Infinite Unknown

A U.S. Air Force MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle. The U.S. is conducting drone strikes in in at least three countries beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Stanley Thompson)

- Everything We Know So Far About Drone Strikes (ProPublica, Jan 11, 2013):

Jan. 11, 2013: this post has been corrected.

You might have heard about the “kill list.” You’ve certainly heard about drones. But the details of the U.S. campaign against militants in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s national security approach – remain shrouded in secrecy. Here’s our guide to what we know—and what we don’t know.

Where is the drone war? Who carries it out?

Drones have been the Obama administration’s tool of choice for taking out militants outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Drones aren’t the exclusive weapon – traditional airstrikes and other attacks have also been reported. But by one estimate, 95 percent of targeted killings since 9/11 have been conducted by drones.  Among the benefits of drones: they don’t put American troops in harm’s way.

Continue reading »

Tags: Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Barack Obama, CIA, George Bush, Global News, Government, Iraq, Military, Obama administration, Pakistan, Politics, Somalia, U.S., Yemen

- Begun the Drone Wars Have (Huffington Post, Nov 27, 2012):

With drones from the beginning there has been a kind of technological determinism associated with the idea that since the United States possesses this relatively new technology it should use it. Facing the uncertainty of reelection, President Obama became so concerned about the lawlessness of his drone killings he sought hastily to codify the rules governing their use. What began in the Bush era as a means for targeting al Qaeda leaders hiding in remote areas has become a vast “amorphous” death machine targeting suspected “militants” in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Now we’ve learned that, in addition to “personality strikes” aimed at individuals deemed enemies of the United States, there are now what’s called “signature strikes” where any congregation of suspicious looking military-age men is open game.

The Obama administration apparently views drones as the cheapest and easiest way to kill “militants” while keeping American casualties low to non-existent. This seeming techno-supremacy has the added political benefit of getting around a war-weary electorate. But future presidents might not quibble about using drones as judiciously as our current president claims to be, hence his rush to clarify the rules of engagement.

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Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Dictatorship, Drones, Global News, Government, Israel, Military, New World Order, Obama administration, Pakistan, Palestine, Politics, Robert Gates, Somalia, Technology, Terrorism, U.S., World News, Yemen

Drones+ iPhone App from Josh Begley on Vimeo.

- Apple Rejects App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes (Wired, Aug 30, 2012):

It seemed like a simple enough idea for an iPhone app: Send users a pop-up notice whenever a flying robots kills someone in one of America’s many undeclared wars. But Apple keeps blocking the Drones+ program from its App Store — and therefore, from iPhones everywhere. The Cupertino company says the content is “objectionable and crude,” according to Apple’s latest rejection letter.

It’s the third time in a month that Apple has turned Drones+ away, says Josh Begley, the program’s New York-based developer. The company’s reasons for keeping the program out of the App Store keep shifting. First, Apple called the bare-bones application that aggregates news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia “not useful.” Then there was an issue with hiding a corporate logo. And now, there’s this crude content problem.

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Tags: Apple, Drones, Global News, iPhone, Military, Pakistan, Somalia, Technology, U.S., Yemen

YouTube Added: 02.11.2012

Tags: Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Banking, Barack Obama, Central Bank, Collapse, Corruption, Debt, Drones, Economy, EU, Europe, Fascism, G20, Gerald Celente, Germany, Global News, Government, Greece, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Italy, Mexico, Mitt Romney, New World Order, Obama administration, Paul Krugman, Politics, Quantitative Easing, Russia, Society, Somalia, Spain, Sudan, Syria, Terrorism, U.S., Vladimir Putin, WWW III, Yemen

- U.S. Expands Secretive Drone Base for African Shadow War (Wired, Oct 26, 2012):

The Pentagon’s secretive drone and commando base in the Horn of Africa is getting a lot bigger and a lot busier as the U.S. doubles down on its shadowy campaign of air strikes, robot surveillance and Special Operation Forces raids in the terror havens of Yemen and Somalia.

Camp Lemonnier, originally a French colonial outpost in Djibouti, a tiny, impoverished nation just north of Somalia, has been the epicenter of America’s Indian Ocean shadow war since just after 9/11. What was once little more than a run-down compound adjacent to Djibouti city’s single-runway international airport is now a sprawling complex of hangars and air-conditioned buildings housing eight Predator drones and eight F-15E fighter-bombers plus other warplanes, as well as around 300 Special Operations Forces and more than 2,000 other U.S. troops and civilians.

According to an investigation by The Washington Post, the Pentagon is spending $1.4 billion to expand the base’s airplane parking and living facilities. The extra housing could accommodate another 800 commandos, the Post reports. The military is also adding new lighting to a emergency landing strip a few miles from Camp Lemonnier — an urgent precaution as more and more planes and drones pack onto the main base’s sole runway. Continue reading »

Tags: Africa, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Barack Obama, CIA, Drones, Global News, Government, Military, Obama administration, Politics, Somalia, Technology, Terrorism, U.S., War, Yemen

YouTube Added: 23.09.2012

Tags: Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Barack Obama, Bush administration, Collapse, Corporations, Economy, Food, Genetically Modified Organisms, George Bush, Gerald Celente, Global News, GMO, Gold, Government, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Meditation, Military, Obama administration, Paul Craig Roberts, Politics, Preparedness, Silver, Society, Somalia, Syria, U.S., War, War Crimes, WW III, Yemen

AMERICAN PSYOPS UNLEASHED AGAINST OUR OWN

- Truth, The Highest Calling for Man (Veterans Today, Sep 17, 2012):

Few understand the real crime of deception.  Deception can be simple betrayal or can be contrived to drive you to murder your friends or defend monsters. Military deception is called “psyops” or “psychological  operations” and is, frankly, tasked specifically with creating wrong beliefs to rob leaders or entire populations of their judgment.

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Tags: Barack Obama, CIA, Dictatorship, False flag, Fascism, Global News, Government, Haqqani Network, Hezbollah, Inside job, Iran, Israel, John McCain, Lebanon, Manchurian Candidate, Military, New World Order, Nuclear, Nuclear weapons, Obama administration, Politics, PSYOPS, Society, Somalia, Syria, Terrorism, U.S., Vietnam, Vietnam War, War

- Drone Club (ZeroHedge, Sep 6, 2012):

The first rule of Fight Club?

You don’t talk about Fight Club.

Obama isn’t a member of Fight Club; he’s a member of Drone Club — which targets individuals in foreign lands, including American citizens and their families, for extrajudicial assassination by drone. And the first rule of Drone Club?

You don’t talk about it.

Via Reprieve:

Apple has for the third time this month rejected an iPhone app which alerts the user to a drone attack and to the number of people killed.  Drones+ enables those concerned to track the strikes to their handset.

This is no doubt an uncomfortable prospect for the US authorities, whose use of drones extends to Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, where no war has been declared.  Such drone strikes have killed more than 3,300 people in Pakistan alone since 2004, according to reports by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Now we don’t know who made this decision, whether Apple thinks that citizens knowing of drone strikes is a national security risk, or whether Apple were leaned on by the CIA, NSA or Pentagon — though given that Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other Presidents combined, the latter wouldn’t be entirely unsurprising. Nonetheless, whatever the truth this is a very disturbing development — after all, how can we rightly judge the administration’s foreign and national security policy without having up to date facts?

Obama claims that the drone strikes are conducted on a very rigorous basis: Continue reading »

Tags: Apple, Assassination, Barack Obama, CIA, Drones, Global News, Government, Military, NSA, Nuclear reactors, Obama administration, Pakistan, Pentagon, Politics, Somalia, War, Yemen

- Does the Iranian Government Have A Right To A Nuclear Bomb? (ZeroHedge, Sep 4, 2012):

Submitted by James E. Miller of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada,

As Reuters reported last week, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has confirmed that while the Iranian government is still enriching uranium at an increasing rate, there is no evidence of a weapons program under development.  Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei still maintains that the nuclear program is entirely peaceful.  According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, senior Obama administration officials say the 2007 intelligence report which confirmed that Iran’s government put a stop to its efforts to create a nuclear bomb in 2003 is still accurate.  Just last February, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also confirmed that the government is not pursuing a weapons program.

The nonexistence of a nuclear weapons program hasn’t stopped the neoconservatives in Congress and the press or the Obama administration from denouncing Iran publicly in the name of American hegemony.  Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney remains willing and eager to use military force to halt the country’s nuclear development.  At a speech before the Veterans of Foreign War convention in July, Romney called the prospect of Iran having a nuclear weapon the greatest “danger in the world today” and castigated President Obama for not doing more to stop the continuing enrichment.  The Obama administration hasn’t been sitting idly by however when it comes to Iran.  Under pressure from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, perhaps the largest pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, Obama signed into law the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act in July which would give “a blank check drawn on the U.S. taxpayer” to Israel “to maintain its qualitative military edge” according to former CIA officer Philip Giraldi.  With Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu playing a game of nuclear blackmail with the White House in an effort to goad Obama into launching a preemptive attack on Iran, U.S. National Security Director Tom Dinilon reportedly presented an attack plan to the war-ready Netanyahu recently. Continue reading »

Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Canada, CIA, Global News, Government, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Nuclear, Nuclear weapons, Obama administration, Philip Giraldi, Politics, Somalia, U.S., Uranium, White House

An MQ-1 Predator armed with Hellfire missiles flies over southern Afghanistan. Photo: Air Force

- Hidden History: America’s Secret Drone War in Africa (Wired, Ag 13, 2012):

More secret bases. More and better unmanned warplanes. More frequent and deadly robotic attacks. Some five years after a U.S. Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flew the type’s first mission over lawless Somalia, the shadowy American-led drone campaign in the Horn of Africa is targeting Islamic militants more ruthlessly than ever.

Thanks to media accounts, indirect official statements, fragmentary crash reports and one complaint by a U.N. monitoring group, we can finally begin to define — however vaguely — the scope and scale of the secret African drone war.

The details that follow are in part conjecture, albeit informed conjecture. They outline of just one of America’s ongoing shadow wars — and one possible model for the future U.S. way of war. Along with the counterterrorism campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen and the Philippines, the Somalia drone war demonstrates how high-tech U.S. forces can inflict major damage on America’s enemies at relatively low cost … and without most U.S. citizens having any idea it’s even happening.

Since 2007, Predator drones and the larger, more powerful Reapers — reinforced by Ravens and Scan Eagle UAVs and Fire Scout robot helicopters plus a small number of huge, high-flying Global Hawks — have hunted Somali jihadists on scores of occasions. It’s part of a broader campaign of jet bombing runs, naval gun bombardment, cruise-missile attacks, raids by Special Operations Forces and assistance to regional armies such as Uganda’s.

In all, air raids by manned and unmanned U.S. aircraft have killed at least 112 Somali militants, according to a count by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Fifty-seven innocent civilians also died in the raids, the nonprofit Bureau found. The dead jihadists have included several senior members of al-Qaeda or the affiliated al-Shabaab extremist group. In January, a drone launched three Hellfire missiles at a convoy near Mogadishu and killed Bilaal al-Barjawi, the mastermind of the 2010 bombing in Kampala, Uganda, that claimed the lives of 74 soccer fans.

In an escalating secret war, drones are doing an ever-greater proportion of the American fighting.

The Drones Are Coming

It wasn’t until relatively recently that U.S. drones were permanently stationed in East Africa. The military and CIA have operated armed versions of General Atomics’ one-ton Predator since 2001, but early on the remote-controlled warplanes were in high demand and short supply. Afghanistan and later Iraq monopolized the drones.

That was a big problem for the small U.S. force in East Africa struggling to keep tabs on increasingly radical, and dangerous, Somali militants. “The largest gap is knowledge,” Navy Rear Adm. Tony Kurta, former commander of U.S. troops in Djibouti, told Danger Room in 2009. Continue reading »

Tags: Africa, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Barack Obama, CIA, Drones, Global News, Government, Military, New World Order, Obama administration, Pakistan, Philippines, Politics, Society, Somalia, Surveillance, Technology, Terrorism, Terrorists, U.S., War, Yemen