One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

[coffin_dodger]

^^ Yikes. Thanks for this, Elf.

from the article above:

The system for creating baseball cards and targeting packages, according to the source, depends largely on intelligence intercepts and a multi-layered system of fallible, human interpretation. “It isn’t a surefire method,” he said. “You’re relying on the fact that you do have all these very powerful machines, capable of collecting extraordinary amounts of data and information,” which can lead personnel involved in targeted killings to believe they have “godlike powers.”

And regardless of fallibility, they have.

[seemslikeadream]

A New Snowden? Whistleblower Leaks Trove of Documents on Drones & Obama’s Assassination Program

The Drone Papers

[Searcher08]

My experience of talking about drones with American liberals is that they see NO problem in it. "As long as it keeps me safe" one said.

[tapitsbo]

Exactly, the usually unidirectional violence inherent to their politics is always excusable because they consider their politics unambiguously good (as long as addressing any nagging feelings of something "problematic" can be infinitely deferred). Fundamentalists.

[seemslikeadream]

Nearly 90 Percent Of People Killed In Recent Drone Strikes Were Not The Target
U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw

[PufPuf93]

Nearly 90 Percent Of People Killed In Recent Drone Strikes Were Not The Target
U.S. drone strikes have killed scores of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw

General Clark spoke too soon about Africa ("Middle East would be like Africa if no oil...."

From the October 14, 2015 US edition of the Guardian:



Obama to deploy 300 US troops to Cameroon to fight Boko Haram

Senior administration official says deployment is part of efforts to fight Boko Haram as militant group expands beyond traditional base in Nigeria

Agence France-Presse

Wednesday 14 October 2015 13.22 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 14 October 2015 13.23 EDT

Barack Obama on Wednesday notified US Congress that he intends to deploy 300 troops to Cameroon to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations.

In a letter released by the White House, the president said 90 personnel had already been deployed, and would be armed for self-defense.

A senior administration official told AFP the deployment was “part of the counter Boko Haram effort”.

Cameroon, along with a growing number of west and central African nations, has been targeted by the Islamist militants, who are expanding operations beyond the group’s traditional base in northern Nigeria.

Twin suicide blasts on Sunday killed at least nine people and injured 29 in far northern Cameroon. Two female suicide bombers carried out the attacks in the village of Kangaleri, security and local sources said.

Nine people died when the first woman detonated a bomb in a tiny milk and donut restaurant. The second suicide bomber killed only herself, a local authority official said.

The attack came a day after triple explosions in Chad left 41 dead.

Both countries are part of a regional coalition that has been fighting the militants.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/o ... boko-haram

[coffin_dodger]

Wahey! More stuff that looks like a gun for Americans to feel safer with

[coffin_dodger]

[seemslikeadream]

ACLU demands CIA disclose drone program details after document leak
Lawsuit seeks information and legal rationale for US drone strikes that have killed thousands of civilians following anonymous whistleblower’s revelation
.
A US Predator drone. The ACLU is pressing for details of unmanned air strikes. Photograph: Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images
Tom McCarthy in New York

Monday 19 October 2015 23.17 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 20 October 2015 10.16 EDT

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) pressed ahead on Monday with a lawsuit to compel the CIA to turn over basic details about the US program of clandestine drone warfare, a week after startling contours of the program emerged in a new leak by an anonymous intelligence source.

The ACLU lawsuit seeks summary data from the CIA on drone strikes, including the locations and dates of strikes, the number of people killed and their identities or status. The ACLU also is seeking memos describing the legal reasoning underpinning the drone program.

None of the summary strike information is currently available to the public, which instead must rely on estimates compiled by analysts and journalists, based on reports on the ground.

“The case is really about the public’s right to know, the right of access to information about this very controversial set of policies,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU. “At this point the enemies of the United States already know that the CIA is carrying out drone strikes. The only effect of the kind of secrecy we’re seeing now is to keep Americans in the dark about their own government’s policies.”

The ACLU lawsuit pertains both to the CIA drone program and any information it may have on a parallel program operated by the defense department, Jaffer said.

In combination, the two programs are believed to have killed thousands of civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. Analysis based on classified documents provided by an unidentified whistleblower to the Intercept and published last week revealed that the military labels unknown people it kills as “enemies killed in action”.

The ACLU case suffered a setback in June, when a judge with the US district court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the CIA’s effort to keep the drone strike information and legal reasoning secret.

On Monday, the ACLU appealed that ruling to the DC circuit appeals court, which has previously ruled in favor of the ACLU in the case. In 2013, a three-judge panel on the court rejected a CIA contention that national security concerns prevented the agency from confirming or denying the possession of any pertinent records.

The ACLU has had partial success with similar freedom of information act lawsuits in the past. In 2009, the group won the release of four secret memos laying out the legal justifications for the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program.

“We are seeking [the drone memos] for precisely the same reasons we sought the torture memos,” Jaffer said. “They are the basis for the government’s most significant national security policy right now.

“We think that the public has a right to know both what the government’s purported legal justifications are for the drone strikes, and also of any limits that the government recognizes on its authority to carry out these kinds of strikes.”

The ACLU also is party, with the New York Times, to a second major drones transparency case currently working its way through the second US circuit court of appeals in Manhattan.

That case resulted in the release last year of a Justice Department memorandum describing an ability to kill an American citizen without trial in Yemen.

That memo contended that the protection of US citizenship was effectively removed by the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), which blessed a global war against al-Qaida.

The memo was thought to provide the legal basis for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the former al-Qaida propagandist and US citizen, in 2011.

In a post on the Just Security blog, Jaffer decried government noncompliance with freedom of information act (FOIA) requests.

“In practice... the government routinely withholds information that the FOIA requires it to disclose,” Jaffer wrote. “On the rare occasion when courts enforce the FOIA over the government’s objections, the government often manages to delay release of information by months or years, and the public gets access to information only long after it most needs it.”

[Grizzly]

https://twitter.com/JesselynRadack/stat ... 0271114240
Finances Frozen For U.S. Drone Operator Whistle Blowers

I have good mind to open a 'war on Citizens' thread ... as one commenter said, they've just made them, non-citizens. The implications of that are mind bending in a free country.

[Grizzly]

I guess it's ubiquitous now. The normalization process is complete.

http://m.chron.com/news/houston-texas/t ... 681240.php

Texas police use drone to catch armed suspects near school

That was fast...

[elfismiles]

I guess it's ubiquitous now. The normalization process is complete.

http://m.chron.com/news/houston-texas/t ... 681240.php

Texas police use drone to catch armed suspects near school

That was fast...

Was just about to post this ... there have been several stories in recent years from Texas police about them looking into using them.

What seems scarily unsaid in that news link is WHY were these two "young adults" ("...pair of suspects that were reported to be carrying firearms near Sam Houston Elementary in Corpus Christi. ...Two suspects, Andrew Ramos, 18, and Isaiah Cheatham, 19") near an elementary school with guns! Maybe there were just armed gang members or carrying as perceived protection. Always scary to consider kids going to school armed.

Here is another story linked to from that Houston Chronicle article to a more local news report with video:

A resident along Lazy Lane called police around 9am to report two suspicious men walking down the street toward Sam Houston Elementary, and claimed one might be carrying a gun.

http://www.kristv.com/story/30673149/cc ... or-suspect

[conniption]

counter punch

December 9, 2015
Why Do They Hate Us? It’s No Mystery

by Sheldon Richman



What do Barack Obama and Donald Trump have in common? Among other things, they have — or pretend to have — no clue why some Muslims hate us. Trump says (I almost typed believes, but I’m not sure anyone, including Trump, knows what he believes) Muslims should be barred from the United States until “until the country’s representatives can figure out what’s going on.”

Note that Trump includes himself among those who haven’t figured it out, or else he surely would have told us. He either does not know, or does not care, why people are willing to kill Americans.

Let’s give these members of the American elite their due: one has to work hard to make a mystery of anti-American (and anti-Western) terrorism emanating from the Middle East. It takes prodigious effort to maintain an air of innocence about San Bernardino and Paris, because no one who claims to be informed can plead ignorance of the long history of U.S. and Western imperialism in the Muslim world. This includes the CIA’s subversion of Iranian democracy in 1953, the U.S. government’s systematic support of compliant autocratic and corrupt Arab monarchies and dictatorships, its empowering of Iraqi Shi’ite Muslims, and its unconditional backing of Israel’s brutal anti-Palestinian policies. (The savage 2014 war on Gaza killed many noncombatants.)

In the 10 years before the 9/11 attacks the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton bombed Iraq while maintaining an embargo, most especially on equipment for the water and sanitation infrastructure the U.S. Air Force had destroyed during the Gulf War. Half a million children died. This was also when U.S. officials promised, then reneged on the promise, to remove U.S. forces from the Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia.

From the air Americans routinely kill noncombatants in Syria and Iraq, most recently this week, when “at least 36 civilians, including 20 children, in a village in eastern Syria” were reportedly killed, according to McClatchyDC. Do Americans notice? Of course not. That’s why San Bernardino and Paris can be made to appear so mysterious.

Things like this happen all the time. The U.S. attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was especially egregious against this background of war crimes.

The U.S. government has conducted war by remote-controlled drones since 2001 in a variety of places, including Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Do Americans have a clue what it must be like to live under the drone threat? You know the answer is no. But many Muslims do, and many others can sympathize.

Since the San Bernardino shooters both had roots in Pakistan, it might be worth focusing on the drone war there, part of the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Steve Coll, in his Nov. 24, 2014 New Yorker article “The Unblinking Stare: The Drone War in Pakistan,” notes that that country “has absorbed more drone strikes — some four hundred — than any other country.” Coll writes, “Armed drones are slow-moving pilotless aircraft equipped with cameras, listening devices, and air-to-ground missiles. They can hover over their targets for hours, transmitting video feed of the scene below, and then strike suddenly.” Most of the time, the remote “pilots” do not know whom they are targeting.

Obama has claimed that the drone war kills few noncombatants, but this is rejected by many authoritative sources, including, Coll reports, a team of NYU and Stanford law students who found that “C.I.A.-operated drones were nowhere near as discriminating toward noncombatants as the agency’s leaders have claimed.”

The kill estimates vary, but the totals are significant — to the families and friends, and to distant Muslims who see their coreligionists slaughtered while minding their own business.

What turns an angry and anguished Muslim into someone willing to kill Americans indiscriminately? That’s a hard question to answer completely. But when violence such as that inflicted by the United States drives a Muslim to the most “radical” form of the faith in search of revenge, the explanation is far more political than religious. If terrorism were happening during peacetime, that might tell another story. But it is not.

It’s not “moderate” Muslims who need to take the lead in ending terrorism. It’s the U.S. foreign-policy makers, whose daily atrocities make targets of Americans at home.

Sheldon Richman keeps the blog “Free Association” and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society.

[elfismiles]

Tokyo police unveil net-wielding interceptor drone (VIDEO)
By James Vincent
on December 11, 2015 09:04 am
http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9891 ... -net-drone

Drone squad to be launched by Tokyo police
2 hours ago
From the section Technology

A drone carrying a small radioactive substance landed on the Japanese PM's office in AprilImage copyright Getty Images
Image caption
A drone carrying a radioactive substance landed on the Japanese PM's office in April

A drone squad, designed to locate and - if necessary - capture nuisance drones flown by members of the public, is to be launched by police in Tokyo.

The police unit will patrol important buildings such as the prime minister's office.

If a suspicious drone is detected, the operator will be warned via loudspeakers on the ground.

But if he or she fails to respond, police will launch drones equipped with nets to bring down the device.

"Terrorist attacks using drones carrying explosives are a possibility," a senior member of the police department's security bureau told the Asahi Shimbun website.

"We hope to defend the nation's functions with the worst-case scenario in mind."

In April, a drone carrying a small amount of radioactive material landed on the roof of the prime minister's office. No-one was injured and a man was subsequently arrested in connection with the incident.

A video posted online by Japanese website Jijicom shows how Tokyo Police's drones, complete with nets, might catch an unwanted airborne device in action.

Airspace restrictions

"In Japan, it is illegal to pilot drones over certain areas such as airports and power plants, over roads, or above a height of 150m," Paul Haswell, a partner at legal firm Pinsent Masons, told the BBC.

"Some cities such as Tokyo and Osaka have also outlawed their use in parks."

Regulations on drones came into force in Japan this week, following an amendment to the country's Aviation Act.

"Japan's new net-carrying, drone-disabling drone is certainly an interesting way to police those areas where drones are forbidden," added Mr Haswell.

Rules over drone use are being tightened up in several countries. In the US for example, authorities have called for a drone register which would list device owners across the nation.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35070818

[elfismiles]

Grreeeaaaaatttttt...

These drones see in the dark
By Elizabeth Weise / USA Today (Tribune News Service) Published: December 11, 2015
SAN FRANCISCO (Tribune News Service) — The world's largest drone maker has teamed up with the nation's largest thermal camera company to create ready-to-fly drones that can see in the dark.

The drone maker is DJI, a China-based company that currently has about 70 percent of the world drone market.

The camera is by FLIR Systems, a Wilsonville, Ore.-based thermal and infrared imaging company.

http://www.stripes.com/news/us/these-dr ... k-1.383318