Russia launches most intensive drone attack since invasion began, says Ukraine

Russia has sent waves of kamikaze drones into Ukraine in what Kyiv claims is the most intensive drone attack since the start of the war. Many in Ukraine fear it could be the start of a long campaign of strikes aimed at destroying the energy infrastructure.

“Kyiv was the main target,” the Ukrainian air force commander Mykola Oleshchuk wrote on his Telegram channel. The capital was attacked in the early hours of Saturday with around 75 Iranian-made Shahed drones, Ukrainian officials claimed, adding that 71 had been shot down.

Russia silent on Tehran arms claim as Ukraine downs Iran-built drone

Russia has declined to comment on US claims that Iran could supply it with ballistic missiles. Ukraine said it shot down a “rare” Iran-built drone amid a barrage of attacks overnight.

The Ukrainian Air Force said on Wednesday that it had downed more than a dozen attack drones and a cruise missile. The overnight assault followed a report by authorities in the southern region of Odesa that a rare Iranian-designed attack and reconnaissance drone had been destroyed.

Ukraine says Russia launched new drone attacks on three regions

Russia has launched several waves of drone attacks on the Kyiv, Poltava and Cherkasy regions of Ukraine, stepping up its assaults on the Ukrainian capital after several weeks of respite, according to Ukrainian officials.

“The enemy’s UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were launched in many groups and attacked Kyiv in waves, from different directions, at the same time constantly changing the vectors of movement along the route,” Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said in a message on Telegram messaging app early on Sunday.

Ukrainian drones attack six Russian regions and hit military planes

Ukrainian drones have attacked at least six regions deep within Russia, including an airfield where they destroyed military transport planes, in one of the largest-scale attacks on Russia in months.

A drone assault on the city of Pskov in north-western Russia damaged four IL-76 military cargo aircraft, Russian authorities said early on Wednesday, engulfing two of the planes in flames.

Ukraine drone strike reportedly destroys Russian supersonic bomber

A drone appears to have destroyed a supersonic Russian bomber on an airfield hundreds of kilometres from Ukraine, British military intelligence has said, the latest in a string of successful assaults on prestige infrastructure and military hardware.

These attacks, far beyond the frontlines, are powerful propaganda for Ukraine, though Kyiv rarely claims them directly. Hits on key assets, which are meant to be heavily guarded by the latest technology, is highly damaging to morale in Russia, even if they do not change the balance of forces on the battlefield.

Houthi drone attack ‘hits arms depot’ at Saudi airport in Najran

Yemen’s Houthi rebels said they launched a bomb-laden drone into Saudi Arabia targeting an airport with a military base – an attack acknowledged by the kingdom.

It was not clear if there were any injuries or what the extent of damage was.

The Houthis’ Almasirah satellite news channel said early on Tuesday the attack hit the airport in Najran with a Qasef-2K drone, striking an “arms depot”.

Drones, Drugs and Death

In April 2015, USA TODAY broke a story with the headline: "US secretly tracked billions of calls for decades." At first glance, it appeared to be yet another Edward Snowden revelation implicating the National Security Agency (NSA), mass surveillance and the 'war on terror.' But it actually concerned a mass surveillance operation that had taken place a decade earlier, not by the NSA, but by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It was not aimed at identifying terrorists, but rather the detection of drug traffickers.

The ‘Drone President’: Rhetoric Versus the Atrocious Facts

President Obama, dubbed “The Drone President” by some, faces rising criticism over a program that has very little oversight, a mounting death toll and results that can be seen as war crimes.

On Monday in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf exposed the major inconsistencies of Obama and CIA Director John Brennan, who claims the president “requires near-certainty of no collateral damage” before he will approve a drone attack.

The Atlantic reports:

    The notion that the Obama Administration has carried out drone strikes only when there is “near-certainty of no collateral damage” is easily disproved propaganda. America hasn’t killed a handful of innocents or a few dozen in the last 8 years. Credible, independent attempts to determine how many civilians the Obama administration has killed arrived at numbers in the hundreds or low thousands. And there is good reason to believe that they undercount the civilians killed.

Who Is the US Killing With Drones?

As the news broke on March 7, 2016, that US drone strikes had killed 150 people in Somalia, the White House announced it will reveal, for the first time, the number of people killed by drones and manned airstrikes "outside areas of active hostilities" since 2009. The tallies will include civilian deaths. This is a critical first step toward much-needed transparency. But it will not go far enough.

Nobody Knows the Identity of the 150 People Killed by U.S. in Somalia But Most Are Certain They Deserved it

The U.S. used drones and manned aircraft yesterday to drop bombs and missiles on Somalia, ending the lives of at least 150 people. As it virtually always does, the Obama administration instantly claimed that the people killed were “terrorists” and militants – members of the Somali group al-Shabab – but provided no evidence to support that assertion.

The Absurd Timing of Michael Hayden’s Drone Campaign

MICHAEL HAYDEN, the former director of the CIA and the NSA, has been making the media rounds over the last few days, discussing and defending some of the most emblematic policies of the post-9/11 era in an effort to promote his new book.

According to its Amazon description, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror delivers “an unprecedented high-level master narrative of America’s intelligence wars.” The title is a reference to Hayden’s philosophy of pushing national security policies to their limits — what he envisions as the edge.

Nearly 90 Percent Of People Killed In Recent Drone Strikes Were Not The Target

The controversial U.S. drone strike program in the Middle East aims to pinpoint and kill terrorist leaders, but new documents indicate that a staggering number of these "targeted killings" affect far more people than just their targets.

According to a new report from The Intercept, nearly 90 percent of people killed in recent drone strikes in Afghanistan "were not the intended targets" of the attacks.

Private firms at heart of US drone warfare

The overstretched US military has hired hundreds of private-sector contractors to the heart of its drone operations to analyse top-secret video feeds and help track suspected terrorist leaders, an investigation has found.

Contracts unearthed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal a secretive industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, placing a corporate workforce alongside uniformed personnel analysing intelligence from areas of interest.

Beyond the Drone Debate: Should US Military and CIA Be Judge, Jury and Executioner?

In late April, it was revealed that during a January drone strike in Pakistan, the United States accidentally killed two Western hostages held by al-Qaeda. The hostages were American aid worker Warren Weinstein, who was kidnapped by al-Qaeda in 2011, and an Italian named Giovanni Lo Porto, kidnapped in 2012. The killings momentarily reignited discussion in the mainstream media about drone strikes in countries like Pakistan and Yemen. However, the debate was relatively short-lived and left out several important questions, such as the history of assassination in US foreign policy and whether the premises of the extrajudicial killing program are sound.

Airstrike That Killed 52 Civilians Raises Questions About Obama’s Approach to Islamic State

As Mariam Karouny reports for Reuters, the US air strike on Friday that inadvertently hit a village of non-combatants, killing members of six families, raises new questions about the Obama administration’s approach to fighting Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) in Syria.  Despite months of bombing raids, Daesh has lost no territory in Syria.

The strike, according to the Syria Observatory, landed on a village on the east bank of the Euphrates River rather hitting its fundamentalist target.

Marjorie Cohn on Drone Warfare: Illegal, Immoral and Ineffective

In this anthology edited by Marjorie Cohn - law professor, Truthout contributor and human rights authority - the clarity of the case against drones used for assassinations is persuasively made. Get this book now, with an introduction by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Law professor, writer and social critic Marjorie Cohn explores human rights and US foreign policy, and the frequent contradiction between the two in her monthly Truthout column, "Human Rights and Global Wrongs." She agreed to an interview with Leslie Thatcher recently about her new book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.

A Year After Congressional Testimony, Drone Strike Victims Still Searching for Justice

Drone strikes launched on October 11 of this year in Pakistan's Tirah Valley in the Khyber region and in Shawal in the North Waziristan region brought the total number of strikes in Pakistan to 400 since June 2004. The CIA's covert drone program regularly strikes parts of Yemen and Somalia as well.

In addition, a US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes against IS fighters since the US military first launched its own airstrikes in Iraq in August. An increased emphasis on drone warfare to combat IS forces has longtime critics of the CIA's covert drone program, especially as it's used in countries like Pakistan and Yemen, on guard.

"The war hawks never met a conflict, they never met a problem, they didn't think could be solved by invasion, occupying or drones, and we're going to see more of that, unfortunately," says filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who directed Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars, in an interview. "It's almost a knee-jerk reaction."

41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes – the facts on the ground

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.

THE UNBLINKING STARE -- The drone war in Pakistan.

At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns. In June, on a hot weekday morning, Noor Behram arrived at the gate carrying a white plastic shopping bag full of photographs. He had a four-inch black beard and wore a blue shalwar kameez and a flat Chitrali hat. He met me in the lobby. We sat down, and Behram spilled his photos onto a table. Some of the prints were curled and faded. For the past seven years, he said, he has driven around North Waziristan on a small red Honda motorcycle, visiting the sites of American drone missile strikes as soon after an attack as possible.

Only 4% of drone victims in Pakistan identified as al Qaeda members

As the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan hits 400, research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that fewer than 4% of the people killed have been identified by available records as members of al Qaeda. This calls in to question US Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim last year that only “confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level” were fired at.