Stephen Lendman

A new report jointly prepared by Stanford University's International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (SU) and New York University School of Law's Global Justice Clinic (NYU) is titled "Living Under Drones."

Part one discusses strikes on rescuers, funerals, and other civilian targets. Part two examines surveillance, the effects of drones overhead, and how their use creates fear and distrust. Part three considers the economic and impoverishment hardships families and communities sustain. Overall SU/NYU examines key aspects of the CIA's drone policy. It exposes facts political Washington and media scoundrels suppress. The dominant narrative claims drone strikes are precise and effective. They involve "targeted killings." Terrorists are assassinated with "minimal downsides or collateral impacts." As a result, America is much safer. "This narrative is false." It's a bald-faced lie. Drone strikes are indiscriminate. Mostly noncombatant civilians are killed.

The SU/NYU report followed nine months of intensive research. They included two investigations in Pakistan. Over 130 interviews were conducted with victims, witnesses, and experts. Thousands of pages of documentation and media reports were reviewed. This report "presents evidence of the damaging and counterproductive effects of" America's drone-strike policy. Firsthand evidence confirms it. So-called benefits don't exist. Civilians sustain enormous harm. "Living Under Drones" exposes what official accounts won't say.

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Adnan Al-Daini

In 1966, I watched Ken Loach’s drama documentary “Cathy come home”. Wikipedia summarizes the play thus:

“The play tells the story of a young couple, Cathy and Reg. Initially their relationship flourishes and they have a child and move into a modern home. When Reg is injured and loses his job, they are evicted by bailiffs, and they face a life of poverty and unemployment, illegally squatting in empty houses and staying in shelters. Finally, Cathy has her children taken away by social services.”

I still remember the play vividly; it had a profound effect on me as it brought my earliest memories as a child of 5 into focus, living in my uncle’s house, his family, my grandmother, and my family (my parents, my sister and me); my family had one tiny room.

My father was desperately looking for work, and eventually found some labouring work in a school in another town 60 miles away. We moved with him, and again had to live in a rented room for another 6 months. That experience made me regard homelessness as one of the greatest horrors that could befall an individual or a family.

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Chris Floyd

In the category of "the sky is blue," "fire is hot" and "the sun rises in the east," the Guardian reports on a new study showing that Washington's murderous drone killing campaign in Pakistan is "counterproductive."

The sarcasm above is not meant to cast aspersions on the report itself -- which is detailed, devastating, and very productive -- but on the prevailing mindset in the ruling circles of the West (the self-proclaimed "defenders of civilization") that makes such a study even necessary, much less 'controversial.'

For of course even the denizens of the many secret services and black-op armies and intelligence agencies that make up America's world-straddling security apparat have said, repeatedly, that Washington's policy of murdering, torturing, renditioning and indefinitely detaining innocent people all over the world -- day after day, week after week, year after year -- is in fact creating the very extremism and anti-Americanism the policy purports to combat.

Thus the new report, by the law schools of New York University and Stanford (a famously if not notoriously conservative institution) should be, in a sane and rational world, a case of carrying coals to Newscastle or selling ice to the Inuit: an exercise in redunancy.

But instead, sadly, the report, "Living Under Drones," is a very, very rare instance of speaking truth to the power that is waging a hideous campaign of terror -- there is no other word for it -- against innocent people all over the world.

The personal testimonies gathered by the researchers -- on the ground, in Pakistan -- are shattering ... at least for those who actually believe that these swarthy foreigner are actually human beings, with "hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions .. fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is." You can be sure -- you can be damned sure -- that the Nobel Peace Laureate in the White House has never and will never read these stories of the ones he is terrorizing, night and day. These testimonies will never appear beside the scraps of rumor, conjecture and brutal prejudice that constitute the "reports" he sees each Tuesday -- "Terror Tuesday" -- when he meets in the Oval Office with his death squad team to decide who will be assassinated that week.

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