New films, reports, and media coverage are finally giving the American public a taste of the personal tragedies involved in the U.S. drone war.
Drone Victims Come Out of the Shadows
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Yemen
Perpetual War: How Does the Global War on Terror Ever End?
This epilogue to Scahill’s bestselling book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, is posted with the kind permission of its publisher, Nation Books. On January 21, 2013, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Just as he...
Foreign Policy Thin-Sliced (8/23/13)
Egypt: A Peaceful State Rule by a Junta “We have this thing about us, that the Egyptian Army is untouchable,” [a woman named] Israa said. “So many want Egypt ruled with an iron grip,” she said. [But] “This is not us. … It’s not Egypt at all. We are not happy with...
When Will the Dirty Wars End?
Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars details the growing use of extrajudicial assassinations by the U.S. executive branch to strike at targets around the planet, without any declaration of war or meaningful congressional oversight. And it documents the human toll of such unchecked power by featuring some of the innocent victims of this global war.
Postcard from Yemen
Running along the beachside route toward Kubagan, Yemen, there is a small flexible tube. It’s a garden hose running all the way from the next town, and it’s the only source of clean water the village has.
Embassy Protests and Middle East Unrest in Context
It seems bizarre that right-wing pundits would be so desperate to use the recent anti-American protests in the Middle East—in most cases numbering only a few hundred people and in no cases numbering more than two or three thousand—as somehow indicative of why the United States should oppose greater democracy in the Middle East.
Anything But a Love Triangle: Yemen’s Ex-president, al-Qaeda, and Washington
Neither former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh nor al Qaeda in Yemen have learned that murdering your countrymen turns their survivors against you.
Counterterrorism Calculus in Yemen Shortchanging Political Solutions
The White House neither confirms nor denies the air war in Yemen.
Target: Africa
An informal competition took place during the Bush years for the title of “second front” in the war on terror. Administration officials often referred to Southeast Asia as the next major franchise location for al-Qaeda, with the Philippines in particular slated to become the “next Afghanistan.” Then there was the border between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, which State Department officials termed a “focal point for Islamic extremism in Latin America.” Worried about the spread of al-Qaeda operatives in North Africa, the Bush administration also developed the Pan-Sahel Initiative, which became the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative before finally being folded into the Pentagon’s new Africa Command.
Poets Stand Up
In Paris, poets staged a flash mob outside the Louvre Museum. In North Carolina, they sent poems to their state legislators, calling on them to restore arts education funding to the decimated state budget. In Vancouver, BC, poets cleaned up a beach before their reading. There was a reading in solidarity with the people of Tibet in Pasadena, California, events throughout Mexico City demanding an end to violence, and “an exorcism of fear and helplessness” in Norman, Oklahoma. Poets gathered in Fez, Morocco, and Jalalabad, Afghanistan and Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.