Should Obama Continue Drone Attacks In Pakistan? - Hamad Mir

[Turborama]

Run time: 04:18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRby1IDACB8   Posted on YouTube: April 10, 2009 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: April 11, 2009 By DU Member: Turborama Views on DU: 637

 
Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/04/01/Resurgence_of_the_Taliban_in_Pakistan_Hamid_Mir

Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir criticizes President Obama for continuing unmanned drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas, a policy started under the Bush administration. Mir claims that the drones have killed many women and children, but no top al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders.

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Hamid Mir, Executive Editor, Geo TV; Osama bin Laden's Authorized Biographer Best known internationally as the sole journalist to have interviewed Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks, Mir is a prominent Pakistani journalist who specializes in investigative reporting in Pakistan and abroad. Mir has exposed various corruption scandals and has put major political figures, including Pervez Musharraf, Condoleezza Rice and Hamid Karzai in the hot seat on Geo TV, Pakistan's most popular TV station. He has been called the media face of the Taliban, a CIA agent and more. Find out what he knows about the state of the Pakistan government, the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy in the region and what it's like to be an investigative journalist in one of the most turbulent regions in the world.

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Personally, I'm totally against the use of drones and think that Britain should be playing a much bigger part in trying to help Pakistan sort this mess out, seeing as they are the ones who set the ball rolling 50+ years ago.

There's an interesting piece in today's Independent that touches on this...

Leading article: Britain's security hinges on curbing terrorism in Pakistan

Tougher visa checks alone will not eradicate this menace

Saturday, 11 April 2009

This week's arrest of several Pakistani students in terror raids across the North West has prompted a fit of introspection about the integrity of our visa system. The Conservatives have demanded that the Government "step up" checks on the roughly 10,000 annual student visa applications from Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Home Office has been talking up its new points-based entry system.

Yet this misses the point. Checks clearly need to be carried out, but we should be wary of the notion that dangerous individuals can be weeded out by a sufficiently rigorous immigration bureaucracy. The history of plots and atrocities in recent years shows us that terrorists do not conform to any simple profiling. The effectiveness of routine background checks is limited.

Terrorists are often discovered to be astonishingly well integrated. An NHS doctor from Iraq was involved in the botched 2007 attempt to bomb a nightclub in London. Mohammed Siddique Khan, the orchestrator of the 7 July London bombing, was a classroom assistant at a Leeds school.

There seems to be an assumption that those individuals arrested in Manchester and Liverpool this week were merely posing as students. But they could easily be genuine. And that would not necessarily make them any less of a threat.

Rather than fretting about visas, we need to get to the roots of the problem: Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in Pakistan. The UK is getting the blowback from the failure of the Islamabad government to dismantle the terror groups which continue to operate from within Pakistan's borders. Our own security services estimate that about three-quarters of the plots against UK targets they are monitoring have a Pakistan connection.

Full article: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-britains-security-hinges-on-curbing-terrorism-in-pakistan-1667302.html

[esfergus]

1. We MUST Stop Remote Warfare

Remote warfare is inherently a war crime. We must stop it, not support it, and collectively abhor it.

We do not really know who we are firing them at, they produce primarily "collateral" damage (in other words, they kill more non-combatants than combatants), and they utterly enrage the local populace.

How would you feel if you were sitting in your house and a Hellfire rocket hit it? Well, you probably wouldn't feel anything because you'd be dead. But, if you did somehow miraculously survive or you were a friend and relative of the dead--how would you feel?

Would you feel like blowing some shit up in the attacking country? Of course you would!