Drones Fire Missiles Which Kill Everybody Close By

The Recon Drone is a controllable UAV that will detect enemy positions. The Assault Drone is a remote controlled turret that can move throughout the map and, once a match is made, can launch a missile to kill the target. The Assault Drone is equipped with a Light Machine Gun and a Rocket Launcher. Drones lurk and circle homes, vehicles, etc. before unleashing Hellfire missiles, often in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. Killer drones are a very accurate form of artillery that takes everybody close by, along with the victim, and sometimes finds the wrong house or car. In principle, it's just a big, mobile gun.

Does the CIA Even Know Who Its Drones Are Killing?

During the Bush era, the agency helped imprison scores of innocents. In the Obama era, it decides who to blow up.

November 7, 2011

The Atlantic - Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said that the War on Terror detainees who made it to the prison at Guantanamo Bay were "the worst of the worst." At the time, many Americans believed him. Hadn't the detainees been captured by the military or the CIA, or evaluated by experienced American interrogators before being transferred there? We now know that many of the 779 detainees who wound up at Gitmo were innocent.

"Of the 212 Afghans at the base, almost half were, in the assessments of the US forces, either entirely innocent, mere Taliban conscripts, or had been transferred to Guantánamo with no reason for doing so on file," The Guardian reported earlier this year.

Said the Telegraph,

"Guantanamo Bay has been used to incarcerate dozens of terrorists who have admitted plotting terrifying attacks against the West -- while imprisoning more than 150 totally innocent people, top-secret files disclose."

President Obama doesn't send suspected terrorists to Guantanamo Bay. Instead, he kills them with drones.

Those drones are operated by the same military and CIA that sent hundreds of innocents to prison. The targets killed by the drones aren't subject to waterboarding. They're blown up from afar. The Obama Administration doesn't torture -- it just quietly kills.

How exactly does it decide who to kill? That's a secret.

Who has it killed?

We don't know -- but not because the information is classified.

The CIA doesn't know either, most of the time. Says the Wall Street Journal, after interviewing what it calls "high level officials," there are two kinds of drone strikes:

"Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren't always known. The bulk of CIA's drone strikes are signature strikes. The second type of drone strike, known as a 'personality' strike, targets known terrorist leaders and has faced less internal scrutiny."

So the Obama Administration is killing people in Pakistan. And the Obama Administration doesn't know who they are. It's sure that they're very bad people. It's just that no one knows their names.

Many Americans can't believe their government would kill innocents in drone strikes. But hundreds of innocents were imprisoned in Guantanamo despite being interrogated first. Domestically, the Innocence Project estimates that there are tens of thousands of innocent citizens in U.S. prisons, despite a system that guarantees due process, a right to counsel, and a standard of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." Then we send pilot-less airplanes to a foreign country, receive images taken from high altitudes, and a CIA employee decides whether to fire or not. And many Americans still can't believe that their government would kill innocents in drone strikes.

This is a moral failure -- and a political one too.

President Obama's defenders say that he'd have closed Guantanamo Bay if not for a recalcitrant Congress. True or not, the fact remains that his drone policy doesn't just indefinitely detain people without charges, it outright kills them. Bush has been rightly castigated for failing to provide enough oversight to prevent accused terrorists from being abused. What does Obama do to prevent accused terrorists from being killed?

"Mr. Obama was an early convert to drones," the Wall Street Journal reports. "The CIA has had freedom to decide who to target and when to strike. The White House usually is notified immediately after signature strikes take place, not beforehand, a senior U.S. official said."

Gitmo innocents wasted years of their lives behind bars. Innocent victims of the drone strikes are dead forevermore.

Yet most Democrats who opposed Guantanamo Bay, a facility that is still open, will back Obama, sans even a primary challenge from the civil libertarian wing of the party, and the Republicans, who once campaigned on the idea of a humble foreign policy, won't so much as criticize Obama for his drone war, preferring to portray him as soft on Islamist terrorists.

Our system of government was designed so that, in order for the government to kill lots of foreigners, the Congress had to declare war. Today agents of the government wage a partly classified, undeclared drone war administered by our spy agency, which is accountable to the president only after it scores a kill. Is the Nobel Peace Prize committee still happy with its choice? Is this to go on for four more years? Here are the newest changes to the program:

"The State Department won greater sway in strike decisions; Pakistani leaders got advance notice about more operations; and the CIA agreed to suspend operations when Pakistani officials visit the U.S."

Is that enough?

Drones : Killing For Sport?

October 29, 2011

Activist Post - Each time that I hear of a new drone strike by America in some distant foreign land, by some video game player wielding a computer joystick in Nevada, I get an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my soul that my country has committed a cowardly act of murder, simply because it’s virtually risk-free and so easy to do so.

There is something about a remote-controlled, highly efficient killing machine that just does not sit well with me, both as a civilized human being, and an American citizen. And there is also something about the CIA conducting these so called ‘war on terror’ drone missions through a ‘Special Activities Division’, which has a conveniently irresponsible ring to it.

Without getting too deeply into the actual numbers of casualties, the notion of which most Americans are used to that collateral damage in the form of civilian deaths from drone strikes is non-existent or minimal, has been clearly disputed in an August 2011 report, by an independently backed British, not-for-profit, investigative journalism initiative, based at City University In London.

‘The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’ as it calls itself, is currently at odds with U.S. Intelligence officials, who for obvious reasons, often make it appear to the American public as if each and every drone strike they conduct is a logistical and surgical success.

Yet, according to the aforementioned report that I have cited, there are credible reports of more than 150 children having their lives snuffed out to date, via American military drones.

The idea that innocent people may be dying because of drone strikes, although chilling to consider, hardly comes as a shock to me at least, because like most people, I find it inconceivable that any machine constructed by human hands can ever be designed to function as perfectly as intended.

So instead of trying to justify any possible unintended civilian deaths or casualties, isn’t it a reasonably necessary time — with our most dangerous and notorious of foes all but routed and flattened — for any American possessing the least bit of conscience to ask themselves how it is possible for a child in Pakistan; or more recently perhaps in Yemen, to even slightly be considered a terrorist threat to the homeland of the United States?

The drone program of America is seldom spoken of by our government officials who are in the know, but that is to be expected I suppose. Yet, what alarms me more are my fellow citizens who seem so utterly desensitized to the idea of the CIA taking out any human target it may please with hellfire missiles, nearly a dozen years out since the attack on the World Trade center. When, if ever, is the United States going to be ‘safe’ or sated enough to end the bloodshed abroad, and to moth ball these vicious, mechanical terminators, which quite probably create more terrorists these days than they could possibly kill?

Whenever it is that I hear yet another news report of a military drone taking out some alleged threat to the United States – my blood begins to boil in both shame and indignation. This, simply because I am all but sure there are officers or personnel in some military control room thousands of miles away from the attack; not to mention over-zealous secret servants in Washington, all slapping one another on the back as though they have all actually done something heroic to defend their county.

Yet from this layman’s perspective, I don’t much find using a robot to sneak up on an enemy and perform an assassination much to be proud of. To the contrary, isn’t a drone mission an act of terror in itself? And if so, doesn’t it therefore seem logical to ask oneself if America has become a nation which hunts down people whom we suspect may do us harm, regardless of any significant capacity for them to do so, just for sport?

Drones Matter!

October 20, 2011

American Thinker - Drones are news when one kills people; otherwise, out of sight seems to equal out of mind. We may regret that; besides missiles, they're carrying political mischief and a transportation revolution.

Drones are remotely controlled air, sea, and land vehicles of various sizes, kinds, and uses. Hobbyists have used small ones for decades; almost anyone can use one. People also hack them and steal them.

We're going to see a lot more drones; the latest lets a soldier in the field dive it onto a target, where it explodes. We should be thinking about consequences before we're surprised by events. A public dialogue might save a lot of trouble.

President Bush generated left-wing criticism while allowing comparatively few drone attacks; President Obama, with several times Bush's number of strikes, has hardly raised a dimple on the surface of the news. Because we've wrapped assassination in new technology, it's apparently now acceptable, at least to most of the media.

Does President Obama realize the picture he presents apologizing for American arrogance while sending drones to other countries to very publicly kill people? It looks foolish at home and hypocritical where the drones hit.

Killer drones are a very accurate form of artillery that takes everybody close by along with the victim and sometimes finds the wrong house or car. In principle, it's just a big, mobile gun. A drone killing is a P/R disaster where it hits (how would you feel about Chinese drones killing folk in San Francisco?), and it invites future reprisals as drones proliferate. Proliferation won't take long, either; U.S. military drones are active in dozens of countries, flying from 60 or more bases scattered over the world (not counting ships) and with so many hands involved now that the rapid spread of the technology is guaranteed. Add to that the fact that other friendly and not-so-friendly countries are playing catch-up at top speed.

We shouldn't forget that a drone doesn't need to fly to kill people. Those on wheels or in the water can work just as well; naval torpedoes are primitive drones, right? And we really haven't seen what's possible in car bombs yet, though we will: suicidal drivers will be replaced with technology.

At the moment, some victims are al-Qaeda folk, a group that attacked the U.S. More are Taliban, a group that didn't but whose members belong to a country the U.S. invaded. That's a very limited clientele that we should expect to see enlarged as other users' programs come on stream. Something to think about...

For a while, everyone will assume that any drone victim is a U.S. government victim, though increasingly, that won't be true as the technology finds more users. Further issues with U.S. government use appear when the victims are Americans supposed to be constitutionally protected. Historically, killing others at will has been an earmark of tyranny; it was emphatically not a presidential power intended by the Founders. So where did President Obama acquire it? If al-Qaeda leaders and Obama both claim the right to kill at will, maybe they're not so different.

Drones raise other questions; they can replace people; invade privacy; and clutter crowded skies, streets, and waterways. Drones already clutter earth orbits, range into space, and occasionally fall back onto our heads. Driverless drones transport us around airports; those will come to include driverless trains, trucks, buses, and finally cars. Drones also inspect oil and gas pipelines and sewers; tiny ones are beginning to do surgery. The list will only grow.

Air traffic control depends on people talking. How will flying drones fit in? How will illegal users be handled? Drones are already flying; this needs attention.

Driverless transporting of people and goods will probably wait as long as unions can stall them -- especially passenger aircraft with delay enhanced by fear. But how about air freight? The U.S. Navy is now testing a full-sized drone jet fighter designed for carrier use; air freight should be easy.

As drones multiply, conflicts and competition will pull users into a struggle to control or deny uses. Much human progress will be served -- or disserved -- by the way these struggles work out. Government will have its hand in; noting that a camel is said to be a horse designed by a government committee, should surgical drones be regulated by an Obamacare committee at this early stage of development? We know that unionized and regulated American railroads are costly and inefficient; are the benefits of drone tech likely to flower in that milieu? The potential gains are huge, but they could be postponed for decades.

The currently leading user provides a clue: the U.S. Air Force flies most of the Global Hawks, Reapers, Predators, and other large flying drones from control rooms resembling TV studios, often in Nevada. Though computers do most of the flying, the Air Force requires all its drone operators to be fully trained, certified pilots, a bit like mandating that rocket scientists fire 4th of July rockets at the park. Smaller, battlefield-surveillance drones are flown by army sergeants with a week or two of training. The Air Force doesn't like the larger drones out of its hands, grudgingly allowing some to the CIA.

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