacks; more than were carried out during the entirety of George W. Bush’s two four year terms in office.

Reports from 2009, drawn up by Pakistani authorities, indicated that close to 700 civilians had already perished, with just 14 wanted Al Qaeda leaders killed in the attacks.

The ACLU estimates that US drone strikes have killed as many as 4,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2002. Of those, a significant proportion were civilians.

Last week it was revealed that the families of three US citizens killed in drone strikes in Yemen last year – including al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaqi – have filed a civil lawsuit against top US officials.

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

Tags: drones

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55 Percent Of Americans Believe That The Government Will Take Care Of Them If Disaster Strikes

Michael Snyder
American Dream
July 23, 2012

If a major emergency happened in the United States, do you have faith that the government would take care of you?  Amazingly, even after all of the examples to the contrary that we have seen in recent years, a solid majority of all Americans actually believe that the government will be there for them when things hit the fan.  According to a new survey conducted by the Adelphi University Center for Health Innovation, 55 percent of Americans believe that the authorities will come to their rescue when disaster strikes.  Sadly, most Americans still view the government as a “nanny state” that has both the capability and the willingness to take care of them from the cradle to the grave.  Most Americans still have faith that the government will come through for them when they need it the most.  But all we have to do is look back at what happened during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to realize what a crock of baloney that is.  Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that was limited to a relatively small geographic area, and yet we all saw how the response of the federal government was a complete and utter failure.  So what is going to happen someday if there is a nationwide disaster that stretches on for months or even years?  Do you really believe that the federal government will be there for you?

How is the federal government going to take care of more than 300 million Americans in the event of a major financial collapse?

How is the federal government going to rescue more than 300 million Americans if a killer pandemic sweeps the nation?

How is the federal government going to make sure that more than 300 million Americans are safe and secure if a cyber attack cripples our power grid or takes down the entire Internet?

How is the federal government going to get food and water to more than 300 million Americans if an EMP blast takes down most of the electronics in this country?

It would be easy to go on and on discussing various nationwide emergency scenarios.  All over the globe the number of earthquakes is increasing, and it would be easy to imagine an absolutely massive earthquake on the west coast or alongthe New Madrid fault in the middle of the country leaving tens of millions of Americans in need of basic assistance.

What would the federal government do in a situation like that?

Or how would the government handle a full-blown eruption of a major volcano in the Pacific northwest?

If the federal government could not even come close to handling Hurricane Katrina, then how in the world are they going to rescue us from something far worse?

Sadly, most Americans just roll along as if everything is going to be just fine.  Just check out some of the other numbers from the survey mentioned at the top of this article….

-44 percent of all Americans do not have first-aid kits in their homes.

-48 percent of all Americans do not have any emergency supplies stored up.

-53 percent of all Americans do not have a 3 day supply of nonperishable food and water in their homes.

Essentially, what we have got is about half the country that is completely and totally unprepared.

About half the nation is sitting back and relying on the government to make all of the preparations.

Yes, the government is definitely preparing, but those preparations are only going to go so far.

On July 19th, 2012 FEMA posted a solicitation document for packaged meals.  According to that document, the maximum amount of meals that would be provided to FEMA under the contract would be 17.5 million meals.  The following is from the FEMA solicitation document….

As referred to in paragraph (b) of FAR Clause 52.216-22, “Indefinite Quantity” of this contract, the guaranteed contract minimum is 21,000 packaged meals to include the base and option periods.  The contract ceiling amount shall not exceed 17,500,000 packaged meals.

But even if FEMA ordered all 17.5 million meals, that simply is not going to go very far.  That would only be enough to provide about 5 percent of the population with a single meal.

So perhaps we should applaud FEMA for thinking ahead, but the truth is that there is simply no way that FEMA is going to be able to provide even the basic necessities for everyone if there is a very large regional or national disaster.

When a true disaster hits this country, the system is going to be concerned with saving and guarding and perpetuating itself.  The system is not really going to care about the survival of all of the “useless eaters” out there.

Recently, Barack Obama signed a series of executive orders that grant him extraordinary powers in the event of a national emergency.

With the stroke of a pen, Barack Obama could potentially take control of all food, all energy, all health resources, all transportation resources and all communication resources (including television, radio and the Internet).

Barack Obama insists that all of these executive orders are absolutely necessary.

Does he know something that we don’t?

In a recent editorial by Barack Obama that ran in the Wall Street Journal, Obama warned us of some of the potential consequences of a devastating cyber attack….

It doesn’t take much to imagine the consequences of a successful cyber attack. In a future conflict, an adversary unable to match our military supremacy on the battlefield might seek to exploit our computer vulnerabilities here at home. Taking down vital banking systems could trigger a financial crisis. The lack of clean water or functioning hospitals could spark a public health emergency. And as we’ve seen in past blackouts, the loss of electricity can bring businesses, cities and entire regions to a standstill.

So is there a reason why he is coming out with this now just a few months before the election?

That is a very good question.

In any event, the truth is that in the event of a major nationwide emergency the number one priority of the authorities will not be to take care of you.

In fact, the well being of you and your family will be very low on the list.

One of the top priorities will be to restore order, and authorities will use as much violence and brutality as it takes in order to do that.

We see examples of this around the nation every day.  For example, just check out the video posted below.  In the video, police officers in Anaheim, California can be seen firing “non-lethal” rounds at men, women and children while a police dog knocks over a baby carriage and attacks a woman who is holding a baby….

If that is how the authorities treat us in “good times”, then how would they treat us during a true emergency?

And right now things are falling apart all around us.  The economy continues to get worse in many ways, and the U.S. poverty rate is currently on pace to reach its highest level since the 1960s.

As I wrote about a few days ago, the Federal Reserve and the federal government did not prevent the last major global financial crisis, and they are not going to be able to prevent the next one from happening either.

If you want to make it through what is coming, it is up to you to get prepared.  Nobody else is going to do it for you.

When the next major natural disaster or economic crisis happens, it will be those that have prepared that will have hope.  Those that have not prepared will be freaking out and many of them will totally give in to despair or fear.  But those that have gotten ready for the storm ahead of time will be able to be at peace.

Our world is becoming more unstable with each passing day.  If you have blind faith that the government will always take care of you, then there is a very good chance that someday you will be bitterly disappointed.  But if you work really hard to prepare yourself and your family now, then you will have a much better chance of making it through what is rapidly approaching.

Tags: Domestic News, Government Corruption

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London bus drivers to vote again over possible strikes

Considering how much money the kuntz in charge have made out of the Olympics scam I think £500 bonus is more than reasonable for the bus drivers...

London bus drivers seek a £500 bonus for extra work during the Olympics.

The Unite trade union is to reballot London bus drivers barred from striking over Olympic bonuses by a high court injunction, as transport bosses criticised "deplorable" protests that disrupted bus services in the capital on Wednesday.

The union will hold a new poll for 4,000 workers at three operators that had secured an injunction over ballot irregularities last week, although thousands of drivers at 17 other operators went ahead with strikes last Frida over a £500 Games payment .

Unite confirmed the move as groups of supporters staged protests outside depots used by the three operators involved in the high court ruling.

Transport for London, which runs the capital's tube and bus networks, said the impromptu protests had disrupted 33 services.

"Any disruption to transport services for Londoners is simply deplorable especially in circumstances where the employers' offer has not even been put to the bus workers themselves," said a TfL spokesperson.

Unite is preparing to announce further strike dates as it steps up demands for a £500 Olympic Games bonus for its 21,000 bus industry members, although the payment could ultimately extend to around 29,000 staff.

It is understood that bus operators have calculated the union's demands as equating to a payment of around £21m – more than double the £8.3m on the table from the Olympic Delivery Authority – and is considerably higher than the widely publicised number of £14m.

Once extras such as employee tax and national insurance contributions are added in, bus operators claim, the £500 payment rises to a gross payment of up to £700.

Unite's regional secretary Peter Kavanagh said: "The overall figure is not the primary issue. It is not a huge sum of money compared with the tens of millions of pounds that TfL will be earning in extra bus revenues during the games."

It is also understood that bus operators have sounded out TfL about a contribution towards an Olympic bonus, but TfL has made clear that the ODA fund will be the limit of any taxpayer-backed contribution.

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