One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby Grizzly » Thu Jun 27, 2013 10:21 pm

http://pactac.net/series/digital-inflections-drone-warfare/

The CTheory seminar on Drone Wars was held at the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture on June 5th, 2013. The seminar includes short presentations, discussion and a new video by Jackson 2bears, "After the Drones."

DRONE WARS

----------

The increasing use of drones as a tactical military strategy deployed in the "War on Terror," raises three questions of urgent significance for contemporary political and social theory. First, as Judith Butler has noted in Frames of War one of the primary division lines of contemporary politics involves "bodies that count" and, conversely, bodies that don't count. In this case, the deployment of drones as a military strategy might be viewed as premised on a prior moral calculation concerning whose bodies are deemed grieveable and thus worthy of remembrance and those rendered, in effect, ethically invisible. Second, while drone warfare involves sophisticated cybernetic technologies, it also involves a prior ontological understanding concerning the existence of good and evil in the world. For example, President Obama's justification for the use of military violence in the exercise of the "Just War" is explicitly based on a public rhetoric supporting an absolutist conception of evil. Third, the seemingly widespread acceptance of drones for purposes ranging from surveillance, targeting and exploration is, in the end, perhaps less a novel technological development than one which indicates a fundamental change in human subjectivity. In this case, perhaps drones can be so acceptable because we have passed beyond human subjectivity into something very different, still unexplored, namely a new form of subjectivity anticipated in the writings of Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, and Jean Baudrillard.

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
User avatar
Grizzly
 
Posts: 4722
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:15 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 28, 2013 9:39 am

In 2009, Lebanon filed a complaint with the United Nations, presenting over 7,000 documents pertaining to Israeli violations of the Lebanese territory.

Israeli warplanes and drones have violated Lebanon’s airspace and flown over several areas of the country.


The Lebanese Army Command Guidance Directorate said two Israeli drones violated the airspace from above the southern village of al-Naqoura, situated about 91 kilometers (57 miles) south of Beirut at 9:35 a.m. local time (0625 GMT) on Thursday.

According to the report, the Israeli drones also executed circular flights over the southern towns of Baalbeck and Hermel. The drones then left the Lebanese skies at around 8:20 p.m. local time (1720 GMT).

The report further indicated that six Israeli warplanes also breached Lebanon’s airspace at around 11:00 a.m. local time (0800 GMT) and executed circle flights over different parts of the country. They left the airspace at around 7:20 p.m. local time (1420 GMT).

Israel violates Lebanon’s airspace on an almost daily basis, claiming the flights serve surveillance purposes.

Lebanon’s government, the Hezbollah resistance movement, and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, have repeatedly condemned the Israeli overflights, saying they are in clear violation of UN Resolution 1701 and the Lebanese sovereignty.

UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which brokered a ceasefire in the war of aggression Israel launched on Lebanon in 2006, calls on Tel Aviv to respect Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

In 2009, Lebanon filed a complaint with the United Nations, presenting over 7,000 documents pertaining to Israeli violations of the Lebanese territory.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby Elvis » Wed Jul 10, 2013 9:41 pm

It's just sooo wonderful, that so many US tax dollars, great American minds and other valuable resources could be marshalled to produce this technological achievement.

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/07/10/navy-northrop-score-historic-first-with-successful-x-47b-drone-carrier-landing/

Navy, Northrop Score Historic First With (Mostly) Successful X-47B Drone Carrier Landings

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. and COLIN CLARK on July 10, 2013 at 3:06 PM

Image
X-47B Takes Off from USS Bush in May.

[UPDATED 8:00 pm with news that third landing attempt was aborted] Two out of three ain’t bad, if you’re trying something no one’s ever done before.

Landing on the narrow, pitching deck of a Navy aircraft carrier is one of the hardest things a human being can do. Today, for the first time in history, a robot did it — twice.

After all the VIPs and reporters had been hustled off the USS George H.W. Bush, however, a third attempt had to be aborted when the experimental X-47B electronic brain “self-detected a navigation computer anomaly,” a Navy spokesman emailed reporters this evening at 7:30. The drone diverted to a landing field ashore without further incident.

We’re working to get details on just what went wrong, but the abort underlines just how difficult and revolutionary it is to get an unmanned aircraft to land itself on a carrier. It’s also worth noting that it’s way more impressive that the X-47B drone detected the potential problem itself than it would have been if the humans on the ground had to figure it out. And it’s way better to have spotted the problem in flight than discovering it only because the drone crumpled itself into a multi-million-dollar fireball on the crowded carrier deck.

In fact, while it’s easy to be blasé about drones nowadays — with missile-firing Predators acting as the long arm of the war on terrorism abroad and the FAA working to get (unarmed) unmanned air vehicles, aka UAVs, flying in domestic airspace — the X-47B is something different, and not just because it can land on a carrier.

“Traditional” drones like the infamous Predator are best described as “remotely piloted aircraft”: There’s a human being — or two, or three — sitting in a cockpit-like control station on the ground, complete with joystick, where they eyeball video feeds on screens and fly the UAV much like a kid playing a computer game. But an operator on the ground never has the same feel for what the aircraft’s doing as a pilot physically in the plane; screens alone can’t substitute for the fine-tuned balance detection of the inner ear, to start with. There’s also always at least a little lag time between something happening to the aircraft, the data getting transmitted to the operator on the ground, and the operator’s reactions getting transmitted back. That’s part of the reason why drones crash uncomfortably often.

That kind of lag and error is intolerable in the split-second conditions of a carrier landing, when a slight slip can send the aircraft splashing into the water or smashing into the “island” housing the ship’s command bridge and radars. (Small drones such as the Scan Eagle have landed aboard ship before, sort of, but only by being so small they could crash into a net or snag a cable extended from the side of the vessel). Landing on a carrier deck requires the X-47B to be much more autonomous than earlier drones.

“We did not have somebody [aboard the ship] with a stick and throttle and a rudder to drive this thing,” Rear Admiral Mathias Winter told reporters after the first two (successful) landings. (Winter is the one-star admiral in charge of all the Navy’s unmanned aircraft programs). “We have automated routines and algorithms that were knitted together in an autonomous logic to tell the system to go do different activities, and it does it autonomously.”

As of the first two landings, Winter said, the drone was performing precisely as the simulations and computer models said it would. “We knew we were going to touch down X number of inches past the second wire, the [tail] hook was going to bounce X number of feet, and that hook point was going to engage the [No.] 3 cross-deck pendant at a specific time,” Winter told reporters in the cavernous hanger of the USS Bush, describing which of the carrier’s three “arresting gear” cables the drone was supposed to catch to brake itself to a halt. ”We’re going to [analyze] the data, but my visual eyeball showed that exactly happened.”

But even if a test event didn’t proceed precisely as planned, Rear Adm. Winter said prophetically, it would put the X-47B’s failsafes through their paces in valuable ways. ”In every event there’s success,” he said. If, for instance, the drone had come in for a landing and not caught the arresting gear, he explained, “there is ‘bolter’ logic in this system, so that if you do not engage, you have to be able to keep flying and be able to go around.” The Navy actually had the X-47B perform a “touch and go” — coming in for a landing, hitting the deck with its wheels, but then zooming off again — back in May, months before trying for an actual landing today.

Even today, the first event was not a landing but a “wave-off” to test the X-47B’s ability to come in for a landing but then break off when a control officer on the flight deck hit an abort switch. Human pilots are trained to watch for the guy on deck frantically waving his arms — hence the term “wave-off” — but a robot has to be told electronically.

Only after making sure that emergency system actually worked did the X-47B come in for the actual, historic landing. Then the drone taxied to the end of the flight deck, got loaded into the carrier’s launching catapult, and shot back into the air again, at which point it came round and made its second successful landing. Only on the third try did something glitch — and that it’s possible for this evolution to go wrong only underscores how historic today’s successes were.

So this isn’t rocket science: It’s actually more complicated than that. ”The engineers and our testers will go back and make sure that the signal strength, the different voltages, all the way down to the ones and zeroes, did exactly what we expected them to do,” Winter said in his press conference before the abort. “Where it didn’t, it’ll help [us] to understand.”



***



Policymakers in and out of the Navy were quick to extoll today’s first, successful set of landings:

“The first successful landing of an unmanned aerial vehicle on an aircraft carrier constitutes a revolution in carrier aviation,” Rep. Randy Forbes, chairman of the House Armed Services seapower and projections forces subcommittee. “Unmanned carrier aviation is a ‘game-changing’ technology that will facilitate American power projection, particularly in access-denied environments, for decades to come. Fielding this technology must be one of the Navy’s highest priorities.”

It’s tempting to compare the landing to the first aircraft landing on a ship executed by the Navy in 1917, as Navy Secretary Ray Mabus did. ”We have certainly come a long way in the 102 years since Eugene Ely made the first arrested landing aboard an aircraft carrier,” Mabus said in a statement.

Mabus touted the drone’s landing as proof that ”carriers will remain relevant throughout their 50-year lifespan.” But some analysts say large drones like the X-47B will compete with manned aircraft for the very limited deck space of a carrier and will duplicate capabilities they offer. Smaller drones may be better suited to carrier duty, they argue.

It’s very difficult to tell at this stage, but large UAVs or Remotely Piloted Aircraft or whatever we’re calling drones this week may eventually replace many manned platforms. Or they may become a limited force that supplements the manned force. The X-47B is an experimental aircraft and it will take years before the Navy and Marines figure out just what roles they are best suited for.

(One tidbit to bear in mind: the Navy has been very careful to say this is the first time ”a tailless, unmanned autonomous aircraft landed on a modern aircraft carrier.” Given the number of classified aircraft fielded over time, and the fact that other unmanned planes with tails may well have landed during classified missions, the Navy may be hinting at something here.)

The X-47B made its first carrier touch-and-go and takeoff in May, with the Navy clearly confident in the program and eager to move it along at a fairly brisk pace.

Topics: Adm. Jonathan Greenert, adm. mathias winter, drones, navy, Northrop Grumman, Ray Mabus, Rep. Randy Forbes, research and development, UAVs, USS George HW Bush, x-47b






I tought it was odd that Northrop Grumman was not mentioned in the body of the article.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7413
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby elfismiles » Wed Jul 10, 2013 10:36 pm

SkyNet Lives
Postby elfismiles » 15 Mar 2012
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34262

Image

Image

Image

Image
User avatar
elfismiles
 
Posts: 8511
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:46 pm
Blog: View Blog (4)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 10, 2013 10:46 pm

What They Can See
by Abby Zimet
Image

Worried yet by the first landing of an unmanned Navy drone on an aircraft carrier, thus rendering possible combat "anywhere on the planet"? If not, try this: First video on DARPA's "next generation of surveillance," the $18.5 million Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS), the most advanced surveillance system in the world, capable of patrolling at 17,500 feet and sending back high-resolution images of 1.8 gigapixels so clear you can see the color of a bad guy's - or good guy's, or your - shirt. Just so you know. And NOVA aired this a few months ago; God knows what they can do now.


http://video.pbs.org/video/2325492143/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 15, 2013 3:30 pm

Obama's secret kill list – the disposition matrix
The disposition matrix is a complex grid of suspected terrorists to be traced then targeted in drone strikes or captured and interrogated. And the British government appears to be colluding in it

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Sunday 14 July 2013 14.00 EDT

Barack Obama, chairing the 'Terror Tuesday' meetings, agrees the final schedule of names on the disposition matrix. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
When Bilal Berjawi spoke to his wife for the last time, he had no way of being certain that he was about to die. But he should have had his suspicions.

A short, dumpy Londoner who was not, in the words of some who knew him, one of the world's greatest thinkers, Berjawi had been fighting for months in Somalia with al-Shabaab, the Islamist militant group. His wife was 4,400 miles away, at home in west London. In June 2011, Berjawi had almost been killed in a US drone strike on an al-Shabaab camp on the coast. After that he became wary of telephones. But in January last year, when his wife went into labour and was admitted to St Mary's hospital in Paddington, he decided to risk a quick phone conversation.

A few hours after the call ended Berjawi was targeted in a fresh drone strike. Perhaps the telephone contact triggered alerts all the way from Camp Lemmonier, the US military's enormous home-from-home at Djibouti, to the National Security Agency's headquarters in Maryland. Perhaps a few screens also lit up at GCHQ in Cheltenham? This time the drone attack was successful, from the US perspective, and al-Shabaab issued a terse statement: "The martyr received what he wished for and what he went out for."

The following month, Berjawi's former next-door neighbour, who was also in Somalia, was similarly "martyred". Like Berjawi, Mohamed Sakr had just turned 27 when he was killed in an air strike.

Four months later, the FBI in Manhattan announced that a third man from London, a Vietnamese-born convert to Islam, had been charged with a series of terrorism offences, and that if convicted he would face a mandatory 40-year sentence. This man was promptly arrested by Scotland Yard and is now fighting extradition to the US. And a few weeks after that, another of Berjawi's mates from London was detained after travelling from Somalia to Djibouti, where he was interrogated for months by US intelligence officers before being hooded and put aboard an aircraft. When 23-year-old Mahdi Hashi next saw daylight, he was being led into a courtroom in Brooklyn.

That these four men had something in common is clear enough: they were all Muslims, all accused of terrorism offences, and all British (or they were British: curiously, all of them unexpectedly lost their British citizenship just as they were about to become unstuck). There is, however, a common theme that is less obvious: it appears that all of them had found their way on to the "disposition matrix".

The euphemisms of counter-terrorism

When contemplating the euphemisms that have slipped into the lexicon since 9/11, the adjective Orwellian is difficult to avoid. But while such terms as extraordinary rendition, targeted killing and enhanced interrogation are universally known, and their true meanings – kidnap, assassination, torture – widely understood, the disposition matrix has not yet gained such traction.

Since the Obama administration largely shut down the CIA's rendition programme, choosing instead to dispose of its enemies in drone attacks, those individuals who are being nominated for killing have been discussed at a weekly counter-terrorism meeting at the White House situation room that has become known as Terror Tuesday. Barack Obama, in the chair and wishing to be seen as a restraining influence, agrees the final schedule of names. Once details of these meetings began to emerge it was not long before the media began talking of "kill lists". More double-speak was required, it seemed, and before long the term disposition matrix was born.

In truth, the matrix is more than a mere euphemism for a kill list, or even a capture-or-kill list. It is a sophisticated grid, mounted upon a database that is said to have been more than two years in the development, containing biographies of individuals believed to pose a threat to US interests, and their known or suspected locations, as well as a range of options for their disposal.

It is a grid, however, that both blurs and expands the boundaries that human rights law and the law of war place upon acts of abduction or targeted killing. There have been claims that people's names have been entered into it with little or no evidence. And it appears that it will be with us for many years to come.

The background to its creation was the growing realisation in Washington that the drone programme could be creating more enemies than it was destroying. In Pakistan, for example, where the government estimates that more than 400 people have been killed in around 330 drone strikes since 9/11, the US has arguably outstripped even India as the most reviled foreign country. At one point, Admiral Mike Mullen, when chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, was repo rted to be having furious rows over the issue with his opposite number in Pakistan, General Ashfaq Kayani.


Admiral Mike Mullen (left), when chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, was reported to have furious rows over the drone programme with his opposite number in Pakistan, General Ashfaq Kayani (right). Photograph: Javier Diaz/Reuters
The term entered the public domain following a briefing given to the Washington Post before last year's presidential election. "We had a disposition problem," one former counter-terrorism official involved in the development of the Matrix told the Post. Expanding on the nature of that problem, a second administration official added that while "we're not going to end up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying 'we love America'", there needed to be a recognition that "we can't possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us".

Drawing upon legal advice that has remained largely secret, senior officials at the US Counter-Terrorism Center designed a grid that incorporated the existing kill lists of the CIA and the US military's special forces, but which also offered some new rules and restraints.

Some individuals whose names were entered into the matrix, and who were roaming around Somalia or Yemen, would continue to face drone attack when their whereabouts become known. Others could be targeted and killed by special forces. In a speech in May, Obama suggested that a special court could be given oversight of these targeted killings.

An unknown number would end up in the so-called black sites that the US still quietly operates in east Africa, or in prisons run by US allies in the Middle East or Central Asia. But for others, who for political reasons could not be summarily dispatched or secretly imprisoned, there would be a secret grand jury investigation, followed in some cases by formal arrest and extradition, and in others by "rendition to justice": they would be grabbed, interrogated without being read their rights, then flown to the US and put on trial with a publicly funded defence lawyer.

Orwell once wrote about political language being "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable". As far as the White House is concerned, however, the term disposition matrix describes a continually evolving blueprint not for murder, but for a defence against a threat that continues to change shape and seek out new havens.

As the Obama administration's tactics became more variegated, the British authorities co-operated, of course, but also ensured that the new rules of the game helped to serve their own counter-terrorism objectives.

Paul Pillar, who served in the CIA for 28 years, including a period as the agency's senior counter-terrorism analyst, says the British, when grappling with what he describes as a sticky case – "someone who is a violence-prone anti-western jihadi", for example – would welcome a chance to pass on that case to the US. It would be a matter, as he puts it, of allowing someone else to have their headache.

"They might think, if it's going to be a headache for someone, let the Americans have the headache," says Pillar. "That's what the United States has done. The US would drop cases if they were going to be sticky, and let someone else take over. We would let the Egyptians or the Jordanians or whoever take over a very sticky one. From the United Kingdom point of view, if it is going to be a headache for anyone: let the Americans have the headache."

The four young Londoners – Berjawi, Sakr, Hashi and the Vietnamese-born convert – were certainly considered by MI5 and MI6 to be something of a headache. But could they have been seen so problematic – so sticky – that the US would be encouraged to enter their names into the Matrix?

The home secretary's special power

Berjawi and Sakr were members of a looseknit group of young Muslims who were on nodding terms with each other, having attended the same mosques and schools and having played in the same five-a-side football matches in west London.

A few members of this group came to be closely scrutinised by MI5 when it emerged that they had links with the men who attempted to carry out a wave of bombings on London's underground train network on 21 July 2005. Others came to the attention of the authorities as a result of their own conduct. Mohammed Ezzouek, for example, who attended North Westminster community school with Berjawi, was abducted in Kenya and interrogated by British intelligence officers after a trip to Somalia in 2006; another schoolmate, Tariq al-Daour, has recently been released from jail after serving a sentence for inciting terrorism.

As well as sharing their faith and, according to the UK authorities, jihadist intent, these young men had something else in common: they were all dual nationals. Berjawi was born in Lebanon and moved to London with his parents as an infant. Sakr was born in London, but was deemed to be a British-Egyptian dual national because his parents were born in Egypt. Ezzouek is British-Moroccan, while al-Daour is British-Palestinian.

This left them vulnerable to a little-known weapon in the government's counter-terrorism armoury, one that Theresa May has been deploying with increasing frequency since she became home secretary three years ago. Under the terms of a piece of the 2006 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act, and a previous piece of legislation dating to 1981, May has the power to deprive dual nationals of their British citizenship if she is "satisfied that deprivation is conducive to the public good".


The Home Office is extraordinarily sensitive about its use of the power, but it is known that Theresa May has deprived at least 17 people of their British citizenship. Photograph: Chris Ison/PA
This power can be applied only to dual nationals, and those who lose their citizenship can appeal. The government appears usually to wait until the individual has left the country before moving them to deprive them of their citizenship, however, and appeals are heard at the highly secretive special immigration appeals commission (SIAC), where the government can submit evidence that cannot be seen or challenged by the appellant.

The Home Office is extraordinarily sensitive about the manner in which this power is being used. It has responded to Freedom of Information Act requests about May's increased use of this power with delays and appeals; some information requested by the Guardian in June 2011 has still not been handed over. What is known is that at least 17 people have been deprived of their British citizenship at a stroke of May's pen. In most cases, if not all, the home secretary has taken action on the recommendation of MI5. In each case, a warning notice was sent to the British home of the target, and the deprivation order signed a day or two later.

One person who lost their British citizenship in this way was Anna Chapman, a Russian spy, but the remainder are thought to all be Muslims. Several of them – including a British-Pakistani father and his three sons – were born in the UK, while most of the others arrived as children. And some have been deprived of their citizenship not because they were assessed to be involved in terrorism or any other criminal activity, but because of their alleged involvement in Islamist extremism.

Berjawi and Sakr both travelled to Somalia after claiming that they were being harassed by police in the UK, and were then stripped of their British citizenship. Several months later they were killed. The exact nature of any intelligence that the British government may have shared with Washington before their names were apparently entered into the disposition matrix is deeply secret: the UK has consistently refused to either confirm or deny that it shares intelligence in support of drone strikes, arguing that to do so would damage both national security and relations with the US government.

More than 12 months after Sakr's death, his father, Gamal, a businessman who settled in London 37 years ago, still cannot talk about his loss without breaking down and weeping. He alleges that one of his two surviving sons has since been harassed by police, and suspects that this boy would also have been stripped of his citizenship had he left the country. "It's madness," he cries. "They're driving these boys to Afghanistan. They're making everything worse."

Last year Gamal and his wife flew to Cairo, formally renounced their Egyptian citizenship, and on their return asked their lawyer to let it be known that their sons were no longer dual nationals. But while he wants his family to remain in Britain, the manner in which his son met his death has shattered his trust in the British government. "It was clearly directed from the UK," he says. "He wasn't just killed: he was assassinated."

The case of Mahdi Hashi

Mahdi Hashi was five years old when his family moved to London from Somalia. He returned to the country in 2009, and took up arms for al-Shabaab in its civil war with government forces. A few months earlier he had complained to the Independent that he been under pressure to assist MI5, which he was refusing to do. Hashi was one of a few dozen young British men who have followed the same path: in one internet video clip, an al-Shabaab fighter with a cockney accent can be heard urging fellow Muslims "living in the lands of disbelief" to come and join him. It is thought that the identities of all these men are known to MI5.

After the deaths of Berjawi and Sakr, Hashi was detained by al-Shabaab, who suspected that he was a British spy, and that he was responsible for bringing the drones down on the heads of his brothers-in-arms. According to his US lawyer, Harry Batchelder, he was released in early June last year. The militants had identified three other men whom they believed were the culprits, executing them shortly afterwards.

Within a few days of Hashi's release, May signed an order depriving him of his British citizenship. The warning notice that was sent to his family's home read: "The reason for this decision is that the Security Service assess that you have been involved in Islamist extremism and present a risk to the national security of the United Kingdom due to your extremist activities."

Hashi decided to leave Somalia, and travelled to Djibouti with two other fighters, both Somali-Swedish dual nationals. All three were arrested in a raid on a building, where they had been sleeping on the roof, and were taken to the local intelligence agency headquarters. Hashi says he was interrogated for several weeks by US intelligence officers who refused to identify themselves. These men then handed him over to a team of FBI interrogators, who took a lengthy statement. Hashi was then hooded, put aboard an aircraft, and flown to New York. On arrival he was charged with conspiracy to support a terrorist organisation.


Mahdi Hashi ... arrested and taken to court in the US after having his British citizenship revoked. Photograph: Teri Pengilley
Hashi has since been quoted in a news report as saying he was tortured while in custody in Djibouti. There is reason to doubt that this happened, however: a number of sources familiar with his defence case say that the journalist who wrote the report may have been misled. And the line of defence that he relied upon while being interrogated – that Somalia's civil war is no concern of the US or the UK – evaporated overnight when al-Shabaab threatened to launch attacks in Britain.

When Hashi was led into court in Brooklyn in January, handcuffed and dressed in a grey and orange prison uniform, he was relaxed and smiling. The 23-year-old had been warned that if he failed to co-operate with the US government, he would be likely to spend the rest of his life behind bars. But he appeared unconcerned.

At no point did the UK government intervene. Indeed, it cannot: he is no longer British.

When the Home Office was asked whether it knew Hashi was facing detention and forcible removal to the US at the point at which May revoked his citizenship, a spokesperson replied: "We do not routinely comment on individual deprivation cases, nor do we comment on intelligence issues."

The Home Office is also refusing to say whether it is aware of other individuals being killed after losing their British citizenship. On one point it is unambiguous, however. "Citizenship," it said in a statement, "is a privilege, not a right."

The case of 'B2'

A glimpse of even closer UK-US counter-terrorism co-operation can be seen in the case of the Vietnamese-born convert, who cannot be named for legal reasons. Born in 1983 in the far north of Vietnam, he was a month old when his family travelled by sea to Hong Kong, six when they moved to the UK and settled in London, and 12 when he became a British citizen.

While studying web design at a college in Greenwich, he converted to Islam. He later came into contact with the banned Islamist group al-Muhajiroun, and was an associate of Richard Dart, a fellow convert who was the subject of a TV documentary entitled My Brother the Islamist, and who was jailed for six years in April after travelling to Pakistan to seek terrorism training. In December 2010, this man told his eight-months-pregnant wife that he was going to Ireland for a few weeks. Instead, he travelled to Yemen and stayed for seven months. MI5 believes he received terrorism training from al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula and worked on the group's online magazine, Inspire.

He denies this. Much of the evidence against him comes from a man called Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali who once lived in the English midlands, and who was "rendered to justice" in much the same way as Hashi after being captured in the Gulf of Aden two years ago. Warsame is now co-operating with the US Justice Department.

On arrival back at Heathrow airport, the Vietnamese-born man was searched by police and arrested when a live bullet was found in his rucksack. A few months later, while he was free on bail, May signed an order revoking his British citizenship. Detained by immigration officials and facing deportation to Vietnam, he appealed to SIAC, where he was given the cipher B2. He won his case after the Vietnamese ambassador to London gave evidence in which he denied that he was one of their citizens. Depriving him of British citizenship at that point would have rendered him stateless, which would have been unlawful.

Within minutes of SIAC announcing its decision and granting B2 unconditional bail, he was rearrested while sitting in the cells at the SIAC building. The warrant had been issued by magistrates five weeks earlier, at the request of the US Justice Department. Moments after that, the FBI announced that B2 had been charged with five terrorism offences and faced up to 40 years in jail. He was driven straight from SIAC to Westminster magistrates' court, where he faced extradition proceedings.

B2 continues to resist his removal to the US, with his lawyers arguing that he could have been charged in the UK. Indeed, the allegations made by the US authorities, if true, would appear to represent multiple breaches of several UK laws: the Terrorism Act 2000, the Terrorism Act 2006 and the Firearms Act 1968. Asked why B2 was not being prosecuted in the English courts – why, in other words, the Americans were having this particular headache, and not the British – a Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson said: "As this is a live case and the issue of forum may be raised by the defence in court, it would be inappropriate for us to discuss this in advance of the extradition hearing."

The rule of 'imminent threat'

In the coffee shops of west London, old friends of Berjawi, Sakr, Hashi and B2 are equally reluctant to talk, especially when questioned about the calamities that have befallen the four men. When they do, it is in a slightly furtive way, almost in whispers.

Ezzouek explains that he never leaves the country any more, fearing he too will be stripped of his British citizenship. Al-Daour is watched closely and says he faces recall to prison whenever he places a foot wrong. Failing even to tell his probation officer that he has bought a car, for example, is enough to see him back behind bars. A number of their associates claim to have learned of the deaths of Berjawi and Sakr from MI5 officers who approached them with the news, and suggested they forget about travelling to Somalia.

Last February, a 16-page US justice department memo, leaked to NBC News, disclosed something of the legal basis for the drone programme. Its authors asserted that the killing of US citizens is lawful if they pose an "imminent threat" of violent attack against the US, and capture is impossible. The document adopts a broad definition of imminence, saying no evidence of a specific plot is needed, and remains silent on the fate that faces enemies who are – or were – citizens of an allied nation, such as the UK.


Londoner Bilal Berjawi died in a drone strike. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
But if the Obama administration is satisfied that the targeted killing of US citizens is lawful, there is little reason to doubt that young men who have been stripped of their British citizenship, and who take up arms in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere, will continue to find their way on to the disposition matrix, and continue to be killed by missiles fired from drones hovering high overhead, or rendered to courts in the US.

And while Obama says he wants to curtail the drone programme, his officials have been briefing journalists that they believe the operations are likely to continue for another decade, at least. Given al-Qaida's resilience and ability to spread, they say, no clear end is in sight.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby 8bitagent » Mon Jul 15, 2013 11:07 pm

Man, Cornell West...hardcore to the bone. He wrote this on his Facebook page today

Our criminal justice system is itself criminal, especially for poor and Black people – Yet the murder of over 200 innocent children by U.S. drones is also criminal. Will our “color-blind” president ever wake up and will the Obama apologists now admit the sad truth about his pathetic words and actions for Black and poor people? Does not his silence on poverty and race hide the sufferings of our precious Trayvons and Marissas here and abroad? Is Obama as committed to justice for Trayvon as he is to prosecuting Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden?
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
User avatar
8bitagent
 
Posts: 12243
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2007 6:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby elfismiles » Tue Jul 16, 2013 6:39 pm


Global Hawk: The drone the Pentagon couldn’t ground
By Richard H.P. Sia and Alexander Cohen | Center for Public Integrity

WASHINGTON — With billions of dollars in spending reductions looming, Air Force officials looked around last year for a program they could cut that was underperforming, had busted its budget and wasn’t vital to immediate combat needs.
Eventually, they settled on the production line for a $223 million aircraft known as the Global Hawk, with the wingspan of a tanker but no pilot in the cockpit, built to fly over vast terrain for a little more than a day while sending back data to military commanders on the ground.
“The Block 30 (version of Global Hawk) is not operationally effective,” the Pentagon’s top testing official had declared in a blunt 2011 report about the drones being assembled by Northrop Grumman in Palmdale, Calif. Canceling its production and putting recently built models into long-term storage would save $2.5 billion over five years, the service projected. Its missions could be picked up by an Air Force stalwart, the U-2 spy plane, which had room for more sensors and could fly higher.
What happened next was an object lesson in the power of a defense contractor to trump the Pentagon’s own attempts to set the nation’s military spending priorities amid a tough fiscal climate. A team of Northrop lobbyists, packed with former congressional staff and bolstered by hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, persuaded Congress to demand the drone’s continued production and operation.
In so doing, the contractor defied not only the leadership of the Air Force but also the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey. He told the House Armed Services Committee in February 2012 that the Global Hawk “has fundamentally priced itself out of our ability to afford it.” The White House, in two messages to Congress last year, said it “strongly objects” to the lawmakers’ demands for additional Global Hawks.
But its protests were to no avail.
Northrop’s successful campaign to thwart the government culminated in a letter this May from two influential House of Representatives lawmakers to newly installed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, reminding him of the requirement to buy three more of the drone aircraft at an estimated cost of at least $300 million.
The letter, whose authors – Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., and Rep. James Moran, D-Va. – have received a total of $135,100 from Northrop Grumman’s political action committee and employees for their election campaigns and leadership PACs since the beginning of 2009, is emblematic of the political forces now inhibiting a major drawdown in military spending.
Northrop Grumman’s political strategy “is entirely predictable: Hire the right people, target the right people, contribute to the right people, then link them together with subcontractors and go for the gold,” said Gordon Adams, who served as the senior White House budget official for national security from 1993 to 1997 and has studied defense spending and procurement for more than 30 years.
A spokesman for McKeon, Claude Chafin, said the lawmaker was responding to the absence of a credible Pentagon analysis supporting “the additional shedding of” assets such as the Global Hawk in the midst of “the war fighter’s growing need.”
Concurrent testing and production
Northrop Grumman has hailed the Block 30 – the largest drone in the U.S. arsenal – as an “unblinking eye” platform that does a better job of tracking objects on the ground for a longer period.
But Global Hawks ran into trouble partly because they were pressed quickly into service over Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other countries while still technically under development. Only after the new Global Hawks were in the field “did the services find out how commanders would actually use them,” said a congressional analyst who’s familiar with the program but wasn’t authorized to be quoted speaking about it.
The concurrent testing and production “put it at increased risk of cost growth,” the Government Accountability Office said last year. In all, the cost of a single Global Hawk jumped by more than 150 percent, from about $88 million in 2001 to $223 million in 2012, the GAO reported in March.
That record led a special Pentagon report June 28, examining why the defense-wide acquisition system routinely produces large cost overruns, to depict the Global Hawk in particular as an egregious outlier. “Analyzing just aircraft development contracts” such as Global Hawk, the report said, Northrop Grumman’s work had “significantly higher cost growth” than rival behemoths Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Rigorous testing from October 2010 through January 2011 led the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester to conclude, moreover, that the Block 30 was unreliable.
Given the Block 30 troubles, Air Force officials concluded in late 2011 that they couldn’t fly both that aircraft and the U-2 under provisions in the Budget Control Act.
But cost and reliability concerns took a back seat to the risk of losing jobs, said former Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., who played a key role last year in blocking the proposed retirement of Block 30s as the chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces.
Bartlett, who lost his bid for re-election last fall, spoke openly about how his colleagues on the full committee “see the military as a jobs program,” something he said wasn’t necessarily in the national interest. “How is that consistent with national security? And budget frugality?” he asked rhetorically, explaining that his colleagues often rationalize such dilemmas away.
After rumors of the program’s cancellation surfaced in late 2011, Northrop Grumman activated a “Support Global Hawk” website that described the drones as “high-flying, combat-proven aircraft (that) are so robust and reliable that they’re in high demand by war fighters who fly them.” The advocacy site listed all the suppliers, their congressional districts and the lawmakers who represented them. It also offered a “Take Action” form visitors could fill in that would be emailed to their elected officials.
Northrop Grumman also circulated fliers on Capitol Hill with a map of the country showing the locations of major Global Hawk manufacturing sites, military bases and major subcontractors.
Donations as aircraft was under discussion
Among the 26 in-house and outside lobbyists who identified Global Hawk or surveillance issues on their lobbying reports were three well-connected former Republican aides to the House Appropriations Committee.
The company also reached out to lawmakers in another familiar way – with well-timed campaign contributions. Its political action committee gave $10,000 to the re-election campaign and leadership PAC of House Armed Services Chairman McKeon in February and March 2012, when his committee was grilling senior Pentagon and Air Force officials about the Block 30 issue in public hearings, according to campaign finance records.
Barely six weeks later, McKeon’s committee approved the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill with the provision ordering the Air Force to keep flying Block 30s.
McKeon, whose district is home to Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale facility, where final assembly of Global Hawks is done, has received at least $113,000 from the company’s employees and PAC since he became the House Armed Services Committee chairman in January 2009, the Center for Public Integrity analysis shows.
In the end, the Air Force didn’t get what it said it wanted in 2011 or 2012: Congress ordered it to keep both the U-2 and the Global Hawk Block 30’s in operation.
"There’s no free lunch here," then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta complained at a news conference after McKeon’s committee acted. "Every dollar that is added will have to be offset by cuts in national security. And if for some reason they do not want to comply with the Budget Control Act, then they would certainly be adding to the deficit, which only puts our national security further at risk."
But after Moran and McKeon sent their letter to Hagel, the service folded its cards.
“The Air Force considers the three additional Block 30 aircraft excess to need; however, to comply with congressional direction, the Air Force is taking action to execute unobligated funding and acquire these last three Block 30 aircraft,” said Ed Gulick, an Air Force spokesman.
Copyright 2013 . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, independent investigative news outlet. For more of its stories on this topic go to www.publicintegrity.org.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/16/1 ... rylink=cpy

User avatar
elfismiles
 
Posts: 8511
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:46 pm
Blog: View Blog (4)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 17, 2013 1:35 pm

Zimmerman is a Domestic Drone
By Vijay Prashad

Source: CounterpunchWednesday, July 17, 2013

Vijay Prashad's ZSpace Page

Blood stained the street a few days before we moved into our home in Hartford, CT. in 1997. Our welcome block party was to be a vigil. It smelled of something rancid perfumed in eulogies of self-righteousness.

The corner down the street had become a transit point for the drug trade, already in its decline. One of the residents, Jay Boland, had taken on the role of vigilante for the street, defending it against the predations of the gang members. He carried a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson, once made down the road in Springfield, MA. Boland, the gangsters later said, used to sit in his car on the street with his gun in his lap. If any of them walked around, he’d threaten them. They claimed that on at least one occasion, Boland had used racist language against them. One hot August night, Boland returned home at 1am, confronted Samuel Davis near his home and –as Maxine Bernstein of the Hartford Courant wrote the story – “at least one neighbour heard an exchange of words, followed by one gunshot, a pause, and then a burst of gunfire.” The police accused Davis of shooting Boland first, and then Boland returned fire with his gun. Boland died in a neighbour’s arms, while Davis, bleeding, made a getaway, only to be later arrested.

In court, Davis flailed about, calling the Judge a Nazi and suggesting that the police had given the actual killer a deal while stringing him up. The press at that time characterized Davis as someone out of touch with reality. Another way to see it is that Davis well knew what was coming – he got a 100-year sentence. “You did post-graduate work in street crime,” said the Judge. It was open and shut.

No candle at the vigil was shaped like a .38, nor was one burning out the obscenities that might have polluted the languid air. It was clear to my neighbours that Boland was the hero, and that Davis the criminal. Even if Davis was a “post-graduate” in street crime, what made Boland a hero? The West End of Hartford had become a bastion of liberalism – lots of college professors and social workers, liberal preachers and massage therapists. The red meat of conservatism was not to be found here. “We moved to Hartford,” a man told me proudly. It was enough of a badge to live here, even with this anxiousness, to prove post-racism. It is the urban way of saying “we have Black friends,” which is now politically expressed as “we have a Black president.” Because these things happen – where you live, who your friends are, who your president is – seems sufficient to inoculate one from the structures of racism that encage not only our homes but our imagination. What was a Connecticut Yankee doing, sitting in his car, not far from Mark Twain’s home, with a police special in his lap, threatening drug dealers as they strayed from the corner?

What was George Zimmerman doing in his Honda Ridgeline, driving around Sanford, Florida, looking for trouble? If Trayvon Martin had been wearing a suit and driving a BMW, Zimmerman would have resented him – envy refracted through an enduring sense of racial hierarchy. That is why so many wealthy African Americans in fancy cars find themselves being unduly pulled over by white police officers – just checking, I suppose, if the car has been stolen. But Martin, age 17, had on a hoodie, which does not evoke resentment for the racist consciousness – only a strange mixture of fear and anger. If it were fear alone that struck Zimmerman, he would have turned off and driven home, left a lot of distance between himself and the person who he would have seen as a predator. But the racist consciousness does not experience fear without anger – it is the latter that forces him to go on the hunt. He had to get the target.

Zimmerman forced the confrontation, held out the gun and pulled the trigger. That is beyond question. What he did had been legally sanctified by the State of Florida. Zimmerman was Florida’s domestic drone, hovering around in his Ridgeline, looking for the “bad guys,” asking the home base – in this case the local police station – for permission to engage and then going in for the kill. Nothing he had done from the minute he began to stalk Martin was illegal, just as nothing is illegal to the drone operators as they set their Reapers into flight and let loose their Hellfire missiles on some unsuspecting “bad guys” who are en route to a wedding or just going out to get some kebabs on the ridge. Black youth on American streets or “military-age males” in the badlands of Af-Pak and Yemen are in the strike zone – combatants, as the White House put it of the latter, “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” If there is such intelligence (over the killing of 16 year old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in 2011, for example) the US does not apologize for it, but in private the President says he is “surprised” and “upset.” No one was charged with Abdulrahman’s murder, and if they were, they’d say that they stood their ground in killing all in the strike zone. Zimmerman and the drone operators fire the shot – but the ideology comes from above their pay grade.

Long before the financial crisis of 2007, it was plain that the US economy was in disarray. Jobless growth and credit-funded consumerism fuelled the growth rate. But beneath that lurked a growing social divide. During the Clinton years (1993-2000) society was laid on the rack as the new economic policies ratcheted widening social inequality. The elites knew what they were doing – in a landscape of joblessness, they cast off the indigent (Welfare Reform) and sent them to prison (Crime Bill). The future was left to the resilience of families and communities and to the underground economies (legal and illegal). Chronic joblessness, with a collapse of state institutions to expand the social wage, is met by an increase in the means of repression (police and jails) and the ideology of consumerism. It is a dangerous social soup. Michaelann Bewsee of Springfield’s Arise for Social Justice calls these neighbourhoods “an economic dustbowl.”

Parallel to the defeat of the US working-class in the 1990s, thrown into chronic unemployment and debt, was the rise of multiculturalism. To actually settle the aged question of racism, the State and society would have to uncover and unravel the ligaments of power. But this was not possible short of a major social transformation. Instead, the State and society encouraged a mild social policy – multiculturalism – which afforded the most talented and fortunate of the oppressed populations to become shining emblems of racism’s end. Look, these darker bodies suggest, we have arrived. But what is always in question is what this we refers to – to those few who have arrived or those many whose Sisyphean journey to the American Dream is to be short-circuited by someone else’s arrival. Obama is the president, ergo racism is over. What had succeeded over the course of the 1990s and into the 2000s was not anti-racism, but multiculturalism, whose success did not undermine racism. In fact, multiculturalism’s success sharpened racism. Obama’s ascent sharpened resentment, as does the sight of a Black family in a fancy car. What we live in now is what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the stagnant equality of sameness.” Integration with resentment, King suggested, is not a community. It is stagnant because there is little hope of transcending the resentment. It is sameness because there is no understanding that ancient inequalities that have now hardened cannot be simply wished away. They have to be confronted and overcome.

Trayvon Martin and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki were teenagers, young children eager to make something of themselves in this world. To the eyes of the racist consciousness neither were human – they were threats to be liquidated. The awful immediacy of vigilante justice is back, with bearers of this terrifying reality being its executioners – a Zimmerman here, a drone operator there. In a society that seems to only doff its cap to the military and the police, it is no wonder that ordinary civilians want to be associated with that kind of heroism. They believe that heroism is to be found on the trigger end of a gun or a missile. But real heroism might be found elsewhere – in the byways of US society where ordinary people are working hard to transform this ghastly jobless growth engine into something meaningful. The real heroes are the one who will organize the Justice for Trayvon rallies, raising awareness amongst their neighbours of the social costs of the policies plotted by the elites. If people like Zimmerman dreamed a little less about being a hero in the conventional sense, he’d have lived a more generous life. As someone put it on Twitter, wouldn’t it have been nice if on February 26, 2012, a man in a Honda Ridgeline pulled up beside a teenager out to get some snacks in the pouring rain and asked him if he wanted a ride home?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 17, 2013 2:16 pm

Air Force Drone Crash Closes Remote Fla. Highway

TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. July 17, 2013 (AP)
A remote stretch of a Florida Panhandle highway is closed after an Air Force drone crashed near the area.

Tyndall Air Force Base says the QF-4 drone crashed on takeoff early Wednesday. No one was injured in the crash.

The Air Force closed Highway 98 west of Panama City and east of Mexico Beach because of fires from the crash. Officials say the drone has a limited, 24-hour battery life and will be inactive after the battery is depleted.

Officials say the stretch of highway could remain closed for up to 24 hours.
TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. July 17, 2013 (AP)
A remote stretch of a Florida Panhandle highway is closed after an Air Force drone crashed near the area.

Tyndall Air Force Base says the QF-4 drone crashed on takeoff early Wednesday. No one was injured in the crash.

The Air Force closed Highway 98 west of Panama City and east of Mexico Beach because of fires from the crash. Officials say the drone has a limited, 24-hour battery life and will be inactive after the battery is depleted.

Officials say the stretch of highway could remain closed for up to 24 hours.


Image

Full Sized Jet Fighter Drone, QF-4, Crashes Along Florida Highway [PHOTOS]

By Robert Schoon (r.schoon@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Jul 17, 2013 12:08 PM EDT
Tags breaking news, Drones, U.S. Air Force, Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida

(Photo : Twitter: @WJHG_TV)
A full sized jet fighter, modified into an unmanned target drone, spun out of control Wednesday morning and crashed along U.S. Route 98, a highway near Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. No injuries have been reported.
This is the second time in a week, according to WJHG's report (via Gizmodo), that a drone has gone down at Tyndall Air Force Base, located near Panama City, Florida. According to Tyndall Air Force Base's statement, the drone was a QF-4 - a modified F-4 Phantom, a full-sized jet fighter-bomber which was primarily used by the Air Force during the Vietnam War era. The drones are used as a realistic full-scale target for air-to-air weapons system tests.
Like Us on Facebook

A McDonnell F4H-1F (later F-4A) Phantom II fighter during carrier qualification trials on the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Independence (CVA-62) in April 1960. (Credit: USN)
Eyewitnesses said that the large drone came in "hard and fast," according to WJHG's report, and then exploded, sending up a huge black cloud of smoke. Last Wednesday morning, Tyndall Air Force Base destroyed a QF-4 drone over the Gulf of Mexico for "safety considerations during its return to base following a routine operation," according to the Air Force's statement.
The drone can be flown remotely, and according to the Air Force's fact sheet, an explosive device is placed in the QF-4 to destroy the aircraft remotely if it should become uncontrollable and pose a danger to those on the ground. As of yet, it's unclear whether this fail-safe worked, though a picture from the highway nearby, US 98, shows smoke billowing up from the ground.


A QF-4 Drone in flight as it is tracked by a missile at Tyndall AFB, Fla. The drones are used as moving targets to test weapons. (Credit: USN)
The drone was assigned to the 53rd Weapons Evaluation Group and crashed during take-off at 8:25 Wednesday morning. Authorities have closed the highway near the crash site. The road may be closed for up to 24 hours, and Panama City drivers headed to Mexico Beach are encouraged to use Highway 22 east to Highway 71 south as a detour.
A statement has been released by Tyndall Air Force Base on the incident:
"An unmanned Air Force QF-4 drone, assigned here to the 53rd Weapons Evaluation Group, crashed on the drone runway during take-off at 8:25 a.m. today. No personnel were injured during the incident.
Base and local police and safety officials have closed Highway 98 and are anticipating that it will remain closed for up to 24 hours. This closure is being done strictly as a precautionary measure due to fires resulting from the crash and a small self-destruct charge carried on board the drone. The status of this device is unknown however, it is powered by a short-life battery which will be fully depleted in 24 hours.
The charge is used to destroy the drone if it leaves its pre-approved flight plan. Motorist traveling from Panama City to Mexico Beach, should use Hwy. 22 east to Hwy. 71 south, and from Mexico Beach to Panama City Hwy. 71 north to Hwy. 22 west.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby MayDay » Wed Jul 17, 2013 6:31 pm

Town of Deer Trail considering hunting licenses for unmanned aerial vehicles, bounties for drones
'They fly in town, they get shot down,' man says

Posted: 07/16/2013
Last Updated: 16 hours ago

Amanda Kost | Email Me
DEER TRAIL, Colo. - The small town of Deer Trail, Colorado is considering a bold move. The town board will be voting on an ordinance that would create drone hunting licenses and offer bounties for unmanned aerial vehicles.

Deer Trail resident, Phillip Steel, drafted the ordinance.

"We do not want drones in town," said Steel. "They fly in town, they get shot down."

Even though it's against the law to destroy federal property, Steel's proposed ordinance outlines weapons, ammunition, rules of engagement, techniques, and bounties for drone hunting.

The ordinates states, "The Town of Deer Trail shall issue a reward of $100 to any shooter who presents a valid hunting license and the following identifiable parts of an unmanned aerial vehicle whose markings and configuration are consistent with those used on any similar craft known to be owned or operated by the United States federal government."

7NEWS Reporter Amanda Kost asked Steel, "Have you ever seen a drone flying over your town?"

"No," Steel responded. "This is a very symbolic ordinance. Basically, I do not believe in the idea of a surveillance society, and I believe we are heading that way."

If passed by the town board, Deer Trail would charge $25 for drone hunting licenses, valid for one year.

"They'll sell like hot cakes, and it would be a real drone hunting license," said Steel, "It could be a huge moneymaker for the town."

Deer Trail resident, David Boyd, is also one of seven votes on the town board.

"Even if a tiny percentage of people get online (for a) drone license, that's cool. That's a lot of money to a small town like us,"said Boyd. "Could be known for it as well, which probably might be a mixed blessing, but what the heck?"

The board will consider the drone hunting ordinance on Aug. 6.

"I'm leaning towards yes," said Boyd. "I'm good with passing it as long as it's safe."

The ordinance specifies that weapons used for engagement of unmanned aerial vehicles would be limited to, "any shotgun, 12 gauge or smaller, having a barrel length of 18 inches or greater." Drone hunting licenses would be issued without a background investigation, and on an anonymous basis. Applicants would have to be at least 21 years old and be able to, "read and understand English."

Deer Trail, Town clerk, Kim Oldfield said, "I can see it as a benefit, monetarily speaking, because of the novelty of the ordinance."

Oldfield said there's talk of promoting the ordinance as a novelty and, "Possibly hunting drones in a skeet, fun-filled festival. We’re the home of the world’s first rodeo, so we could home of the world’s first drone hunt."

"If they were to read it for the title alone and not for the novelty and what it really is, it sounds scary, and it sounds super vigilante and frightening," said Oldfield. "The real idea behind it is it’s a potential fun, moneymaker, and it could be really cool for our community and we’ve needed something to bring us together, and this could be it."

7NEWS asked Deer Trail Mayor, Franks Fields, if he wanted the town to be known for drone hunting.

"Well, I don't know," answered Fields. "I haven't made my decision yet."

"It's all novelty. Do a little drone fest, get people to come out, have fun," Fields explained.

Said Steel, "To him it's a novelty, yes. To me, I'm serious."
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/ea ... for-drones
User avatar
MayDay
 
Posts: 350
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2012 7:30 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jul 19, 2013 10:06 am


Fake Signs On Bay Area Highways Say Drones Looking For Speeders (VIDEO)
July 19, 2013 12:17 AM
Image
MARIN COUNTY (KPIX 5) — Several signs have cropped up on Bay Area highways, telling drivers that drones are enforcing speed limits. The California Highway Patrol told KPIX 5 the signs are fakes and that they do not have drones.

“As people are driving by and they see something like this, it’s definitely a distraction,” said Officer Andrew Barclay of the California Highway Patrol.

“The first officer who saw this on Highway 37 was out patrolling his beat…did a double take, flipped around, came back, and confirmed it was what he saw.”

The metal signs say, “Speed enforced by drones.” They also show a drone firing a weapon.

Barclay said the signs violate Section 21465 of the California Vehicle Code, which prohibits imitation signs from being posted on highways.

According to Barclay, whoever made the signs knew what they were doing. “Professional materials, it is a black & white reflective sign, just like the signs that we use on the side of the road for speed limits, and everything else,” he said.

“One of the signs that we found on Highway 37 was actually mounted using tamper-resistant bolts,” Barclay said. “The other two signs were strapped using metal strapping on poles on the side of the freeway.”

Barclay said the agency does not have the unmanned aircraft.

“At CHP we definitely do not have drones. We use radar, lidar, pace, we have planes and we have helicopters, but we do not have drones,” he said. “Along with not having drones we definitely do not have any drones that would fire any type of weaponry.”

KPIX 5 learned several more signs have popped up on Bay Area roadways on Thursday. The Highway Patrol is investigating and checking in with sign makers to see if they filled the unique order.


http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/0 ... -highways/

User avatar
elfismiles
 
Posts: 8511
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:46 pm
Blog: View Blog (4)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby Joao » Fri Jul 19, 2013 3:21 pm

elfismiles » Fri Jul 19, 2013 7:06 am wrote:
Fake Signs On Bay Area Highways Say Drones Looking For Speeders

Image
Joao
 
Posts: 522
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jul 21, 2013 9:57 am

The huge drone that could not be grounded
A major defense contractor used campaign donations and insider access on Capitol Hill to defy the Air Force and keep a troubled drone aloft at a cost to taxpayers of billions of dollars
By Richard H.P. SiaAlexander Cohen 12:01 am, July 16, 2013 Updated: 2:04 pm, July 18, 2013

An RQ-4B Global Hawk Block 30 prepares to land at Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County, Calif. Chris Kaufman/AP

An Air Force proposal to save $2.5 billion by closing a drone production line and mothballing some of the aircraft was defeated this year and last year by its manufacturer, Northrop Grumman.
The drone, known as the Global Hawk Block 30, had numerous operating flaws and recurrent maintenance troubles.
Twenty-six lobbyists helped block the Air Force proposal, including many former congressional staff.
Northrop’s employees and PAC invested a half-million dollars in the 2012 election campaigns by members of the key decisionmaking committee, House Armed Services, and have given its chairman $113,000 since 2009.
With large budget cuts looming in the next decade, top Air Force officials knew last year they needed to halt spending on some large and expensive programs. So they looked for a candidate that was underperforming, had busted its budget, and wasn’t vital to immediate combat needs.

They soon settled on the production line for a $223 million aircraft with the wingspan of a tanker but no pilot in the cockpit, built to fly over vast terrain for a little more than a day while sending imagery and other data back to military commanders on the ground. Given the ambitious name “Global Hawk,” the aircraft had cost far more than expected, and was plagued by recurrent operating flaws and maintenance troubles.

“The Block 30 [version of Global Hawk] is not operationally effective,” the Pentagon’s top testing official had declared in a blunt May 2011 report about the drones being assembled by Northrop Grumman in Palmdale, Calif.

Canceling the purchase of new Global Hawks and putting recently-built planes in long-term storage would save $2.5 billion over five years, the service projected. And the drone’s military missions could be picked up by an Air Force stalwart, the U-2 spy plane, which had room for more sensors and could fly higher.

But what happened next was an object lesson in the power of a defense contractor to trump the Pentagon’s own attempts to set the nation’s military spending priorities amid a tough fiscal climate. A team of Northrop lobbyists, packed with former congressional staff and bolstered by hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, persuaded Congress to demand the drone’s continued production and operation.

In so doing, the contractor — which had revenue of $25.2 billion in 2012, more than 90 percent from the federal treasury — defied not only the leadership of the Air Force, but also the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey. He told the House Armed Services Committee in February 2012 that the Global Hawk “has fundamentally priced itself out of our ability to afford it.” The White House, in two messages to Congress last year, said it “strongly objects” to the lawmakers’ demand for additional Global Hawks, but the protests were to no avail.

Northrop’s strikingly successful campaign to thwart the government culminated in a letter this May from two influential House lawmakers to newly installed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, reminding him of the requirement to buy three more of the drone aircraft. The Air Force, they complained to Hagel, had not heeded “clear congressional intent [and] explicit direction to complete the acquisition.”

The letter, whose authors — Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., and Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va. — received a total of $135,100 from Northrop Grumman’s political action committee and employees for their election campaigns and leadership PACs since the beginning of 2009, is emblematic of the political forces that helped stoke a 117 percent jump in the Defense Department’s procurement budget from fiscal year 2001 through its peak in fiscal year 2010.

Those forces are now causing some lawmakers to resist the drawdown in military spending that President Obama and some military analysts say is needed to help shrink the federal deficit, projected to be $759 billion this year, and repair the nation’s long-term economic health.

Northrop Grumman’s political strategy “is entirely predictable — hire the right people, target the right people, contribute to the right people, then link them together with subcontractors and go for the gold,” said Gordon Adams, who served as the senior White House budget official for national security from 1993 to 1997 and has studied defense spending and procurement for more than 30 years.

“Killing a major program, in production, is rather like vampire-killing,” Adams added. “You have to drive a silver stake through its heart to make sure it is dead.”

The battle over the Global Hawk is one of many in which a major defense contractor and its influential friends in Congress have forced the military to spend money on hardware it doesn’t want. An Army proposal in 2011 to stop refurbishing the M1 Abrams tank to save $3 billion was blocked by the same House and Senate defense panels in response to the lobbying muscle of the tank manufacturer, General Dynamics.

A contractor-driven campaign “often works,” Adams said. “It eked out more F-22 [fighters] than the Air Force wanted. It extended the C-17 [transport] production line by several years as Congress ordered up 10 more aircraft beyond what the Air Force needed.”

The case of the Global Hawks Block 30s also shows how lawmakers — even deficit hawks who say they want to slash federal spending — still earmark money for favored defense projects, even though such earmarks are formally prohibited by both House and Senate rules.

In this case, the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill Congress passed last December and the spending bill it enacted in March require the Air Force not only to keep flying Block 30s for roughly $260 million a year through calendar year 2014, but to also spend as much as $443 million on three more. The House — which has been Northrop Grumman’s close ally in the fight — voted in June for a fiscal year 2014 defense authorization bill that extends Block 30 operations two additional years, through 2016.

Unexpected maintenance and flight problems

The Global Hawk at issue — the largest drone in the U.S. arsenal — is a successor to a smaller Block 10 drone that the Air Force flew successfully from 2001 until 2011. Northrop Grumman hailed the Block 30 as an “unblinking eye” platform that does a better job of tracking objects on the ground for a longer period.

But in a reversal of the prescribed path in which weapons systems are designed and fully tested before going into full production and being dispatched to war zones, Global Hawks were pressed quickly into service over Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the Horn of Africa, Japan and Haiti while still technically under development.

The reason is that the drones were a “technology push rather than a requirements pull,” in which the manufacturer developed a new capability before combat commanders specified exactly what they needed, according to a congressional source familiar with the program. Only after the new Global Hawks were in the field “did the services find out how commanders would actually use them,” he said. Randy Belote, Northrop Grumman’s vice president for strategic communications, declined comment on this characterization.

The Block 30 models were designed to fly for 28-35 hours compared to the 10-12 hour endurance limit of the piloted U-2s. But unlike the U-2, Global Hawks are not equipped with electronic countermeasures to defeat air defenses, and lack the U-2’s “all-weather” capability, according to congressional testimony by Air Force officials.

Moreover, the drones and their sensors have been prone to a wide range of problems, many of them blamed on the speed with which the aircraft were deployed.

To meet certain data needs, for example, Block 30s have been torn apart and rebuilt to add some sensors already present on the U-2. Built with hardwired sensors, unlike a newer, more “plug-and-play” version known as the Block 40, the Block 30 “lacks the flexibility to change with new requirements,” said the congressional source, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

The concurrent testing and production also “put it at increased risk of cost growth,” the Government Accountability Office said last year, and the program has twice triggered special statutory provisions alerting Congress to its cost overruns. In all, the cost of a single Global Hawk jumped by more than 150 percent, from about $88 million in 2001 to $223 million in 2012, GAO reported in March.

That record caused a special Pentagon report on June 28, examining why the defense-wide acquisition system routinely produces large cost overruns, to depict the Global Hawk in particular as an egregious outlier. “Analyzing just aircraft development contracts” such as Global Hawk, the report said, Northrop Grumman had “significantly higher cost growth” than rival behemoths Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

The program was restructured in 2011 by Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, then the Pentagon’s procurement chief, who nonetheless told Congress that its continuation “is essential to national security.” He cut the number of Block 30s to be bought and scaled back the full program’s price tag of $13.9 billion to $12.4 billion.

Meanwhile, rigorous testing from October 2010 through January 2011 led the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester to conclude that the Block 30 was unreliable. The Block 30’s “mission-critical air vehicle components fail at high rates, resulting in poor takeoff reliability, high air abort rates, low mission capable rates, an excessive demand for critical spare parts and a high demand for maintenance support,” J. Michael Gilmore said in a May 2011 report.

When flying at a near-continuous pace, the Block 30 provided less than half the required 55 percent “Effective Time On Station” coverage — the amount of time loitering over a target to gather intelligence — over a 30-day period, Gilmore said. Its sensor to identify radar and communications signals “does not consistently deliver actionable signal intelligence end-products to operational users due to technical performance deficiencies” and other reasons, he said.

As a result, Gilmore added, the Block 30 “is not operationally effective for conducting near-continuous, persistent ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations].”

Bracing for congressional “impact”

Given the Block 30 troubles, Air Force officials concluded in late 2011 that they could not fly both that aircraft and the U-2 under provisions in the Budget Control Act. The U-2 already met all the military’s requirements for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, while significant investment would be needed to give Block 30s the same capabilities.

The Air Force knew its decision would be controversial on Capitol Hill. “We were bracing for impact,” recalled a retired Air Force pilot who worked with the Air Force liaison office. “There are too many constituencies tied to the Global Hawk.”

“The Block 30 Global Hawk has fundamentally priced itself out of our ability to afford it when the U-2 gives, in some cases, a better capability and, in some cases, just a slightly less capable platform,” Dempsey told a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Feb. 15, 2012. “So what you are seeing there is our ability to eliminate redundancy, to continue to invest in the best value, and to avoid at every possibility redundancy that fundamentally is too expensive.”

But cost and reliability concerns took a back seat to the risk of losing jobs, said former Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., who last year played a key role in blocking the proposed retirement of Block 30s as chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces.

Bartlett, who lost his bid for re-election last fall, spoke openly about how his colleagues on the full committee “see the military as a jobs program,” something he said is not necessarily in the national interest. “How is that consistent with national security? And budget frugality?” he asked rhetorically, asserting that his colleagues often rationalize such dilemmas away.

“Everybody has to look in the mirror and not see a jerk, so they have to argue with themselves that keeping this factory going in their district is the best thing for their country, whether it is or not,” Bartlett said.

After rumors of the program’s cancellation surfaced in late 2011, Northrop Grumman activated a “Support Global Hawk” website that described the drones as “high-flying, combat-proven aircraft [that] are so robust and reliable that they’re in high demand by warfighters who fly them.”

The advocacy site, which Belote, the Northrop Grumman spokesman, told the Center for Public Integrity was set up at the request of company employees who supported the Block 30, listed all the suppliers, their congressional districts and the lawmakers who represented them. The site also offered a “Take Action” form visitors could fill in that would be emailed to their elected officials. “Please help our troops continue to receive this much-needed capability,” the site said.

Northrop Grumman also circulated fliers on Capitol Hill with a map of the country showing the locations of major Global Hawk manufacturing sites, military bases and major subcontractors. The “Global Hawk Enterprise across the U.S.” has 3,483 Northrop Grumman employees in 22 states, 303 suppliers in 36 states and almost $600 million in supplier purchases, the flier said.

It was a sales pitch that major defense contractors — and often the military services themselves — routinely circulate on Capitol Hill. “There are probably 500 floating around right now,” a House armed services aide said, referring to fliers similar to Northrop Grumman’s, emphasizing the jobs issue.

Among the 26 in-house and outside lobbyists who identified Global Hawk or surveillance issues on their lobbying reports were three well-connected former Republican aides to the House Appropriations Committee: Jeff Shockey, a former staff director; John Scofield, a former communications director; and Letitia White, a longtime aide to former Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif. Also on the team was Northrop Grumman Vice President for Government Relations Sid Ashworth, who spent 14 years on the Senate Appropriations Committee staff, serving as staff director for two subcommittees, including defense.

Northrop Grumman employee and PAC contributions to House Armed Services members

April 27 — A key House
subcommittee adds $260.4 million
for Global Hawk Block 30 operations.
Feb. 13, 2012 — Obama releases
his budget for FY 2013, including
cancellation of the Global Hawk Block 30.
May 17 — The House
Appropriations Committee approves
the FY13 defense spending bill.
Feb. 28 — Air Force
officials testify about
Global Hawk to the House
Armed Services Committee.
May 9 — The House Armed Services
Committee approves the National Defense
Authorization Act for FY 2013.
May 8 — Another House
subcommittee requires purchase
of three more Block 30s.
May 18 — The House
approves the FY 2013 National
Defense Authorization Act.
$55.3k over 7 days
$10k

Northrop Grumman employee and PAC contributions to House Armed Services, 2009-2012. Northrop Grumman has targeted its contributions at key members and subcommittees of House Armed Services. Chris Zubak-Skees/Center for Public Integrity
Discussions lubricated by donations

The company also reached out to lawmakers in another familiar way — with well-timed campaign contributions. A computer analysis of campaign finance records by the Center for Public Integrity shows that the company’s political action committee gave $10,000 to the re-election campaign and leadership PAC of House Armed Services Chairman McKeon in February and March 2012, when his committee was grilling senior Pentagon and Air Force officials about the Block 30 issue in public hearings.

Barely six weeks later, McKeon’s committee approved the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill with the provision ordering the Air Force to keep flying Block 30s through 2014.

McKeon, whose district is home to Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale facility where final assembly of Global Hawks is done, has received at least $113,000 from the company’s employees and PAC since becoming House Armed Services Committee chairman in January 2009, the CPI analysis shows. By comparison, McKeon received only $28,950 from the company’s employees and PAC in the four years before picking up the chairman’s gavel.

A spokesman for McKeon, Claude Chafin, said he was responding to the absence of a credible Pentagon analysis supporting “the additional shedding of” assets like the Global Hawk in the midst of “the warfighter’s growing need.”

Other members of his committee also received generous support from the company while the Global Hawk’s future was up for grabs during the first half of 2012, with at least $243,000, in total, flowing into their campaigns.

Many of these checks coincided with important steps in keeping the Global Hawk Block 30 program alive. For example, the House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Subcommittee voted on April 26, 2012 to approve its portion of the 2013 defense bill that included the provision requiring the Air Force to keep flying the drones. The following week, Northrop Grumman funneled $26,500 to seven subcommittee members, the largest one-week investment in the panel during the entire 2012 campaign cycle.

In all, Northrop Grumman employees and PAC gave considerably more in campaign contributions to the key House defense panels in the 2012 election cycle than they had in the previous one, the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis shows. Members of the full House Armed Services Committee received about $584,000, in total, during the 2012 election cycle, 46 percent more than in the 2010 cycle. Young’s House defense appropriations subcommittee received $191,000 in the 2012 cycle, an increase of nearly 50 percent.

Although McKeon was the top recipient of donations from Northrop Grumman’s employees and PAC among members of the four House and Senate defense committees, other influential House lawmakers also reaped substantial donations from the firm. Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., chairman of the powerful House defense appropriations subcommittee, received $40,500 in campaign and leadership donations since 2009. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., ranking member on House Armed Services, received $35,000 in the same period.

A spokesman for Young did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Smith said in an interview that he opposed mothballing a new aircraft “in favor of the U2 which is 50 or 60 year old technology.”

Belote, of Northrop Grumman, told the Center for Public Integrity that PAC contributions are made only at the request of lawmakers. “We do not solicit members to determine if they would like to receive PAC funds,” he said.

Belote confirmed that the Northrop Grumman’s PAC focuses on members of the four congressional defense panels — armed services and defense appropriations — and also on members of Congress whose districts include either company facilities or employees. In fact, Northrop Grumman and its employees gave almost $1.9 million to the campaigns and leadership PACs of members of the four panels since 2009, 52 percent of the total they gave to all members of Congress during the same period.

“We are very diligent in following PAC regulations and in meeting all reporting requirements,” Belote added.

A credibility problem for the Air Force

As the Air Force tried to counter Northrop’s lobbying effort in 2012, it faced a credibility problem. In early 2011, the service had initially urged that all 33 U-2s be retired and replaced with Global Hawk Block 30s, despite the drone program’s cost overruns and test failures.

“The Air Force … has done some things that were not well thought out,” said the retired pilot. He said the idea that Global Hawks could be substituted for U-2s first emerged a decade ago, when service officials were desperately looking for money to support full-scale production of the new F-22 fighter jet and thought ending the U-2 program would free up needed funds.

“Prior to that, there was never any discussion that Global Hawk could replace the U-2. There was zero analysis to support the idea,” this source said.

At that point, the Air Force had not designed the Global Hawk to perform all the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance work done by U-2s, which can fly at 70,000 feet and rival spy satellites in the quality of their imagery and data. Expensive upgrades would be necessary to make the drone a true competitor to the U-2, which had already been upgraded and will be viable through 2040.

As a result, skeptical lawmakers resoundingly defeated the Air Force’s bid to retire the U-2s, demanding in legislative language that the Air Force prove the Global Hawks would have the same or lower operating and maintenance costs than the U-2s.

Lawmakers and their aides subsequently inundated the Air Force with letters seeking detailed comparisons of the two programs, said the retired pilot, who helped the Air Force liaison office answer those requests.

Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman circulated an analysis of Air Force data that claimed the Global Hawk was cheaper to operate, giving ammunition to allies, such as Rep. Moran, a member of the House defense appropriations subcommittee.

Moran, who successfully urged Northrop Grumman to move its headquarters from Los Angeles to his district in Falls Church, Va., in 2011, confronted top Air Force officials at a May 9 hearing last year, insisting that their figures showing each aircraft operating at roughly the same $32,000 per hour cost was flawed and that the Global Hawk was cheaper to operate.

A spokesman for Moran did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Gen. Mark Welsh, the Air Force chief of staff, responded that the hourly cost was “about the same” but argued that, because U-2s are deployed closer to their surveillance targets, their operation costs much less overall. Taking that into account, “the U-2 costs less than the Global Hawk, which typically is more centrally located in a region and has a longer way to travel; therefore, the longer endurance flights — which are the strength of the Global Hawk — cost more money,” the general said.

“Those opposed to the Global Hawk retirement already had their answers,” the retired pilot said. “They didn't really want facts and explanations, so it was an exercise in futility.”

Northrop Grumman’s supporters also argued that after spending at least $4 billion to build the Block 30s, the drones should be put to good use, instead of being retired to the Air Force’s “boneyard” at the Davis-Monthan base in Arizona. Some lawmakers also argued that ending the Block 30 program could raise the cost of a version that the company was building for the Navy.

At a Feb. 28, 2012 hearing, Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla., who has received $17,500 from Northrop Grumman’s PAC since 2009, marveled about “these really cool” Global Hawks. “I've seen the Global Hawk up close, very impressive. You know, it makes you feel proud to be an American that this is the kind of stuff that we're putting out,” Rooney told top Air Force officials. “Nothing against the U2, but when you talk about antiquated systems versus what we've got to show the world in the future, it was just impressive.”

When Rooney asked why the Air Force couldn’t keep flying both of them, Gen. Norton Schwartz, then the Air Force chief of staff, responded that “if resources were not an issue or were less an issue, we might well make a strategic decision to do something along those lines, but we did not have that option.” He called the potential savings “not trivial.”

The contractor gets its way

But when Bartlett drafted the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill for his subcommittee on April 26, 2012, he included language ordering the Air Force to keep the Block 30s in service. Bartlett said in the interview that his staff director, who he said had met with Northrop’s lobbyists, obtained approval for that language from staff on McKeon’s committee. Bartlett’s staff director died in January.

“The U-2 is old and obviously needs maintenance to keep it going. They just never convinced us that, in fact, it would save money to throw [Global Hawks] on the trash heap,” Bartlett said in an interview.

The Senate Armed Services Committee took a different view, and accepted the Air Force’s claim that the Block 30’s were more costly and less useful. But the committee allowed the House position to prevail in a conference that resolved disagreements over the defense bill. And the result was that the Air Force did not get what it said it wanted in 2011 or 2012: It was instead ordered by Congress to keep both the U-2 and the Global Hawk Block 30’s in operation.

"There's no free lunch here," then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta complained at a news conference after McKeon’s committee acted. "Every dollar that is added will have to be offset by cuts in national security. And if for some reason they do not want to comply with the Budget Control Act, then they would certainly be adding to the deficit, which only puts our national security further at risk."

Northrop Grumman at this point wants the Global Hawk budget to be approved as quickly as possible, and so it has offered the Air Force what it claims is a reduced price for the three additional aircraft. The Air Force until recently was not taking the bait, and it tried again this spring to resist the purchases.

But after Moran and McKeon sent their letter to Hagel, it folded its cards. “The Air Force considers the three additional Block 30 aircraft excess to need; however, to comply with congressional direction, the Air Force is taking action to execute unobligated funding and acquire these last three Block 30 aircraft,” said Ed Gulick, an Air Force spokesman.

Overall, defense procurement spending has been declining since 2011. But as the pie shrinks, “every contractor worth his salt is going to do battle for his system; every member of Congress, attentive to re-election, is going to discover that that one system is the key to our nation's security,” observed Adams, the former national security budget official. The services, he said, will get squeezed as a result and wind up buying more “things they don't need.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 22, 2013 8:16 am

CIVIL LIBERTIES
Al Jazeera English / By Charlotte Silver
Here Come the Drone Wars in America -- The Public vs. Overzealous Police
Using drones for surveillance in the US won't make overzealous police behaviour or lack of accountability disappear.
July 19, 2013

Recently, outgoing director of the FBI Robert Mueller revealed that his agency has used drones to conduct surveillance in the United States. Mueller's casual admission serves as an opportune moment for drone enthusiasts: introducing the FBI's domestic drone programme with nonchalance, he swung wide the door on which drooling police departments have long been banging.

For the past year, law enforcement agencies have tried with varying success to convince their wary constituents that drones are necessary for such innocuous, even beneficent, endeavors as conducting search and rescue operations, detecting forest fires and tracking down wandering Alzheimer patients.

Senator Dianne Feinstein pressed Mueller on the privacy risks drones pose to US citizens, but the FBI director needed only to reassure her that his agency had used drones in a "narrowly focused" way in order to quell any qualms the California Senator and Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee might have had. Hardly a champion of the public's right to privacy, however, Feinstein distinguishes herself as one of the most vocal opponents of transparency as well as a leader of the government's war on whistleblowers.

However, others are not so easily appeased.

"The FBI is in its own ball park in terms of rules and techniques. They really have their own rulebook... But local law enforcement has been secretive and very un-transparent about their desires to use drones so this will give them further ammunition that they don't need guidelines to adopt drones," said Nadia Kayyali, a legal fellow with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, in an interview with me.

"Troubling that Feinstein notes Americans' privacy concerns regarding drones, but the[n] has never seen - or apparently requested - the FBI's privacy limitations that exist to address those concerns," Micah Zenko of the Council of Foreign Relations noted on his blog on June 21.

But the notion that simply writing up and codifying a set of regulations for the domestic use of drones would be a silver bullet that adequately addresses privacy and Fourth Amendment concerns is a dubious one: police departments operate with near total impunity and very little transparency. With no accountability, rules have little meaning - as any grieving family member of someone extra-judicially shot and killed by the police will attest.

To shed further light on the deeply flawed mechanics of holding police accountable even to their own regulations, I spoke with Andrea Pritchett. Andrea has been overseeing police conduct in Berkeley, California for 23 years. She helped found Berkeley CopWatch, a grassroots group that monitors the conduct of the police on Berkeley's streets. Every week, the group's members and volunteers of all ages ride through the streets of Berkeley, listening to the police scanner and shadowing the path of the police so they can document their conduct. Sometimes, Andrea and other CopWatch workers traverse the city on foot, getting to know people on the streets, hearing their stories and learning about their interactions with the police.

Speaking at a public forum held last month in Berkeley to discuss the plans of Alameda County Sheriff's Department to acquire a drone, Pritchett said: "It's hard enough watching what police do on the ground, so if it all goes up in the air I don't know what we're going to do".

Pritchett's words bring what has been a largely theoretical conversation about domestic drone oversight into sharp and concrete focus. She has committed much of her life to the hard task of documenting police activities in an effort to hold them to account, and is intimate with the environment of impunity in which Berkeley police operate, their disregard for community concerns and the reticence with which they share information with the public.

The heavily redacted documents on the FBI's drone programmes, released by the FAA a day after Mueller's disclosure, give a glimpse into just how (un)transparent any law enforcement agency's drone programme will likely be and should reaffirm public skepticism.

Aside from learning that the FBI has operated UAV's since 2010, according to the Washington Post "the documents provide virtually no details" on the FBI's use of drones in US airspace, invoking "the need to keep law enforcement operations confidential".

"We have tried to monitor police conduct and we've been stymied at every point," Pritchett said. Pritchett has requested public records on the demographic statistics of individuals tracked, photographed and surveilled by the BPD in order to quantify racial profiling, and was told by the department they "didn't keep that information".

The limits of legislation

Last February, the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that 81 county and city law enforcement agencies had quietly applied for certificates of authorisation from the Federal Aviation Administration so that they could operate unmanned aerial vehicles in their localities. Police and sheriffs had simply sought acquisition of drones without consulting their communities or proposing any sort of policy framework that would govern the use of such vehicles.

In response, most states and some municipalities drew up legislation to regulate local law enforcement agencies' uses of drones. Many of those bills - introduced in all but seven states - adopted the language from model legislation and recommendations put forward by civil libertarian organisations such as the ACLU and the Tenth Amendment Center.

However, Kayyali pointed out that in some cases the states' proposed regulations had so many loopholes they appeared to be aimed at mollifying the public rather than effectively protecting its civil liberties.

Furthermore, according to Kayyali, largely absent in many of these pending bills is a crucial component, the right to sue law enforcement agencies for damages, that would enable civilians to hold the agencies accountable to any regulations. Of the six state bills that have been signed into law thus far, only Florida's and Texas' include such a right to civil litigation.

Norm Stamper, the former Chief of Police in Seattle, Washington, is now an outspoken critic of police conduct in America. In an interview with me he noted that the 18,000 jurisdictions in the country and police and sheriff's departments operate with varying protocols and relationships to their communities.

"There should be a routinised path of accountability so that the police and community are involved in drafting and articulating policies and procedures together," Stamper said. "It's critical that there be a full, authentic partnership between police and civil libertarians."

But as of now, that kind of cooperation doesn't exist: "Police operate unilaterally, and that is unacceptable and frightening," Stamper said. "I don't have confidence that American law enforcement is ready for that seamless partnership between themselves and the community."

Civil liberties lawyers have maintained that with stringent regulations, it's possible for law enforcement to adopt drone technology the "right" way. While it's clear the establishment of such regulations is crucial, it is only the first step and one that won't make law enforcement's thuggish behaviour or lack of accountability magically disappear. Civilians will continue to have to do battle to enforce regulations. That battle is already an uphill one and with drones to worry about, it will just get steeper.

Just ask a veteran of this struggle, Andrea Pritchett.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 43 guests