The Dick and The Drone
Filed Under Bullshit, Media, Terror | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
The US drone war is the one conflict that’s always continually escalating — even as the US vacates an isolated Pakistani base from where UAV aircraft were launched will apparently not slow the operations down at all.
From Wired: The CIA just got kicked out of a major Pakistani launching pad for the drone war. But just because the agency is packing up its stuff like a dumped lover doesn’t mean the deadly flying robots will head home. They’ll just move to the airbases in nearby Afghanistan. Consider it the drone equivalent of crashing on a friend’s couch for a while.
These machines don’t need no introduction.
And this is the future.
George Jr. started the program, but President Obama has most-definitely put his mark on it.
There were about 30 strikes on Pakistan during Obama’s first year in office, up from about 13 strikes between 2004 and 2007 and in 2009, about 54 attacks, all also in Pakistan.
Last year, the war expanded to include Yemen, and a total of 122 strikes.
In 2011, there have been 81 strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen combined — of course, there’s still Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya, where hot ‘legal‘ wars are being conducted.
Although there’s been a lot of news about drones, last week, Iran got their hands on a piece of US equipment in the form of a RQ-170 Sentinel, when it was somehow downed inside Iranian territory.
And despite Obama formally asking for the craft’s return, Iran says no way jose, considering the Sentinel “war booty.”
From Time this morning:
“Their plane invaded Iran and Iranian forces reacted powerfully,” said Defense Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi
“Now, instead of offering an apology to the Iranian nation, they impudently ask for the return of the plane.”
…
Vahidi said the United States should apologize for invading Iranian air space instead of asking for drone back.
“Iran will defend its stance and interests strongly,” Vahidi said in remarks carried by the semi-official Mehr news agency.
Some US officials say Iran won’t get much out of the captured drone, but Russia and China might as both are accustomed to copying military hardware from other countries and the innards of the Sentinel should have ant-tamper measures: At least, it’s supposed to, according to the Boeing engineer. “Dumbest thing in the world if it didn’t.”
Another brick in the wall in the nasty Iranian dust-up.
And now another big opinion in the ways of the war world: Richard ‘The Dick‘ Cheney says Obama is acting like a baby and he should man-up to the Iranians — in an interview with CNN on Monday, The Dick claimed Obama should have ordered an airstrike to destroy the downed Sentinel.
Via Press TV: “The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it,” Cheney said, adding, “You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick air strike.”
If your bowels are strong enough, view the CNN interview here.
Use of drones is really most indiscriminate and the US should be ashamed of how these machines kill without remorse and without human feelings.
See the horror of the aftermath of drone attacks here.
From War correspondent Eric Margolis via RT:
“…it is a cheap way to fight, and does not endanger any American lives.
“It is popular on Capital Hill because it appears to be having success and the military has got to come up with something, or the CIA saying ‘we are killing militants’ and filling a body-count list.
But there is a danger here, and that is what American intelligence professionals have been rightly saying for sometime: As the CIA becomes more and more militarized, it is losing its primary mission, which is to provide intelligence and information on an unbiased basis… it is now a participant [in the US’s wars], and its decisions and information will be biased as a result.”
As a result…
(Illustration found here).
Drone on…
Canker in the ‘Predator Pie’
Filed Under Just Plain War, Orwellian, Technology | Leave a Comment
“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says.
“But no one’s panicking.
“Yet.”
(Illustration found here).
The quote above comes from a Danger Room blog post on a computer virus that’s infested the US unmanned drone program, and although reportedly the canker hasn’t bothered flight operations at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the problem is no one knows for sure the source.
And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus.
“We think it’s benign.
“But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks.
The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread.
But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech.
That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.
This throws a stick in the flywheel — drones are the future of US military adventures.
Even though officially the program doesn’t exist — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — it might be the single worst kept secret in the U.S. government.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the former CIA director, may as well have confirmed what most of the world already knows when he made two light-hearted references to the secret CIA drone program during a trip to Italy.
When the subject of Predator drones came up Friday during an appearance here at Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily, Mr. Panetta said that in his old job, he had become “very familiar” with Predators.
Earlier in the day, speaking to Navy sailors in Naples, he made another crack about the effectiveness of Predators.
“Having moved from the CIA to the Pentagon, obviously I have a hell of a lot more weapons available to me in this job than I had in the CIA, although the Predators weren’t bad,” Mr. Panetta said.
Leon is just one big belly laugh, huh?
The evolution of UAVs — Unmanned Aerial Vehicles — is not all that hilarious, however, and has more than just a whiff of souless terminator about its infrastructure.
In February 2001, the machines unknowingly became self aware with the successful launch off itself of Hellfire missiles, thus, helping it evolve from a non-lethal, reconnaissance asset to an armed, highly accurate tank killer.
Or whoever.
The cowboy in George Jr. smoothed the transition — the first reported UAV-assassination use was in November 2002 with the blasting away of a SUV in the deserts of Yemen.
The SUV supposedly contained Al Qaeda leader Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi and some other guys — all were killed.
This, however, near the bottom of the USATODAY article reporting the incident (the link above): A Predator targeted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar at the start of the war on Afghanistan, but military lawyers could not decide whether he could be struck, officials have said. Its missiles were ultimately fired near him, but not to kill him.
Odd that, considering most-recent history.
The U.S. made nine drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004 and 2007, 33 in 2008, 53 in 2009 — Obama’s first year in office — and 118 in 2010.
Through Oct. 2, 2011, a recorded 60 strikes.
Under George Jr., a drone strike every 40 days, and with Obama, way-up to one every four days.
All this bad shit by two drone operations — one through the US military, the other via the CIA.
The latter, according to a detailed New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer, is the boner:
The military’s version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets enemies of U.S. troops stationed there.
As such, it is an extension of conventional warfare.
The C.I.A.’s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in countries where U.S. troops are not based.
It was initiated by the Bush Administration and, according to Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, Obama has left in place virtually all the key personnel.
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.
And this bit is from nearly two years ago.
So now the killing via drone in late September of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki has revealed more publicly the darkness behind UAVs.
The al-Awlaki incident has opened a legal can of worms, raised all kinds of moral and ethical questions, but the concern is too late.
From Reuters:
American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said.
Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
Glenn Greenwald has a most-interesting post on the subject here, and this note: Even for those deeply cynical about American political culture: wouldn’t you have thought a few years ago that having the President create a White House panel to place Americans on a CIA hit list — in secret, without a shred of due process — would be a bridge too far?
And the other side of the bridge?
Unimaginable security opportunities.
Technology eventually shrinks both costs and ease of use — metro drones could eliminate the need for a lot of actual police officers, and with some modification, ID the shit out of just about anything:
A miniature airborne drone has helped archaeologists capture images for creating a 3-D model of an ancient burial mound in Russia, scientists say.
Archaeological sites are often in remote and rugged areas.
As such, it can be hard to reach and map them with the limited budgets archaeologists typically have.
Scientists are now using drones to extend their view into these hard-to-reach spots.
“There are a lot possibilities with this method,” said researcher Marijn Hendrickx, a geographer at the University of Ghent in Belgium.
Ah, the possibilities…
Info/intell off a little battery-powered four-propeller “quadrocopter” could just as easily be sent to the Creech Air Force Base control room or the local FBI/Pentagon/CIA shop, which could trigger the appearance of the quad’s bigger, and much-more-violent cousins, instead of some archaeologists mapping ancient tombs.
One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see the possibilities.
And these machines are already flying over the US — working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, fire fighting in Arizona and Texas, inspecting flood damage along the Mississippi River, and so forth.
Reaper drones are in training in northern New York state: Army officials say the pilots will randomly pick out targets such as buildings and vehicles to observe during the training flights.
Which brings up this from the LA Times last month: Jay Stanley, a senior analyst on privacy and technology at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the unregulated use of drone aircraft “leaves the gates wide open for a dramatic increase in surveillance of American life.”
However, these machines are becoming more and more domesticated, as one guy says in the above story: “People are constantly coming up and wanting a piece of that Predator pie.”
Of course, the very name, Predator, means there’s nasty-pointed thorns in that pie.
The actual indiscriminate horror on the ground in the near-vicinity of these UAV attacks is not so sweet for any bystanders, men, women, or children.
Just this morning, Press TV reported 16 civilians were killed and 50 others injured in a drone strike in southern Somalia near the border with Kenya — US operates drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen.
And whole killing operation is bullshit, especially from within the US government.
The CIA claims no civilians have been killed in drone strikes for over a year — the New York Times last August begged to differ: In a UAV strike in May which bagged a bunch of insurgents, the CIA claimed no innocents died, but a report compiled by British and Pakistani journalists reveals the strike hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house, and although the militants died, so did six civilians.
Says the Times: Accounts of strike after strike from official and unofficial sources are so at odds that they often seem to describe different events.
Hard to fathom Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, huh?
Obama’s antics since in office apparently prompted this commentary from Pakistan’s The Nation:
Obama is, in short, the Rambo of drone warfare and so it is not fair to accuse him of being soft on terrorists.
This is a heavily caveated assessment, for one of the differences between Obama and Bush is that Bush developed a more coherent and systematic strategy and embedded the kinetic dimension within that larger strategy (reasonable people can debate how effective the Bush administration was in implementing that strategy).
Obama’s overall strategy is not as coherent and systematic (cf. Iraq policy, artificial and arbitrary timelines, inattention to mobilising support, etc.).
And on some of his terror policies, the incoherence does seem tied in part to what critics could consider “softness.”
But there is no doubt that Obama, as he promised during the 2008 campaign, has shown a vigour in deploying one important weapon in his arsenal: drone strikes.
Obama and change, but ‘Rambo?’
Bad Eye on High — Seeking ‘Adversarial intent’
Filed Under Terror, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“If this works out, we’ll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas,” says Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation, which recently won one of the Army contracts.
“A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we’ll know it was the same guy that went in.”
– Description of innovative drone technology, from Wired
(Illustration found here).
Even as the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is becoming worse — an uptick of nearly 40 percent more violence this year than in 2010 — the sky-ways above the war-spattered country has become alive with the whine of unmanned drones.
The conflict there, however, is getting bad, real bad: Three NATO soldiers were killed Wednesday in eastern Afghanistan, while nearly at the same time, eight Afghan policemen died in an ambush in the south, and all this horror in the wake of the US embassy attack in Kabul earlier this month, followed by the assassination of a former Afghan president who was trying to work with the Taliban on a peace plan.
No country for young or old men.
Emboldened by the successful slaughter in Afghanistan, the US reportedly are building new drone bases in Ethiopia and in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean — all in secret, of course — to enable better attacks on insurgents in Somalia and Yemen.
Use of drones surged 134 percent in 2010 over the previous year, and President Obama has apparently made these machines the focal point for modern war — only five drone attacks in Pakistan during 2007, 36 in 2008 (most of those in the last half of that year) and in Obama’s first year in office, the tempo of such attacks in Pakistan increased 47 percent.
Despite all evidence to the total contrary, last summer, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, blubbered “there hasn’t been a single collateral [civilian] death” in Pakistan and since drones are perfect, “exceptionally surgical and precise” and “do not put… innocent men, women and children in danger.”
Such bullshit — there’s been 236 attacks under Obama, one every four days.
And with drones, it’s quiet, easy killing with machines themselves making life-and-death decisions.
War has gone beyond human control:
And the machines being used to do the killing are also being enhanced, moving the United States one step closer to an apparent goal of constant low-intensity warfare capability worldwide.
The United States government is reportedly working to develop pilotless military drones that are fully automatic, identifying and destroying human targets on the ground without any intervention from an operator or pilot back in Nevada, and this is generating virtually no public outrage.
The drones would reportedly seek their targets based on facial-recognition software or other biometrics. The Defense Department planners have dubbed the technological leap “lethal autonomy,” meaning that the life-or-death decision can be made instantaneously and independently by the machine without any slowing down of the process due to a human being having to make a decision whether to fire or not.
The key words ‘generating virtually no public outrage‘ is where the US war effort is moving in an attempt to keep the Long War going even longer — out of sight, out of range.
And it’s topical — this week, the FBI arrested a 26-year-old US citizen on charges of “plotting an attack on the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol with a remote-controlled model aircraft” and although authorities claim there was no real danger, the ability of this guy armed with a physics degree to plan something like this might become common place in the near future.
So these unmanned drone future is kind of scary, even for US peoples.
From the Wire link above:
The Pentagon isn’t content to simply watch the enemies it knows it has, however.
The Army also wants to identify potentially hostile behavior and intent, in order to uncover clandestine foes.
Charles River Analytics is using its Army cash to build a so-called “Adversary Behavior Acquisition, Collection, Understanding, and Summarization (ABACUS)” tool.
The system would integrate data from informants’ tips, drone footage, and captured phone calls.
Then it would apply “a human behavior modeling and simulation engine” that would spit out “intent-based threat assessments of individuals and groups.”
In other words: This software could potentially find out which people are most likely to harbor ill will toward the U.S. military or its objectives.
Feeling nervous yet?
“The enemy goes to great lengths to hide his activities,” explains Modus Operandi, Inc., which won an Army contract to assemble “probabilistic algorithms th[at] determine the likelihood of adversarial intent.”
The company calls its system “Clear Heart.”
As in, the contents of your heart are now open for the Pentagon to see.
It may be the most unnerving detail in this whole unnerving story.
Not only watch your back, but watch your emotions.
Blind-Sided Eye
Filed Under Bullshit, Lying, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
New US DOD honcho Leon Panetta opened his big yap last week and blubbered to the troops in Iraq that they were there “because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” but he, of course, was just playing, talking shit to the troops.
He backpedaled, or tried to run it back: “I wasn’t saying, you know, the invasion — or going into the issues or the justification of that. It was more the fact that we really had to deal with Al Qaeda here, they developed a presence here and that tied in.”
In other words, he lied.
And from the results, there’s not much an ordinary US person can do.
(Illustration found here).
When it comes to war, the US doesn’t always show its brightest side, the words ‘cover up,’ are tossed about like a beach ball, bouncing from place to place, never settling — and the media just goes, duh!
No one really took Leon to absolute task for such shit, instead tried to play up the George Jr. vs President Obama angle, leaving out the fact the entire thinking world knows that’s a lie — even the US senate.
So, no surprise when John Brennan, President Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor, bald-faced lied last month about civilian casualties off the US drone war in Afghanistan.
Brennan blubbered:
Later, when asked whether a policy of targeted killing was appropriate for the United States, Brennan responded that the U.S. is “exceptionally precise and surgical in terms of addressing the terrorist threat. And by that I mean, if there are terrorists who are within an area where there are women and children or others, you know, we do not take such action that might put those innocent men, women and children in danger.”
He added that in the last year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”
Such bullshit — and Brennan knew it.
And however — from the ACLU blog (h/t antiwar.com):
Zero civilian casualties — during a period when there were more than 100 CIA drone strikes — sounded almost too good to be true.
As it turns out, it was.
According to a new report from the UK’s award-winning Bureau of Investigative Journalism, released last night, at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 strikes since August 2010.
Among these, the Bureau reports that it has identified, by name, six children killed in drone strikes. More civilians are likely to have been killed in an additional 15 strikes for which precise information is not available.
In response to queries from the Bureau, a senior official stood by Brennan’s zero-civilian casualties claim and insisted that “the most accurate information on counter-terror operations resides with the United States.”
The trouble is that United States refuses to share its information — even basic information — with the public.
On Monday, I wrote about the drone operations in the Af-Pak theater and highlighted a report from the UK’s The Guardian about this guy, Noor Behram, who investigates the aftermath of such attacks.
He was quoted as saying: “For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant,” he said. “I don’t go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed.”
On top of that, Afghan civilian deaths have jumped 15 percent this year.
A death to lying, or turning that nasty blind eye.
Drone On ‘Heroes’
Filed Under War & Politics | Leave a Comment
We can all rest much, much easier as Jackboot John McCain has his slippers fast on the ground in Libya: Aljazeera ‘s Sue Turton, reporting from Benghazi, said McCain told reporters he was there to meet the Transitional National Council and members of the military to assess the situation on the ground.
He also denied concerns about the possibility of extremist or al-Qaeda elements fighting alongside the rebel forces, saying “they [rebel fighters] are my heroes”.
(Illustration found here).
President Obama okayed on Thursday the use of unmanned drone strikes in Libya, but he surely couldn’t have meant Jackboot John — one asshole of a drone if there’s ever been one (and don’t call him Shirley).
Just ask the Foo Fighters, they don’t much care for McCain as their ‘Hero.’
Jackboot John aside (who, however, can possibly forget his blubbering ‘we are all Georgians‘), the dust-up in Libya has indeed mission creeped its way into a full-blown military operation as Obama has green-lighted the use of those nefarious predator drones in combating Muammar Gaddafi’s forces — the shit will hit the oil-stained fan now.
Defense Secretary Bob Gates made the drone announcement at a Pentagon briefing, but it was Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who blubbered the biggest pile of bullshit.
From the Washington Post:
“What they will bring that is unique to the conflict is their ability to get down lower, therefore to be able to get better visibility on targets that have started to dig themselves into defensive positions,” Cartwright said. “They are uniquely suited for urban areas.”
He added, “It’s very difficult to pick friend from foe. So a vehicle like the Predator that can get down lower and can get IDs better helps us.”
Yeah, right — just as the military talking heads went silent, came this report of 25 killed (including three women) this morning in Pakistan from at least two drone strikes, and last week, drones are suspected in the killing of two US servicemen in Afghanistan — oops, my bad — in a case of so-called ‘friendly fire:’ One official stressed that at this point the incident is being treated as a suspected fratricide.
Pakistan has continued to blast the US over the drone strikes, calling them a “core irritant” in keeping a happy working relationship going between the two countries.
The US apparently just replied F**k you, or words to that effect.
Or just deny shit.
Using the US playbook — In a NATO air-strike (of regular manned jet aircraft) yesterday on a Tripoli suburb that reportedly killed seven civilians and wounded some 18 others, NATO was at first denying the reports, claiming there was “no indication” any of the people were civilians and ruled out any investigation into the matter, but then later said something like this: In spite of the denial, NATO Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard issued a statement in the wake of the attacks urging Libyan civilians to “distance themselves from Gadhafi regime forces and equipment whenever possible.”
(from antiwar.com).
Maybe when the whirl of the drone is heard, just bend over and kiss your ass bye-bye.