Hancock’s Reaper drone; Remote control there and here

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From Ed Kinane’s Blog at the Syracuse Post Standard

Here in upstate New York, pretty much below the radar, a tragedy unfolds. But not without resistance.

For several years the unmanned robotic Reaper drones of the 174th Attack Wing of the New York National Guard have been piloted from Hancock air base. These weaponized robots kill and maim – and terrorize – the people of Afghanistan. Many – maybe most — of these hapless Afghans are non-combatants: infants, children, mothers, elders, unarmed men; also livestock.

The Attack Wing does its killing by remote control from its safe perch at Hancock just outside Syracuse thousands of miles from where the Reaper’s Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs strike. Continue reading →

HOLDING OUR GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE

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HOLDING OUR GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE:
FILING A CRIMINAL COMPLAINT FOR WAR CRIMES

Joy First       May 23, 2013
National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance

It could have been any kind of gathering between friends as I sat with six others in Malachy Kilbride’s living room in Arlington, VA on the morning of May 21, 2013, drinking coffee and munching on pastries.  Besides Malachy and me, we were joined by David Barrows, Max Obuszewski, Manijeh Saba, Ray McGovern, and Ted Majdosz.  But there was a sense of excitement and anticipation in the air that morning.  We have risked arrest together many times before acting in resistance to the illegal and immoral actions of our government, but today we were going to try something different.  Continue reading →

Jim Clune: Resisting Drones, Global War, and Empire

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Jim Clune of the Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars, speaks in his home town of Binghamton after spending 10 days in Onondaga County jail for protesting the Drones at Hancock Air National Guard Base, located in a suburb of Syracuse, NY. His talk in articulate, informative and moving.

Originally posted on Other Voices, Other Choices, May 14, 2013

DRONE WARS: How White Privilege Obscures Real Dialogue

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By Noor Mir and Rooj Alwazir, (CodePink Blog)

Noor is the Pakistani-American anti-drone campaign coordinator at CODEPINK. She tweets @thedronalisa. Rooj is a Yemeni-American activist and organizer with SupportYemen. She tweets @rooj129.Originally published on Muftah

We are not here to proffer an analysis. We aren’t academics. We are here as a Pakistani and a Yemeni, as activists, as citizens of this country and as citizens of our homelands. We are dismayed. We are confused. But we are not hopeless.

We had been waiting for this hearing for a long time. With a handful of location and time changes, rumors floating around of Rand Paul as a witness and a push by human rights organizations around the globe to make calls to their senators and ask them to pose the important questions about civilian casualties of the secret war, the momentum had crescendoed by the time the moment finally approached on Tuesday. We were the first in line at noon for the 4 pm hearing, amused by the cameras trained on members of the Intelligence Committee as they were hurried by their staff into their closed meeting on the Boston bombings. One of our colleagues stood in the receiving line and asked senators the same question as they speed-walked past him, undoubtedly avoiding the activist in pink, “What about Abdulrahman Al-awlaki? He was just a boy? Continue reading →

Meet the Pilots

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A year ago, at the New York State Fair in Syracuse, I met a drone pilot while I was outside the main entrance protesting the MQ9 Reaper drones being flown from nearby Hancock Air National Guard Base.   Every year we have a Tableau on the lawn beside the entrance to the Fair that depicts the aftermath of a drone strike in Afghanistan where Hancock pilots fly their drones, though it could be Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia or any of the other places where drones strike civilian targets where suspected ‘militants’ might be present.  Notice I say, ‘suspected’ and ‘might’.   The only certainty is that the location is a civilian structure like a home, a workplace, a place of worship or market in a civilian context, like a village.  This isn’t war as it was explained to me in the study of history.  It is pillage.  And the result, as we show in our tableau, is the death or ordinary people, men, women, children and elders, and the destruction of their homes, workplaces and places of worship.

Last year, in particular, Hancock Air Base was promoting it’s grisly work with a booth inside the fair where people could experiment with controlling a drone flight emulator.  Continue reading →

The Human Face of War

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The Human Face of War,
A Workshop with Kathy Kelly (Afghanistan), Noor Mir (Pakistan), Sarah Ahmed, (Iraq), and Rooj Alwazir, (Yemen)
Filmed and produced by Ted Forsyth of Rochester Indymedia

Watch the video of the presentation below, and then listen to the discussion on the player below the video.


The discussion that followed: