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By Paul Craig Roberts, opednews.com, july 3, 2012

Hot Air Day is upon us. On July 4, hot air will spew forth all over the country as dignitaries deliver homilies to our “freedom and democracy” and praise “our brave troops” who are protecting our freedom by “killing them over there before they come over here.”

Not a single one of these speeches will contain one word of truth. No speaker will lament the death of the US Constitution or urge his audience to action to restore the only document that protects their liberty. No speaker will acknowledge that in the 21st century the Bush/Obama Regime, with the complicity of the Department of Justice, federal courts, Congress, presstitute media, law schools, bar associations, and an insouciant public have murdered the Constitution in the name of the “war on terror.”

As in medieval times, American citizens can be thrown into dungeons and never accounted for. No evidence or charges need be presented to a court. No trial is required, and no conviction.

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This week we have seen a US drone strike in Pakistan which was reported to have killed six people (or ‘militants’ as those killed by drones are normally labelled) and a strike in Yemen which was reported to have killed three “suspected al-Qaida militants” on the outskirts of Aden. Such strikes have become almost routine, even though international condemnation is growing with both UN representatives  and former US president Jimmy Carter  speaking out in recent days.

Less routine was a “mystery” strike on a convoy of trucks in Northern Mali which was also reported this week.  According to the Magharebia website (which it should be noted is supported by United States Africa Command) seven “terrorists” of a brigade linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) were killed while several others were injured.  US intelligence officials contacted by the Long War Journal would neither confirm nor deny US involvement in the strike.

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Code Pink and other peace activists tags a mock drone strike ahead of the NATO summit. (Zach D. Robers/Gregpalast.com)

Why has there been so little organized resistance to drone warfare?

BY Rebecca Burns, In These Times, July 2, 2012

At an October 2011 meeting between Pakistani elders and human rights lawyers, 16-year-old Tariq Aziz stood up to volunteer for a dangerous assignment. The meeting, held in Islamabad by U.K. legal charity Reprieve, sought to expose the impact of drone strikes in the North Waziristan region, and Aziz hoped that by learning to photograph the strikes he could help protect his community.

Three days later, Aziz, along with his 12-year-old cousin, were themselves killed in a drone strike while on their way to pick up their aunt.

Aziz’s determination to document the devastation caused by drones belies one of the most disturbing aspects of their use: U.S. drone strikes are carried out in secret in at least six countries, with no judicial or Congressional oversight of the targets chosen by administration officials. Though a 2011 report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that up to 3,000 people—as many as 781 of them civilians—have been killed in drone attacks since 2004, noncombatant deaths in drone attacks were denied outright by U.S. officials until April of this year, when White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan said that they were “exceedingly rare.”

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President Obama rebranded the “global war on terror” the “war on Al Qaeda,” but his counterterrorism strategy hews closely to President George W. Bush’s, as the U.S. joins conflicts in Yemen and elsewhere that have little connection to the 9/11 attacks, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar writes.

By Paul R. Pillar, Consortium News, June 23, 2012

In a semi-annual report to Congress “consistent with” the War Powers Resolution (a formulation presidents use to abide by the resolution without conceding its constitutionality), President Obama last week acknowledged publicly for the first time that U.S. military forces have been engaged in “direct action” in Somalia and Yemen.

The report does not disclose anything that had not already been revealed in unofficial accounts, and the press was inclined to treat the matter as a secrecy issue, noting how grudgingly the administration has been saying anything about the operations involved.

President George W. Bush speaks about the “Global War on Terror” on March 27, 2008, in Dayton, Ohio. (White House photo by Eric Draper)

But the most important and disturbing aspect of this situation is not so much the secrecy but rather the fact that U.S. military forces are in effect engaging in undeclared hostilities with no effective limits — geographic, temporal or legal.

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US drones attacked a house in the Shawal Valley, in North Waziristan Agency along the border with Afghanistan overnight, killing eight “suspected militants” who were, as usual, entirely unidentified by local officials.

Local officials said that they thought some of the slain might have been foreigners, but that the strikes had burned the house down and the bodies were so charred that there was no way to tell for certain who they were.

The area attacked is the domain of Hafiz Gul Bahadar, the leader of a local Taliban faction. There is no indication, beyond the location, that the people killed had anything to do with Bahadar, but that seems to be the assumption Pakistani officials are operating under.

This is the second time the Shawal Valley has been attacked in less than a week, with a Tuesday night attack against the valley burning another home to the ground and killing the six people inside. None of the victims of that attack were identified either.

AHRC, June 30, 2012

ASIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION – URGENT APPEALS PROGRAMME

Urgent Appeal Case: AHRC-UAC-115-2012

30 June 2012
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Dear friends,

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information that a 14-year-old girl, from the Hindu religious minority community was abducted by gangsters and forcibly converted to Islam. When a police case was filed against the abductors the girl was produced before a Magistrate’s Court by the gangsters to record a statement that she has embraced Islam as her religion. The irony of the judicial process is that the judicial magistrate has accepted her subsequent marriage as legal in spite of the Pakistan law which does not allow the marriage of girls before the age of 16 years. Her age was forged from 14 to 18 by the police and perpetrators before the judicial magistrate who had never asked for evidence about her age.

The father of the victim received information from the police that girl has been shifted to the tribal areas of the Pakistan, close to Afghanistan border for nefarious designs.

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