Britain dispatches advanced warship to Persian Gulf

By Haaretz

The Royal Navy is sending its most advanced warship to the Persian Gulf, in a deployment intended to send a message to Iran following its threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, the Daily Telegraph reported.

According to the report, the HMS Daring, a Type 45 destroyer, will depart Portsmouth next Wednesday and has been equipped with new technology that will enable it to intercept any Iranian missile. It also reportedly possesses the world’s most sophisticated naval radar.

Earlier this week, British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond warned Iran against blocking the strait.

On Friday, Iran announced it will carry out more military exercises in the strait. Iran recently completed a 10-day drill in the strategic waterway.

Western countries have readied plans to use strategic oil stocks to replace almost all Gulf oil lost if Iran blocks the waterway, Reuters reported, citing…

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US aircraft carrier ‘spotted’ in Iran wargames zone

By YNews

A US aircraft carrier entered a zone near the Strait of Hormuz being used by the Iranian navy for wargames, an Iranian official said Thursday amid rising tensions over the key oil-transit channel.

“A US aircraft carrier was spotted inside the maneuver zone… by a navy reconnaissance aircraft,” Commodore Mahmoud Mousavi, the spokesman for the Iranian exercises, told the official IRNA news agency.

The Iranian aircraft took video and photos of the US vessel, he added.

The US aircraft carrier was believed to the USS John C. Stennis, one of the US navy’s biggest warships.

US officials announced Wednesday that the ship and its accompanying battle group moved through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow stretch at the entrance to the Gulf that is the world’s most important choke point for oil shipments.

After warnings from the Iranian government and navy this week that Iran could close the strait if threatened by further Western sanctions, the US Defense Department Iran, which is already subject to several rounds of sanctions over its nuclear program, has repeatedly said it could target the Strait…

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‘Man of Mass Destruction’? RT challenges Iraq War architect

By RT

As the day draws closer for the US to withdraw its troops from Iraq, many question how Iraq will fare on its own. RT spoke to one of the chief architects of this campaign, who shared his views on the justifications and failings behind the invasion. ¬A former assistant to the US Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan and a chairman of the Defense Policy Board under George W. Bush, Richard Perle is considered one of the most controversial figures in US politics.

French warships hit Somalia coastline

By Press TV

The missiles are reported to have struck the town of Kuda and the port of Kismayo, a Press TV correspondent reported on Thursday.

Witnesses said that four cruise missiles hit near Kismayo while another six missiles struck Kuda.

There has been no immediate report on the number of casualties.

Kenyan officials confirmed the French navy’s role in Somalia. However, Paris denied having deployed any warships in the area.

The French navy is said to be assisting Kenyan forces which crossed into Somali borders more than a week ago in hunt for al-Shabab fighters.

Kenyan troops have launched an air and ground offensive against Somali’s al-Shabab fighters, accusing the group of kidnapping foreigners on its soil.

Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991 when warlords overthrew former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

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U.S. increases Yemen drone strikes

By Karen DeYoung

The Obama administration has significantly increased the frequency of drone strikes and other air attacks against the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen in recent months amid rising concern about political collapse there.Some of the the strikes, carried out by the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have been focused in the southern part of the country, where insurgent forces have for the first time conquered and held territory as the Yemeni government continues to struggle against escalating opposition to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 33-year rule.

Unlike in Pakistan, where the CIA has presidential authorization to launch drone strikes at will, each U.S. attack in Yemen — and those being conducted in nearby Somalia, most recently on Thursday near the southern port city of Kismayo — requires White House approval, senior administration officials said.The officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter on the record, said intended targets must be drawn from an approved list of key members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula deemed by U.S. intelligence officials to be involved in planning attacks against the West. White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan last week put their number at “a couple of dozen, maybe.”

Although several unconfirmed strikes each week have been reported by local media in Yemen and Somalia, the administration has made no public acknowledgment of the escalated campaign, and officials who discussed the increase declined to provide numbers.

The heightened air activity coincides with the administration’s determination this year that AQAP, as the Yemen-based group is known, poses a more significant threat to the United States than the core al-Qaeda group based…

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The Virtue-less war of the ‘Nintendo bomber’

By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

In April, the British Ministry of Defence published a study which for the first time gave serious consideration to the moral, ethical and legal aspects of the drone wars. The study advises defense planners that ‘before unmanned systems become ubiquitous’ they must ‘ensure that, by removing some of the horror, or at least keeping it at a distance we do not risk losing our controlling humanity and make war more likely.’ The report is particularly concerned that the low risks of using drones were enabling policy makers to consider military action in places where they would otherwise be hesitant: ‘the use of force is totally a function of the existence of an unmanned capability’, it suggest.

The conclusions of the report are sobering. So is the fact that it was produced by a British military think tank rather than a US Congressional committee. In the US, the media and political establishment are still romancing the drone, with the kind of giddy attention that sometimes borders on the inappropriate. In a  May 10, 2009 segment on the Predator drone, Lara Logan of CBS’s 60 Minutes was positively breathless. Two years later, at a New America Foundation conference on drones, Professor Thomas Nachbar of the University of Virginia School of Law declared drones ‘fun’ and argued ‘against more transparency’ in their use.

Drones are attractive to US militarists and their courtiers because they are politically liberating. In their battle against public opinion and institutional inertia, politicians have often found technology an ally. The drones must therefore be understood in the context of a long-standing US desire to develop the technological means for achieving global Pax Americana. And for a century, airpower has been…

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