Text Fwd: Court Victory for the Creech 14 who were against the drones 무인 비행기에 저항한 크리치 기지 14 시위자들의 법정 승리

* Slide by MacGregor Eddy, in the Nevada Desert Experience site

* Frank Cordaro forwarded the below texts on Sept. 25, 2010
___________________________________________________________

National Catholic Reporter
A peace movement victory in court
by John Dear SJ on Sep. 21, 2010

Excerpt

"Fourteen anti-war activists may have made history today in a Las Vegas courtroom when they turned a misdemeanor trespassing trial into a possible referendum on America's newfound taste for remote-controlled warfare." That's how one Las Vegas newspaper summed up our stunning day in court last Tuesday, Sept. 14, when fourteen of us stood trial for walking on to Creech Air Force Base last year on April 9, 2009 to protest the U.S. drones.

[...]

the defendants were able to extract several key points from their witnesses:

* Intentional killing is a war crime, as embodied in U.S. constitutional law.
* Drone strikes by U.S. and coalition forces kill a disproportionate number of civilians.
* People have the right, even the duty, to stop war crimes.
* According to the Nuremberg principles, individuals are required to disobey domestic orders that cause crimes against humanity.

[...]

"By all accounts, the Creech 14 trial is the first time in history an American judge has allowed a trial to touch on possible motivations of anti-drone protesters," the local paper said.

READ MORE
___________________________________________________________

National Catholic Reporter
Drones on trial, and a judge listens
by Tom Roberts on Sep. 18, 2010

Excerpt

Drones have raised to a new level the detachment with which modern warfare can be conducted. Operated remotely from great distances away, drones are lifeless, indiscriminate killing machines. They’ve been responsible for countless civilian deaths and a concomitant rising tide of anger against the United States in Pakistan. What follows is an intriguing account of the recent trial of 14 activists who trespassed at an Air Force Base in Nevada protesting the use of drones.

READ MORE

___________________________________________________________

Text Fwd: DRONE EXPLOSION

* Image source: same as below

Bruce Gagnon blog Nov. 16, 2009
DRONE EXPLOSION

Bob Anderson in Albuquerque, NM sent me a bunch of photos this morning from a protest they just held at Kirtland AFB. Kirtland is a key space warfare technology development base and the folks there who make up the group called Stop the War Machine hold regular protests at the base.

There was also a drone protest this past weekend in upstate New York were Reaper UAV's will be based.

Out near Las Vegas, Nevada a series of protests are being planned at Creech AFB where drones are flown via space satellites over Afghanistan and Pakistan. A CodePink bus will go from the San Francisco bay area to Creech on November 26 and folks will hold actions outside the base thru December 2.

Here in Maine the key advocate for a UAV flight test center at the closing Brunswick Naval Air Station, John Richardson, is declaring his candidacy for governor today. He is a Democrat, and former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives. In the last couple years he has been serving as the Commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development. In that role he has been serving on the base redevelopment authority and well over a year ago I saw an article in the local paper where he was pushing drones.

The Democrats are happy to take any and all Pentagon largess....that's one reason why I will be voting for Maine's Green Party governor candidate Lynne Williams in the next election.

Text Fwd: Like killing flies

Like Killing Flies
http://www.timesrecord.com/articles/2009/06/23/opinion/letters/doc4a410a46e9925659592879.txt

Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Times Record (Brunswick, Maine)

Dear Editor:
The national media made a big deal about President Obama killing a fly. His “I got the sucker” was even compared to a similar moment by honest Abe Lincoln.

But sadly little time in the national media is spent describing the tragic consequences to hundreds of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan who have been killed by United States unmanned aerial vehicles, or “drones” as they are popularly called.

These drones are directed by military space satellites and flown by U.S. soldiers sitting at computer terminals inside Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nev. The Air Force named these drones the “Predator” and the “Reaper.” The pilots watch in “real time” as cameras on the drones send back images from the war zone and in split-second time a button is pressed and missiles are fired. Is it the Taliban? Is it a wedding?

Can there be the slightest doubt that this “hands off” way of killing today is absolutely repugnant? What does it say about us as a nation that we can cavalierly kill from a distance with little conscience or public outcry?

It’s as if we are just killing flies.

Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://space4peace.blogspot.com (Blog)


* Related Fwd article
http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=131441413568&h=LG5kz&u=CKyiA&ref=nf
'Dozens dead' in US drone strike
June 24, 2009

Video & Text Fwd: CBS TV PROPAGANDA PIECE ON UAV'S

* Video & Text informed at Bruce Gagnon's blog
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
CBS TV PROPAGANDA PIECE ON UAV'S



'Here is the CBS TV's "60 Minutes" story on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle's (UAV). It is not a critical piece of journalism but is simply a piece of war promotional propaganda.

These systems (called Predator and Reaper) are the ones killing so many civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan today. The reason the Pentagon gave "access" to 60 Minutes to do this story is because of the growing numbers of innocent people they are killing. This propaganda piece is to reassure the American people. Designed to show us that the Pentagon is careful to ensure the sanctity of life.

These "stand-off" weapons, controlled from satellites, are flown by soldiers using remote controlled joy-sticks while sitting inside Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada. It's war from space on the cheap.

These space directed systems for modern warfare will be the theme of our Keep Space for Peace Week this coming October 3-10. See our new poster here. You can order the poster for $3 each or five for $12.'


* Related Site (Site informed by Bev Hannon and Frank Cordaro on May 13, 2009

Bev Hannon on May 11, 2009

America's New Air Force
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/08/60minutes/main5001439.shtml

Increasingly, the U.S. military is relying on un-manned, often armed
aircraft to track and destroy the enemy - sometimes controlled from
bases thousands of miles away from the battlefront. Lara Logan
reports.

Watch it now: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5004882n

Text Fwd: GUEST ARTICLE - CLOSER LOOK AT THE KILLER DRONES

* Text informed in Bruce Gagnon's blog*
Image source*
Same article as below

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2009/04/guest-article-closer-look-at-killer.html
Friday, April 03, 2009
GUEST ARTICLE - CLOSER LOOK AT THE KILLER DRONES
By Kathy Kelly and Brian Terrall

It’s one thing to study online articles describing the MQ-9 Reapers and MQ-1 Predators. It’s quite another to identify these drones as they take off from runways at Nevada’s Creech Air Force base, where our “Ground the Drones…Lest We Reap the Whirlwind” campaign is holding a ten-day vigil.

This morning, during a one hour walk from Cactus Springs, Nevada, where we are housed, to the gates of Creech Air Force base, we saw the Predator and Reaper drones glide into the skies, once every two minutes. We could easily distinguish the Predator from the Reaper, - if the tailfins are up, it’s a Predator, tail fins down, a Reaper.

The MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones both function to collect information through surveillance; both can carry weapons. The MQ9 Reaper drone, which the USAF refers to as a “hunter-killer” vehicle, can carry two 500 pound bombs as well as several Hellfire missiles.

Creech Air Force Base is headquarters for coordinating the latest high tech weapons that use unmanned aerial systems (UASs) for surveillance and increasingly lethal attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, (UAVs), take off from runways in the country of origin, controlled by a pilot, nearby, “on the ground.” But once many of the UAVs are airborne, teams inside trailers at Creech Air Force base and other U. S. sites begin to control them.

We’ve become more skilled in spotting and hearing the vehicles.

But, we want to acknowledge that Creech Air Force base pilots guiding surveillance missions over areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they are ordered to hunt down Taliban fighters, are absorbing and processing information which we wish they could disclose to us. Trainers at the base have arranged for a contractor to hire “extras” to pose as insurgents, walking about the range inside the base, so that pilots training for combat can practice shooting them. This is all done by simulation. Sometimes flares are set up to simulate plumes of smoke representing pretended battle scenes. But when the pilots fly drones over actual land in Pakistan and Afghanistan, they can see faces; they can gain a sense for the terrain and study the infrastructure. A drone’s camera can show them pictures of everyday life in a region most of us never think much about.

We should be thinking about the cares and concerns of people who have been enduring steady attacks, displacement, economic stress, and, amongst the most impoverished, insufficient supplies of food, water and medicine.

The Pentagon stated, today, that the situation in Pakistan is dire. We agree. Pakistanis have faced dire shortages of goods needed to sustain basic human rights. Security issues such as food security, provision of health care, and development of education can’t be addressed by sending more and more troops into a region, or by firing missiles and dropping bombs.

In the past few days, the Taliban have responded to U.S. drone attacks with attacks of their own and with threats of further retaliation which have provoked renewed drone attacks by the United States. Are we to believe that the predictable spiral of violence is the only way forward?

Antagonisms against the US in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq will be reduced when we actively respond to the reality revealed to us by the drones’ own surveillance cameras: severe poverty and a crumbling or nonexistent infrastructure. Human interaction, negotiation, diplomacy and dialogue, not surveillance and bombing by robots, will ensure a more peaceful future at home and abroad.

We can’t see what the drones’ “pilots” can see through the camera-eye of the surveillance vehicle. But, we can see a pattern in the way that the U.S. government sells or markets yet another war strategy in an area of the world where the U.S. wants to dominate other people’s precious resources and control or develop transportation routes. We’ve heard before that the U.S. must go to war to protect human rights of people in the war zone and to enhance security of U.S. people. Certainly, the U.S. is nervous because Pakistan possesses a “nuclear asset,” that is to say, nuclear bombs. But so do other states that have been reckless and dangerous in the conduct of their foreign policy, particularly the United States and Israel.

At the gates of Creech Air Force Base, our signs read: “Ground the Drones…Lest You Reap the Whirlwind,” and “Ending War: Our Collective Responsibility.” Our statement says: “Proponents of the use of UASs insist that there is a great advantage to fighting wars in ‘real-time’ by ‘pilots’ sitting at consoles in offices on air bases far from the dangerous front line of military activity. With less risk to the lives of U.S. soldiers and hence to the popularity and careers of politicians, the deaths of ‘enemy’ noncombatants by the thousands are counted acceptable. The illusion that war can be waged with no domestic cost dehumanizes both us and our enemies. It fosters a callous disregard for human life that can lead to even more recklessness on the part of politicians.”

We hope that U.S. people will take a closer look at our belief that peace will come through generous love and through human interaction, negotiation, dialogue and diplomacy, and not through robots armed with missiles.

Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and the author of Other Lands Have Dreams (published by CounterPunch/AK Press). Her email is kathy@vcnv.org

Brian Terrell (terrellcpm@yahoo.com) lives and works at the Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in Maloy, IA.