Zawahiri reportedly killed

[Raoul]

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[calodo2003]

Wiki updated. That means it’s true.

 

[Sir Matt]

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Thanks for replacing Mike Flynn's buddy Eli Lake with a better source.

Good news. I hope they spell out where he was living before he moved back to Kabul, though that might upset the Pakistanis, whom I assume gave us permission to launch the drone.

 

[2cents]

Historic footage of al-Zawahiri in an Egyptian jail in the early 80s. He's clearly the spokesman for the prisoners:


The last 20 years must have been boring as feck for him.

 

[neverdie]

Thanks for replacing Mike Flynn's buddy Eli Lake with a better source.

Good news. I hope they spell out where he was living before he moved back to Kabul, though that might upset the Pakistanis, whom I assume gave us permission to launch the drone.

in afghanistan? would have to be taliban that gave permission which is possible but unlikely or is example of us drone strikes circumventing international law. you might say for good reason this time but overall not a good thing at all.

 

[HookedOnAPhelan]

Not his biggest fan, far from it, but wish him a peaceful rest.

 

[Sir Matt]

in afghanistan?

In the past, CIA has flown drones out of Pakistan from airbases with tacit approval from the Pakistani military/government. There were long-term rumors that he was living in Karachi or somewhere else in Pakistan.

 

[neverdie]

In the past, CIA has flown drones out of Pakistan from airbases with tacit approval from the Pakistani military/government. There were long-term rumors that he was living in Karachi or somewhere else in Pakistan.

yeah they have an agreement with pakistan that irks pakistanis and previous government but not with afghanistan. would be agaisnt tribal laws i think. on other hand, possible they made a deal with the taliban. this is if the strike was in afghanistan which is what i've seen reported.

 

[Raoul]

yeah they have an agreement with pakistan that irks pakistanis and previous government but not with afghanistan. would be agaisnt tribal laws i think. on other hand, possible they made a deal with the taliban. this is if the strike was in afghanistan which is what i've seen reported.

They still have platforms that can reach targets in both nations. As mentioned ad nauseum in previous threads, international law is unenforceable on large states, thereby rendering it feckless in these matters.

 

[Sir Matt]

yeah they have an agreement with pakistan that irks pakistanis and previous government but not with afghanistan. would be agaisnt tribal laws i think. on other hand, possible they made a deal with the taliban. this is if the strike was in afghanistan which is what i've seen reported.

What is the Taliban going to do about it though? It's not as though they have complex air defenses. They're landlocked and have enough problems to deal with. It's possible the Taliban ok'd it, but I doubt it.

 

[SalfordRed18]

Not his biggest fan, far from it, but wish him a peaceful rest.

Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.

 

[neverdie]

They still have platforms that can reach targets in both nations. As mentioned ad nauseum in previous threads, international law is unenforceable on large states, thereby rendering it feckless in these matters.

yeah my guess is that they didn't ask taliban for persmission.

that's why i said you might think it a good thing in this instance but it's a indication of bad things more generally.

bad man who murdered people murdered by means of murder responsible for the deaths of many people who have never murdered anyone. don't think i'll clap.

 

[2cents]

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[Carolina Red]

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Haha. Got em

 

[Carolina Red]

Hand wringing over the leader of Al-Qaeda dying. Goodness me

 

[2cents]

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[Raoul]

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He’s a non player at this point. Been hiding in Iran for nearly two decades apparently.

 

[Sir Matt]

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[neverdie]

Hand wringing over the leader of Al-Qaeda dying. Goodness me

don't think anyone cares about the leader of al qaeda. it's more the idea that you should cheer a method of murder responsible for the deaths of far more innocent people. like those who go to weddings.

really is "bad man who murdered good people murdered by bad people via means of murder responsible for the deaths of good people who have never murdered anyone". is that a good thing? i don't know. isolated, sure. taken in the context of all the innocent people murdered by the same method including the unilateralism and it's not so good. i'm not hand wringing over zawahiri and doubt anyone is or will.

 

[Carolina Red]

cheer a method of murder

Well for starters, I wouldn’t call killing the leader of Al Qaeda “murder”.

like those who go to weddings

I’ve not seen yet that we bombed a wedding this time, so I’m not complaining about bombing weddings. If we did, then I will.

 

[neverdie]

Well for starters, I wouldn’t call killing the leader of Al Qaeda “murder”.

I’ve not seen yet that we bombed a wedding this time, so I’m not complaining about bombing weddings. If we did, then I will.

to me it's like one serial killer killing another. i'm thinking it's not a bad thing that one is dead but not a good thing that some will cheer the surviving one, either.

 

[maniak]

This is a very divisive move, one that should make unhappy those who really want to see tangible political changes in the middle-east.

 

[Rado_N]

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Any word on any “collateral damage”?

I mean feck the cnut they were targeting, but the US doesn’t exactly have a solid history with drone strikes.

 

[RedDevil@84]

Can anyone explain how relevant is this assassination to Al Qaeda's current influence?

 

[Carolina Red]

to me it's like one serial killer killing another. i'm thinking it's not a bad thing that one is dead but not a good thing that some will cheer the surviving one, either.

Alrighty then

Would you rather we have sent in the Navy SEALs like OBL?

And honestly, considering what happened the last time we asked the Taliban’s permission to kill the leader of AQ, I’m not surprised we didn’t ask.

 

[2cents]

Any word on any “collateral damage”?

I mean feck the cnut they were targeting, but the US doesn’t exactly have a solid history with drone strikes.

Rumours that a couple of Haqqanis might have been present at the time. But US seem to be very firmly putting it out that no civilians were killed.

 

[neverdie]

I mean feck the cnut they were targeting, but the US doesn’t exactly have a solid history with drone strikes.

pretty much where i'm at.

 

[calodo2003]

This is a very divisive move, one that should make unhappy those who really want to see tangible political changes in the middle-east.

How / why so?

 

[neverdie]

Alrighty then

Would you rather we have sent in the Navy SEALs like OBL?

And honestly, considering what happened the last time we asked the Taliban’s permission to kill the leader of AQ, I’m not surprised we didn’t ask.

it's the fact that hundreds and almost certainly thousands of innocent people have been murdered via this method. if you take the high end figure, that's more people than AQ ever murdered in the us. so like someone said above, feck this cnut but not in the territory of cheering a drone strike.

 

[2cents]

Can anyone explain how relevant is this assassination to Al Qaeda's current influence?

There'll be a lot of hot takes published in the next few days on this topic. As far as the Al Qaeda central leadership and command in the Af-Pak region goes, I guess much depends on the current status of the Taliban-Al Qaeda relationship, and how this will affect that. But my vague understanding would be that the al Qaeda regional affiliates in places like Syria and Yemen, who probably operate with almost complete autonomy, will be unaffected.

 

[Carolina Red]

How / why so?

He’s making a meme from the Israel / Palestine thread

 

[Raoul]

Can anyone explain how relevant is this assassination to Al Qaeda's current influence?

There won’t be much since AQ proper have been more or less a non factor since the rise of ISIS in 2014. This is purely payback for 9/11.

 

[calodo2003]

He’s making a meme from the Israel / Palestine thread

That makes more sense.

 

[Carolina Red]

it's the fact that hundreds and almost certainly thousands of innocent people have been murdered via this method. if you take the high end figure, that's more people than AQ ever murdered in the us. so like someone said above, feck this cnut but not in the territory of cheering a drone strike.

Well, I asked if you’d rather us put boots on the ground…

What’s the proper way to kill the leader of an international terrorist organization?

 

[neverdie]

Well, I asked if you’d rather us put boots on the ground…

What’s the proper way to kill the leader of an international terrorist organization?

we talking cia or aq?

One year ago this July, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale stood in front of Judge Liam O’Grady at his sentencing and explained himself. After a lengthy investigation and prosecution, it was finally the day when Hale would find out if he would spend years in prison for doing something he felt morally obligated to do: Tell the truth about the United States’ drone program.

While working as a drone analyst in the U.S. Air Force in Afghanistan, he witnessed attacks waged against innocent civilians that, to this day, still haunt him. Those experiences eventually led him to blow the whistle on the drone program. Judge O’Grady said Hale wasn’t being punished for telling the truth, but for stealing government documents that disclose that truth. For that, Hale was subjected to a lengthy investigation and prosecution where he was charged under the Espionage Act, a law that was passed over 100 years ago to deal with spies but has been used to prosecute antiwar dissidents and whistleblowers.

But Daniel Hale is no spy. He is a person who could not live with himself if he did not tell the U.S. people what was being done in their name. Thanks to him, we had proof that the drone program wasn’t as targeted as we were being told. The prosecution accused Hale of leaking the information that was included in “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept. They included Pentagon documents that confirmed that in one drone operation in Afghanistan, 90 percent of the people killed were not the intended target.

Hale said to Judge O’Grady:

I am here today to answer for the crime of stealing papers, for which I expect to spend some portion of my life in prison. But what I am really here for is having stolen something that was never mine to take: precious human life, for which I was well-compensated and given a medal. I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretended things weren’t happening that were.… Please, I beg you, forgive me, your honor, for taking papers as opposed to the lives of others. I could not, God so help me, have done otherwise.

That day, Hale was facing 10 years in prison. His friends and family sat in the courtroom holding their breath, waiting to hear how long it would be until they would see him again. Judge O’Grady handed down a sentence of 45 months. Days later, Hale was moved from Alexandria, Virginia, to Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, where he would spend his 33rd birthday. A year later, he is spending the rest of his sentence in the federal prison in Marion, Illinois.

A particular story was talked about often in the lead up to Hale’s sentencing. When he was in Afghanistan, he saw the U.S. carry out a drone strike on a car that was allegedly being driven by a target. The missile hit the back of the vehicle, and later Hale saw a woman get out of the passenger side and pull two things out of the car before they drove off again. He found out later that the woman had pulled her daughters out of the car. They had been hit by the drone strike. They were 5 and 3 years old.

Had the strike gone as planned and the target been killed, his wife and children would be considered “collateral damage.” In this case, the “target” drove off while leaving two little girls behind. The ongoing 20-year-long “war on terror” made collateral damage feel so normal to so many back in the U.S. Hale is in prison for showing the world that these stories are not few and far between, but instead are a regular feature of U.S. drone warfare.

Over years of investigation and prosecution, the U.S. government was never able to prove Hale’s leaks ever harmed anyone: He is not truly in prison for espionage, but for embarrassing the U.S. government for its undemocratic and brutal practices.
On a few occasions since the sentencing, I have opened up my mailbox in Chicago to letters from the U.S. federal prison in Marion, Illinois, just a few hours south of me — letters from Daniel Hale. I also talk to his friends about what we’ve heard from him to try and piece together what his life may look like. Every conversation begins with: “How is Daniel doing and is he feeling okay? Who has gone to see him in visitation? Who has he written to?” In Marion, Hale is held in a Communications Management Unit that was first designed to deal with people suspected of terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

Communications are heavily monitored. It took Hale six months to get approval to write to me. While no prison sentence would be justifiable, the fact that he is incarcerated in a unit that effectively limits his interaction with the outside world can only be described as cruel and unusual. Hale is a highly sociable person who had plans to write about his experiences and continue deepening relationships with like-minded people. It is near impossible for him to do so in a unit known as “Little Guantánamo.”

The Drone Papers containing the information that Hale leaked were released during the Barack Obama presidency, and no one came for him. It wasn’t until the beginning of Donald Trump’s assault on whistleblowers that Hale started to face the consequences for his honesty, and what he felt was his duty to humanity. President Joe Biden has an opportunity to distinguish himself from Trump by granting Hale clemency. His revelations harmed no one, and instead helped scores of U.S. Muslims get removed from undemocratic and illegal terrorist watchlists by giving the Council on American Islamic Relations the information that they needed to sue the U.S. government. Any president who values democracy should see that Hale poses no threat to society and grant his release immediately.

Hale is a powerful writer, and there is a lot to take from his letter to Judge O’Grady and his sentencing statement. However, he hates when his story takes center stage. He blew the whistle on the drone program not because he wanted to go through years of an espionage investigation and spend years of his life behind bars. He did it because he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t tell the world the truth.

In October 2012, a young boy named Zubair was injured along with his sister in a drone attack in Pakistan. Zubair went in front of Congress and said, “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.” That has been the reality of the U.S. drone program. That grief has our country’s name written all over it, and it’s up to us to dramatically change that legacy and free the people who dared to tell us the truth at great personal risk

https://truthout.org/articles/biden...y-to-drone-warfare-whistleblower-daniel-hale/

 

[Carolina Red]

we talking cia or aq?

The one that flew planes into our buildings when I was 12.

I’ve asked twice now.

 

[Fergies Gum]

Defining moment of Biden's presidency.

 

[calodo2003]

Defining moment of Biden's presidency.

Depends on who one asks.

The Afghanistan debacle is also up there.

 

[2cents]

More historic footage of al Zawahiri here, this time weighing in on the Family Guy controversy:

 

[neverdie]

The one that flew planes into our buildings when I was 12.

I’ve asked twice now.

The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Ten months later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur.

Eight years later, Zawahiri is still alive. Seventy-six children and 29 adults, according to reports after the two strikes, are not.

However many Americans know who Zawahiri is, far fewer are familiar with Qari Hussain. Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Qaida that trained the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, before his unsuccessful 2010 attack. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010.

Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm.

A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147

US drone and airstrikes have killed at least 22,000 civilians – and perhaps as many as 48,000 – since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, according to new analysis published by the civilian harm monitoring group Airwars.

The analysis, based on the US military’s own assertion that it has conducted almost 100,000 airstrikes since 2001, represents an attempt to estimate the number of civilian deaths across the multiple conflicts that have comprised aspects of the “war on terror”.

The figures, released just ahead of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, come as the US president, Joe Biden, promised to end the “forever wars” that have marked the past two decades, and with the US withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Since taking office Biden has reduced US reliance on airstrikes amid a formal review of US drone policy, and has withdrawn from many of the foreign interventions that marked the time in office of his three predecessors George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, since the 2001 attacks on the US by al-Qaida.

Encompassing attacks on Islamic State in Syria, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as strikes against militant and terror groups in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Libya, the US has said it had conducted at least 91,340 strikes in 20 years – including 9,000 against the Islamic State, the Airwars report said.

Based on that total, Airwars has calculated that “US actions likely killed at least 22,679 civilians, with that number potentially as high as 48,308”.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-...east-22000-civilians-since-911-analysis-finds

the proper way for murderers to kill murderers is ultimately a thing for murderers to decide. i'd prefer it didn't happen at all. definitely won't cheer it.