“Tenía solo 18 años cuando me secuestraron, me vendieron a Estados Unidos y me llevaron a uno de los agujeros negros de la CIA. Me torturaron durante meses. Luego me llevaron a Guantánamo, donde pasé cerca de quince años sin cargos ni juicio. Lo que se me hizo no fue una aberración. Eran órdenes”. Mansur Adayfi, antiguo prisionero en la cárcel de la base naval estadounidense en Guantánamo y activista de la organización CAGE International, se dirigía así en junio pasado a un panel de la

In a 2013 Congressional hearing on drone warfare, a young Pakistani boy named Zubair Rehman, aged 13 at the time, talked about the feeling of living under the threat of constant drone strikes. In his powerful testimony, Zubair stated that “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies…The drones do not fly when the skies are gray…When the sky brightens, drones return and we live in fear.”

More than a decade after his testimony and twenty-five years into the so-called global war on terror, far from being a relic of the past, drone warfare is one of the many omnipresent threats that have been cemented by the U.S. in countries across the globe. Generations of Muslim children have grown up in the world that the war on terror has created — a world in which endless war has been normalized, torture justified, and with both the state and the media painting a target on the backs on entire Muslim populations across the globe. For children like Zubair, who should be turning 26 this year, the color of the sky still serves as an ominous threat warning of the likelihood of state violence.

On Thursday, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the startling suggestion that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have knowingly allowed the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas in order to shore up his own political power. Speculation along this line, of course, is not new, but it was remarkable to hear it from a distinguished world leader like Clinton, who made the allegation on Morning Joe.