News for the Waking Generation
Jason Liosatos
21st Century Wire
Drones are the perfect murderers weapon because Drones feel no emotions, they have no ethical and moral opinion, they don’t need a salary, a uniform, a pension, food, or sleep, and Drones also don’t talk about what they have done or seen.
Consider this: Drones and their operators, don’t suffer from traumatic stress, they don’t commit suicide, but we are told they do the job of dozens of soldiers with one bomb at the press of a button, without all the planning it takes with boots on the ground. They perform without emotions and feelings and are the perfect killing machine.
The mind-set of the people using and producing these killing machines is evident in the names they use for the different Drone models: Predator, Hunter, Reaper, Warrior, Switchblade, Shadow, Dragon Eye, Raven, Outrider, Hawk, Fire Bolt, Pegasus, Dominator, Phantom Eye, Phantom Ray and Scan Eagle. These shocking names prove what aggressors these dangerous people are in Government, who are supposed to be the peaceful stewards of our societies and bringers of a better world. These Drone names are something you might expect from the consciousness of gangs of thugs not the supposedly intelligent, peacekeepers of the world. Such names suggest the opposite of people of peace and good will, but rather of terrorists and tyrants of the highest degree.
The story becomes even more insane as we see the Drone operators sat comfortably, dressed in military uniform in front of a screen with levers and kill buttons, thousands of miles away from the places where they terrify and murder their victims. The operators may hover above and watch a house for weeks, where they believe suspects may be entering, sometimes watching little children and women also coming and going unaware that a killing machine is hovering above them with a judge and jury sat at a screen watching, many thousands of miles away deciding their fate, whether they will live or die. Apparently there are also paid informants, also on the ground who sometimes stick a tiny patch on a suspects house which the Drone operators zoom in on from thousands of feet away, then incinerate the property and its inhabitants at their discretion. 
Surprisingly and interestingly the Drone operators are suffering post traumatic stress and depression after incinerating their fellow human beings, even though they are a cowardly 2,000 miles away, due to them having watched beautiful little children come and go for weeks with mothers and fathers before they press the button to murder them all along with the suspect who ‘just might be’ guilty, or ‘just might be’ inside.
As many millions of innocent Americans are now struggling to come to terms with these war crimes against humanity, they themselves are facing the terrifying and daunting prospect of their own US government turning the Drones on them as they plan to unleash 30,000 Drones into the skies above USA ‘The Land of the Free’, within the next decade, with the possibility of being murdered and incinerated without a trial, something that people would never believe possible in the great USA, ‘The Land of the Free’. Peoples freedoms are now becoming quickly eroded by a government who knows that the population that once trusted and revered them are fast becoming the enemy of the government they once trusted, as it becomes more and more glaringly obvious to the people that they are not free, but virtual slaves to a system of fear and suppression spearheaded by a small ruling cliché which is protected by its own police and military. That clique, the rule by gangs, of the most unscrupulous people on the planet, who are hell-bent on control of its citizens at any cost.People are awakening globally to the shocking fact that they never really were free, but had just been convinced that they were, and as more freedoms are eroded via more Drones, surveillance, gun control and austerity, that realization is gathering momentum as it spreads through each country with the inevitable uprisings and demands of more freedom.
What we are witnessing is a battle between freedom and suppression, as the ruling oligarchs panic to keep the uprising, awakening people down and asleep, and the suppressed awakening populations in a panic to struggle free before the noose of that suppression tightens any further. And so we watch as the epoch of slavery and suppression, and killing and war, mayhem and madness reach a climax, as the perpetrators and perpetrators of that epoch hold on, knuckles white to humanities straining leash.
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Author Jason Liosatos is host of Global Peace Radio, and is also the author of the book The Emergency Transformation of Human Beings: The Solution to the World’s Problems.
TIMBUKTU, Mali — One of the last things the bearded fighters did before leaving this city was to drive to the market where traders lay their carpets out in the sand.
The al-Qaida extremists bypassed the brightly colored, high-end synthetic floor coverings and stopped their pickup truck in front of a man selling more modest mats woven from desert grass, priced at $1.40 apiece. There they bought two bales of 25 mats each, and asked him to bundle them on top of the car, along with a stack of sticks.
“It’s the first time someone has bought such a large amount,” said the mat seller, Leitny Cisse al-Djoumat. “They didn’t explain why they wanted so many.”
Military officials can tell why: The fighters are stretching the mats across the tops of their cars on poles to form natural carports, so that drones cannot detect them from the air.
The instruction to camouflage cars is one of 22 tips on how to avoid drones, listed on a document left behind by the Islamic extremists as they fled northern Mali from a French military intervention last month. A Xeroxed copy of the document, which was first published on a jihadist forum two years ago, was found by The Associated Press in a manila envelope on the floor of a building here occupied by al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb.
The tipsheet reflects how al-Qaida’s chapter in North Africa anticipated a military intervention that would make use of drones, as the battleground in the war on terror worldwide is shifting from boots on the ground to unmanned planes in the air. The presence of the document in Mali, first authored by a Yemeni, also shows the coordination between al-Qaida chapters, which security experts have called a source of increasing concern.
“This new document… shows we are no longer dealing with an isolated local problem, but with an enemy which is reaching across continents to share advice,” said Bruce Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, now the director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution.
The tips in the document range from the broad (No. 7, hide from being directly or indirectly spotted, especially at night) to the specific (No 18, formation of fake gatherings, for example by using dolls and statues placed outside false ditches to mislead the enemy.) The use of the mats appears to be a West African twist on No. 3, which advises camouflaging the tops of cars and the roofs of buildings, possibly by spreading reflective glass.
While some of the tips are outdated or far-fetched, taken together, they suggest the Islamists in Mali are responding to the threat of drones with sound, common-sense advice that may help them to melt into the desert in between attacks, leaving barely a trace.
“These are not dumb techniques. It shows that they are acting pretty astutely,” said Col. Cedric Leighton, a 26-year-veteran of the United States Air Force, who helped set up the Predator drone program, which later tracked Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. “What it does is, it buys them a little bit more time – and in this conflict, time is key. And they will use it to move away from an area, from a bombing raid, and do it very quickly.”
The success of some of the tips will depend on the circumstances and the model of drones used, Leighton said. For example, from the air, where perceptions of depth become obfuscated, an imagery sensor would interpret a mat stretched over the top of a car as one lying on the ground, concealing the vehicle.
New models of drones, such as the Harfung used by the French or the MQ-9 “Reaper,” sometimes have infrared sensors that can pick up the heat signature of a car whose engine has just been shut off. However, even an infrared sensor would have trouble detecting a car left under a mat tent overnight, so that its temperature is the same as on the surrounding ground, Leighton said.
Unarmed drones are already being used by the French in Mali to collect intelligence on al-Qaida groups, and U.S. officials have said plans are underway to establish a new drone base in northwestern Africa. The U.S. recently signed a “status of forces agreement” with Niger, one of the nations bordering Mali, suggesting the drone base may be situated there and would be primarily used to gather intelligence to help the French.
The author of the tipsheet found in Timbuktu is Abdallah bin Muhammad, the nom de guerre for a senior commander of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based branch of the terror network. The document was first published in Arabic on an extremist website on June 2, 2011, a month after bin Laden’s death, according to Mathieu Guidere, a professor at the University of Toulouse. Guidere runs a database of statements by extremist groups, including al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, and he reviewed and authenticated the document found by the AP.
The tipsheet is still little known, if at all, in English, though it has been republished at least three times in Arabic on other jihadist forums after drone strikes took out U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in September 2011 and al-Qaida second-in-command Abu Yahya al-Libi in Pakistan in June 2012. It was most recently issued two weeks ago on another extremist website after plans for the possible U.S. drone base in Niger began surfacing, Guidere said.
“This document supports the fact that they knew there are secret U.S. bases for drones, and were preparing themselves,” he said. “They were thinking about this issue for a long time.”
The idea of hiding under trees to avoid drones, which is tip No. 10, appears to be coming from the highest levels of the terror network. In a letter written by bin Laden and first published by the U.S. Center for Combating Terrorism, the terror mastermind instructs his followers to deliver a message to Abdelmalek Droukdel, the head of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, whose fighters have been active in Mali for at least a decade.
“I want the brothers in the Islamic Maghreb to know that planting trees helps the mujahedeen and gives them cover,” bin Laden writes in the missive. “Trees will give the mujahedeen the freedom to move around especially if the enemy sends spying aircrafts to the area.”
Hiding under trees is exactly what the al-Qaida fighters did in Mali, according to residents in Diabaly, the last town they took before the French stemmed their advance last month. Just after French warplanes incinerated rebel cars that had been left outside, the fighters began to commandeer houses with large mango trees and park their four-by-fours in the shade of their rubbery leaves.
Hamidou Sissouma, a schoolteacher, said the Islamists chose his house because of its generous trees, and rammed their trucks through his earthen wall to drive right into his courtyard. Another resident showed the gash the occupiers had made in his mango tree by parking their pickup too close to the trunk.
In Timbuktu also, fighters hid their cars under trees, and disembarked from them in a hurry when they were being chased, in accordance with tip No. 13.
Moustapha al-Housseini, an appliance repairman, was outside his shop fixing a client’s broken radio on the day the aerial bombardments began. He said he heard the sound of the planes and saw the Islamists at almost the same moment. Abou Zeid, the senior al-Qaida emir in the region, rushed to jam his car under a pair of tamarind trees outside the store.
“He and his men got out of the car and dove under the awning,” said al-Housseini. “As for what I did? Me and my employees? We also ran. As fast as we could.”
Along with the grass mats, the al-Qaida men in Mali made creative use of another natural resource to hide their cars: Mud.
Asse Ag Imahalit, a gardener at a building in Timbuktu, said he was at first puzzled to see that the fighters sleeping inside the compound sent for large bags of sugar every day. Then, he said, he observed them mixing the sugar with dirt, adding water and using the sticky mixture to “paint” their cars. Residents said the cars of the al-Qaida fighters are permanently covered in mud.
The drone tipsheet, discovered in the regional tax department occupied by Abou Zeid, shows how familiar al-Qaida has become with drone attacks, which have allowed the U.S. to take out senior leaders in the terrorist group without a messy ground battle. The preface and epilogue of the tipsheet make it clear that al-Qaida well realizes the advantages of drones: They are relatively cheap in terms of money and lives, alleviating “the pressure of American public opinion.”
Ironically, the first drone attack on an al-Qaida figure in 2002 took out the head of the branch in Yemen – the same branch that authored the document found in Mali, according to Riedel. Drones began to be used in Iraq in 2006 and in Pakistan in 2007, but it wasn’t until 2009 that they became a hallmark of the war on terror, he said.
“Since we do not want to put boots on the ground in places like Mali, they are certain to be the way of the future,” he said. “They are already the future.”
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In what probably was his last move as defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta on Wednesday announced the creation of a new type of medal for troops engaged in cyber-operations and drone strikes, saying the move “recognizes the changing face of warfare.”
“I’ve seen firsthand how modern tools, like remotely piloted platforms and cyber-systems, have changed the way wars are fought,” Panetta said during his swan-song news conference at the Pentagon. “They’ve given our men and women the ability to engage the enemy and change the course of battle, even from afar.”
Reeling from the cost, mixed results and unintended consequences of protracted ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration has come to rely heavily on drones to carry out the targeted killing of suspected extremists worldwide. It also has stepped up efforts to sharpen the country’s capabilities in cyberspace in the face of threats that officials say are growing and pose direct danger to U.S. national security.
The Pentagon’s most prestigious awards will still go to “those who display gallantry and valor in actions where their lives are on the line,” Panetta said.
The new honor is called the Distinguished Warfare Medal. It will be awarded to a few warriors who make exceptional contributions, officials said.
At the news conference, Panetta, a former congressman, said he lamented the deterioration of the relationship between Capitol Hill and the executive branch.
“We need to find solutions,” he said. “We can’t just sit here and complain. We can’t just sit here and blame others. We can’t just sit here and point fingers at each other.”
The remarks appeared to reflect frustration about the searing opposition his presumptive replacement has faced. Former senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) got a lashing Tuesday from Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee as the panel, which is dominated by Democrats, narrowly supported his nomination in a party-line vote. The full Senate is expected to vote on Hagel’s confirmation by Friday.
The military has transformed warfare into a deadly computer game with drone weapons. Media programs like Weaponology or Future Weapons on the Military Channel provide detailed examples of the lethalness of autonomous technology.
The use of drones as the preferred method of carnage is well established. Seldom do moral questions come into the discussions of eliminating enemies of the state. The rules of engagement vested in international law and the Geneva Convention, either ignored or rewritten for high-tech 21st Century combat, becomes the foundational tactic to maintain the killing force of the grand empire.
The video, Remote Control War, is an informative summary of the capabilities and uses of a drone air force. After viewing the range of aftermaths from GPS targeting, ponder the role of perpetual DARPAconflict. The distress from invented terrorism is used against the American public as a tool to incrementally relinquish basic rights and individual liberties. Matt K. Lewis offers up this assessment in an item published by This Week, Obama, drones, and the blissful ignorance of Americans.
“And here’s the ugly truth: Obama is giving us what we want . . .
Americans, it turns out, don’t really have the stomach for the unseemly business of taking prisoners, extracting information from prisoners, and then (maybe) going through the emotional, time consuming, and costly business of a trial.
American citizens want someone who will make the big, bad world disappear. Problems only exist if we have to confront them. Obama has made warfare more convenient for us — and less emotionally taxing.”
Beware of the unseen predators over foreign lands for the blowback is the real source of the instability and a root cause of hatred for American hegemony. What you are witnessing is the imbalance between Legislature and the Presidency. The war powers responsibility of Congress, long surrendered to the imperial commander and chief of killing incorporated is a national tragedy.
In another TW article, Peter Weber raises an essential question, Will Congress curb Obama’s drone strikes?, provides a mainstream assessment that seems lacking within the federal government.
“Since at least the 9/11 attacks, Congress has been less than confrontational with the White House over presidential powers to conduct war and anti-terrorism operations, to the dismay of civil libertarians. So we had President George W. Bush’s warrantless domestic wiretaps retroactively green-lighted by Congress, torture only officially nixed by a change in presidents, and a big ramping-up of lethal drones being used to kill terrorism suspects under President Obama. But Obama’s decision to kill at least two Americans working for al Qaeda in Yemen in 2011, and the legal justification that emerged in a leaked white paper (read below) this week, has caused a big, unusual outcry from both the Left and Right.”
The esteemed New York Times, part of the Obama fawning media, continues to carry water for the administration in Congress to See Memo Backing Drone Attacks on Americans.
“This week, NBC News obtained an unclassified, shorter “white paper” that detailed some of the legal analysis about killing a citizen and was apparently derived from the classified Awlaki memorandum. The paper said the United States could target a citizen if he was a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda involved in plots against the country and if his capture was not feasible.”
One might be accused of NYT bashing if you dare point out that their reporting resembles a briefing session from White House press secretary, Jay Carney. The use of warbots on home soil is a short step from spreading terminal sanctions of homeland security.
Reason.com warns of the threat from a robotic police state and the common ground to oppose this misuse of surveillance in the essay, The Bipartisan Opposition to Domestic Drones.
“Both the progressive American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Rutherford Institute cheer legislative efforts to place strict limits on unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. And, prodded by privacy groups, state lawmakers nationwide-Republicans and Democrats alike-have launched an all-out offensive against the unmanned aerial vehicles.
The prospect of cheap, small, portable flying video surveillance machines threatens to eradicate existing practical limits on aerial monitoring and allow for pervasive surveillance, police fishing expeditions and abusive use of these tools in way that could eliminate the privacy Americans have traditionally enjoyed in their movements and activities,” the bill’s author, Sen. Robyn Driscoll, a Democrat from Billings, testified.”
The ACLU presents a list of provisions that the Civil Liberties organization advocates. Also Read the ACLU’s full report on domestic drones. “Congress has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to change airspace rules to make it much easier for police nationwide to use domestic drones, but the law does not include badly needed privacy protections. The ACLU recommends the following safeguards:
USAGE LIMITS: Drones should be deployed by law enforcement only with a warrant, in an emergency, or when there are specific and articulable grounds to believe that the drone will collect evidence relating to a specific criminal act.
DATA RETENTION: Images should be retained only when there is reasonable suspicion that they contain evidence of a crime or are relevant to an ongoing investigation or trial.
POLICY: Usage policy on domestic drones should be decided by the public’s representatives, not by police departments, and the policies should be clear, written, and open to the public.
ABUSE PREVENTION & ACCOUNTABILITY: Use of domestic drones should be subject to open audits and proper oversight to prevent misuse.
WEAPONS: Domestic drones should not be equipped with lethal or non-lethal weapons.”
Relying on Rutherford Institute Model Resolution, Charlottesville Becomes First U.S. City to Limit Police Drones; TRI Calls on Rest of Country to Follow Suit.
“In a 3-2 vote, members of the Charlottesville City Council adopted a resolution drafted by The Rutherford Institute which urges the Virginia General Assembly to prevent police agencies from utilizing drones outfitted with anti-personnel devices such as tasers and tear gas and prohibit the government from using data recorded via police spy drones in criminal prosecutions. In so doing, Charlottesville has become the first city in the country to limit the use of police spy drones, providing momentum and inspiration for other cities across the country to follow suit.
The passage of the resolution, which also places a two-year moratorium on the use of drones within city limits, coincides with a Department of Justice memo leaked to the media which outlines the Obama administration’s rationale for assassinating U.S. citizens via drone strike. With at least 30,000 drones expected to occupy U.S. airspace by 2020, John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, has called on government officials at the local, state, and federal level to do their part to safeguard Americans against the use of drones by police. Rutherford Institute attorneys have drafted and made available to the public language that can be adopted at all levels of government in order to address concerns being raised about the threats posed by drones to citizens’ privacy.”
When was the last time that a civil liberty issue developed an alliance of purpose to oppose the despotism of the totalitarian murder regime?
The Judge Napolitano YouTube: Killing Americans with Drones is Nowhere Justifiable Under The Constitution, goes unheeded as the country sinks into a zombie trance of public acquiescence. The compliant society is rooted in denial and disbelief.
Even so, some of the more perceptive state legislatures are waking up to the danger of domestic drone operations. Texas “Anti Drone” Laws Would be Toughest in USA, and “prohibit federal law enforcement or federal officials from flying drones over Texas to spy on random citizens. Only individuals who are suspected with reasonable cause could be the target of drone surveillance, and only with a warrant issued by a judge of an open and public court.”
Politico details, “Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has not decided whether he will sign a bill barring state and local agencies from using drones for two years — the first legislation of its kind in the country that passed through the state’s General Assembly Tuesday with bipartisan support.”
The National Defense Authorization Act is the latest unconstitutional measure that targets domestic citizens for punitive punishment. Due process, now reduced to “Due or Die” is the harbinger of the use of domestic drone capitulation. What will it take to awaken submissive citizens that the capability of foreign deployed drones easily can be weaponized for local operations?
The Obama administration has demonstrated an eagerness to trump up a bogus domestic terrorist threat that requires a surrender of our Bill of Rights. Reaper drones are a much greater peril than just a violation of privacy. A technology that is rapidly expanding and designed to militarize the police state into a killing field of reputed rebellious Americans – violates true national security.
“Making warfare more convenient and less emotionally taxing” is the direct opposite of the horror of battle. When a false flag surgical strike targets your location and your person, it will not be an episode in a computer simulation.
Patrick Henningsen
Washington residents take away expensive new police toys.
This news comes on the back of a week of controversy surrounding Obama’s CIA Director nominee, John O. Brennan, seen by many as a pioneer of sorts in the field of US military secret drone assassinations. This has presented an ethical dilemma for President Obama, who ascended to power on a liberal PR wave which is fundamentally at odds with this level of anti-constitutional and illegal policy.
Obama himself signed the bill in early 2012 that enabled some 30,000 drones in the domestic US, to be operated by the Department of Homeland Security and local police departments, Seattle being one such city scheduled for adoption of a junior ‘Skynet’ beta program.
Make no mistake about it – there is an Washington DC-based agenda to roll out drones all over the country. Seattle’s Police Department had obtained these two small drones through a federal grant.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn explained:
“Today I spoke with Seattle Police Chief John Diaz and we agreed that it was time to end the unmanned aerial vehicle program so that SPD can focus its resources on public safety and the community building work that is the department’s priority. (They) will be returned to the vendor.”
Public protesters gathered in for the October public meeting on the city’s new drone program, which prompted police to quickly retreat on the issue:
“The testimony opposing drones has been overwhelmingly clear that the 11 people who testified this afternoon, all of whom testified against the use of drones, was symbolic of the general reaction we are getting,” said Chairman Bruce Harrell.
Compared to other direct actions, this was a relatively modest effort, which should encourage other citizen groups keeping the encroaching police state at bay – for now at least. Mia Jacobson who represents the citizen group StandUP explains, “If 11 voices can protect the people from flying government robots watching their every move – what can 20 voices do? What can your voice accomplish?”.
In addition to Seattle, the city of Charlottesville, Va., also rejected drones by ordering a two-year moratorium on their use thanks to The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group.
According to FOX news: the U.S. Department of Homeland Security drones do enter Washington State airspace occasionally, patrolling the Canadian border east of the Cascade mountains. The two 10,000-pound Predator-B unmanned aircraft are based in North Dakota.
by David Jackson
The leak of a document on the Obama administration’s drone strike policy has some people in Washington playing the “what if” game.
What if President George W. Bush’s administration had written such a document on the legality of drone attacks, even on U.S. citizens working with suspected terrorists overseas?
Former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted: “Good thing (Department of Justice) drone memo didn’t come out in 2008. Candidate Obama would never have put up with stuff like that going on.”
Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman who hosts MSNBC’s Morning Joe, said that if this were the Bush administration, there would be “congressional hearings” and “articles of impeachment.”
Candidate Obama and Democrats did indeed criticize Bush-era counterterrorism policies, such as warrantless wiretaps and enhanced interrogation techniques (waterboarding).
Aides to President Obama said he is continuing the war on terrorism, authorized by Congress shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Obama “takes the absolute necessity to conduct our war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates in a way that’s consistent with the Constitution and our laws very seriously,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney.
The spokesman added that “it is a matter of fact that al-Qaeda is in a state of war against us and that senior leaders, operational leaders of al-Qaeda are continually plotting to attack the United States, plotting to kill American citizens as they did most horrifically on Sept. 11, 2001.”
