Drone summit Nov 2013

Drone summit Nov 2013

Faisal bin Ali Gaber is a soft-spoken engineer from Yemen. After he lost his cousin and brother-in-law in a drone strike in August 2012, he published an open letter to President Obama and Yemeni President Hadi. He said his brother-in-law was an imam who had strongly and publicly opposed al-Qaeda, and that his young cousin was a policeman. “Our town was no battlefield. We had no warning. Our local police were never asked to make any arrest,” he wrote to the presidents. “Your silence in the face of these injustices only makes matters worse. If the strike was a mistake, the family — like all wrongly bereaved families of this secret air war — deserve a formal apology.”

Now Faisal Gaber will get a chance to appeal directly to the American people. This weekend for the first time ever, a Yemeni delegation of drone strike victims’ family members, human rights experts and grassroots leaders will be visiting Washington as part of the Global Drone Summit–– You can watch the Summit live all weekend on the CODEPINK livestream channel.

While the CIA and US military have been using lethal drones for over a decade, this will be only the second time that drone victims have gotten visas to come to the United States to tell their stories. The first visit was just a few weeks ago when, on October 29, the Rehman family — a father with his two children — came all the way from the Pakistani tribal territory of North Waziristan to the US Capitol to tell the heart-wrenching story of the death of the children’s beloved 67-year-old grandmother. The hearing, convened by Congressman Alan Grayson, had the congressman, the translator and the public in tears. The Rehman family’s story is documented in the new film Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Foundation, which was released at the time of their visit.

Just as the visit and the film have put real faces on drone victims, new reports by prestigious institutions have brought the covert drone wars out of the shadows. Amnesty International issued a report on drone strikes in Pakistan. Human Rights Watch issued a report on the civilian cost of US targeted killings in Yemen, the new focal point of the US drone wars. Also just released are two UN reports: one by Christof Heyns, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and the other is by Ben Emmerson, the special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism. Both question the US legal framework in light of international law and decry the lack of transparency and accountability. The UN reports engendered the first-ever UN discussion on remote-controlled killing at the General Assembly when, on October 26, representatives from a broad swath of nations took turns denouncing US drone policies.

The US government is feeling the pressure. It has taken steps to reduce civilian casualties and has reduced the actual number of strikes, but certainly not eliminated them. In fact, there was a drone strike in Somalia on October 28, one in Pakistan on October 31, and yet another one in Yemen on November 7.

While the reduction in the number of strikes is a partial victory, it cannot erase the hundreds of innocent lives lost over the years. Also, with the global proliferation of drones (thanks to the easing of restrictions on overseas sales and the introduction of domestic drones into US skies by September 2015), their usage will inevitably increase.

That’s why the Global Drone Summit on November 16-17 will bring together hundreds of people from across the US and around the world to discuss strategies to stop the proliferation of drones used for killing and spying. It is organized by the peace group CODEPINK, along with the Institute for Policy Studies, The NationMagazine, Center for Constitutional Rights, and the National Lawyers Guild.

In addition to the Yemeni delegation, the Summit will include drone pilots, legal experts, human rights advocates, authors, technology experts, artists and grassroots activists. Their hope is to build a global movement to rein in the use of drones for the purposes of killing and spying. With the FAA mandated to open up US airspace to drones by 2015, and police departments around the country anxious to purchase drones with Homeland Security grants, the issue of drones for domestic surveillance is of grave concern to civil liberty and privacy activists.

It seems that the more Americans know about the effects of killer drones, the less likely they are to support them. Polls show a precipitous decline in support from 83 percent in 2012 to 61 percentone year later. Hearing directly from the victims will continue to erode the support.

As Predator drones are forced out into the light of day, the veneer about their pinpoint precision and effectiveness in fighting terrorism is being peeled away. What gets exposed is the innocent lives destroyed and the blowback that keeps us in a state of perpetual war.

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You can watch video of the Drone Summit  that live streamed over the weekend

Medea Benjamin with American peace delegation in Yemen; June 2013 Photo Credit: codepinkhq

Medea Benjamin with American peace delegation in Yemen; June 2013 Photo Credit: codepinkhq

Medea Benjamin, Co-founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange, reports back from a recent delegation to Yemen:

“In Yemen we are close to the bottom in all kinds of measures like income and education, but there’s one statistic where we come out on top: the number of prisoners in Guantanamo,” laughed Mohammad Naji Allaw, a successful Yemeni lawyer who ploughs his firm’s profits into the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms. “Over 90 of 166 Guantanamo prisoners are from Yemen. Most of them, 56 to be exact, have already been cleared by the US government for release but the US government still won’t send them back.”

Our American peace delegation spent the week in Yemen meeting with lawyers, human rights activists, government officials and most importantly, families with loved ones in Guantanamo.

While we were visiting, Congress passed an amendment saying that no US military funds could be used to transfer prisoners from Guantanamo back to Yemen. The families and Yemeni officials we met were outraged. “You mean that after detaining Yemenis for over 11 years without charges and trials, refusing to release even those prisoners who have been cleared of all wrongdoing, forcing them to starve themselves to call attention to their plight, you’re saying that Congress is going to make it even harder to send them home?,” they asked us. “How can this be?”

How could we explain this to the mother of Abdulhakeem Ghaleeb, who hasn’t seen her son since he was 17 years old in 2002, a mother who can’t eat a meal in peace, knowing that her son has been on a hunger strike since February 6 and is now so weak he can’t speak? How can we explain this to 12-year-old Awda, who was in her mother’s womb when her father Abdulrahman Al Shubati was carted off to the island gulag, and here she was, holding his picture with tears streaming down her cheeks? What could we say to Ameena Yehya, whose brother had been sending home letters with beautiful drawings of flowers and scenes from their village, but stopped even writing five years ago because he is too hopeless to lift his pen? Or to Ali Mohammed, who said that on video call arranged every two months with the Red Cross he barely recognized his brother—a lifeless skeleton with sunken eyes and a big, inflated nose from where the feeding tube is forced down his nostrils?

We couldn’t bear to tell them the truth: that their sons, husbands, fathers and brothers are simply pawns in the US game of politics where one party is always trying to “out hawk” the other, where concern about winning the next election far eclipses any respect for the rights of the prisoners. And we didn’t have the heart to tell them that most American have become so consumed by fear after 9/11 that they think that holding these prisoners in Guantanamo indefinitely somehow makes them safer?

So instead we hugged and cried together. Our delegation explained that we are totally opposed to this cruel policy. We told them that over 300,000 Americans have signed petitions calling for Guantanamo to be closed. We talked about Americans like CODEPINK co-founder Diane Wilson and Veterans for Peace Elliott Adams who are risking their own lives on a long-term solidarity hunger strike—Diane since May 1 and Elliott since May 17. We showed them photos of our protests outside the White House. I mentioned that I even interrupted President Obama’s national security speech on May 23, demanding that he take action to release the 86 prisoners cleared for release. But gnawing constantly on our minds was the fact that we are just not doing enough, not caring enough, not creative enough, not strategic enough to force a change in policy.

In 2009, President Obama had cleared 56 Yemenis for transfer home, 26 immediately with 30 others to follow. But days after Christmas Day attempt to bomb an aircraft as it was landing in Detroit, Obama placed a moratorium on the transfer of Yemeni detainees. The would-be bomber, Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, who had hidden plastic explosives in his underwear, told U.S. investigators that he’d been recruited for the mission in Yemen by Anwar al Awlaki, the US-born cleric who was later killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011.

Human Rights Minister Hooria Mashoohouras heard US officials say that Yemeni government is not stable enough or strong enough to make sure the released prisoners don’t take up arms against America. They have told her that even if some of the prisoners were totally innocent and unjustly imprisoned, now—after 11 years behind bars—they probably hate the US so much that they’ll want revenge. In our meeting with Mashoohourshe threw up her arms in exasperation. “So you abuse these men and then you keep abusing them because they might hate you for your abuse? Is that the way the US justice system works?,” she asked.

Mashhour said the Yemeni government has already agreed to assign 10 government ministries to monitor repatriated detainees to ensure they don’t threaten the United States. The returnees, she said, would receive counseling, job training and other aid. She also explained how she went to Washington DC in May to sign a Memorandum of Understanding to release the cleared Yemeni prisoners, but left empty handed, complaining that she was never received at the White House.

Now the US government is setting up another obstacle: it wants Yemen to set up a rehabilitation center, but it has not committed money to fund it. Many people we talked to in Yemen believe the US government should not only fund the rehabilitation center, as this is a problem that the US created and Yemen has no money, but that it should also compensate the prisoners who have been wrongly imprisoned.

Instead, the US Congress is trying to cut off funds that could even be used to send the prisoners home. The Congressional amendment passed on June 14 is designed just for Yemen, prohibiting Department of Defense funds from being used to repatriate Yemenis. This doesn’t become law unless it is passed by the Senate and signed by the president. So there’s still time to stop it.

When we spoke about this amendment to Nadia Sakkof, an extraordinarily talented young women who is one of the key organizers of the National Dialogue Committee, she sprung into action. “Excuse me,” she apologized, running over to her computer, “but this is simply unacceptable and I must do something about this right now.” She fired off a message of outrage to her contacts in the U.S. Congress and wrote a letter to her colleagues at the National Dialogue Committee, asking them to join her in complaining to the US government about this new affront. By the end of the next day, 136 members of the National Dialogue had signed on and she had delivered the letter to the US Ambassador.

The following day, June 17, we planned the first-ever protest of Yemenis and Americans outside the US Embassy in Sanaa. Our 7-person delegation arrived at 10 am, thinking that perhaps a few dozen Yemenis would join us. After all, it was a weekend, the place was hard to get to, and they had very little notice in advance.

We waited, we heard a commotion. Marching up with street, in bright orange jumpsuits, were several hundred Yemeni families and their supporters. They were chanting “Freedom, freedom, where are you? Human rights, human rights, where are you?”

After the chants and speeches, we brought out a letter to send to President Obama, via the Embassy, in the name of our delegation and the Yemenis. One by one, starting with the women, the Yemenis came up to sign the letter. The ones who couldn’t write stamped their fingerprints. Even the children signed. The guards allowed a few of us to cross the barricades so we could deliver the letter to an Embassy representative. We also reiterated to the Embassy staff that earlier in the week, Ambassador Gerald Feierstein had promised to us he would meet with some of the families, and we hoped he would fulfill that promise.

At the end of the rally, we visited the National Dialogue Committee, which has been meeting for several months to co-build the foundations for a more democratic, peaceful nation. We brought orange ribbons for delegates to wear as armbands to show support for the Guantanamo prisoners. Even the security guards and reporters wanted to wear them. The 300 armbands we had quickly disappeared, with people asking for more. The support for the prisoners among the different political parties and independents at the National Dialogue is nearly universal. They say the refusal of the administration to release the Yemenis is an affront to the nation’s pride.

Attorney Mohammad Naji Allaw told us he has lost faith in Obama but he still has faith in the American people. We must work together to turn a noble page in American history. These prisoners are nearing death; time is running out. Please, go back and tell your friends in America that these are real human beings with real families, all of whom are suffering every day. The American people must do more to stop this.”

http://closegitmo.net/links/june-26-actions-white-house-nationwide/june-26-washington-dc/

TAKE ACTION!

By Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis

When all you have is bombs, everything starts to look like a target. And so after years of providing Libya’s dictator with the weapons he’s been using against the people, all the international community – France, Britain and the United States – has to offer the people of Libya is more bombs, this time dropped from the sky rather than delivered in a box to Muammar Gaddafi’s palace.

If the bitter lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything, though, it’s that wars of liberation exact a deadly toll on those they purportedly liberate – and that democracy doesn’t come on the back of a Tomahawk missile.

President Barack Obama announced his latest peace-through-bombs initiative last week — joining ongoing U.S. conflicts and proxy wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — by declaring he could not “stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy, and … where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government.”

Within 24 hours of the announcement, more than 110 U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired into Libya, including the capital Tripoli, reportedly killing dozens of innocent civilians — as missiles, even the “smart” kind, are wont to do. According to The New York Times, allied warplanes with “brutal efficiency” bombed “tanks, missile launches and civilian cars, leaving a smoldering trail of wreckage that stretched for miles.”

“[M]any of the tanks seemed to have been retreating,” the paper reported. That’s the reality of the no-fly zone and the mission creep that started the moment it was enacted: bombing civilians and massacring retreating troops. And like any other war, it’s not pretty.

While much of the media presents an unquestioning, sanitized version of the war — cable news hosts more focused on interviewing retired generals about America’s fancy killing machines than the actual, bloody facts on the ground — the truth is that wars, even liberal-minded “humanitarian” ones, entail destroying people and places. Though cloaked in altruism that would be more believable were we dealing with monasteries, not nation-states, the war in Libya is no different. And innocents pay the price.

If protecting civilians from evil dictators was the goal, though — as opposed to, say, safeguarding natural resources and the investments of major oil companies — there’s an easier, safer way than aerial bombardment for the U.S. and its allies to consider: simply stop arming and propping up evil dictators. After all, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi reaped the benefits from Western nations all too eager to cozy up to and rehabilitate the image of a dictator with oil, with those denouncing him today as a murderous tyrant just a matter of weeks ago selling him the very arms his regime has been using to suppress the rebellion against it.

In 2009 alone, European governments — including Britain and France — sold Libya more than $470 million worth of weapons, including fighter jets, guns and bombs. And before it started calling for regime change, the Obama administration was working to provide the Libyan dictator another $77 million in weapons, on top of the $17 million it provided in 2009 and the $46 million the Bush administration provided in 2008.

Meanwhile, for dictatorial regimes in Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, U.S. support continues to this day. On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even gave the U.S. stamp of approval to the brutal crackdown on protesters in Bahrain, saying the country’s authoritarian rulers “obviously” had the “sovereign right” to invite troops from Saudi Arabia to occupy their country and carry out human rights abuses, including attacks on injured protesters as they lay in their hospital beds.

In Yemen, which has received more than $300 million in military aid from the U.S. over the last five years, the Obama administration continues to support corrupt thug and president-for-life Ali Abdullah Saleh, who recently ordered a massacre of more than 50 of his own citizens who dared protest his rule. And this support has allowed the U.S. can carry out its own massacres under the auspices of the war on terror, with one American bombing raid last year taking out 41 Yemeni civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, according to Amnesty International.

Rather than engage in cruise missile liberalism, Obama could save lives by immediately ending support for these brutal regimes. But for U.S. administrations, both Democratic and Republican, arms sales appear to trump liberation. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute documented that Washington accounted for 54 percent of arms sales to Persian Gulf states between 2005 and 2009.

Last September, the Financial Times reported that the U.S. had struck deals to provide Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman with $123 billion worth of arms. The repressive monarchy of Saudi Arabia accounts for over half that figure, with it set to receive $67 billion worth of weapons, including 84 F-15 jets, 70 Apache gunships, 72 Black Hawk helicopters, 36 light helicopters and thousands of laser-guided smart bombs – the largest weapons deal in U.S. history.

Instead of forking over $150 million a day to the weapons industry to attack Libya or selling $67 billion in weapons to the Saudis so they can repress not just their own people, but those of Bahrain, we – the ones being asked to forgo Social Security to help pay for empire – should demand those who purport to represent us in Washington stop arming dictators in our name. That might drain some bucks from the merchants of death, but it would give non-violent protesters throughout the Middle East a fighting chance to liberate themselves.

The U.S. government need not drop a single bomb in the Middle East to help liberate oppressed people. All it need do is stop selling bombs to their oppressors.

Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace (www.codepinkalert.org) and Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org). Charles Davis (davis.charles84@gmail.com) has covered Congress for NPR and Pacifica stations, and freelanced for the international news wire Inter Press Service.