The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that numbers of civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than two hundred people. Of those, only thirty-five were the intended targets. During one four-and-a-half-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the United States has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse. “Anyone caught in the vicinity is guilty by association,” the source said. “[When] a drone strike kills more than one person, there is no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate. . . . So it’s a phenomenal gamble.” — The Disturbing Truth Behind U.S. Drone Assassinations That the Government Tried to Keep Secret
The victim said Mr. Turner had admitted drinking, but still had not acknowledged any fault in the attack, insisting the episode had been consensual. She said the court privileged his well-being over her own, and in the end declined to punish him severely because the authorities considered the disruption to his studies and athletic career at a prestigious university when determining his sentence. She wrote: The probation officer weighed the fact that he has surrendered a hard-earned swimming scholarship. How fast Brock swims does not lessen the severity of what happened to me, and should not lessen the severity of his punishment. If a first-time offender from an underprivileged background was accused of three felonies and displayed no accountability for his actions other than drinking, what would his sentence be? The fact that Brock was an athlete at a private university should not be seen as an entitlement to leniency, but as an opportunity to send a message that sexual assault is against the law regardless of social class. — Light Sentence for Brock Turner in Stanford Rape Case Draws Outrage
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Stanford Rape: What Would the Sentenced Have Been If Brock Turner was Black or Hispanic?:
The Brock Turner Rape Case: A Complete Injustice: Unless you have been living under a rock – or at the very least, haven’t checked Facebook or Twitter lately – then you’ve heard about the troubling legal case of former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner. Turner, who recently turned 20 years old, was convicted of three felonies on March 30th of this year: assault with intent to rape an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object, and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object. By Ascher Robbins
Neoliberalism lowers life expectancy: Economist Michael Hudson says neoliberal policy will pressure U.S. citizens to emigrate, just as it caused millions to leave Russia, the Baltic States, and now Greece in search of a better life.
McKinney: Duopoly is Imploding, But What Comes Next?
The 2016 election is going to be “written about and studied for a very long time,” said six-term former Georgia Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party’s 2008 presidential candidate. “Black voters don’t have any stake at all in the continuation of either the Democratic or Republican Parties, as presently constituted,” said McKinney, who last year earned her doctorate in Leadership and Change. “The implosion of the duopoly is of great political import to the Black community,” she said. “The problem is, however, that we have to be organized in order to have an imprint on the outcome.”
2016 “Most Consequential” Election in a Century
“The two-party duopoly is at an end,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro, the Dubosian scholar and Black Radical Organizing Committee activist who helped put together a national conference on the Black Radical Tradition, in Philadelphia, in January. Monteiro believes that 2016 will go down as “the most consequential election, certainly, in 100 years.” Monteiro noted that Donald Trump told Bloomberg News he would turn the Republican Party into a workers party. “This is huge, said Monteiro. “He has broken every Republican orthodoxy.” Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, “is challenging the elite and the power brokers and the moneybags within the Democratic Party, but he has not gone as far as Trump to challenge American hegemony and American empire.”
Free Rev. Edward Pinkney, Political Prisoner
“The system is rigged and corrupt,” said Rev. Edward Pinkney, the Benton Harbor, Michigan, community activist serving 30 months to 10 years on bogus election tampering charges that he believes stem from his defiance of the Whirlpool Corporations domination of the mostly Black town. “We must stand and demand the government serve the interests of the people, and not the corporations,” said Pinkney, who fears he will be assassinated at the Marquette Branch Prison in the upper peninsula of Michigan. “The attack on democracy in Benton Harbor and around the country shows that the corporate power structure is determined to crush anyone that stands in its way,” he said.
Schools Annually Eject Huge Numbers of Black Girls
Education Week magazine called on experts to explore why Black girls are expelled or suspended from public school six times as often as white girls. It’s “misguided” to think that “low income kids and kids of color need to be heavily disciplined and heavily surveiled,” said Adrienne Dixson, professor of Critical Race Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “Schools should recognize that these behaviors aren’t just because kids want to be bad, but that they are responding to an environment that doesn’t help them feel free.”
Horne: U.S. Subversion has Venezuela on the Ropes
The government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is clearly in trouble, said Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Houston. “With government offices being shut down three days out of the week; with electricity blackouts; with shortages of consumer goods, including toilet paper, this is obviously a reflection of that fact that, number one, the elite of Venezuela have turned against the Maduro regime” and, secondly, the United States is backing the effort to bring down the socialist government. Listen to Black Agenda Radio
James Connolly Quote
The Disturbing Truth Behind U.S. Drone Assassinations That the Government Tried to Keep Secret: During one four-and-a-half-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. By Jeremy Scahill
Syrian Government Troops Enter Islamic State-Held al-Raqqa Province, Racing Against U.S. Allies By Juan Cole