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For Immediate Release
July, 05 2016, 02:00pm EDT
Contact:
Reprieve's London office can be contacted on: communications [at] reprieve.org.uk / +44 (0) 207 553 8140.,Reprieve US,, based in New York City, can be contacted on Katherine [dot] oshea [at] reprieve.org
Yemeni Drone Victim Responds to President Obama's Civilian Casualty Figures
WASHINGTON
A Yemeni victim of the U.S. drone killing program has called on the Obama Administration to reveal whether his family was included in civilian casualty numbers released last week.
Faisal bin ali Jaber, an engineer from Yemen, has repeatedly asked the Administration to publicly admit that the killing of his brother-in-law and nephew in a U.S. drone strike in 2012 was a mistake. His brother-in-law, Salem bin ali Jaber, was an anti-extremist imam who was known for speaking out against al-Qaeda in his sermons, and his nephew, Waleed bin ali Jaber, was a local policeman.
Writing in The Hill today, Mr al Jaber says: "The President's version of transparency - a simple number - does not help the families of the dead. It also does not help us achieve peace. How can Yemen's young people make peace with the world when their first experience of the U.S. is hovering drones, killing innocents, where no-one will admit responsibility?
"We simply want the same respect that the President gave to families of an American and Italian hostage killed in a strike: the public recognition that my family members were innocent, and that the U.S. killed them by mistake."
Jennifer Gibson, attorney at Reprieve, said: ""Friday's announcement by the Administration was not only missing the truth, it was also missing the faces and names of the hundreds of civilians who have been killed by this secretive CIA program - faces like Faisal. These families deserve more than they got Friday. They deserve to know whether they were among the numbers and they deserve the same apology this Administration delivered to the families of western hostages who were killed. Anything less is not transparency. Until we know who we have killed, far from any battlefield, we can't begin to make amends or have the public debate this program demands."
Reprieve is a UK-based human rights organization that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantanamo Bay.
LATEST NEWS
Insiders Say Trump Foreign Aid Cuts Causing 'Violence and Chaos' in Fragile Nations
"It is devastating, but it's not surprising," said one former senior State Department official. "It's all what people in the national security community have predicted."
May 28, 2025
U.S. State Department officials in at least two countries have recently warned that the Trump administration's sudden foreign aid cutoff is fueling "violence and chaos" in some of the world's most vulnerable nations, according to a report published Wednesday.
Internal State Department communications viewed by
ProPublicarevealed that U.S. Embassy officials in the southeastern African nation of Malawi sounded the alarm on cuts to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), which have "yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking" in the Dzaleka refugee camp.
Meanwhile, dramatically reduced U.S. funding to feed refugees in Kenya has sparked violent protests and other incidents, including the trampling death of a pregnant woman during a stampede for food in which police opened fire on desperately hungry people.
"In Kenya, for example, the WFP will cut its rations in June down to 28% — or less than 600 calories a day per person — a low never seen before...The WFP’s standard minimum for adults is 2,100 calories per day." Just unbelievable suffering as U.S. withdraws foreign aid.
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— Lisa Song (@lisalsong.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 1:15 PM
This, as President Donald Trump's administration—spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its de facto leader, Elon Musk—has taken a wrecking ball approach to vital offices and programs including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where contracts for programs including those that fed and provided healthcare for millions of people and fought diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS have been slashed by up to 90%.
Republicans have attempted to justify the cuts under the guise of tackling the staggering U.S. national debt, even as they push a massive tax cut that would disproportionately benefit the ultrarich and corporations while adding trillions of dollars to the deficit, according to a nonpartisan congressional committee.
Although a federal judge ruled in March that Musk's moves to shutter USAID were likely unconstitutional and ordered a halt to the effort, much damage has already been done.
"It is devastating, but it's not surprising," Eric Schwartz, a former State Department assistant secretary and National Security Council member, told ProPublica. "It's all what people in the national security community have predicted."
"I struggle for adjectives to adequately describe the horror that this administration has visited on the world," Schwartz added. "It keeps me up at night."
It is unclear if any of the cables were sent via the official dissent channel set up during the administration of then-President Richard Nixon in an effort to allow State Department personnel to voice opposition to U.S. policies and practices—especially in regard to the Vietnam War—and stop leaks to the press.
The State Department responded to the ProPublica exposé in a statement saying: "It is grossly misleading to blame unrest and violence around the world on America. No one can reasonably expect the United States to be equipped to feed every person on Earth or be responsible for providing medication for every living human."
Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed during a congressional hearing that "no one has died" due to USAID cuts, an assertion refuted by Congressman Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who displayed photos and harrowing stories of people who have, in fact, died since funding for vital programs was slashed or eliminated.
"It's clear that people are dying because U.S. aid was suspended and then reduced. But it's difficult to come up with a precise death toll that can be tied directly to Trump administration policies," according to a Washington Post analysis by Glenn Kessler published on Tuesday. "The death certificates, after all, aren't marked, 'Due to lack of funding by U.S. government.'"
Last month, the international medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said that there will be "more preventable deaths and untold suffering around the world" due to the Trump administration.
"These sudden cuts by the Trump administration are a human-made disaster for the millions of people struggling to survive amid wars, disease outbreaks, and other emergencies," Avril Benoît, who heads the U.S. branch of MSF, said last month.
"We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025."
On the ground in Kenya, WFP country director Lauren Landis told ProPublica that her organization is cutting daily aid rations to less than 600 calories per person—far less than the standard minimum 2,100 calories per day under agency guidelines.
"We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025," Landis said, describing children who look like "walking skeletons" due to severe malnutrition.
Meanwhile, enough food to feed more than 1 million people in some of the world's most fragile places through most of the summer is moldering in storage as USAID funds run dry and workers are laid off.
This,
warned WFP last month, "could amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation."
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'This Is Bad': Haiti Reportedly Hired Erik Prince to Help Kill Gang Members
"It's hard to overstate how badly wrong bringing in foreign mercenaries, such as those allied with Erik Prince, will likely go given the current security, social, and political dynamics," one journalist warned.
May 28, 2025
"What could possibly go wrong?"
That's a questionNew York Times readers sarcastically asked on social media Wednesday, after the newspaper reported that Erik Prince, founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater and a key ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, is working with Haiti's interim government "to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorizing the nation and threatening to take over its capital."
The newspaper noted that Prince declined to comment, and while Blackwater is now defunct, the former Navy SEAL "owns other private military entities." The reporting is based on unnamed American and Haitian officials and other security experts.
"Haiti's government has hired American contractors, including Mr. Prince, in recent months to work on a secret task force to deploy drones meant to kill gang members," who "have been killing civilians and seizing control of vast areas of territory" in the Caribbean country, the Times detailed.
"Mr. Prince's team has been operating the drones since March, but the authorities have yet to announce the death or capture of a single high-value target," according to the paper. Pierre Espérance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti, said the drone attacks have killed more than 200 people.
American journalist Michael Deibert said on social media, "If this story is accurate, on what authority does Haiti's unelected, temporary interim [government] invite foreign forces into the country and by what means—with whose money—do they intend to pay them for their work there?"
The U.S. State Department has poured millions into Haiti's National Police but told the Times it is not paying Prince.
Deibert said that "as someone who has reported on Haiti's armed groups for 25 years, it's hard to overstate how badly wrong bringing in foreign mercenaries, such as those allied with Erik Prince, will likely go given the current security, social, and political dynamics in the country."
This is Bad. Like Capital B. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/u...
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— r: The Alignment Problem, Christian (@jacky.wtf) May 28, 2025 at 5:44 PM
Also weighing in on social media, Keanu Heydari, a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, said: "A lot's going on here! A majority-Black nation, hollowed out by decades of foreign intervention, 'turning to' a white war profiteer to restore 'order.' That is not about logistics, this is about coloniality."
Heydari continued:
This isn't a story about drones and gangs. It's about how the world has made it structurally impossible for Haiti to govern itself—then offers mercenaries as a "solution." Haiti's sovereignty has been chipped away by debt, coups, U.N. missions, and now private warlords.
Why does Erik Prince show up where Black and Brown countries are in crisis? Because the global market rewards violence disguised as security, especially when it's sold by Westerners to postcolonial states. It's racial capitalism in full view.
The NYT missed the story: This isn't a desperate government making tough choices. It's a story of empire outsourcing control, where mercenaries profit from the very chaos empire helped produce. Haiti deserves justice, not occupation by other means.
The Times article follows The Economist's reporting earlier this month that Haiti's interim government, the Transitional Presidential Council, "is so desperate that it is exploring deals with private military contractors. It has been talking to Osprey Global Solutions, a firm based in North Carolina. The founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, visited Haiti in April to negotiate contracts to provide attack drones and training for an anti-gang task force. The council declined to comment."
In response to that paragraph in the May 7 article, Jake Johnston, director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti, also asked, "What could possibly go wrong?"
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Driven by Groundwater Depletion, Colorado River Basin Has Lost Equivalent of Underground Lake Mead
"Everyone in the U.S. should be worried about it, because we grow a lot of food in the Colorado River Basin, and that's food that's used all over the entire country."
May 28, 2025
The authors of a new study on water loss in the Colorado River Basin say "large-scale industrial farming" is closely tied to a major depletion of groundwater in the Southwest, where the pumping of groundwater is largely unregulated.
Researchers at Arizona State University used satellite data to measure groundwater supplies across the basin, which runs through seven states including Arizona, California, and Utah.
Measuring the Earth's gravity field to estimate the mass of underground water in the region, they found that the area has lost 27.8 million acre-feet of groundwater since 2003—roughly the same volume as the capacity of the nation's largest reservoir, Lake Mead.
The loss of groundwater has especially accelerated in the past decade, and the basin lost more than twice as much groundwater since 2003 as the amount of water taken out of reservoirs.
"Groundwater is disappearing 2.4 times faster than the surface water," Jay Famiglietti, the senior author of the study and a hydrologist at Arizona State University, told The Guardian.
Groundwater pumping is unregulated in much of the region, and the researchers noted that parts of the basin that have experienced the greatest losses are in areas with industrial alfalfa farming operations.
"Groundwater is disappearing 2.4 times faster than the surface water."
"Overpumping" is the main driver of groundwater loss in the past two decades, Famigletti said. "There's nothing illegal about it, it's just unprotected."
The Colorado River provides water to about 40 million people and millions of acres of farmland.
"Everyone in the U.S. should be worried about it, because we grow a lot of food in the Colorado River Basin, and that's food that's used all over the entire country," Famigletti told The Guardian.
While groundwater has been depleted, hotter temperatures fueled by the burning of fossil fuels have also contributed to especially arid conditions in the region over the past two decades. Since the beginning of the century the Colorado River's natural flow has been 13% lower than it was in the middle of the 20th century.
"We need to recognize where all this is happening and work with the state to put the brakes on," Famigletti toldThe Washington Post. "We used to say the Colorado River is the lifeblood of the western United States, but now it's becoming groundwater is the lifeblood."
States in the region were forced to reach a federal agreement in 2023 to limit water usage and try to protect the river's supply.
The more water that is lost from the river, Famigletti toldthe Post, "the more pressure there's going to be on the groundwater" in the basin.
"And then," he said, "it becomes a ticking time bomb."
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