One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

[8bitagent]

An app that notifies you when Obama has slaughtered another Pakistani or Yemeni village? Why of course Apple would ban that. Apple donates to Team Obama and is in league with any Orwellian policy the White House has to give.

[82_28]

Will drones replace commercial air travel?

It was a beautiful thing to see, aircraft climbing, wheels up, wings pivoting back, the light, the streaked sky, three of four of us, not a word spoken.

The New Inquiry We might be tempted to read this epigraph, taken from Don DeLillo’s short story “Hammer and Sickle,” as a testament to the sublimity of human aviation. In fact, this scene is conjured from the perspective of maximum-security prisoners who are on work detail, cleaning up the tarmac of an Air Force base while jet fighters thunder indifferently around them. Like so many of DeLillo’s descriptions of air travel, the ostensibly simple beauty of human flight just barely conceals a hideous underbelly.

Now we can imagine a similar scene wherein the aircraft themselves are “unmanned” or piloted by remote control. They might be drones. “Unmanned aerial vehicles” represent an increasingly contested nexus for public and secret discussions about airspace, privacy, police jurisdiction, and remote military targets. And they’re bleeding into everyday life.

In a recent New Yorker article on the private company AeroVironment, Nick Paumgarten surveys the many current experiments, speculative uses, and visionary futures of drones—from the deployment of a Predator drone to assist in a swat invasion of a ranch in North Dakota, to a “Tacocopter” that “theoretically delivers tacos to your door,” to the small-scale “Hummingbird,” crafted with enough verisimilitude so as to confuse actual trochilidae. In the very same issue of the New Yorker, a “Talk of the Town” piece centers on the duo who created the Occupy Wall Street drone, “a kind of four-pronged Frisbee that glides over Lower Manhattan, armed with a video camera, to keep tabs on the police.”

Far from being solely the domain of covert government operatives and paramilitary independent contractors, we find ourselves in an era of ubiquitous droning. The U.S. military was reported to have “some 7,000 aerial drones” as of mid-2011. But then, simply perform a search for “drone” on Amazon and behold the over 7,000 results, starting with a smattering of giddily advertised toy spy devices; or consider the May 27, 2012 cartoon strip in The New York Times by Brian McFadden, entitled “The Many Uses of Police Drones.” These comical (yet in many cases already existing) “many uses” include Backyard Inspections, Traffic Enforcement, Pedestrian Enforcement, Fashion Policing, Disenfranchising Voters, Stifling Dissent, and Fourth Amendment Circumvention. Drones are everywhere—literally (at least potentially), as well as throughout our cultural imagination.

Indeed, at one point in Nick Paumgarten’s New Yorker article he notes, “It will soon be technically feasible, if culturally unimaginable, to deploy passenger and cargo planes with empty cockpits.” Drones could transport us in the near future.

Yet a 2011 Fast Company article on concept aircraft designs, quite counter to its promising title—“NASA Reveals the Weird and Wonderful Commercial Airliners of 2025”—seems to reveal only that future jetliners will look basically like today’s aircraft. And the possibility of remote piloting is not mentioned once in this article as an option or prospect.

The current state of air travel has two sides. On the one hand, aircraft are being miniaturized and controlled remotely, reducing human error in-flight and opening up innumerable possibilities for military operations as well as ordinary people on the ground. At the same time, flight seems determined to reproduce itself more or less as it is, promising ever more hours of tedium and waiting between (and inside) large rooms cruising through space.

These two sides twist and become one where new media technologies enter the scene. Whether manipulating a Parrot AR. Drone Quadricopter (marketed as “Controlled by iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, and Android Devices”), checking in for a routine flight on one’s mobile phone, or dealing with labyrinthine realities of airport life (as one New York Times article put it: “After the Plane Gets You to the Airport, an App Comes in Handy”), mobile communications devices are increasingly called on for navigation purposes—to supplement, as it were, the human body in flight.

***

During a recent radio interview about airports on the program “To The Best of Our Knowledge,” I quipped that Facebook could potentially outpace airports as the ultimate hubs for people’s connections such that humans might stop flying altogether.

Throughout my research and writing about airports I have often wondered about the aura of exception that air travel evokes. I am continually puzzled by how, in an age of so many other technological advances over the past twenty years, airports have managed to retain their status as extraordinary places that demand a strange sort of seriousness and near piety. In a world where social networking can facilitate revolutions, and where connections happen as easily online as off, it seems inevitable that moving hundreds of bodies around in large vessels will go out of fashion.

It isn’t as though I truly believe that Facebook will become the 21st-century transit zone. It’s more that distinct aspects of airports — including high demand for entertainment, feelings of “dead time,” anxieties about contingencies — have anticipated and helped to pave the way for a host of newer experiences that are more about on-demand mediation and information (and capital) flows, and less about human bodies actually going places.

The human body is always in the picture, of course. There’s always an experienced plain, a phenomenal range—whether it’s a craggy mountain or a keyboard, a river eddy or an earbud. Human air travel will most likely be around for some time yet. But drones—particularly the nano-drones of the next generation—suggest that there is a critical convergence on the horizon, where remote sensing and screen culture might displace today’s commonplace demand for airbuses.

Ubiquitous droning calls attention to myriad landscapes of flight. It is sitting in front of a computer monitoring remote locations. It is distinguishing between birds and bots. It is a chorizo taco on its way, tracked on a screen in your palm. It is a speeding ticket that records you going too fast when (you thought) no one else was around. And it is also the bulky plane we still line up to get on, if only as a negative assessment rubric. As Major Michael L. Anderson, a doctoral student at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s advanced navigation technology center, noted about the next generation of drones: “It’s impressive what they can do…compared to what our clumsy aircraft can do.”

I do not know the future of drones. I’m not sure how they will transform commercial air travel, how they will affect that everyday experience that we can’t yet quite imagine will be any different from how it currently exists. But I suspect that drones will continue to borrow from—perhaps eventually to replace—the sensations and expectations that are uniquely found during air travel.

Another DeLillo passage, this one from “Underworld,” is suggestive of this line of inquiry:

There was a noise that started, a worldly hum—you began to hear it when you left your carpeted house and rode out to the airport. He wanted something friendly to read in the single sustained drone that marks every mile in a business traveler’s day.

This passage is about a character’s choice of airport reading, yet the “single sustained drone” is an uncanny instance of prescience. It portends the proliferation of these so-named devices that promise both constant war and its obverse side: the banality of military-grade existence.

The historical, mutually constitutive conjunctions of military and civilian aviation have been well documented and accounted for. What we need next are subtle analyses of how the most quotidian new media practices and ordinary travel experiences are co-shaping one another, and perhaps mutating at scales that go far beyond the human in both directions.

Looking out a window seat at 37,000 feet; zooming way out with Google Earth; seeing the world through the camera eye of a Hummingbird drone—these sorts of experiences de-center the human being, even as they imply human control. They communicate that humans are merely one species migrating around merely one planet in a vast universe. And they are also about the levels ‘below’: the informational, computational, entomological, bacteriological, elemental. These are other versions of the “worldly hum,” to use DeLillo’s phrase, that air travel brings into the foreground—a resonance being made all the more acute by the presence of ubiquitous droning.

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/16/will_dr ... ir_travel/

[seemslikeadream]

Published on Thursday, October 11, 2012 by Common Dreams
Chief of US Security at Embassy in Yemen Shot Dead
- Common Dreams staff
The Yemeni chief of security at the US embassy in Sanaa has been assassinated, officials there have said.

Qassem Aqlani, fifty-five, was on his way to work Thursday when he was gunned down, according to reports, by a masked gunman on a motorcycle who then fled the scene.

The seemingly targeted attack on Aqlani—who has worked at the embassy for nearly twenty years—comes as the US military, in collusion with the Yemeni government, wages an ongoing drone war of assassinations against Al Qaeda-affiliated factions in Yemen.

The US drone attacks have killed many innocent civilians, spawning nationwide anger and protest. Last month, for example, thirteen civilians—including men, women, and children— were killed in a drone strike near the town of Radaa.

Known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group often targeted by the US and Yemen government has called for attacks on the US embassy.

In one of the poorest and most resource scarce nations in the region—shaped by a deep humanitarian emergency caused by a food crisis, lack of available water, and the impact of the US drone operations—Yemen, which also saw the rise and ultimate suppression of an impassioned pro-democracy movement in recent years, continues to teeter on the constant verge of crisis as a highly destabilized country.

[seemslikeadream]

CIA chiefs face arrest over horrific evidence of bloody 'video-game' sorties by drone pilots

By David Rose

PUBLISHED: 18:30 EST, 20 October 2012 | UPDATED: 04:57 EST, 21 October 2012

The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.

A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes.

The dossier has been assembled by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who works for Pakistan’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity Reprieve.

Filed in two separate court cases, it is set to trigger a formal murder investigation by police into the roles of two US officials said to have ordered the strikes. They are Jonathan Banks, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Islamabad station, and John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s former chief lawyer. Mr Akbar and his staff have already gathered further testimony which has yet to be filed.

In the first case, which has already been heard by a court in Islamabad, judgment is expected imminently. If the judge grants Mr Akbar’s petition, an international arrest warrant will be issued via Interpol against the two Americans.

The second case is being heard in the city of Peshawar. In it, Mr Akbar and the families of drone victims who are civilians are seeking a ruling that further strikes in Pakistani airspace should be viewed as ‘acts of war’.

They argue that means the Pakistan Air Force should try to shoot down the drones and that the government should sever diplomatic relations with the US and launch murder inquiries against those responsible.

According to a report last month by academics at Stanford and New York universities, between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed since the strikes in Pakistan began in 2004.

The report said of those, up to 881 were civilians, including 176 children. Only 41 people who had died had been confirmed as ‘high-value’ terrorist targets.

Getting at the truth is difficult because the tribal regions along the frontier are closed to journalists. US security officials continue to claim that almost all those killed are militants who use bases in Pakistan to launch attacks on Western forces across the border in Afghanistan.

In his only acknowledgement that the US has ever launched such attacks at all, President Barack Obama said in January: ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans.’

But behind the dry legal papers seen by The Mail on Sunday lies the most detailed investigation into individual strikes that has yet been carried out. It suggests that the US President was mistaken.
The £100million unbeaten champion: Frankel hailed as world's greatest thoroughbred after winning all 14 races and his Royal fans are enthralled

Missile attacks in in Pakistan have had devastating affects, the dossier revealed

The plaintiff in the Islamabad case is Karim Khan, 45, a journalist and translator with two masters’ degrees, whose family comes from the village of Machi Khel in the tribal region of North Waziristan.

His eldest son, Zahinullah, 18, and his brother, Asif Iqbal, 35, were killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone that struck the family’s guest dining room at about 9.30pm on New Year’s Eve, 2009.

Asif had changed his surname because he loved to recite Iqbal, Pakistan’s national poet, and Mr Khan said: ‘We are an educated family. My uncle is a hospital doctor in Islamabad, and we all work in professions such as teaching.

‘We have never had anything to do with militants or terrorists, and for that reason I always assumed we would be safe.’

Mr Khan said: ‘Zahinullah, who had been studying in Islamabad, had returned to the village to work his way through college, taking a part-time job as a school caretaker.

‘He was a quiet boy and studious – always in the top group of his class.’ Zahinullah also liked football, cricket and hunting partridges.

Asif, he added, was an English teacher and had spent several years taking further courses to improve his qualifications while already in work.

Mr Khan said: ‘He was my kid brother. We used to have a laugh, tell jokes.’ His first child was less than a year old when Asif was killed.

Included in the legal dossier are documents that corroborate Asif and Zahinulla’s educational and employment records, as well as their death certificates. Killed alongside them was Khaliq Dad, a stonemason who was staying with the family while he worked on a local mosque.

Mr Khan, who had been working for a TV station in Islamabad, said he was given the news of their deaths in a 2am phone call from a cousin.
Drones have caused untold damage, and the dossier reveals just how devastating they have been for families

Drones have caused untold damage, and the dossier reveals just how devastating they have been for families

‘I called a friend who had a car and we started driving through the night to get back to the village,’ he said. ‘It was a terrible journey. I was shocked, grieving, angry, like anyone who had lost their loved ones.’

He got home soon after dawn and describes his return ‘like entering a village of the dead – it was so quiet. There was a crowd gathered outside the compound but nowhere for them to sit because the guest rooms had been destroyed’.

Zahinullah, Mr Khan discovered, had been killed instantly, but despite his horrific injuries, Asif had survived long enough to be taken to a nearby hospital. However, he died during the night.

‘We always bury people quickly in our culture. The funeral was at three o’clock that afternoon, and more than 1,000 people came,’ Mr Khan said. ‘Zahinullah had a wound on the side of his face and his body was crushed and charred. I am told the people who push the buttons to fire the missiles call these strikes “bug-splats”.

‘It is beyond my imagination how they can lack all mercy and compassion, and carry on doing this for years. They are not human beings.’

Mr Khan found Mr Akbar through a friend who had attended lectures he gave at an Islamabad university. In 2010, he filed a criminal complaint – known as a first information report – to police naming Mr Banks. However, they took no action, therefore triggering the lawsuit – a judicial review of that failure to act.

If the judge finds in favour of Mr Khan, his decision cannot be appealed, thus making the full criminal inquiry and Interpol warrants inevitable.

According to the legal claim, someone from the Pakistan CIA network led by Mr Banks – who left Pakistan in 2010 – targeted the Khan family and guided the Hellfire missile by throwing a GPS homing device into their compound.
A senior CIA officer said: ‘We do not discuss active operations or allegations against specific individuals.'

Mr Rizzo is named because of an interview he gave to a US reporter after he retired as CIA General Counsel last year. In it, he boasted that he had personally authorised every drone strike in which America’s enemies were ‘hunted down and blown to bits’.

He added: ‘It’s basically a hit-list .  .  . The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head.’

Last night a senior Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Pakistan’s own intelligence agency, the ISI, has always been excluded by the CIA from choosing drone targets.

‘They insist on using their own networks, paying their own informants. Dollars can be very persuasive,’ said the official.

He claimed the intelligence behind drone strikes was often seriously flawed. As a result, ‘they are causing the loss of innocent lives’.

But even this, he added, was not as objectionable as the so-called ‘signature strikes’ – when a drone operator, sitting at a computer screen thousands of miles away in Nevada, selects a target because he thinks the drone camera has spotted something suspicious.

He said: ‘It could be a vehicle containing armed men heading towards the border, and the operator thinks, “Let’s get them before they get there,” without any idea of who they are.

‘It could also just be people sitting together. In the frontier region, every male is armed but it doesn’t mean they are militants.’

One such signature strike killed more than 40 people in Datta Khel in North Waziristan on March 17 last year. The victims, Mr Akbar’s dossier makes clear, had gathered for a jirga – a tribal meeting – in order to discuss a dispute between two clans over the division of royalties from a chromite mine.

Some of the most horrifying testimony comes from Khalil Khan, the son of Malik Haji Babat, a tribal leader and police officer. ‘My father was not a terrorist. He was not an enemy of the United States,’ Khalil’s legal statement says. ‘He was a hard-working and upstanding citizen, the type of person others looked up to and aspired to be like.’

Khalil, 32, last saw his father three hours before his death, when he left for a business meeting in a nearby town. Informed his father had been killed, Khalil hurried to the scene.

‘What I saw when I got off the bus at Datta Khel was horrible,’ he said. ‘I immediately saw flames and women and children were saying there had been a drone strike. The fires spread after the strike.

‘I went to the location where the jirga had been held. The situation was really very bad. There were still people lying around injured.

‘The tribal elders who had been killed could not be identified because there were body parts strewn about. The smell was awful. I just collected the pieces that I believed belonged to my father and placed them in a small coffin.’

Khalil said that as a police officer, his father had earned a good salary, on which he supported his family. Khalil has considered returning to the Gulf, where he worked for 14 years, but ‘because of the frequency of drones I am concerned to leave my family’.

He added that schools in the area were empty because ‘parents are afraid their children will be hit by a missile’.

In another statement – one of 13 taken by Mr Akbar concerning the Datta Khel strike – driver Ahmed Jan, 52, describes the moment the missile hit: ‘We were in the middle of our discussion and I was thrown about 24ft from where I was sitting. I was knocked unconscious. When I awoke, I saw many individuals who were injured or dead.

‘I have lost the use of one of my feet and have a rod inserted because of the injuries. It is so painful for me to walk. There are scars on my face because I had to have an operation on my nose when it would not stop bleeding.’

Mr Jan says he has spent £3,600 on medical treatment but ‘I have never been offered compensation of any kind .  .  . I do not know why this jirga was targeted. I am a malik [elder] of my tribe and therefore a government servant. We were not doing anything wrong or illegal.’

Another survivor was Mohammed Noor, 27, a stonemason, who attended the jirga with his uncle and his cousin, both of whom were killed. ‘The parts of their bodies had to be collected first. These parts were all we had of them,’ he said.

Mr Akbar said that fighting back through the courts was the only way ‘to solve the larger problem’ of the ongoing terrorist conflict.

‘It is the only way to break the cycle of violence,’ he said. ‘If we want to change the people of Waziristan, we first have to show them that we respect the rule of law.’

A senior CIA officer said: ‘We do not discuss active operations or allegations against specific individuals.’ A White House source last night declined to comment.

[justdrew]

Howling at the moon
By Irfan Husain ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irfan_Husain )

Many of us in the punditry profession are guilty of making generalisations about what is happening in the tribal areas without having visited them in recent times. Thus, when we hear about the anger and outrage supposedly sweeping though the people of Fata over the frequent drone attacks, we tend to accept this as the gospel truth.

This myth was recently exploded by Farhat Taj in her article `Drone attacks challenging some fabrications`, published recently in a national daily. Dr Taj is an academic at the University of Oslo, but more importantly, she comes from the region and has a degree of access to tribal Pakhtuns that is rare.

Over the last couple of years, the air has been thick with charges that the US drone campaign is `counter-productive` as it is supposed to have caused the death of many non-combatants. The Pakistani government has lodged numerous protests with the Americans over the collateral damage their attacks have caused, and how they are destabilising the Zardari administration. The hypocrisy inherent in these protests is little short of breathtaking, considering that many of these remote controlled aircraft are said to operate from runways located in Pakistan.

However, as Dr Taj explains in her important article, ordinary people in Fata are delighted that at least somebody is killing the ruthless thugs who have seized control of their villages and their lives. She says that Pakistani and US media have tossed around the figure of `600-700 civilian casualties` without citing any evidence.

According to Dr Taj, “…after every attack the terrorists cordon off the area and no one, including the local villagers, are allowed to come even near the targeted place. The militants themselves collect the bodies, bury the dead and then issue the statement that all of them were innocent civilians.”

Dr Taj goes on to explain that the only civilians who have been killed are the family members of the militants in whose houses other terrorists have gathered. In effect, these killers are using these women and children as human shields, hoping their presence will deter drone attacks. In any case, it is impossible to make even a rough estimate of how many civilians have been killed in the drone campaign.

The writer goes on to say “The people of Waziristan are suffering a brutal kind of occupation under the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It is in this context that they would welcome anyone, Americans, Israelis, Indians or even the devil, to rid them of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Therefore, they welcome the drone attacks. Secondly, the people feel comfortable with the drone attacks because of their precision and targeted strikes. [People prefer them to] the Pakistan Army`s attacks which always result in collateral damage….”

Dr Taj makes perfect sense after all, why would the people under Taliban and Al Qaeda occupation and oppression not cheer when these murderers are killed? What does not make sense is the chorus of protests over these drone attacks emanating from people like Imran Khan and Hamid Gul — to name only two — who claim to speak for the people of the tribal areas. What exactly is their agenda, and why are they acting as cheerleaders for these terrorists?

The breach of our supposedly sacred sovereignty has been cited as the reason for this outrage over the American campaign of targeting terrorists seeking shelter in the tribal areas, and attacking western forces over the border in Afghanistan. However, why should the Americans wait passively for their soldiers to be picked off by militants who use our territory as a base for cross-border attacks?

With the concept of sovereignty comes the responsibility to exercise control over territory. Successive Pakistani governments have failed to seal our borders, and the entire region is suffering from terrorism as a result. All our neighbours have complained publicly and privately over the Pakistani state`s inability or unwillingness to effectively prevent cross-border attacks of the kind we have been witnessing for over two decades now. Indeed, we have been accused of using our lawless borders to further our establishment`s agenda.

In any case, sovereignty is never absolute. Just as nations have the duty to prevent effluents from their factories from contaminating rivers that flow down to lower riparian neighbours, so too do they have the responsibility of halting terrorists from crossing into other states.

Dr Taj concludes her article thus “Moreover, Al Qaeda and the Taliban have done everything to stop the drone attacks by killing hundreds of innocent civilians on the pretext of their being American spies. They thought that by overwhelming the innocent people of Waziristan with terror tactics they would deter any potential informer, but they have failed…. Interestingly, no one in Pakistan has raised objections to killings [sic] of the people of Waziristan on charges of spying for the US. This, the people of Waziristan informed, is a source of torture for them that their fellow Pakistanis condemn the killing of terrorists, but fall into deadly silence over the routine murders of tribesmen….”

I have often wondered about this callous hypocrisy too. If we condemn the Americans so vociferously over the drone campaign, should we not be more critical of the thugs who are killing far more Pakistani civilians? And yet, it seems that our more popular Urdu anchorpersons and TV chat show guests reserve their outrage for Washington, while giving the Taliban and Al Qaeda a free pass over their vicious suicide bombings that have taken hundreds of innocent lives in recent weeks.

Why then are we silent over the daily killings of fellow Pakistanis by the TTP and other terror groups, while frothing at the mouth over the drone attacks? Clearly, this irrational and double-faced reaction is based in the anti-American sentiment that has taken root in Pakistan.

However, if we are to win the war against extremism, we need to analyse where our best interests lie. First we need to face the fact that the war is not going well. Even though the army has cleared most of South Waziristan of the TTP, it does not have the manpower to both hold the area it has wrested from the terrorists, and to take them on in the other regions they have fled to.

We need to wake up to the reality that the enemy has grown very strong in the years we temporised and tried to do deals with them. Clearly, we need allies in this fight. Howling at the moon is not going to get us the cooperation we so desperately need. A solid case can be made for more drone attacks, not less.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

this appears to be the article to which he refers...

Saturday, January 02, 2010
analysis: Drone attacks: challenging some fabrications — Farhat Taj
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\01\02\story_2-1-2010_pg3_5

The people of Waziristan are suffering a brutal kind of occupation under the Taliban and al Qaeda. Therefore, they welcome the drone attacks

There is a deep abyss between the perceptions of the people of Waziristan, the most drone-hit area and the wider Pakistani society on the other side of the River Indus. For the latter, the US drone attacks on Waziristan are a violation of Pakistani’s sovereignty. Politicians, religious leaders, media analysts and anchorpersons express sensational clamour over the supposed ‘civilian casualties’ in the drone attacks. I have been discussing the issue of drone attacks with hundreds of people of Waziristan. They see the US drone attacks as their liberators from the clutches of the terrorists into which, they say, their state has wilfully thrown them. The purpose of today’s column is, one, to challenge the Pakistani and US media reports about the civilian casualties in the drone attacks and, two, to express the view of the people of Waziristan, who are equally terrified by the Taliban and the intelligence agencies of Pakistan. I personally met these people in the Pakhtunkhwa province, where they live as internally displaced persons (IDPs), and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

I would challenge both the US and Pakistani media to provide verifiable evidence of civilian ‘casualties’ because of drone attacks on Waziristan, i.e. names of the people killed, names of their villages, dates and locations of the strikes and, above all, the methodology of the information that they collected. If they can’t meet the challenge, I would request them to stop throwing around fabricated figures of ‘civilian casualties’ that confuse people around the world and provide propaganda material to the pro-Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the politics and media of Pakistan.

I pose that challenge because no one is in a position to give a correct estimate of how many individuals have been killed so far in drone attacks. On the basis of American media estimates, 600 to 700 ‘civilian population’ have been killed. The Pakistani government, pro-Taliban political parties like Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam, Tehrik-e-Insaf, and the media are quoting the same figure. Neither the government of Pakistan nor the media have any access to the area and no system is in place to arrive at precise estimates. The Pakistani government and media take the figure appearing in the American media as an admission by the American government. The US media too do not have access to the area. Moreover, the area is simply not accessible for any kind of independent journalistic or scholarly work on drone attacks. The Taliban simply kill anyone doing so.

The reason why these estimates about civilian ‘casualties’ in the US and Pakistani media are wrong is that after every attack the terrorists cordon off the area and no one, including the local villagers, is allowed to come even near the targeted place. The militants themselves collect the bodies, burry the dead and then issue the statement that all of them were innocent civilians. This has been part of their propaganda to provide excuses to the pro-Taliban and al Qaeda media persons and political forces in Pakistan to generate public sympathies for the terrorists. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or other militants have never admitted to the killing of any important figure of al Qaeda or the TTP. One exception is the killing of Baitullah Mehsud that the TTP reluctantly admitted several days after his death. According to the people of Waziristan, the only civilians who have been killed so far in the drone attacks are women or children of the militants in whose houses/compounds they hold meetings. But that, too, used to happen in the past. Now they don’t hold meetings at places where women and children of the al Qaeda and TTP militants reside. Moreover, in this case too no one is in a position to give even an approximate number of the women and children of the terrorists killed in drone attacks.

The people of Waziristan are suffering a brutal kind of occupation under the Taliban and al Qaeda. It is in this context that they would welcome anyone, Americans, Israelis, Indians or even the devil, to rid them of the Taliban and al Qaeda. Therefore, they welcome the drone attacks. Secondly, the people feel comfortable with the drones because of their precision and targeted strikes. People usually appreciate drone attacks when they compare it with the Pakistan Army’s attacks, which always result in collateral damage. Especially the people of Waziristan have been terrified by the use of long-range artillery and air strikes of the Pakistan Army and Air Force. People complain that not a single TTP or al Qaeda member has been killed so far by the Pakistan Army, whereas a lot of collateral damage has taken place. Thousands of houses have been destroyed and hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed by the Pakistan Army. On the other hand, drone attacks have never targeted the civilian population except, they informed, in one case when the funeral procession of Khwazh Wali, a TTP commander, was hit. In that attack too, many TTP militants were killed including Bilal (the TTP commander of Zangara area) and two Arab members of al Qaeda. But some civilians were also killed. After the attack people got the excuse of not attending the funeral of slain TTP militants or offering them food, which they used to do out of compulsion in order to put themselves in the TTP’s good books. “It (this drone attack) was a blessing in disguise,” several people commented.

I have heard people particularly appreciating the precision of drone strikes. People say that when a drone would hover over the skies, they wouldn’t be disturbed and would carry on their usual business because they would be sure that it does not target the civilians, but the same people would run for shelter when a Pakistani jet would appear in the skies because of its indiscriminate firing. They say that even in the same compound only the exact room — where a high value target (HVT) is present — is targeted. Thus others in the same compound are spared. The people of Waziristan have been complaining why the drones are only restricted to targeting the Arabs. They want the drones to attack the TTP leadership, the Uzbek/Tajik/Turkmen, Punjabi and Pakhtun Taliban. I have heard even religious people of Waziristan cursing the jihad and welcoming even Indian or Israeli support to help them get rid of the TTP and foreign militants. The TTP and foreign militants had made them hostages and occupied their houses by force. The Taliban have publicly killed even the religious scholars in Waziristan.

I have yet to come across a non-TTP resident of Waziristan who supports the Taliban or al Qaeda. Till recently they were terrified by the TTP to the extent that they would not open their mouth to oppose them. But now, having been displaced and out of their reach, some of them speak against them openly and many more than before in private conversations. They express their fear of the intelligence agencies of Pakistan whenever speaking against the Taliban. They see the two as two sides of the same coin.

What we read and hear in the print and electronic media of Pakistan about drone attacks as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty or resulting in killing innocent civilians is not true so far as the people of Waziristan are concerned. According to them, al Qaeda and the TTP are dead scared of drone attacks and their leadership spends sleepless nights. This is a cause of pleasure for the tormented people of Waziristan.

Moreover, al Qaeda and the Taliban have done everything to stop the drone attacks by killing hundreds of innocent civilians on the pretext of their being American spies. They thought that by overwhelming the innocent people of Waziristan with terror tactics they would deter any potential informer, but they have failed. On many occasions the Taliban and al Qaeda have killed the alleged US spies in front of crowds of hundreds, even thousands of tribesmen. Interestingly, no one in Pakistan has raised objection to killings of the people of Waziristan on charges of spying for the US. This, the people of Waziristan informed, is a source of torture for them that their fellow Pakistanis condemn the killing of the terrorists but fall into deadly silence over the routine murders of tribesmen accused of spying for the US by the terrorists occupying their land.

The writer is a research fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research, University of Oslo and a member of Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy. She can be reached at bergen34@yahoo.com

both those pieces were written before Obama stopped the CIA's use of "signature strikes" and before the new smaller missile started being used.

of course the cia wants to start up again with signature strikes and bring them to Yemen. Odd that it would come up right now.

All the figures on militant-vs-civilian casualties are highly unreliable. numbers vary widely.

https://www.google.com/search?q=CIA+"signature+strikes"

[seemslikeadream]

Special Report

The Permanent War

This project, based on interviews with dozens of current and former national security officials, intelligence analysts and others, examines evolving U.S. counterterrorism policies and the practice of targeted killing.
Secret ops expand at U.S. base
Remote U.S. base at core of secret operations

By Craig Whitlock, Published: October 25

This is the third of three articles.

DJIBOUTI CITY, Djibouti — Around the clock, about 16 times a day, drones take off or land at a U.S. military base here, the combat hub for the Obama administration’s counterterrorism wars in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

This transcript recounts the moments before the crash of an armed drone in Djibouti on May 17, 2011. Four others have crashed since drone traffic was stepped up at the clandestine U.S. base.

Some of the unmanned aircraft are bound for Somalia, the collapsed state whose border lies just 10 miles to the southeast. Most of the armed drones, however, veer north across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, another unstable country where they are being used in an increasingly deadly war with an al-Qaeda franchise that has targeted the United States.

Camp Lemonnier, a sun-baked Third World outpost established by the French Foreign Legion, began as a temporary staging ground for U.S. Marines looking for a foothold in the region a decade ago. Over the past two years, the U.S. military has clandestinely transformed it into the busiest Predator drone base outside the Afghan war zone, a model for fighting a new generation of terrorist groups.

The Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the legal and operational details of its targeted-killing program. Behind closed doors, painstaking debates precede each decision to place an individual in the cross hairs of the United States’ perpetual war against al-Qaeda and its allies.

Increasingly, the orders to find, track or kill those people are delivered to Camp Lemonnier. Virtually the entire 500-acre camp is dedicated to counterterrorism, making it the only installation of its kind in the Pentagon’s global network of bases.

Secrecy blankets most of the camp’s activities. The U.S. military rejected requests from The Washington Post to tour Lemonnier last month. Officials cited “operational security concerns,” although they have permitted journalists to visit in the past.

After a Post reporter showed up in Djibouti uninvited, the camp’s highest-ranking commander consented to an interview — on the condition that it take place away from the base, at Djibouti's lone luxury hotel. The commander, Army Maj. Gen. Ralph O. Baker, answered some general queries but declined to comment on drone operations or missions related to Somalia or Yemen.

Despite the secrecy, thousands of pages of military records obtained by The Post — including construction blueprints, drone accident reports and internal planning memos — open a revealing window into Camp Lemonnier. None of the documents is classified and many were acquired via public-records requests.

Taken together, the previously undisclosed documents show how the Djibouti-based drone wars sharply escalated early last year after eight Predators arrived at Lemonnier. The records also chronicle the Pentagon’s ambitious plan to further intensify drone operations here in the coming months.

The documents point to the central role played by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which President Obama has repeatedly relied on to execute the nation’s most sensitive counterterrorism missions.

About 300 Special Operations personnel plan raids and coordinate drone flights from inside a high-security compound at Lemonnier that is dotted with satellite dishes and ringed by concertina wire. Most of the commandos work incognito, concealing their names even from conventional troops on the base.

[beeline]

http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/11/drones-the-best-is-yet-to-come/#more-19857

Little Insurrections
Drones: ‘The best is yet to come’
by Frida Berrigan | November 9, 2012

Thank goodness. It is over. I think the only people mourning the end of what felt like the longest presidential election in history are television ad executives. Between them, the two candidates spent almost a billion dollars on TV ads, concentrated in a few battleground areas. And thank goodness that President Barack Obama was elected to another term. Four years of Mitt and Ann and the Romney boys would have been more than I could stomach. I mean, they named their dog Seamus for crying out loud.

Now what? A lot of good-hearted people who were really excited about Obama the Community Organizer in 2008 are now saying that this is the moment we have all been waiting for; that we elected him for his second term, when — unencumbered by the need to get re-elected — Obama can take off the gloves, pick up the standard of progressives, get the economy back on track, end the wars, close Guantanamo and pretty much rock the Oval Office from its long orbit of politics as usual. He promised as much on Tuesday night — telling the cheering crowds “the best is yet to come.” Sounds nice, doesn’t it? I would be happy if it was true, but I am not holding my breath.

The best is yet to come? On indiscriminate drone warfare? On Guantanamo? On the global war on terror? On saber rattling at Iran?

Let’s just look at drones.

One thing that Barack and Mitt agreed on was drone warfare — the conscience-less killing from above and afar by unmanned aircraft loaded with missiles, flown and targeted from New Mexico or Upstate New York. In their final debate, Mitt Romney was asked if he supported the President’s use of drones. He responded: “It’s widely reported that drones are being used in drone strikes, and I support that entirely and feel the president was right to up the usage of that technology and believe that we should continue to use it to continue to go after the people who represent a threat to this nation and to our friends.”

The newly re-elected president is going to continue to use drones in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and who knows where else, even though no one knows how many innocent civilians have been killed by these indiscriminate weapons.

How is that possible when we can read a license plate from a thousand miles away, splice a gene and chart a storm? Barack Obama’s Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency do not count civilian casualties in the drone war because they don’t want to, don’t think they have to and are counting on the American people to really not care.

Sarah Holewinski is the Executive Director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, which recently worked with Columbia Law School to assess the impact of drone strikes on civilian populations. Holewinski told Danger Room, “nobody knows how many civilians have been killed by covert drone strikes. Nobody — that means the Obama Administration, the Pakistan government, and the media… The Obama administration says civilian casualties are ‘not a huge number.’ If that’s true, evidence could put the debate to rest, but we haven’t seen any.” Their report “The Civilian Impact of Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions,” does not put a number on civilian casualties, but points out the long-term social, political, psychological and economic costs of drone warfare and challenges the Obama administration’s assertions that drone strikes are targeted, surgical, legally justifiable and militarily necessary.

Despite all of this, the Obama administration will continue and expand use of drones in its second term. But don’t worry. There will be changes…at least in language. Yep, the same White House that switched from the dramatic and sweeping “Global War on Terror” to the snooze-inducing term “Overseas Contingency Operations” is no longer talking about “kill lists.” That is too direct. Now we get a “disposition matrix.” I feel better already. Hope and change are here to stay.

Just days before the election, members of Veterans for Peace, the Catholic Worker and other groups went to Hancock Air Field in Upstate New York, where Predator drones are piloted from. They held signs that read,“We will not be complicit in our government’s war crimes.” Nineteen people blocked the entrances. They were arrested. That’s real hope and change and we are going to need a lot of it in the next four years.

[seemslikeadream]

'Dronestagram' filters satellite photos of US drone strikes for your social feeds

[harry ashburn]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/shortcu ... -drone-war


Dronestagram – the website exposing the US's secret drone war

A new website shows the sites hit in US drone attacks – adding to the pressure for greater transparency from Washington

The military is normally only too pleased to herald its successes, and to praise the courage of the men and women who put their lives on the line for their country. Perhaps it is the link (or lack of it) between these two that encourages them to talk-up certain missions, and come over all sheepish when it comes to drones.

Piloted by remote control from thousands of miles away, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been the one unqualified military triumph of the war in Afghanistan. That is, if "success" comes in an equation where lots of people get killed, at next to no risk, at an affordable price.

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which compiles figures on drone strikes, the US has killed up to 3,378 people in 350 drone strikes in the past eight years. And that's just in Pakistan. The US also orchestrates drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia from a base in the tiny African state of Djibouti (which nobody is supposed to know about). But does the White House want to talk about this? Not unless it really has to. And not even then.

In April, President Obama's counter-terrorism advisor, John Brennan, gave a speech in which he defended the use of drones and said great care was taken to ensure attacks were legal and ethical. "We are at war," he said. "We are at war against a terrorist organisation called al-Qaida."

Who gets on the drone kill list, and how, and why attacks happen when they do and where they do, and who takes responsibility for them – well, that's for another day.

Information about UAVs is being dragged out of Washington little by little, which is where James Bridle comes in. Using what little information there is, Bridle, creator of the New Aesthetic micro-blog, has set up Dronestagram. By marrying images from Google and target details from the BIJ, he has started to show the places that have been hit in UAV attacks. Bridle says he wants to make them "a little bit more visible, a little closer. A little more real".

On his blog, booktwo.org, Bridle argues that "drone strikes are the consequence of invisible, distancing technologies, and a technologically disengaged media and society... the technology that was supposed to bring us closer together is also used to obscure and obfuscate." The images on Dronestagram may be just "foreign landscapes", but he hopes their immediacy and intimacy will add to the growing demand for transparency. Earlier this year, Apple rejected an App that did much the same thing, apparently on the grounds that many people would find the content objectionable. Not, presumably, the relatives and friends of the civilians who are often inevitably killed in drone strikes, however carefully targeted the attacks, and precise the missiles.

[harry ashburn]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/no ... e-rulebook

Obama 'drone-warfare rulebook' condemned by human rights groups
New York Times reports administration attempting to set out circumstances in which targeted assassination is justified

Karen McVeigh in New York

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 November 2012 16.22 EST

President Barack Obama's administration is in the process of drawing up a formal rulebook that will set out the circumstances in which targeted assassination by unmanned drones is justified, according to reports.

The New York Times, citing two unnamed sources, said explicit guidelines were being drawn up amid disagreement between the CIA and the departments of defense, justice and state over when lethal action is acceptable.

Human-rights groups and peace groups opposed to the CIA-operated targeted-killing programme, which remains officially classified, said the administration had already rejected international law in pursuing its drone operations.

"To say they are rewriting the rulebook implies that there is already a rulebook" said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Center for Democracy. "But what they are already doing is rejecting a rulebook – of international law – that has been in place since [the second world war]."

He said the news was "frustrating", because it relied on "self-serving sources". The New York Times piece was written by one of the journalists who first exposed the existence of a White House "kill list", in May.

ACLU is currently involved in a legal battle with the US government over the legal memo underlying the controversial targeted killing programme, the basis for drone strikes that have killed American citizens and the process by which individuals are placed on the kill list.

Jaffer said it was impossible to make a judgement about whether the "rulebook" being discussed, according to the Times, was legal or illegal.

"It is frustrating how we are reliant on self-serving leaks" said Jaffir. "We are left with interpreting shadows cast on the wall. The terms that are being used by these officials are undefined, malleable and without definition. It is impossible to know whether they are talking about something lawful or unlawful.

"We are litigating for the release of legal memos. We don't think the public should have to reply on self-serving leaking by unnamed administrative officials."

The New York Times said that, facing the possibility that the president might not be re-elected, work began in the weeks running up to the 6 November election to "develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials".

It went on to say that Obama and his advisers were still debating whether remote-controlled killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the US, or whether it should be more widely used, in order to "help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territories".

Jaffer said he was sceptical about the significance of the debate outlined in the piece. He said: "The suggestion is that there is a significant debate going on within the administration about the scope of the government's authority to carry out targeted killings. I would question the significance of the debate. If imminent is defined as broadly as some say it is within the administration then the gap between the sides is narrow.

"It matters how you define 'imminent'. The Bush administration was able to say it didn't condone torture because of the definition of torture. You might think that if someone says, 'I believe we should only use targeted killings only when there's an imminent threat,' you might think that sounds OK. But without terms like 'imminent' being defined it is impossible to evaluate the arguments."

Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of Code Pink, an anti-war group, said the news that formal rules were being written for targeted killing was "disgusting".

"That they are trying to write the rules for something that is illegal is disgusting" said Benjamin. "They are saying, 'The levers might be in the wrong hands.' What about the way they are using them right now? There is nothing about taking drones out of the hands of the CIA – which is not a military organisation – or getting rid of signature strikes, where there is no evidence that people are involved in terrorist activities."

In Pakistan and Yemen, the CIA and the military have carried out "signature strikes" against groups of suspected and unnamed militants, as well as strikes against named terrorists.

Benjamin said she had just come back from Pakistan, where the "intensity of the backlash will take generations to overcome".

The New York Times quotes an official who, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was "concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands" after the election.

In October, Obama referred to efforts to codify the controversial drone programme. In an interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on 18 October, the president said: "One of the things we've got to do is put legal architecture in place and we need congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president is reined in, in terms of some of the decisions we're making".

While Obama and administration officials have commented publicly on the legal basis for targeted killings, the program is officially secret. In court, government lawyers fighting lawsuits by ACLU continue to claim that no official has ever formally acknowledged the drones, and that there might not even be a drone programme.

Two lawsuits – one by the ACLU and the other by the ACLU and the NYT – seeking information on the legal basis on targeted killing, are still pending.

[elfismiles]

dang harry - you beat me on the draw.

[NeonLX]

[seemslikeadream]

NOVEMBER 25, 2012

The Bloody Black Comedy of the State
Only yesterday, I mentioned one of my exercises in black comedy: my imagining of a show called "Down with Doug!," loosely modeled after that show called "Up with..." some dope with a different name. "Loosely modeled" isn't actually correct; many of the arguments, and even some of the details (the host's unhappy comments about the use of an unpleasant word like "murder," for example), come straight from that other dope's on-air mutterings. The problem with my fevered imaginings, and it is a very terrible problem, is that they are overtaken by events within weeks, sometimes within days, of my writing them.

And now we have this example from what we ridiculously term "real life." We are told that the Obama administration "accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials." The story repeats several times how urgent and gravely serious the administration considered this particular problem to be.

You want me to translate this into more straightforward language, don't you? Yes, I knew you did. Allow me:
Oh, my God! We have to have rules telling everyone exactly how to kill people. If we don't, they're going to go nuts and murder lots of completely innocent human beings! Everyone isn't good and pure the way we are, especially those maniacal Republicans and that monster Romney, so we have to spell out exactly how to do the killing.
No. No, that's not quite it. Let's see. Imagine Jack the Ripper saying the following:
I slash and hack women into bloody strips of meat, rip out their guts and organs, and commit many additional horrific acts intended to desecrate their bodies as fully as possible. But I am a noble and virtuous person. Thus, I do all this in an entirely admirable and moral way. Most of you loathsome creatures cannot even conceive of my goodness. I have therefore written a little book intended for your improvement: Jack's Rules for the Slashing, Disemboweling, Murder and Desecration of Women. If you follow those rules -- follow them to the letter, mind you -- you will still not approach my perfection, but at least your actions will comport with the principles of morally informed, virtuous behavior.
That's better.

The NYT story is a vile exercise in fantasy, and a lie from beginning to end. As we know from numerous reports -- and as we know from what the Obama administration itself has acknowledged -- the Murder Program murders innocent human beings. This isn't a possibility, something that the administration fears might happen. It has happened in an unforgivable number of cases. Moreover, the NYT story tells us this with stark clarity. Here's the most obvious example:
[F]or several years, first in Pakistan and later in Yemen, in addition to “personality strikes” against named terrorists, the C.I.A. and the military have carried out “signature strikes” against groups of suspected, unknown militants.

Originally that term was used to suggest the specific “signature” of a known high-level terrorist, such as his vehicle parked at a meeting place. But the word evolved to mean the “signature” of militants in general — for instance, young men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups. Such strikes have prompted the greatest conflict inside the Obama administration, with some officials questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally justified or worth the local backlash.
The State and its invaluable subsidiaries, such as the NYT, will never spell out the full meaning of passages like this one, and most people will not permit themselves to understand it.

Obama and his fellow murderers kill people about whom they have no specific information at all. That's what this phrase means: "young men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups." We know from other accounts that they don't even need to be "toting arms." Their mere presence "in an area controlled by extremist groups" can be sufficient for the State to kill them. This logically and necessarily means that the State kills people who are completely innocent. Obama and the other criminals have no information whatsoever to even suggest otherwise.

But killing innocent people is the fundamental, intractable problem with the entirety of the Murder Program. The story describes how the Murder Program was initially "aimed at ranking leaders of Al Qaeda thought to be plotting to attack the United States" -- "thought to be," that is, they were suspected terrorists. Later on, "most strikes have been directed at militants whose main battle is with the Pakistani authorities or who fight with the Taliban against American troops in Afghanistan." In other words, these victims of the Murder Program are no threat at all to the United States, or if they are a threat, they are solely because U.S. forces are in Afghanistan -- where they have no right to be. I hesitate to mention this, since I realize most people won't understand what the hell I'm talking about. Nonetheless: if you break into someone's house brandishing weapons and the owner kills you, that doesn't give your pals the right to kill the owner, everyone in his family, and a bunch of people who happen to live in the neighborhood.

And then we are told the targets of the Murder Program changed again, to include still more people: "In Yemen, some strikes apparently launched by the United States killed militants who were preparing to attack Yemeni military forces." They weren't planning to attack the United States, or even U.S. military forces. What they were doing had nothing at all to do with the United States. So as far as the U.S. is concerned, they were completely innocent.

Therefore, in every aspect of the Murder Program, the Program targets innocent human beings, and murders them. The Murder Program is a program designed to murder innocent human beings. That is its purpose and its reason for being. This is the program that the Obama administration constantly expands, and the program that it seeks to institutionalize so that it is a fundamental, critical part of U.S. policy going forward. This is exactly what I discussed several days ago.

The NYT story also makes horribly clear that the debate about whether it is a good idea to murder innocent people is over. Worse than that, such a debate never took place. That's what we're told right near the beginning of the story:
Mr. Obama and his advisers are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.
They're "still debating" whether they should murder innocent people only as a "last resort," or murder innocent people as "a more flexible tool." Whether they should murder innocent people at all never occurred to them. It was never even a question.

Think about that for a minute. It was never even a question for them.

The NYT lays out what can only be regarded as a program that is evil in the means it employs, as well as evil in all its purposes -- but the story carefully observes all the "rules" concerning "polite" and "respectable" discussion of such matters, so that the full meaning of these acts is systematically avoided. The story further informs us that the Obama administration is committed to developing a comprehensive system of rules to make certain that evil is committed in just the right way.

Yes, you should be shaking your head right now, because that makes absolutely no sense. It doesn't make any sense, yet this is the nature of the evil that steadily spreads across our national landscape. And as I have often noted before, every system of government has laws and rules, even dictatorships and even totalitarian governments. Appeals to the "sanctity of the law" and the crucial importance of "rules" play directly into the hands of the State and those who direct its lethal operations. The law and the rules are the means by which they implement and direct their power. When a corrupt and deadly system passes beyond a certain point, the law and the rules do not prevent the commission of evil: they make it possible. Moreover, and this makes all such discussions entirely absurd, the ruling class will disregard the law and the rules whenever they wish, for whatever purpose they choose. Surely the last decade has taught us that much, if nothing else at all.

Yet most people have accepted the myths in every detail. They believe the lies. (For detailed discussions of these issues, see this, this and this; follow the links for still more.)

There is one further, deeply awful aspect to the NYT story, which comes toward the end:
Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistan-born analyst now at the Atlantic Council in Washington, said the United States should start making public a detailed account of the results of each strike, including any collateral deaths, in part to counter propaganda from jihadist groups. “This is a grand opportunity for the Obama administration to take the drones out of the shadows and to be open about their objectives,” he said.
The story immediately goes on to state that "the administration appears to be a long way from embracing such openness."

But suppose it did. One way that would play out comes at the end of my black comedy, "Down with Doug!" The host exults: "I want to emphasize that all of this has been done in a completely open manner. You've seen all of it." What he's talking about is murder, presented on live television. Would that make you feel better?

And do I have to remind people that this is exactly what certain people said during the heated debates about the State's embrace of torture seven or eight years ago? I remember it because I wrote about it at the time. (For a single essay summarizing the key arguments from my lengthy series about torture, see "Lies in the Service of Evil." The articles in the series are listed and briefly described at the end of that piece.) I was appalled and sickened then, and I am appalled and sickened now. Evil does not become less evil because people are "open" about it. It is not miraculously transformed into good through some mysterious process of alchemy. Evil becomes only worse, infinitely worse. And not a single aspect of those debates changed what the State had already decided to do: utilize torture as a standard method of State practice. Yes, yes, I know Obama told us all that he "ended" torture. Surely people, at least a few people, understand now that he lies about everything. He was lying about that, too. (Note: the second part of that essay describes how even the ACLU enthusiastically fell for this particular Obama lie. Not only that, they demanded that we all thank Obama for lying to us so brazenly. It was a thoroughly disgusting display.)

So if certain "critics" of the Murder Program get what they want, the State will be blessedly open about its programs devoted to evil. It will torture and murder regularly, perhaps every day, but in broad daylight, with all of us watching.

And a lot of people will be very pleased indeed. Pleased, hell. They'll be goddamned thrilled.

[elfismiles]

Push to step up domestic use of drones
Gary Martin and Viveca Novak / Published 10:22 p.m., Saturday, November 24, 2012
http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Pu ... 064482.php

[harry ashburn]

long article from Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security