{EOB} Drones: Death and Destruction

WRITER | Ayesha Zee Khan

The UAV’s or “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” were used earlier in the WWI as aerial torpedoes an early version of today’s cruise missiles, however a large scale production of these unmanned aerial vehicles took place in the WWII. The United States did use a prototype UAV called Operation Aphrodite in World War II. It was an attempt to use manned vehicles in an unmanned mode. Later, the drones were used in the Cold war days, the first such drone was the ‘Firebee’ drone, a jet propelled by an engine made by Ryan Aeronautical Company. They were initially used heavily over Communist China in the 1960s, the Vietnam War (they were used extensively in reconnaissance and combat roles), and Operation Iraqi Freedom (2007). The Hunter and the Pioneer, which are used extensively by the US military, are direct derivatives of Israeli systems. The Pioneer was used in the Gulf War which brought good results (according to the American armed forces). Over the past few years; Israel has been responsible for much of the development that has happened in the UAV sector.

The Predator, an Advanced Technology Demonstration Project, demonstrated its worth in the skies over the Balkans. Some of the current versions of the Predator are loaded with Hellfire missiles for attack purposes. Another popular UAV is the Global Hawk. This is a jet powered UAV that was used effectively in Afghanistan. It operates at around 60,000 feet, and carries a wide range of sensors. UAVs that are in use and under development are both long-range and high-endurance vehicles. The Predator, for instance, can stay in the air for around 40 hours whereas; The Global Hawk can stay in the air for 24 hours. The dramatic increase in the development and use of drones across the US armed services reflects what will be an even more aggressive effort over the next 25 years, according to the new Military report.
The jump in Iraq coincided with the buildup of U.S. forces in 2008 summer as the military swelled its ranks to quell the violence in Baghdad. But Pentagon officials said that even as troops begin to slowly come home this (2008) year, the use of Predators, Global Hawks, Shadows and Ravens will not likely slow. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of drones expanded in the year 2010. In 2011, the US Air Force plans to fly as many as 50 drones, or combat air patrols in the war zones, and by 2013 that number will jump to 65, say Air Force officials.
In April 2011, Unmanned aircraft have proven to be powerful weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq and their use have expanded to new areas and operations each year of those conflicts. Some drones are used for surveillance and some, are armed and have been used to hunt and kill militants.
According to Robert Fisk, an international analyst; Al Qaeda was created in the Middle East due to the injustices done on the common people by the puppet governments of the West. Whereas in the west; Al Qaeda flourishes on the hypocrisies and lies of the governments there. Similarly, the attack and invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 with the Soviet war in process the Arab fighters (Mujahedeen) brought in by the CIA have to be destroyed by America now.
“The Year of the Drone” 2009 killed five actual militant leaders in Pakistan whereas 700 innocent civilians died due to the drones. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, in the year 2010, as many as 957 innocent persons became victim of US drone attacks. With such a massive civilian toll and so little to show for it, it is no wonder that Pakistani people have been up in arms over the continued strikes.
In Pakistan, Taliban showed reaction over the drone attacks by suicide bombings in the cities and towns across the country; killing thousands of civilians. Heavy death toll of civilians and security personnel and a huge loss of life and property put resentment into the hearts and minds of common people. The Government’s tacit condolences and protests proved to the Nation that the political leaders had been bought by the US.
There was a halt in the drone strikes while code named Raymond Davis was in Pakistani custody. As soon as he was acquitted (by using the same Sharia law the West hates) a thank you note by the Americans came in the form of drone strike on the 17^th March 2011 in the Pakistani area of North Waziristan where; 40 people died, most of them believed to be civilians and tribal elders meeting to sort out a local land dispute.
According to the Pakistani foreign office, “Drone attacks have become a core irritant in the counter-terror campaign. Pakistan has taken up the matter with the US at all levels,” it said. Pakistani foreign secretary Salman Bashir had lodged a “strong protest” with US Ambassador Cameron Munter, it added.
There is a strong contempt that is felt within the Pakistani active civil society, lawyers, students and the literary circles that there should be an end to this never-ending war that the US has pursued in this part of the region. The drone strikes have led to massive fear in the people of Waziristan and around 800,000 people have been displaced. Schools, hospitals in FATA and Khyber Pakhtun Khwa have been destroyed and the infrastructure in that area is totally damaged.
The tourism industry has totally collapsed particularly in these areas whereas rest of the country too is about to face the same dilemma and that factor has directly and utterly caused a great loss to the country’s economy.
The writer is a bilingual freelance columnist and an active civil society member based at Lahore.

{EOB}Expert Warns NATO Of Cyber Arms Race

TALLINN (AFP): The world is entering an era of a cyber arms race where ever-more sophisticated versions of malware are the weapons of choice of actors often impossible to trace, a top IT expert told NATO Friday.

"We are entering the era of a cyber arms race, but the problem in this arms race is we don't know what kind of new arms the others have, so we don't have a quick, effective means to counter them," Mikko Hypponen said at a meeting on global cyber conflict organised by the Tallinn-based NATO Cyber Centre.

"And we often don't know also who is in charge, who has these weapons," said the Finn, who works for a top global IT security firm.

Hypponen is known for having been involved in weeding out the feared Storm and Stuxnet computer worms and has assisted authorities in the United States, Europe and Asia in cracking global cyber crime.

He singled out defence contractors, government and non-governmental organisations as the "three main large target groups of hackers."

"We are following daily how hackers break into computers and take them over without users having the slightest idea what is going on," Hypponen said.

"The damage arrives usually with the attachment from a sender you know or trust fully, having been linked even to mail looking like arriving from the US Department of Defence, World Bank, United Nations etc., but having in fact nothing to do with them," he added.

He said failures in a widely-used documents system were largely to blame.

"Current technologies are simply failing," charged Chris Brown, an expert from US network security company NetWitness.

"People underestimate the complexity and capability of cyber threat and are not taking proactive steps," he warned.

A NATO official announced this week at the Tallinn conference that the alliance plans to beef up its cyber defence capabilities with the creation of a special task force to detect and respond to Internet attacks.

The Symantec cyber security firm recently reported that web-based attacks in 2010 were up 93 percent from 2009.

The June 7-10 NATO cyber security conference attended by 300 top IT experts from across the globe focuses on the legal and political aspects of national and global Internet security.

{EOB}Afghanistan: 57 killed, 78 USZ vehicles wrecked in Mujahideen attack on one of the largest ever supply convoys

A recent report from Wardag province sates as many as 32 fuel trucks got burned down and more that 40 oil tankers with 6 military rangers were left fully wrecked, whereas more that 25 security guards, 30 drivers and two puppets of ANA were killed with several dozens fatally wounded during a five-hour long fighting that was underway aiming at one of the largest US-NATO invaders military supply convoys in different parts of Wardag province’s Syedabad district including Sheikhabad, Taaj Bagi, Aka Khel, Mamli Khel, Salar, Yousuf Khel and so on.

Live photos from Wardag, Afghanistan

One of the Mujahids has been wounded, while the rest safely returned, the report pointed out, adding that Mujahideen seized some arms and ammo from the possession of the enemies.

More details in this upcoming Afghan War Coverage report inshAllah.

Enticing Fury

{EOB} REPORT: Reality of Killing of a boy by rangers in karachi

killing of a boy in karachi by ranger is exposed ,
Our Ranger shot that man because he reached for Jawans gun. All this propaganda against Rangers is Media Manipulation. These things are the indicator of where the $50 Million bribe by the USA comes into play

Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) state that any person reaching out for the gun of security official should be shot. Kindly watch this video for more detail.
our media, our judiciary and our CIA planted democracy is trying to distroy pakistan . becoz our media is fifth pilar of the enemy whose spreding lies and anarchi to the peoples and our supreme court and cheif justice is also not doing the well job for the betterment of pakistan. shame on cheif justice.

{EOB}Are Palestinian children less worthy?

During the first and second intifada, more than 700 Palestinian children were killed, and a further 313 children died in the Israeli shelling of Gaza in December 2008-July 2009 [GALLO/GETTY] What is it about Jewish and Arab children that privileges the first and spurns the second in the speeches of President Barack Obama, let alone in the Western media more generally? Are Jewish children smarter, prettier, whiter? Are they deserving of sympathy and solidarity, denied to Arab children, because they are innocent and unsullied by the guilt of their parents, themselves often referred to as "the children of Israel"? Or, is it that Arab children are dangerous, threatening, guilty, even dark and ugly, a situation that can only lead to Arabopaedophobia - the Western fear of Arab children? Innocence and childhood are common themes in Western political discourse, official and unofficial. While it is a truism to state that since the end of European colonialism the US and Europe have been, at the official and unofficial levels, friendly to and supportive of the Zionist colonial project and hostile to Palestinians and Arabs in their resistance to Zionism, the expectation would be that a West that insists rhetorically on the "universalism" of its values would show at least a rhetorical commitment to the equality of Arab and Jewish children as victims of the violence visited on the region by Zionist colonialism and the resistance to it. Yet, the only Western sympathy manifest is to Jewish children as symbols of Zionist and Israeli innocence. This Western sympathy is deployed primarily to denounce Arab guilt, including the guilt of Arab children. Indeed, the only time Arab children received any sympathy at all in the West was a few years ago when Israeli and US propaganda outlets, official and unofficial alike, mounted a major propaganda campaign to save these children from their barbaric Arab and Palestinian parents, who allegedly trained them to commit violent acts, or who unlovingly placed them in the middle of danger, sacrificing them for their violent political goals. It was not Israel who was to blame for killing Palestinian children, but the children's own uncaring and cruel parents who placed them in the path of Israeli Jewish bullets, which left Israeli Jews no choice but to kill them. This of course is an old Israeli casuistry used to justify Israel's carnage of Palestinians. Golda Meir had famously articulated the workings of Israel's Jewish conscience thus: "We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours." In the official discourse of post-World War II US power, Jewish children have been often invoked to illustrate the innocence of Israel, a tradition carried faithfully by Barack Obama's rhetoric. Refusing to even acknowledge Arab children as victims of Israel, on June 4, 2009, Obama told Arabs in his Cairo speech: "It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered." He reiterated this in his May 19, 2011 "winds of change" speech, declaring: "For decades, the conflict between Israelis and Arabs has cast a shadow over the region. For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them." A Gazan boy sells vegetables in the rain after the Israeli blockade crushed the economy in the coastal territory  [GALLO/GETTY] Later that week, in his speech to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on May 22, Obama expressed sympathy with the hardship colonising Jews experience while appropriating the lands of the Palestinians: "I saw the daily struggle to survive in the eyes of an eight-year old [Jewish] boy who lost his leg to a Hamas rocket." He averred that the US and Israel, presumably unlike Palestinians or Arabs more generally, "both seek a region where families and their children can live free from the threat of violence". Murdering Arab children The story of Arab children, and especially Palestinian ones, is not only tragic in the context of Israeli violence, but one that also remains ignored, deliberately marginalised, and purposely suppressed in the US and Western media - and in Western political discourse. When Zionist terrorists began to attack Palestinian civilians in the 1930s and 1940s, Palestinian children fell victims. The most famous of these attacks include the Zionist blowing up of Palestinian cafes with grenades (such as occurred in Jerusalem on March 17, 1937) and placing electrically timed mines in crowded market places (first used against Palestinians in Haifa on July 6, 1938). While the violence of the 1930s was the first introduction to the Middle East of such horrific terrorist violence, it is in the 1947-48 Zionist invasion of Palestinian villages and towns that Palestinian children were deliberately not spared. In December 1947, one of the first attacks by the Haganah (the pre-Israel Zionist paramilitary army) first attacks - which would become typical in this period - targeted the Palestinian village of Khisas in the Galilee and killed four Palestinian children. This proved to be a small number compared with the subsequent mass murders awaiting the Palestinians. In the village of Al-Dawayimah, where the Haganah committed a massacre in October 1948, an Israeli army soldier, quoted by Israeli historian Benny Morris, described the scene as such: The first [wave] of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women, and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead... One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house... and to blow up the house with them. The sapper refused... The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clean the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby. Palestinian children were murdered along with adults in April 1948 in the Deir Yassin massacre, to name the most well known slaughter of 1948. This would continue not only during Israel's wars against Arabs in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1978, 1982, 1996, 2006, and 2008, when thousands of children fell victim to indiscriminate Israeli bombardment, but also in more outright massacres: in Qibya in 1953 where even the school was not spared Israel's destruction; in Kafr Kassem in 1956 where the Israeli army massacred 46 unarmed Palestinian citizens of Israel, 23 of whom were children. This trend would continue. In April 1970, during the War of Attrition with Egypt, Israel bombed an Egyptian elementary school in Bahr al-Baqar. Of the 130 school children in attendance, 46 were killed, and over 50 wounded, many of them maimed for life. The school was completely demolished. The first Israeli massacre at Qana in Lebanon in 1996 spared no child or adult, and the second massacre in the same village in 2006 did the same - adults aside, 16 children were killed that year. The number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli soldiers in the first intifada (1987-1993) was 213, not counting the hundreds of induced miscarriages from tear gas grenades thrown inside closed areas targeting pregnant women, and aside from the number of the injured. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that "23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada", one third of whom were children under the age of ten years old. In the same period, Palestinian attacks resulted in the death of five Israeli children. In the second intifada (2000-2004), Israeli soldiers killed more than 500 children with at least 10,000 injured, and 2,200 children arrested. The televised murder of the Palestinian child Muhammad al-Durra shook the world - but not Israeli Jews, whose government concocted the most outrageous and criminal of stories to exonerate Israel. In the Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008, 1,400 Palestinians were killed, of whom 313 were children.

Alas, Obama has no place in his heart for Arab children, only for Jewish ones. He even manages to infantilise Israeli Jewish soldiers who kill Palestinians, as nothing short of innocent children whose families miss them. In his AIPAC speech, Obama calls on Hamas "to release Gilad Shalit, who has been kept from his family for five long years", but not on Israel to release the 6,000 Palestinian political prisoners, who include 300 Palestinian children, languishing in Israel's dungeons for many more years. Perhaps Obama could have at least mentioned the reports of Israeli soldiers' torture of detained Palestinian children issued in late 2010 by Israeli human rights groups. In the case of detained Palestinian sixth graders, in addition to being beaten up and deprived of sleep by Israeli soldiers, two thirteen-year old children testified that "the most awful thing that happened, was when the soldiers went to the bathroom, they peed on us and did not use the toilet. One of them videotaped it." But Obama was not moved by their plight, for they were not Jewish children.

Zionism and Jewish children Interestingly and unlike Obama, Zionism did not always show similar love towards Jewish children, whom it never flinched from sacrificing for its colonial goals. In the Nazi period, Zionist leaders, for example, protested strongly against granting European Jews refuge in any country other than Palestine. In December 1938, David Ben-Gurion responded to a British offer, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, to take thousands of German Jewish children directly to Britain by saying: "If I knew it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), then I would opt for the second alternative, for we must weigh not only the life of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." In November 1940, the Zionists responded to the British-imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, long demanded by the Palestinian people, by blowing up a ship with Jewish civilian passengers in Haifa - killing 242 Jews, including scores of children. For Zionism, Jewish children are as expendable as Palestinian and Arab children, unless they serve its colonial goals. In light of this, it becomes clear that it is not simply the Jewishness or Arabness of children that makes them expendable or not, but their insertion into a political project as figures that can advance its goals or constitute obstacles to them. Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday, July 17, 2006 [AP] Israel's recruitment of Jewish children in paramilitary organisations, which began in 1948, continues apace, and is perhaps best exemplified in its Gadna ["Youth Battalions"] programme, where young Jewish boys and girls are prepared early for their future military service in the most militarised state on earth. Teaching children to hate Given this history, not only are Palestinian children guilty of hating Israeli Jews, but also, Obama insists, they have no reason to hate Jews unless their evil elders indoctrinate them to do so. Binyamin Netanyahu himself, in his speech before Congress last week, reiterated Obama's condemnation of Palestinians who allegedly "continue to educate their children to hate". But what about Israeli Jewish children's hatred of Arabs? A March 2010 poll by Tel Aviv University found that 49.5 per cent of Israeli Jewish high school students believe Palestinian citizens of Israel should not be entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel; 56 per cent believe they should not be eligible for election to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. According to a report in January 2011 in the largest Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, Jewish teachers in Israel stated that anti-Arab racism among Jewish students reached alarming levels, advocating killing Palestinians. The teachers found graffiti written on school walls and even on exam papers stating "Death To Arabs". According to the report, a student at a school in Tel Aviv told his teacher during class that his dream is to become a soldier so he can exterminate all Arabs; several students in his class applauded in support of him. This, in no small amount, is the direct result of the racist Israeli school curricula with which Jewish children are regularly indoctrinated. In his speech to Congress, Prime Minister Netanyahu correctly diagnosed the situation on the ground. He declared: "Our conflict has never been about the establishment of a Palestinian state. It has always been about the existence of the Jewish state." It is the establishment of a Jewish settler colony that the Palestinians must accept to ensure a future for Jewish children and terminate a future for Palestinian children. Indeed it is precisely the refusal of Arabs to adopt Arabopedophobia that is the biggest impediment to peace in the region. Obama hopes that a Palestinian bantustan could limit the threat that Palestinian children constitute to the nightmare that is "the Jewish and democratic state". He recognises that the world can no longer claim to support universalism while endorsing Israel's right to discriminate against non-Jews. In his AIPAC speech, he said as much when he told Israel's lobby that the entire world, including Asia, Latin America, Europe (and he could have added Africa, which he inexplicably excluded) and the Arab World can no longer tolerate Israel's institutionalised racism; that America in fact stands alone with Israel today. Clearly, Obama's love for Jewish children knows no limits. His Arabopaedophobic views, however, are not accidental, but are motivated by his great love for the "children of Israel", a love that can only be realised through continued hatred and containment of all Arabs, children and adults alike. Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. He is author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge, 2006). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Eagles Of Brasstacks editorial policy.