The United States has announced its latest round of sanctions against Iranian drone and missile production, this time focusing on firms and individuals who allegedly procured equipment for Tehran's drone programme. In a statement on Tuesday, the US Department of the Treasury said the targeted "procurement network" operates on behalf of Iran's Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL), which oversees firms involved in developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ballistic missiles. The latest sanctions came as US officials continued to accuse Iran of supplying Russia with drones for its invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. The European Union has also targeted Iran's drone industry with sanctions. "Iran's well-documented proliferation of UAVs and conventional weapons to its proxies continues to undermine both regional security and global stability," Brian Nelson, the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the US Treasury, said in a statement.

The US is using methods of violence against domestic protests it has repeatedly used in its imperial adventures abroad. As the world was gripped by the shocking scenes of police brutality against the Black community in the United States and the aggressive posture adopted by President Donald Trump against the protestors, an important development was missed by many observers. On May 29, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency flew a Predator drone, the machine used to kill suspected terrorists around the world, over the protestors in Minneapolis. The use of the drone led to immediate condemnations from civil rights groups on the ground, as the city of Minneapolis lies outside the 100-air-mile border zone where the CBP has jurisdiction. The incident is significant because it reflects the willingness of the US authorities to use technology developed to propagate imperial designs abroad against their own citizens.

The United States Government is to clip the wings of its civilian drone programme amidst continuing fears China could co-opt the tech to conduct espionage. Part of the 810-strong drone fleet -- used for such diverse tasks as monitoring endangered species and mapping landscapes -- was made by Chinese firm DJI. The move -- which will likely see the drones only fly in emergencies, such as to aid firefighting efforts -- builds on the temporary ban that began in October 2019. DJI Sciences and Technologies Ltd is a Chinese tech firm based out of Shenzhen, Guangdong province. The acronym DJI is short for'Dà-Jiāng Innovations'.

Donald Trump's commitment to "remain[ing] a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia," despite the regime's gruesome torture and murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, is clearly symptomatic of the malignantly self-serving nature of US foreign policy, which has long propped up dictatorships and enabled atrocities around the world for the sake of profit and power. However, many of Trump's most vocal critics on the Saudi file show signs of an equally dangerous pathological condition: a profound historical amnesia that permits some of the most prominent proponents of the US' own torturous and murderous policies to now parade as champions of human rights, without any apparent sense of irony. Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan, for instance, has insisted that "the US should never turn a blind eye to this sort of inhumanity [referring to the murder of Khashoggi] … because this is a nation that remains faithful to its values" - a curiously self-righteous stance for a man who not only repeatedly turned a blind eye to the inhumanity of past and present CIA practices such as extraordinary rendition, torture, and drone assassination, but actively defended and (in the case of drone use) expanded them. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the brutal murder of Khashoggi as "completely abhorrent to everything the United States holds dear and stands for in the world". Yet he praised another perpetrator of abhorrent deeds, CIA "black site" torture prison manager Gina Haspel, as an "excellent choice" for Director of the CIA.

Fri 19 Jan 2018 09.09 EST Last modified on Sat 20 Jan 2018 01.44 EST Russia responded on 5 January to an attack by a swarm of drones targeting a Russian airbase in north-western Syria and a naval station on the Mediterranean Sea. The multi-drone attack, which is suspected to have been launched by militants, is the first of its kind, representing a new threat from terrorist groups. The use of a swarm attack demonstrates a militant capability, which was previously limited to states, to simultaneously control and coordinate several commercial drones at one time using a GPS unit. This development may send viewers of the science-fiction series Black Mirror into hiding, but it should prompt professional militaries to double down on countermeasures, specifically the creation of electronic jamming tech. Swashbuckling drones operated by rebels and militants have been shoring up the frontlines of conflict internationally, in some cases braving the choppy waters off the coast of Yemen, and in others crowding the skies over Syria and Iraq.

Washington, DC - A US federal appeals court has thrown out a lawsuit by the families of two Yemeni men allegedly killed as innocent bystanders in a US drone strike in 2012 but one of the judges said US "democracy is broken" after announcing the ruling. The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel in Washington on Friday upheld a lower court's finding that it had no say over the president's drone programme. The case began in 2015 when two family members of Faisal bin Ali Jaber, who brought the "wrongful death" case against then-President Barack Obama in 2015, were killed by a drone strike Yemen in 2012. Faisal's nephew Waleed, 26, and brother-in-law Salem, a father of seven and noted anti-extremist imam, were killed in the strike alongwith three others. Faisal's lawsuit requested an apology from the US government and declaration that the strike was unlawful.

Donald Trump's presidency got off to a bloody start in January, when a special operations forces raid against al-Qaeda in Yemen killed numerous civilians and a US Navy SEAL. The raid was a disaster, but it did not deter the US from launching more attacks using drones and other weapons platforms. In one week earlier this month, the Trump administration conducted about 40 strikes in Yemen, including 25 on a single day. Added to that, there was a drone attack in Pakistan, the first in the country since May 2016. Barack Obama was much criticised for his dramatic escalation of drone strikes in non-battlefield settings such as Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia. But Trump is already surpassing Obama's record.

The White House has said that up to 116 civilians have been killed by drone and other US strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya since Barack Obama took office in 2009, a figure that has been slammed by watchdog groups as an undercount, which suggests that the real figure could be as high as 1,100. Published by the Director of National Intelligence on Friday, the report said that between January 20, 2009, and December 31, 2015, the US carried out 473 strikes, which killed up to 2,581 "combatants" and anywhere from 64 to 116 civilians. The civilian casualties disclosed in the report were from nations not recognised as "battlefields," and did not reflect US air attacks in "areas of active hostilities" such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria. Watchdog and rights groups have long claimed that the US administration does not know how many civilians it has killed and does not do enough to prevent civilian casualties when carrying out counterterrorism operations. Reprieve, an international human rights organisation, said the US government's previous statements about the drone programme have proven to be false by its own internal documents. It said the Obama administration has "shifted the goalposts on what counts as a'civilian' to such an extent that any estimate may be far removed from reality".

Cian Westmoreland was 18 years old when he enlisted in the US Air Force. Now 28, the former serviceman served with the 606 Air Control Squadron in Germany and the 73rd Expeditionary Air Control Squadron in Kandahar, Afghanistan, as an Air Force Technician. He built the communications infrastructure for the US military's drone programme in Afghanistan, which, according to a 2015 report by The Intercept led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians. In 2010, after four years in the military, he left the Air Force and joined other whistle-blowers speaking out about US drone policy. The group of technicians and operators wrote an open letter to US President Barack Obama.