Military - new material (74)
01 July 2011
War crimes: from Bloody Sunday in Derry, Northern Ireland to Croatia, Kosovo and Iraq. The role of Sir Michael Jackson. Professor Michael Chossudovsky. Troops Out Movement website, 2011. Almost 40 years after the Bloody Sunday massacre, and following the Saville Commission’s report into it, Chossudovsky asks if “members of the First Batallion of the Parachute regiment [were] obeying orders from higher up?” It examines the structure of the regiment, looking at the roles of General Sir Robert Ford, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford and especially the role of Captain Michael Jackson, which has “been obfuscated since the outset of the investigation in 1972.” It concludes that both Wilford and Jackson were “rewarded rather than prosecuted for their role in the 1972 massacre”, pointing at the latter’s rise “to the highest rank of the British military, before retiring in 2006 from the rank of Commander of the general Staff.” The article also considers Jackson’s role in other theatres of ethnic warfare, “first in Bosnia and Croatia and then in Kosovo.” Available as free download on the TOM website at: http://www.troopsoutmovement.com/latestnews.htm
MoD plans rise of the machines with drones in place of soldiers, Nick Hopkins. The Guardian 27.9.11. This article considers the Ministry of Defence’s attempts to develop “a new generation of surveillance systems that will automatically identify people regarded as high-value targets.” The kind of equipment the defence experts are looking for includes: ““automatic (assisted) target recognition” systems, specifically designed to identify people and vehicles from the air, or on the ground.”
The Predator Paradox, Ken Macdonald. The Guardian 6.5.11. Macdonald, a chair of Reprieve and a Liberal Democrat peer, considers the killing of Osama bin laden, noting that US President Obama vetoed a bombing raid because of the “risk that innocents would die in full view of the watching world”. Obama is reported to have vetoed the bombing because, in Macdonald’s words, “Predator drones, launched by technicians in California, were too crude a weapon because hearts and minds...matter almost as much as bombs.” Macdonald draws attention to the fact that “these presidential scruples do not always translate into other areas of attack in that struggling part of the world.” He also notes the phenomenal increase in drone strikes under the Obama administration: “In the four years between 2004 and 2007, there were just nine US drone strikes in north-west Pakistan, with around 25 deaths a year; in 2010 there were around 118, with estimates of up to 1,000 people killed.” Reprieve website: http://www.reprieve.org.uk/