Journalists Harassed By Airport Officials For Passing Out TSA Body Scanner Opt Out Flyers – but a Sheriff Steps in to Defend rights!
BRADLEY MANNING UPDATE:Bradley Manning is being punished – and tortured – for a crime that amounts to believing one’s highest duty is to the American people and not the American government
Walmart CEOs Concealed Evidence Of Vast Bribery Scandal
Jeremy Scahill on Obama’s War Machine, American Assassinations & Journalism
When Barack Obama took office, drone strikes were a once-in-a-while thing, with an attack every week or two. Now, they’re the centerpiece of a global U.S. counterterrorism campaign. Obama institutionalized the strikes to the point where he could hand off to the next president an efficient bureaucratic process for delivering death-by-robot practically on autopilot. Only now he’s the next president. Welcome to Obama’s second-term agenda for dealing with the world. As the Ramones sang: second verse, same as the first.
Early in the first term, then-CIA director Leon Panetta observed that drones were the “only game in town” for attacking al-Qaida in Pakistan. By that he meant invading a country for the third time in a decade was a nonstarter, and the flesh-and-blood spies needed to do a traditional intelligence operation weren’t available in sufficient numbers. So the Obama administration all but crafted its counterterrorism strategy around the drones, turning their surveillance and lethal operations into a bureaucratic apparatus led by White House aides with minimal outside oversight. The CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command, elite forces that rarely operate visibly, have the lead for implementing the robot-based agenda — and augmenting it with commando raids. Backstopping them are new tools to invade and disrupt enemy data networks.
The strikes have spread from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia. And now that Obama’s been reelected, expect them to spread to Mali, another country most Americans neither know nor understand. The northern part of the North African country has fallen into militant hands. U.S.-aligned forces are currently plotting to take it back. The coming arrival of Army Gen. David Rodriguez, the former day-to-day commander of the Afghanistan war, as leader of U.S. forces in Africa is a signal that Obama wants someone experienced at managing protracted wars on a continent where large troop footprints aren’t available. Instead, Rodriguez will have to track, check and erode the spread of al-Qaida in northern and eastern Africa using drones and commando forces, available from his expanding bases in places like Djibouti. If all of this seems routine, that’s the point.
The Obama administration is doing something similar with cyber weaponry. It’s trying to make them a normal part of everyday conflict. Gone are the days when senior officers equivocated in public about their ability to disrupt enemy data networks. Now the Air Force talks openly about spending $10 million on new tools “to destroy, deny, degrade, disrupt, deceive, corrupt, or usurp the adversaries [sic] ability to use the cyberspace domain for his advantage.” The Pentagon’s futurists at Darpa have launched a new “Plan X” to routinize the corruption of enemy networks and the exfiltration of data within normal military operations. Routinization may actually be the wrong word: Darpa wants military malware that works like “the auto-pilot function in modern aircraft.” The Stuxnet worm that messed with Iran’s centrifuges was only the beginning.
All this might seem aggressive for a president who liked to say on the campaign trail that “the tide of war is receding.” But the tide of war never actually goes out. And the wicked-hard problems facing Obama’s national security team may only be getting under way.
Next comes Iran. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that he will feel the need to strike Iran by next summer. Obama has a stronger hand with Netanyahu now that he doesn’t have to worry about reelection, but he’s still committed himself rhetorically to preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon. Even if Obama can avert a war, his clear preference, Iran will continue to consume a tremendous amount of the White House and the Pentagon’s attention. The alternative to a massive bombing campaign might not be so benign, either: the point of Stuxnet was to make the Iranians distrust the industrial controls on their nuclear program’s centrifuges.
Then comes Afghanistan, a war that Obama does not discuss candidly. He’s fond of saying, as he did in one of his final ads, that he plans on “ending the war in Afghanistan, so we can do some nation-building here at home.” His real policy is way more complex than that. Yes, Obama is committed to withdrawing most troops and ending a formal U.S. combat role by 2014. Obama plans to keep a residual troop presence in the country, even after the 2014 “withdrawal,” and negotiations with the Afghans about what shape that presence will take — and for what purpose — are supposed to begin shortly. Among the things Obama is likely to seek: Afghanistan’s permission to keep its air bases as launchpads for drone strikes into Pakistan. The charitable interpretation is to say Obama is caveating his out-of-Afghanistan pledge. The uncharitable interpretation is that he’s misleading the country on it.
The Obama administration is still grappling with the implications of its sprawling, robot-led war. Some of its top officials are just starting to question how long the strikes have to persist. But they haven’t addressed concerns about the precedent the U.S. is setting by sending robots to violate the sovereignty of nations, which are unavoidable as drone technology advances and proliferates. Micah Zenko, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees a reckoning with the robots on the horizon.
“There is a recognition within the administration that the current trajectory of drone strikes is unsustainable,” Zenko says. “They are opposed in countries where strikes occur and globally, and that opposition could lead to losing host-nation support for current or future drone bases or over-flight rights.” In other words, tomorrow’s America diplomats may find that drones overshadow the routine geopolitical agenda they seek to advance. The trouble is, the administration’s early search for less-lethal policies to supplement or supplant the drones isn’t promising.
Obama’s broader foreign policy agenda keeps getting derailed. He barely talks about his expansive goal of eliminating global nuclear weapons anymore. Any route to an Israeli-Palestinian peace runs through Netanyahu, who only wants to talk about Iran. The much-heralded “pivot” of the U.S. defense posture toward Asia, a relatively modest goal, keeps getting deferred by the crises of the moment: the Navy’s newest and more advanced ships are going to confront Iran, not to preserve the freedom of the Pacific shipping lanes. A former Obama Pentagon official, Rosa Brooks, recently lamented the Obama team’s chronic inability to shape global events.
Civil libertarians rightly point to Obama’s reversals on expanding warrantless surveillance; the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects; military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay; prosecuting whistleblowers; and embracing an expensive definition of the war on terrorism’s executive powers. But there’s little evidence that Obama will change course. In an insightful blog post, the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes writes that Obama’s civil-liberties and national security record is best explained by a policy “consensus” in D.C., running through George W. Bush’s second term and Obama’s first, that basically agrees on a definition of executive power that civil libertarians dislike. It’s uncomfortable with torture, but basically comfortable with expansive domestic spying and detention powers.
As Obama’s second term dawns, it’s time to put away ideological illusions about his approach to foreign affairs. Liberals keep waiting for an agenda that’s less killer-robot-y. Conservatives are unable to see him as anything but a peacenik: “We’ll get to see what jimmy carter’s 2nd term would have looked like,” tweeted Jim Carafano, a defense analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
But the evidence is staring everyone in the face. Obama has elevated a practice of stealthy robotic warfare to the tactic of choice for U.S. security priorities, and built around it a system that operates it practically on bureaucratic inertia. Obama has a powerful incentive of all to continue his trajectory: with the one major exception of the Benghazi consulate disaster, Obama’s handling of global affairs has been notably free of high-profile screwups. That’s the sort of thing that propels a foreign policy agenda — to borrow a term — forward.
The official story surrounding the events of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya which left four Americans dead, has now officially fallen apart.
After numerous flips and flops by the Obama administration, which originally attempted to paint the incident as a Muslim outcry over an anti-Islamic video, whistle blowers throughout the U.S. government, including within the White House, the State Department, national intelligence agencies and the U.S.military have made available stunning details that suggest not only did operational commanders have live visual and audio communications from drones overhead and intelligence assets on the ground, but that some commanders within the military were prepared to go-it-alone after being told to “stand down.”
Africom commanding officer U.S. General Carter Ham, after being ordered to essentially surrender control of the situation to alleged Al Queda terrorists and let Americans on the ground die, made the unilateral decision to ignore orders from the Secretary of Defense and activated special operations teams at his disposal for immediate deployment to the area.
According to reports, once the General went rogue he was arrested within minutes by his second in command and relieved of duty.
“(The) basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on; without having some real-time information about what’s taking place,” Panetta told Pentagon reporters. “And as a result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the ground in that area, Gen. Ham, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.”
The information I heard today was that General Ham as head of Africom received the same e-mails the White House received requesting help/support as the attack was taking place. General Ham immediately had a rapid response unit ready and communicated to the Pentagon that he had a unit ready.
General Ham then received the order to stand down. His response was to screw it, he was going to help anyhow. Within 30 seconds to a minute after making the move to respond, his second in command apprehended General Ham and told him that he was now relieved of his command.
The question now is whether the American people will hold to account the chain of command responsible for leaving our people behind, fabricating a politically expedient story, and continuing to sell the now defunct lie(s) even after all of their variations of the story were found to be false and misleading.
A General who made the decision to assist diplomatic and intelligence assets on the ground has been arrested and will likely be retired or worse, while those who ordered the removal of embassy security details and ordered U.S. forces to stand-down are left to go on about their business and likely risk more American lives in the future.
In some circles the actions of those at the very top of the command structure during the Bengzahi attacks would be considered traitorous.
A Danish spy claims that the third marriage of terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki was actually part of a CIA plot to set up the al-Qaeda leader for a CIA assassination attempt. A former member of Denmark’s intelligence service claims that he was paid by the CIA to introduce the American-born al-Awlaki to his future bride via letters and video proposals.
According to several reports in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten over the weekend, the spy is 36-year-old Morten Storm, a Dutch citizen who converted to Islam and moved to Yemen in the late 1990s. Storm says that he befriend many Islamic radicals during his time there, but became disillusioned with their cause and turned against them in 2006, offering to become a spy on behalf of PET, Denmark’s intelligence agency.
Storm says that in 2009, al-Awlaki asked him to help find a European Muslim woman to become his third wife. So Storm recruited a Croatian woman, who’s identified as “Aminah” in the reports, who was sympathetic to al-Awlaki via Facebook and helped introduce them. All the while, Storm says he was paid $250,000 by the CIA to set up the marriage, and they also supplied a suitcase rigged with tracking devices that was given to the woman—who was not in on the plot—when she traveled to Yemen to meet al-Awlaki. The supposed idea behind the plot was to use the device to determine the terrorist’s location and then kill them both with a bombing strike. The plan failed when the al-Awlaki’s aides made her get rid of the suitcase upon her arrival, but al-Awlaki and Aminah did eventually marry.
Even though that plan didn’t work out, Storm says he still contributed to the drone strike that did kill al-Awlaki in 2011. He says he continued to exchange messages with al-Awlaki via a USB stick that was passed back and forth between them. That stick may been the device that allowed the U.S. to pinpoint his location for the drone attack that killed him. (Aminah is said to still be alive today, working for an al-Qaeda magazine.)
The reports have upset some Danish citizens who are worried that if Storm’s story is real, it means their government participated in an illegal assassination. PET has said in the past that they played no part in his death. That doesn’t even get into the fact that they may have used an unsuspecting person as “live bait” for a deadly hit. Also, a Muslim community leader from Birmingham who knew Storm when he lived briefly in England has spoken out against him, saying Storm was a troublemaker who tired to radicalize young Muslims and is only out for attention and money. Storm claims that was just part of his cover as a radical Muslim and there are audio recordings linking him to al-Awlaki. Neither PET or CIA would comment on the story.
Imran Khan, the former Pakistan cricket captain turned politician, was taken off an international flight from Canada to New York and questioned by US immigration officials over his views on drone strikes and jihad.
Khan, who has been at the forefront of a high-profile campaign as leader of the Pakistan Movement for Justice party (PTI) to end US drone strikes in northern Pakistan, had been in Canada to give a speech and was on his way to a fundraising dinner in the US on Friday.
Khan recently attempted to lead a high-profile march into south Waziristan which included US peace activists from the Code Pink group with some 15,000 of his supporters.
He claims that the drone strikes kill large numbers of innocent civilians – a claim denied by the US.
“I was taken off from plane and interrogated by US Immigration in Canada on my views on drones. My stance is known. Drone attacks must stop,” Khan tweeted yesterday after his questioning.
He added: “Missed flight and sad to miss the fundraising lunch in NY but nothing will change my stance.”
A US state department spokeswoman confirmed Khan’s questioning. “We are aware that Imran Khan was briefly delayed in Toronto before boarding the next flight to the United States,” she told Pakistani media.
“The issue was resolved. Mr Khan is welcome in the United States.”
US immigration authorities refused to comment on Khan’s case but a spokeswoman quoted by the Toronto Sun newspaper said: “Our dual mission is to facilitate travel in the United States while we secure our borders, our people, and our visitors from those that would do us harm like terrorists and terrorist weapons, criminals, and contraband,” said CBP spokesman Joanne Ferreira.
“Under US immigration law, applicants for admission bear the burden of proof to establish that they are clearly eligible to enter the United States. In order to demonstrate that they are admissible, the applicant must overcome all grounds of inadmissibility.”
Some Canadian commentators have speculated that Khan’s questioning was because of groups who have been protesting his visit to the US, including a group called the American Islamic Leadership Coalition which reportedly wrote to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton asking her to revoke the US visa granted to Khan.
“The US embassy made a significant error in granting this Islamist leader a visa,” the group said in a statement.
“Granting individuals like Khan access to the US to fundraise is against the interest of the people of Pakistan and the national security interests of the US.”
Ali Zaidi, an official in Khan’s party demanded “a prompt and thorough inquiry into this sordid episode” and “an unconditional apology from the US government”.
We’re used to thinking of robot swarms as consisting of lots and lots of similar robots working together. What we’re starting to see now, though, are swarms of heterogeneous robots, where you get different robots combining their powers to make each other more efficient and more capable. One of the first projects to really make this work was Swarmanoid, with teams of footbots and handbots and eyebots, and researchers presented a similar idea at IROS earlier this month, using an AR Drone to help a swarm of self-assembling ground robots to climb over a hill.
The focus of this research is communication: getting a flying robot to be able to communicate with a swarm of ground robots by relying exclusively on visual feedback from LEDs. All you need to get this to work are lights, cameras, and some mildly intelligent robots: you can leave your maps, GPS, IMU, hardware IDs, and all that stuff at home. Here’s a video of the system in action:
As interesting as the communication is, it’s the applications that really make this video worth watching. Since the ground robots can’t see very far, they rely on the quadrotor to scout ahead and estimate the parameters of upcoming obstacles. Then, the quadrotor instructs the swarm on the ground how to team up to best overcome those obstacles. With the hill, for example, the quadrotor can use stereo imagery to compute how steep it is, run an onboard simulation to see how many ground robots will have to team up to make it over, and then give instruction and direction to the robots below. Very clever.
“Spatially Targeted Communication and Self-Assembly,” by Nithin Mathews, Anders Lyhne Christensen, Rehan O’Grady, and Marco Dorigo, from Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, was presented at IROS 2012 in Vilamoura, Portugal.
WikiLeaks to Release Over 100 Secret Documents on Detention Policies
Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets
PlayStation ‘master key’ leaked online, Tiny Drones Work Together!
Jester Update: th3j35t3r ‘patriot hacker’ Promotes the Military Industrial Complex & Al-CIA-duh. FYI, it’s a group account, one of them exposed himself to be Tom Ryan, of Provide Security. (‘Terrorist Hackers’ are good for InfoSec biz)
Hacktivists Advocate: Meet The Lawyer Who Defends Anonymous
We’re as harmless or dangerous as anyone else. Chances are that we’re less dangerous because we don’t want to screw you all over. #Anonymous
Study found war against violent Islamists has become increasingly deadly
Researchers blame common tactic now being used – the ‘double-tap’ strike
Drone strikes condemned for their ineffectiveness in targeting militants
Just one in 50 victims of America’s deadly drone strikes in Pakistan are terrorists – while the rest are innocent civilians, a new report claimed today.The authoritative joint study, by Stanford and New York Universities, concludes that men, women and children are being terrorised by the operations ’24 hours-a-day’.
And the authors lay much of the blame on the use of the ‘double-tap’ strike where a drone fires one missile – and then a second as rescuers try to drag victims from the rubble. One aid agency said they had a six-hour delay before going to the scene.
The tactic has cast such a shadow of fear over strike zones that people often wait for hours before daring to visit the scene of an attack. Investigators also discovered that communities living in fear of the drones were suffering severe stress and related illnesses. Many parents had taken their children out of school because they were so afraid of a missile-strike.
Today campaigners savaged the use of drones, claiming that they were destroying a way of life.
Clive Stafford Smith, director of the charity Reprieve which helped interview people for the report, said: ‘This shows that drone strikes go much further than simply killing innocent civilians. An entire region is being terrorised by the constant threat of death from the skies. ‘
There have been at least 345 strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan in the past eight years.
‘These strikes are becoming much more common,’ Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents victims of drone strikes, told The Independent.
‘In the past it used to be a one-off, every now and then. Now almost every other attack is a double tap. There is no justification for it.’
The study is the product of nine months’ research and more than 130 interviews, it is one of the most exhaustive attempts by academics to understand – and evaluate – Washington’s drone wars.
Despite assurances the attacks are ‘surgical’, researchers found barely two per cent of their victims are known militants and that the idea that the strikes make the world a safer place for the U.S. is ‘ambiguous at best’.
Researchers added that traumatic effects of the strikes go far beyond fatalities, psychologically battering a population which lives under the daily threat of annihilation from the air, and ruining the local economy.
They conclude by calling on Washington completely to reassess its drone-strike programme or risk alienating the very people they hope to win over.
They also observe that the strikes set worrying precedents for extra-judicial killings at a time when many nations are building up their unmanned weapon arsenals.
The Obama administration is unlikely to heed their demands given the zeal with which America has expanded its drone programme over the past two years.
Washington says the drone program is vital to combating militants that threaten the U.S. and who use Pakistan’s tribal regions as a safe haven.
The number of attacks have fallen since a Nato strike in 2011 killed 24 Pakistani soldiers and strained U.S.-Pakistan relations.
Pakistan wants the drone strikes stopped – or it wants to control the drones directly – something the U.S. refuses.
Reapers and Predators are now active over the skies of Somalia and Yemen as well as Pakistan and – less covertly – Afghanistan.
But campaigners like Mr Akbar hope the Stanford/New York University research may start to make an impact on the American public.
‘It’s an important piece of work,’ he told The Independent. ‘No one in the U.S. wants to listen to a Pakistani lawyer saying these strikes are wrong. But they might listen to American academics.’
Today, Pakistani intelligence officials revealed a pair of missiles fired from an unmanned American spy aircraft slammed into a militant hideout in northwestern Pakistan last night.
The two officials said missiles from the drone aircraft hit the village of Dawar Musaki in the North Waziristan region, which borders Afghanistan to the west.
Some of the dead were believed to be foreign fighters but the officials did not know how many or where they were from.
The Monday strike was the second in three days. On Saturday a U.S. drone fired two missiles at a vehicle in northwest Pakistan, killing four suspected militants.
That attack took place in the village of Mohammed Khel, also in North Waziristan.
North Waziristan is the last tribal region in which the Pakistan military has not launched an operation against militants, although the U.S. has been continually pushing for such a move.
The Pakistanis contend that their military is already overstretched fighting operations in other areas but many in the U.S. believe they are reluctant to carry out an operation because of their longstanding ties to some of the militants operating there such as the Haqqani network.
While everyone in Washington is talking about the upcoming presidential debate today, one of the U.S. Air Force’s newest high-tech toys was taking big step — er, flight — forward.
The Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) is an effort to build a missile that flies over — not into — a target, be it an entire military base, neighborhood, or a even a lone tank and shuts down all the electronics inside without harming a soul. (Think of it almost as a mini-EMP in a rocket.) On Oct. 16, a CHAMP missile flew an hour-long preprogrammed route low over the Utah desert, “degrading and defeating”the electronics inside seven different targets. In a building along the route packed with computers, the screens all went dark as CHAMP sailed by, emitting a blast of high-power microwaves, according to CHAMP-maker Boeing’s Oct. 22 press release announcing the test flight. (The weapon even took out the remotely controlled TV cameras that were monitoring the tests, claimed Boeing.)
As the Chicago-based defense giant says in its press release, “CHAMP, which renders electronic targets useless, is a non-kinetic alternative to traditional explosive weapons that use the energy of motion to defeat a target.” (Side note: “energy of motion” is a nice way of saying that missiles, bombs, and bullets slam into things and explode.)
So, how does CHAMP fit into the Pentagon’s post Iraq and Afghan war plans? As everyone knows, the Defense Department is focusing on how to defeat new generations of air defense radars, surface to air missiles, anti ship missiles, and a host of other technologies that are specifically meant to keep American weapons systems at bay.
This means coming up with a fleet of new stealth bombers, fighters, and drone jets that can penetrate these defenses. It also means creating a bevy of long-range — or standoff weapons — capable of being launched by unstealthy jets far away from heavily defended targets. Where does something like CHAMP come in? As a door kicker. Launched from a stealth aircraft and designed to take out enemy air defense networks and command and control centers, CHAMP would pave the way for less stealthy jets and help to “blind” the enemy.
“In the near future, this technology may be used to render an enemy’s electronic and data systems useless even before the first troops or aircraft arrive,” said Keith Coleman, CHAMP program manager at Boeing’s Phantom Works division, in a press release.
Still, don’t expect to see CHAMP fielded soon. It’s simply meant to demonstrate that such a weapon is feasible. In the meantime, the Pentagon is buying EA-18G Growler electronic attack jets for the Navy while the Air Force and Marine Corps hope to use something called the Next Generation Jammer along with powerful Active Electronically Scanned Array radars (AESA radars can be used to jam other radars, in addition to many other things) on their F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to defeat enemy sensors. And don’t be surprised if the Navy decides to equip its planned fleet of stealthy combat drones, known as UCLASS, with some sort of electronic warfare gear aimed at jamming enemy electronics.
Andrew Sullivan says he’ll use it less scrupulously than the president. But based on what evidence? Current policy is plenty unscrupulous already.
Asked about drone strikes during Monday’s foreign policy debate, Mitt Romney basically said that President Obama is right to use them. Expect more drone warfare in 2013 regardless of who wins the election. Does that mean that the two candidates are indistinguishable on the issue? My friend and former boss Andrew Sullivan doesn’t think so. “Memo to Conor Friedersdorf,” he wrote while live-blogging at The Dish. “You think Romney would be as scrupulous in drone warfare as Obama?” Implicit is the judgment that Obama has been “scrupulous.”
But it isn’t so.
Sullivan and I agree that Obama won last night’s debate, and that he’d be likely to preside over a more prudent, reality-based foreign policy than Romney, based on the respective campaigns that they’ve run. On drones, however, Romney appears to have the exact same position as Obama. And Obama has been egregiously unscrupulous. I don’t want to hear the dodge about how drone strikes are necessary. It’s beside the point. This is about the specific ways Obama has waged the drone war. Even if you agree in theory with drone strikes, Obama’s actions ought to bother you.
Let me be specific:
As Jane Mayer noted when describing the CIA’s drone strikes, “The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.”
The Obama Administration avoids judicial accountability by arguing that the drone program is secret, even as it acknowledges the existence of the program when bragging about killing terrorists.
As the Mayer article goes on to state, “because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war. Should something go wrong in the C.I.A.’s program — last month, the Air Force lost control of a drone and had to shoot it down over Afghanistan — it’s unclear what the consequences would be.”
According to The New York Times, “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
The Obama Administration permits the CIA to carry out “signature strikes” even though they don’t know the identity of the people they’re trying to kill!
As Glenn Greenwald explained, “In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that after the U.S. kills people with drones in Pakistan, it then targets for death those who show up at the scene to rescue the survivors and retrieve the bodies, as well as those who gather to mourn the dead at funerals.”
As a report published by the law clinics at NYU and Standford document, innocent people in Waziristan are being terrorized and traumatized daily by Obama’s drone war. And the policy has killed, at minimum, hundreds of innocent people, a judgment that is supported even by data from the New America Foundation, whose methods almost certainly under-count dead innocents.
So to sum up, Obama has implemented a global killing program with zero checks and balances; he’s operated it out of the CIA rather than the Department of Defense; he invokes the state-secrets privilege to avoid defending it in court, even as he brags about its efficacy; it includes killing people whose identities we don’t even know; all military-aged males we kill are presumed to be “militants”; the Pakistani government reportedly gets to pick some of the targets; at minimum, hundreds of innocents have been killed, including rescuers and funeral-goers; a 16-year-old American citizen was among those killed; and Sullivan, having been exposed many times to all the information I’ve just included, thinks its accurate to call Obama’s drone program “scrupulous,” though it could easily be made more transparent, accountable, and lawful.
What really gets me is that, in addition to arguing that Obama has run this program scrupulously (something implied in Sullivan’s question, and explicitly argued in threads like this one), Sullivan has also himself articulated almost all of the reasons why the program has been unscrupulous — that is to say, why Obama’s drone policy “disregards, or has contempt for, laws of right or justice with which he is perfectly well acquainted, and which should restrain his actions.”
“One thing I’ve learned this past decade is that the CIA is pretty much its own judge, jury and executioner,” Sullivan wrote. “It is much less accountable to the public, more likely to break the laws of war and destroy the evidence, more likely to do things that could escalate rather than ameliorate a conflict.” Is it scrupulous to pick an organization like that to run your drone program?
Says Sullivan’s post from June of 2011 (emphasis added):
Obama is now engaged in two illegal wars — in Libya and in Yemen. There was no Congressional debate or vote on these wars — and one is being waged by the CIA with unmanned drones. I think we have learned a little about what happens when you give the CIA carte blanche to run a war with no accountability except to a president who has a vested interest in covering up errors.
Said Sullivan on another occasion, “Put drones in the hands of an executive who is empowered to do anything without any input from the other branches of government … and we have a problem indeed.” He is also on record stating that “counting every military-age man in the vicinity of a Jihadist as a terrorist is a total cop-out,” and he even wrote that “if the CIA, based on its own intelligence, can launch a war or wars with weapons that can incur no US fatalities, the propensity to be permanently at war, permanently making America enemies, permanently requiring more wars to put out the flames previous wars started, then the Founders’ vision is essentially over. I think it’s a duty to make sure their vision survives this twenty-first century test.”
So let’s get back to Sullivan’s debate night question. “You think Romney would be as scrupulous in drone warfare as Obama?” My best guess is that, on drone warfare, their policies would be about the same — that is to say, alarmingly unscrupulous, with unpredictable consequences. That’s what happens when you give someone the power to kill without checks in secret.
I have no reason to think one or the other would predictably kill more innocent people with drones. Does Sullivan? If Romney wins, what odds would Sullivan give on the proposition that Romney ultimately kills more civilians with drones than Obama has? Based on what evidence? Obama has already killed an American citizen without trial and conducted drone strikes in a country where no war has been declared, so I don’t see how Romney would set any precedents that are even more alarming. (What precedent would that be?) Overall, I have no idea whose drone war would be more damaging. Having watched Sullivan strongly denounce and other times defend Obama’s drone war in posts that cannot be reconciled with one another, I don’t think he knows either.
So what if Romney is elected and turns out to be much worse on drones? It could totally happen. I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll be opposing his unaccountable killing policy from day one regardless, just as I’ve opposed Obama’s policy due to its manifold flaws. And if Romney’s drone policy turns out to have all sorts of catastrophic consequences? I hope Sullivan remembers that Obama established the bipartisan consensus behind a worldwide drone-strike strategy and set all the necessary precedents without losing the support of backers like Sullivan. (He didn’t even lose support for continuing his current drone policy itself.) A Romney drone fleet, operating in numerous countries with zero oversight from the judiciary or Congress, with American citizens in the crosshairs? Obama and his supporters built that. It would be ready for President Romney on day one.
A law professor at Notre Dame leads a lonely campaign to stop the targeted killings in Pakistan and elsewhere, insisting they violate international law.
Notre Dame law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell is a leading critic of the U.S. targeted-killing program against Al Qaeda militants. (Los Angeles Times, Ken Dilanian / October 9, 2012)
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Notre Dame law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell was in her office last month when Imran Khan, a former cricket star who could be Pakistan’s next prime minister, phoned to ask for help.
Pakistanis are furious about the CIA‘s covert campaign of drone missile strikes, Khan told her. Was she aware that the CIA often doesn’t know who it is killing?
“Yes, of all Americans, I think I have a pretty good handle on the facts,” she replied, recounting the call.
O’Connell, a fierce critic of America’s drone attacks outside a war zone, insists the targeted killings are illegal under international law.
“We wouldn’t accept or want a world in which Russia or China or Iran is claiming authority to kill alleged enemies of the state based on secret evidence of the executive branch alone,” O’Connell said. “And yet that’s the authority we’re asserting.”
O’Connell, 54, has led a lonely campaign to stop the drones since she wrote a paper branding the first CIA drone strike, in 2002, as unlawful. She rejected claims by the George W. Bush administration that the attack, which killed several Al Qaeda militants and a U.S. citizen, was a legitimate act of self-defense in the war on terrorism.
Since then, President Obama has sharply increased drone attacks, and O’Connell has jousted with government officials, debated other academics and outlined her critique in scholarly publications.
“Her views are definitely taken seriously,” said Sean Murphy, a former State Department lawyer who argues the drone strikes are permitted under the law. “She’s on the leading edge of this argument.”
She remains in a small minority of U.S. legal scholars, but her views are gaining currency as targeted killings continue.
A report issued last month by researchers at the law schools of New York University and Stanford University argued that many U.S. drone strikes appear unlawful because they don’t meet the strict legal test for killing outside a war zone — to stop an imminent threat to life when no other means is available.
In June, Christof Heyns, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, told a conference in Geneva that “double tap” drone strikes, in which a second missile is fired at people coming to aid the wounded, could constitute a war crime. Pakistan claims several such attacks have occurred in its tribal areas.
O’Connell and her intellectual allies agree the United States is fighting a lawful war in Afghanistan because it gave shelter to terrorists who attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001. But they argue that killing militants in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia is not a legitimate part of that conflict, and thus violates laws of war intended to protect noncombatants.
If the U.S. government has a case against an Al Qaeda militant in Yemen or Somalia, they argue, it must try to arrest him and give him a chance to surrender unless lives are in immediate danger.
That view strikes O’Connell’s many critics as a naive reading of international law that fails to account for modern stateless terrorists. But the U.S. government held a similar view until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
U.S. officials criticized Israel for killing Palestinian militants on the West Bank in the 1990s, for example, and CIA officials believed they lacked the authority to kill Osama bin Laden even after he was indicted for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.
National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to comment for this article, but he noted that White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan publicly explained the administration’s view on targeted killings in April.
“As a matter of international law, the United States is in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, in response to the 9/11 attacks, and we may also use force consistent with our inherent right of national self-defense,” Brennan said.
Under Obama, the United States has launched 284 drone missile strikes in Pakistan and 49 in Yemen, according to independent groups that track reported attacks. That’s up from 46 in Pakistan and one in Yemen under Bush. Strikes have also been reported in Somalia.
So-called high-value targets typically are named on a classified “kill list,” which is reviewed by lawyers from the White House, the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies. Many others are killed in “signature strikes” that target unidentified militants based on activities deemed suspicious.
In September, Obama sought to explain who gets targeted and why.
“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” Obama told CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”
O’Connell and other critics say no evidence suggests that all those killed met Obama’s standard. Drone strikes have killed up to 3,000 people, according to the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute in Washington.
O’Connell sees her effort as an exercise in moral suasion, similar to the public outcry that erupted after news reports detailed how the CIA had used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques against several Al Qaeda detainees after Sept. 11.
A trim woman with brown hair, O’Connell isn’t a pacifist. Her husband is a former Army interrogator who served in the first Gulf War. They met while she was working for the Defense Department, teaching soldiers about international law.
O’Connell praises the Navy SEAL mission that killed Bin Laden, and supports using drones to target enemy fighters in Afghanistan. “I do think drones can be a more accurate weapon, and I’m all in favor of saving our troops’ lives,” she said.
Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution fellow who supports the drone strikes, put O’Connell on the defensive in a debate two years ago by challenging her to take her position to its logical conclusion — as he put it, “that President Obama is a serial killer.”
She fumbled her response. But upon reflection, she sees some parallels to the abortion debate. One can believe, as she does strongly, that abortion is deeply immoral, without labeling women who have abortions as murderers.
“I feel the same way about targeted killing,” she said. “I understand that Americans don’t … see it, but we want the practice to end. I don’t think President Obama should go to jail for it.”
You are looking at an insect spy drone for urban areas, already in production, funded by the US Government. It can be remotely controlled an is equipped with a Camera and Microphone. It can land on you and may have the potential to take a DNA sample, or leave RFID tracking nano-technology on (or in) your skin. It can fly through an open window, or it can attach to your clothing until you take it in your home.
The quite strange unarmed bird-like drone which was recovered by Pakistani forces in August of 2011 apparently did not just fly over Pakistan, but was also apparently spotted by Iraqi insurgents at least two years before making its way to Pakistan.
A reader of The Aviationist tipped them off to a video posted on May 28, 2009 showing the drone captured by the Iraqi Hezbollah in Iraq which is eerily similar to the drone which was captured in Pakistan.
The providence of the drone is shrouded in a thick veil of mystery since no nation would take responsibility for the device which has, according to Danger Room, “silver wings and a span about the size of a grown man’s outstretched arms, the drone was clearly more than a hobbyist’s toy: the remains of a camera were near the crash site, a camera that fit into the robotic bird’s belly, ostensibly for spying on insurgents.”
Danger Room points out that the drone is quite similar to, but definitely not exactly the same as, Festo’s “SmartBird” drone.
The dimensions of the two drones are similar and the designs obviously look alike as well although, “It’s clearly not the same drone, as the wings are obviously different: the mystery drone’s wings are straighter and more sharply angled than the SmartBird’s sleeker, more rounded wings, which mimic those of the gull,” according to Danger Room.
The nation or entity behind the drone is difficult to determine outside from speculation based on the nations currently involved in operations in Pakistan.
However, Danger Room seems to think it belong so the U.S. in writing, “Iraqi Hezbollah date its photos of the mystery drone to May 2009 in Basra, a major city in southern Iraq. Back then, U.S. troops were training their Iraqi counterparts on new-line intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems. Hmm.”
While the video and screenshots don’t reveal any technical information on the drone which is all that new, it does show that the drone in Iraq and that in Pakistan are closely related.
Both have a design which relies on flapping wings, a trapezoidal tail feather and a spherical camera placed in the belly of the bird.
However, the drone recovered in Pakistan has a tailfin on the underside of the rear feather which the drone in Iraq is missing and the version found in Iraq is a duller color than the reflective silver drone in Pakistan.
“The fact that it was probably already flying in Iraq two years before crashing in Pakistan, proves that the bird-like UAV is not a toy but a small combat proven spy drone,” writes The Aviationist’s David Cenciotti.
This deals a significant blow to those who have repeatedly claimed that it was actually just a DIY drone, evidenced by Danger Room tagging the latest post with “DIY Drones.”
However, since we really have no idea who made the drone or who was operating it, one cannot say with certainty that it is not a DIY creation of some group somewhere although I find this quite unlikely.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to speculate on the issue with any degree of certainty since we know very little about the drone and its origin but it will be fascinating to see if more information comes out or if more appearances of the strange device begin to surface.
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The first thing is to know what to expect before hand. While people think about the dollar dropping to nothing, or an Obama re-election, you need to consider the most pressing signs of a pending martial law.
How pending?
About 15 minutes or less away from being put into a bus.
Now there are people who would look forward to 3 hots and a cot. And there are some who would actively encourage you to go to the camps. There was an article that said that social services folks are encourage self-sufficient people to use food stamps, and that the self-sufficient mentality was preventing more people from being on food stamps.
But we aren’t those people. We are the kinds that enjoy freedom.
So what do we look for?
Using the backbone of a military operation, you must make the enemy (that would be you) deaf, dumb, and blind.
What does that mean? It means you must be blind: Not knowing what to expect, how many men are in the operation, and what your final destination will be. This means that the operation will most likely take place in the middle of the night. When they roll up, mega watt lights will be shone onto the neighbourhood. This disorientates you as well as illuminate your home for movement. This also means the power to your block will be secured. Depending on the size of the town, perhaps several blocks at once. That would be a good thing. Read on…
Deaf means that you won’t know what is going on. Loud noises, such as bullhorns shouting orders, diesel engines running, and people yelling at you to go here or there. It also means you won’t be able to receive texts or cell phone service.
Dumb, or mute, means you won’t be able to call anyone, tweet, post a Facebook update, send an email of warning. Imagine if the events took place in Chicago. How quick would such a warning get spread all over Facebook or Twitter. It would “trends” quickly and the element of surprise would be gone.
Making you deaf and dumb is as simple as securing the internet with the Internet Kill Switch. That ends Facebook, Twitter, and Email.
And all you have to do to secure the cell phone or land-line service is to have the US military show up at the local phone office and have them secure all lines in the place. Turning the power off would be as effective as cutting lines, but once power is restored you could have normal service. Infrastructure would be maintained.
Your neighbourhood is now deaf, dumb, and blind.
You need to buy yourself some time. Not much time, but just enough time.
And you have about 5 minutes to do it in. Maybe less.
What do you need?
You need to make an alert when you lose power. This is from my site:
“I took a small wall wart that is rated at 12 volts and about 100 mA. I attached it to the power and ground part of a small 12v relay I bought from radio shack. I then took a 9v battery connector and a piezeo alarm and put it on the connectors of the relay that if there is no power to the relay – will allow current to flow. The way you find that is to put the red wire of the connector to the relay, and one of the leads from the alarm to the opposite side of the relay. Connect the black wire and the other alarm wire together.
Provided you have a 9v battery on the connector you should hear a sound. If not, change to a different spot on the relay. So when you apply power by plugging in the wall wart, the sound goes off. Remove the wart or turn off the power, you get an alarm sound. “
When I was in the Navy, any time we lost power we went into an immediate Security Alert. And you should too. When that alarm sounds (Put it in your bedroom as close to the bed as possible), after you pull the alarm out of the socket, get up and hide the children,
And that means you have to have pre-arranged hiding spots.
A window seat is a great way to start. Make a bench, bolt it to the wall under the bedroom window, and make small doors for the child to hide in. You can do the same for your room. Tell the children just to go if they are ever told, and to stay very quiet until you tell them to come out. And only you. Pretend to be someone else and see if they come to them. Soldiers may be very sneaky and say, “Your parents told me to get you. Come on, let’s go to them!”
Practice this frequently so they are aware of what needs to be done, and to be done in the dark, and to be done without question.
If you can’t make a window bench, then fill your closet up with “boxes”. These boxes are “stacked” to make it look like a storage area, but it’s just a shell. If you are in a manufactured home or a single story home, go to the closet and cut open a hatch to the crawl space. Have a black blanket so you can hide under the blanket to stay concealed. USE YOUR IMAGINATION!
The idea is that soldiers don’t have much time to search each home. They have to keep moving onto the next house. Once they leave and the power goes back on – DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING. If the bathroom light was on, leave it on. The smart meters will detect and record ANY changes and it will alert someone that there are people within the home!
Drones will be used to monitor communities and neighbourhoods. Going out after dark is the same as going out during the day.
If you go out at night, take a night vision capable video camera. Put black plastic around the IR lamp that is usually beneath the camera’s lens. This will prevent the drone from seeing the IR light, but you’ll be able to see the IR lights on the drone in the dark.
If you feel froggy, shoot down the drone AS IT LEAVES! The flight will be level and of constant speed, enough for you to get a bead on it. It’s difficult to tell where the shot came from, and you’ll get some satisfaction of taking one down. These thing are expensive and if they have to redirect one away from another area, that means someone else is getting a break.
If you have to move from one place to another, do so during a rain or thunderstorm. These conditions make drone flying very difficult and seeing anything of value VERY difficult. Yes, it is horrible conditions for you, but at least you will be free.
If, during the day, you see people wandering through your town, ignore them and hide. They may be “spies” looking for the last holdouts. As a rule of thumb, 8 to 80, blind, crippled, or crazy, means anyone may be a threat. Don’t kill them, just let them pass through. Watch them to see if they use a radio. IF they do use one, listen for codes such as, “Secure”, “Subjects”, “Natives”, or “SitRep (Situation Report)”
Such phrases would mean that they are looking for you as wolves in sheep’s clothing. DO NOTHING towards them. Get their photos if you can but remain hidden.
Satellites may detect heat from fireplaces, so use the covert cooking methods like solar cooking, Hay Box cooking or Creveche. If you can, light a match in the sewers to eliminate any flammable gasses, and cook down there. The streets should hide the heat signature well enough, especially in the day. Solar cooking using the back of a pickup may be a good decision as it may imitate the accumulated heat of a canopy.
You will be on your own. You will be the deciding factor if you live free or die free.
But it’s your decision. No one else makes it for you.
Remembering the ‘Correct’ version of History is important! let’s set the foundation for the various methods of lying-into-war, Where and when history has chosen to ‘overlook’. Think-Tanks that manipulate & influence, Power Brokers of the Global Elite, Secret Societies and what some would describe as Satanic Mass-Sacrificial Agreements.
Political Assassinations throughout history, Targeted killing and the Obama ‘hit list’, Black Ops, Conspiracy, Drones, and the technology that makes it all possible.
EFF activists Trevor Timm and Parker Higgins explain how widespread drones are becoming, how they’ve already been hacked, and how the situation may get a lot worse before it gets better.
A General who made the decision to assist diplomatic and intelligence assets on the ground has been arrested and will likely be retired or worse, while those who ordered the removal of embassy security details and ordered U.S. forces to stand-down are left to go on about their business and likely risk more American lives in the future.
