Pentagon mulls NATO request for more U.S. drones in Libya campaign
By David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times
July 21, 2011, 5:53 p.m.
Reporting from Washington— The Obama administration is considering sending more Predator drones and other surveillance planes to bolster the NATO air war in Libya, and has reopened a debate over whether to give weapons to the rebels seeking to overthrow Moammar Kadafi, a senior Defense Department official said.
NATO commanders requested the sophisticated surveillance aircraft after concluding that they were running out of military targets in Libya after four months of bombing and missile strikes against Kadafi's military forces and command facilities, U.S. and NATO officials said.
The Pentagon's willingness to consider strengthening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force in Libya marks an apparent shift since Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta took over the Pentagon early this month.
Panetta has emphasized that winning the war in Libya is one of his top priorities. His predecessor, Robert M. Gates, had urged European allies to do more and had stressed that the U.S. military was overstretched.
NATO commanders are especially eager to obtain more Predator drones, which can remain aloft for a dozen hours or longer, beaming live video and other intelligence data back to targeting analysts on the ground, a senior NATO officer said. The Predator drones can carry two air-to-ground missiles.
"It's getting more difficult to find stuff to blow up," said a senior NATO officer, noting that Kadafi's forces are increasingly using civilian facilities to carry out military operations. "Predators really enable you study things and to develop a picture of what is going on."
The Pentagon sent NATO several Predators to augment the Libya operation three months ago. Additional drones would permit expanded surveillance of facilities where the alliance suspects Kadafi and his inner circle are directing attacks, the officials said.
"We are looking at all the possibilities" for sending drones and other surveillance aircraft, said the senior Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the debate is ongoing.
The official said sending more Predator drones would require transferring them from war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, and counter-terrorism operations elsewhere, and that some U.S. officials and senior commanders oppose the move.
"The reason why this is hard is that everything we have is currently committed elsewhere," the official added.
Ali Aujali, the rebels' envoy in Washington, said the rebel leadership had long ago put in a request for U.S. military aid. He said the need is for small arms, antitank weapons and four-wheel-drive vehicles for the desert, as well as equipment to detect minefields laid by Kadafi's forces.
"We can't get rid of this man by throwing eggs at him," Aujali said.
The war in Libya has cut the country in half. Kadafi still controls the capital, Tripoli, and much of the surrounding area in the west. The rebels hold the country's eastern region. Giving the rebels lethal aid for the first time would signal that the White House has decided to deepen the U.S. role in hopes of turning the tide in the rebels' favor.
The Obama administration has furnished the rebels with uniforms, boots, radios, tents, medical supplies and other nonlethal assistance since April. But the United States declined to provide weapons and other lethal aid, in part because Washington did not formally recognize the rebels.
That hurdle was crossed last week when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that the United States would join more than 30 other nations in recognizing the rebel leadership coalition, known as the Transitional National Council, as Libya's government.
"Now that the recognition has taken place, I think that discussion" of providing military aid "will be back on the table," the senior Pentagon official said.
France and several other countries have acknowledged providing small arms and other military aid to the rebels. Any U.S. decision to send assistance would be made in consultation with allies, Defense Department officials said.
The fighting in eastern Libya has appeared stalemated for weeks. In the west, rebels in the Nafusa Mountains and the coastal enclave of Misurata have made slow progress in their drive toward Tripoli.
With Kadafi refusing to step down despite the NATO bombing, the Obama administration has gradually accepted that a solution to the crisis could involve letting him stay in Libya.
The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said this week that the administration continued to believe that Kadafi had lost legitimacy and needed to give up power. But he said the United States would not make a determination about where Kadafi should go.
The immediate issue for the Pentagon is whether to meet NATO's request for more Predators and other surveillance planes.
The Pentagon currently has assigned enough Predators to the operation to keep two over Libya around the clock, U.S. officials have said. In addition, the U.S. has provided a Global Hawk drone — an unarmed high-altitude surveillance plane — and dozens of other manned aircraft, which conduct surveillance, intelligence collection, aerial refueling and other support missions.
Most of the strikes against ground targets have been carried out by manned aircraft from France, Britain and a few other countries. But U.S. Predator drones also have carried out 64 strikes against ground targets since April, according to the Pentagon.
NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu declined to comment on the alliance's request to Washington. She said NATO has "got the assets that we need right now" to continue carrying out the air campaign.
"It's a complex situation," she added. "It's a very fluid situation, and that's why ISR is key." ISR stands for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
NATO's formal request for more surveillance planes did not specifically ask for Predators, officials said, but alliance officials made it clear in discussions with U.S. officials that their preference was for more drones.
Since the NATO bombing campaign began in March, it has damaged or destroyed about 570 Libyan military bases, bunkers and other unspecified "facilities"; 355 air-defense missiles; more than 500 tanks and other armored vehicles; and an estimated 860 ammunition dumps, according to statistics released by NATO.
david.cloud@latimes.com
Times staff writer Paul Richter contributed to this report.
Flying robotic seagull attracts flock of birds
July 26, 2011
German engineering firm Festo has developed a robotic seagull that’s so lifelike it appeared to fool real birds into thinking that it was part of the flock.
SmartBird is an ultralight flapping-wing robot inspired by the herring gull, and it can start, fly and land autonomously, Festo said. It weighs less than a pound and has a 6 1/2-foot wingspan, according to a company fact sheet.
Watch in the video above as the SmartBird coasts above the crowd and attracts a nearby flock of birds. According to the YouTube post, the flight took place at TEDGlobal 2011, an annual five-day technology conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.
TED, or Technology Entertainment and Design, the organization that held the event, posted another video of SmartBird as it flew indoors. Tech geeks and aerospace nerds alike gave it a standing ovation.
“The audience watches in awe as the robotic SmartBird -- powered simply by the motion of its wings -- takes flight over their heads in the TEDGlobal theater,” the post says.
Now that it has gotten the attention of both human and avian crowds, who knows what’s next for the company?
"We try to mimic nature," said Festo designer Markus Fischer in the YouTube video.
This year, AeroVironment Inc. in Monrovia unveiled a pocket-size drone, dubbed the Nano Hummingbird, which mimicked the flight of a real life hummingbird. Outfitted with a tiny camera, the little drone was developed with funding from the Pentagon. Some analysts say the technology might find its way as a mini-spy plane on the battlefield or in urban areas.
It's a bird! It's a spy! It's both
By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times
A pocket-size drone dubbed the Nano Hummingbird for the way it flaps its tiny robotic wings has been developed for the Pentagon by a Monrovia company as a mini-spy plane capable of maneuvering on the battlefield and in urban areas.
The battery-powered drone was built by AeroVironment Inc. for the Pentagon's research arm as part of a series of experiments in nanotechnology. The little flying machine is built to look like a bird for potential use in spy missions.
The results of a five-year effort to develop the drone are being announced Thursday by the company and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Equipped with a camera, the drone can fly at speeds of up to 11 miles per hour, AeroVironment said. It can hover and fly sideways, backward and forward, as well as go clockwise and counterclockwise, by remote control for about eight minutes.
The quick flight meets the goals set forth by the government to build a flying "hummingbird-like" aircraft. It also demonstrates the promise of fielding mini-spy planes. Industry insiders see the technology eventually being capable of flying through open windows or sitting on power lines, capturing audio and video while enemies would be none the wiser.
The Hummingbird would be a major departure from existing drones that closely resemble traditional aircraft. The next step is likely to be further refinement of the technology, officials said, before decisions are made about whether the drones would be mass-produced and deployed.
"The miniaturization of drones is where it really gets interesting," said defense expert Peter W. Singer, author of "Wired for War," a book about robotic warfare. "You can use these things anywhere, put them anyplace, and the target will never even know they're being watched."
With a wingspan of 6.5 inches, the mini-drone weighs 19 grams, or less than a AA battery. The Hummingbird's guts are made up of motors, communications systems and a video camera. It is slightly larger than the average hummingbird.
The success of the program "paves the way for a new generation of aircraft with the agility and appearance of small birds," Todd Hylton, Hummingbird program manager for the Pentagon's research arm, said in a statement.
In all, the Pentagon has awarded about $4 million to AeroVironment since 2006 to develop the technology and the drone itself.
Matt Keennon, the company's manager on the project, said it was a technical challenge to create the mini-machine from scratch because it pushes the limitations of aerodynamics.
Less than two years ago, an earlier version of the drone could fly for 20 seconds. Keennon said the current eight minutes of flight are likely to be extended as experiments continue.
"This is a new form of man-made flight," Keennon said. It is about "biomimicry," or building a machine that is inspired by nature, he said.
The Pentagon issued seven specific milestones for the Hummingbird, including the ability to hover in a 5-mph wind gust and the ability to fly from outdoors to indoors and back outdoors through a normal-size doorway.
Critics have noted that privacy issues may emerge depending on how the drones are used.
For now, the Hummingbird is just a prototype, Keennon said. But 10 years from now, he sees the technology carrying out detailed reconnaissance missions.
But it's not likely to be a "hummingbird," considering that that's a rare bird in, say, New York City.
"I'm not a bird expert, but a sparrow seems to be better," Keennon said.
william.hennigan@latimes.com
Pentagon seeks mini-weapons for new age of warfare
By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times
May 30, 2011, 6:18 p.m.
Under mounting pressure to keep its massive budget in check, the Pentagon is looking to cheaper, smaller weapons to wage war in the 21st century.
A new generation of weaponry is being readied in clandestine laboratories across the nation that puts a priority on pintsized technology that would be more precise in warfare and less likely to cause civilian casualties. Increasingly, the Pentagon is being forced to discard expensive, hulking, Cold War-era armaments that exact a heavy toll on property and human lives.
At L-3 Interstate Electronics Corp. in Anaheim, technicians work in secure rooms developing a GPS guidance system for a 13-pound "smart bomb" that would be attached to small, low-flying drone.
Engineers in Simi Valley at AeroVironment Inc. are developing a mini-cruise missile designed to fit into a soldier's rucksack, be fired from a mortar and scour the battlefield for enemy targets.
And in suburban Portland, Ore. Voxtel Inc. is concocting an invisible mist to be sprayed on enemy fighters and make them shine brightly in night-vision goggles.
These miniature weapons have one thing in common: They will be delivered with the help of small robotic planes. Drones have grown in importance as the Pentagon has seen them play a vital role in Iraq, Afghanistan and reportedly in the raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Now, engineers in Southern California and elsewhere are refining drone technology to deliver a powerful wallop with increasingly smaller robotic planes — many of which resemble model aircraft buzzing around local parks.
This work is aimed primarily at one buyer —the Pentagon, which is seeking a total of $671 billion for fiscal 2012. Of that, drones represent $4.8 billion, a small but growing segment of the defense budget — and that doesn't include spending on robotic weapons technology in the classified portion of the budget.
This comes at a time when expensive weapons programs, like Marine Corps amphibious assault vehicles and Navy cruisers, are being eyed for trims.
Although some mini-weapons may resemble toys, they represent a new wave of sophisticated technology in modern warfare, which has forced the military and weapons-makers to think small. And they are just a few under development that have been disclosed.
"There are a lot of weapons in the military's arsenal," said Lt. Col. Brad Beach, an official who coordinates the Marines' drone technology. "But what we don't have is something small."
The military is flush with multi-ton bunker-busting bombs designed to reduce fortified buildings into smoldering rubble.
But Marines on the front lines in Afghanistan say there is an urgent need for a weapon that is small and powerful enough to protect them from insurgents planting roadside bombs.
Marines already have small spy drones with high-powered cameras, but what they need is a way to destroy the enemies that their drones discover.
Looking to fill the need, the 13-pound "smart bomb" has been under development for three years. The 2-foot-long bomb is steered by a GPS-guided system made in Anaheim. The bomb is called Small Tactical Munition, or STM, and is under development by Raytheon Co.
"Soldiers are watching bad guys plant" roadside bombs and "can't do anything about it," said Cody Tretschok, who leads work on the program at Raytheon. "They have to call in an air strike, which can take 30 to 60 minutes. The time lapse is too great."
The idea is that the small bomb could be slung under the spy plane's wing, dropped to a specific point using GPS coordinates or a laser-guidance system, and blast apart "soft" targets, such as pickup trucks and individuals, located 15,000 feet below.
Raytheon does not yet have a contract for the bomb and is building it entirely with its own money.
"We're proactively anticipating the military's need," said Tretschok, who is testing the technology at the Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.
In a similar fashion, drone-maker AeroVironment in Simi Valley didn't wait for the government when it started to build its Switchblade mini-cruise missile to seek and destroy nearby targets.
The little missile, which looks less harmless than many Fourth of July fireworks, is fired from a mortar, unfolds its wings as it goes, and begins sending live video and GPS coordinates to the soldier who launched it.
The 2-foot-long battery-powered drone would be tipped with a tiny warhead and remotely operated from a handheld controller. It is being designed to fly above a warzone for at least five minutes for more than a mile at a time.
"This technology gives the war fighter the ability to pinpoint where and when he strikes," said Steven Gitlin, an AeroVironment spokesman. "It's all about precision."
Critics say the technology may be too imprecise and hard to track, said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution.
But the weapons have sophisticated internal guidance systems, which is key because much of today's fighting takes place in crowded urban environments, such as targets located in or near population centers, he said.
"Weapons are sometimes only usable today if they're small. The bottom line is: You're not going to go around dropping 500-pound bombs everywhere," O'Hanlon added. "Collateral damage is unacceptable in modern warfare."
Knowing this, the military has embarked on using mini-drones for a "tagging, tracking and locating" initiative, which centers on secretly marking a target with invisible sprays and other identifiers so they don't get lost in crowds.
Companies like Beaverton, Ore.-based Voxtel have benefited from the millions of dollars that the government is handing to contractors for research. The small 30-person company, which makes tagging products to prevent the counterfeiting of bank notes, lottery tickets and other items, now believes its microscopic nanocrystals — which become part of an invisible spray — may be are exactly what the military needs.
Tagging, tracking and locating "is a hot topic in government work," said George Williams, company president. "It isn't easy tracking somebody in a crowded urban environment like what is seen in today's wars."
Indeed. Earlier this year, the Air Force asked for proposals on developing a way to "tag" targets with "clouds" of unseen materials sprayed from quiet, low-flying drones.
In its request, the Air Force said "one method of distribution would be 'crop-dusting' from a sufficiently high altitude (to avoid detection) and letting the dust-cloud fall on a target or in front of it if it is moving."
Other methods suggested to covertly mark the targets were to "pneumatically blow a cloud" or "burst above" them.
As the military moves into miniaturizing its weapon stockpile, contractors believe applications such as these may be crucial to the overall effort. "What we do is just one part of a complex system," Voxtel President Williams said. "We play a small role."
william.hennigan@latimes.com
Space shuttle Endeavour carries stamp-sized mini-satellites into orbit [Video]
May 16, 2011
When space shuttle Endeavour blasted off Monday morning it carried three tiny satellites -- each the size of a postage stamp -- along with it.
Endeavour, NASA's next-to-last shuttle mission, left its Florida launch pad at 5:56 a.m. Pacific Time with the slim, 1-inch-square chips aboard. The mini-satellites are set to be mounted on the outside of the International Space Station and will collect data measuring the harsh conditions of space.
Mason Peck, the professor who led the project to build the satellites at Cornell University, said the spacecraft, dubbed Sprite, are prototypes. The mini-satellites will remain in space for a “few years,” before they’re to be removed and brought back to Earth.
In the future, Peck envisions launching waves of the little satellites simultaneously to capture information about space in real-time.
“Their small size allows them to travel like space dust,” he said in a statement. “Blown by solar winds, they can ‘sail’ to distant locations without fuel.”
Currently the cost of building, maintaining and launching full-size satellites is in the millions of dollars. These small, light spacecraft could bring costs down, Peck said.
“We’re actually trying to create a new capability and build it from the ground up,” Peck said. “We want to learn what’s the bare minimum we can design for communication from space.”
Costly Drone Is Poised to Replace U-2 Spy Plane
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
PALMDALE, Calif. — Tucked away here in the Mojave Desert, the assembly plant for the high-flying Global Hawk jet resembles a giant hobby shop.
Work tables surround a handful of fuselages, and an unusually long wing — needed to slip through the thin air at 60,000 feet — is ready to be bolted into place. Open panels await controls for cameras and eavesdropping gear, and bright blue tool bins and parts vats are scattered around the concrete floor.
Just 50 people work in the factory and a test hangar, and only five of the Cessna-size drones will be built this year. But despite a spate of delays, second-guessing and cost overruns, the Global Hawk is once again on track to replace one of America’s most noted aircraft: the U-2 spy plane, famed for its role in the cold war and more recently Afghanistan.
The Air Force decided last month to stick with its $12 billion Global Hawk program, betting that the unmanned drone can replicate the aging U-2’s ability to sweep up a broad mix of intelligence from commanding heights, and do it more safely and for much longer stretches than the piloted U-2. The Navy is also onboard, with plans to spend $11 billion on a version that could patrol vast ocean areas.
The continued push for the Global Hawk reflects how drones are changing warfare and how critical high-altitude spying can be in any type of fight. Still, the program remains ensnared in military politics and budget battles, and the aircraft itself awaits some important technical changes that could slow its unveiling. In particular, creating the new models and their high-tech sensors, which can cost more than the planes, has been difficult.
And in an era in which remotely piloted planes are seen as relatively cheap and easy solutions, the Global Hawk has become the Escalade of drones, the gold-plated one that nearly broke the bank.
“The Global Hawk is a very impressive product, but it is also a very expensive product,” said Richard L. Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group, a consultancy in Fairfax, Va. “Those U-2s were paid for a long time ago.”
Since 2001, the cost of the Air Force program has more than doubled, and the service recently cut its planned fleet of Global Hawks to 55 from 77. That lifted the total estimate for each plane, including the sensors and all the research and development, to $218 million, compared to $28 million for the Reaper, the largest armed drone.
Pentagon tests also suggested last fall that the new Air Force model was not reliable enough to provide sustained surveillance. Parts failed frequently, and the equipment for intercepting telephone and radio conversations, a vital requirement for replacing the U-2, had trouble pinpointing the source of the calls.
Pentagon officials and executives at Northrop Grumman, which is building the Global Hawk, say they are trimming costs and replacing the faulty parts. Since March, commanders have rushed nine of the planes into use over Japan, Libya and Afghanistan, and they say they have done a good job in taking images of the earthquake damage in Japan and bombing targets in the war zones.
But analysts say the biggest test — and perhaps the next step in the shift from manned to robotic aircraft — will come if Northrop can field enough Global Hawks with better eavesdropping gear to make the commanders feel comfortable about retiring the U-2.
That transition was originally supposed to happen this year. Edward A. Walby, a business development director at Northrop, said the company now expected to have enough Global Hawks in the air by the end of 2012. That would give the Air Force time to check them out before phasing out the 32 U-2s by 2015.
But even that could change. Congress has said it will not approve any shift that would leave significant intelligence gaps. Mr. Aboulafia, the aviation analyst, said cuts in the military budget could also slow the transition. And critics of the military’s contracting practices say that instead of revamping the Global Hawk project, the Pentagon should have tabled it until all the technology was ready.
“Once again, we have a system that has failed to meet effectiveness and suitability requirements, but one that no doubt will proceed post-haste into full production and deployment,” said Thomas P. Christie, a former top Pentagon testing official.
The Global Hawks, monitored by shifts of pilots on computers in California, fly 24-hour missions, twice as long as a U-2 pilot can stay up, and the Pentagon says they will be cheaper to operate.
Like the U-2, they can peer down from twice the height of a commercial airliner and spot a group of insurgents or a tank 50 to 100 miles away. The images can be sent directly to troops in a firefight or to intelligence centers, where analysts examine them and send out more in-depth reports.
The U-2 was created in the 1950s to monitor Soviet nuclear sites. It is still used, as the Global Hawk will be, to supplement satellites by gazing into North Korea and Iran from outside their borders.
But the towering heights have also enabled the U-2 to survey so much territory in Afghanistan, and scoop up so many Taliban phone calls, that it has become one of the best sources of tips for where to send the Predator and Reaper drones, which fly at lower altitudes and fire missiles.
Intelligence officials say the combination of images and intercepted conversations from the same area provides a richer picture of what is going on, and they want the Global Hawk to be able to act as a similar trigger for dispatching other planes.
A more basic version of the Global Hawk has supplied battlefield images in Afghanistan and Iraq since shortly after the 2001 terror attacks. But the effort to enlarge the plane to carry eavesdropping gear and other new sensors required a more substantial redesign than expected. And Northrop is now trying to resolve the problems with the parts. It is replacing faulty electrical generators and navigation systems and improving the eavesdropping software.
Under the latest plans, the Air Force will buy 31 of the Global Hawks with upgraded cameras and the eavesdropping gear and 11 with a sensor that could more closely track the movements of enemy troops and vehicles. The Navy would build 68 of the maritime models, Germany is buying a few of the planes, and NATO might buy some, too.
Here in Palmdale, where Northrop also built the B-2 bombers and is now working on fuselages for the F-35 fighter, there is a sense of relief that the Global Hawk finally seems a little closer to moving from a sidekick role to the spotlight.
Inside the beige factory, Mr. Walby, the Northrop official and a former U-2 pilot, said he sometimes gets flak from his old buddies, who delight in having been able to keep the U-2 relevant. Most of the U-2 pilots know the changeover is inevitable. But a few would rather not acknowledge, he said, that the U-2 is also “limited by the man.”
Not only are there limits to how long each mission can last, but U-2 pilots are subject to disorienting decompression illnesses.
“And there’s a small group, when I’m at a U-2 reunion, that I have to remind about how we buried four U-2 pilots while I was with the program,” Mr. Walby said, referring to crashes. “I said: ‘Is it really worth it? Now that we have the technology to stop that from happening, is it worth it?’ ”
World's first 3-D printed airplane takes to the skies
August 2, 2011 | 7:46 pm
Forget about high-powered drills, metal-bending press brakes and high-pressure die casting -- all you really need to build an airplane is a 21st century printer.
A small group of aeronautical engineers at the University of Southampton sent the world's first 3-D printed aircraft into the skies above Britain, according to a report by New Scientist magazine.
Watch in New Scientist's video above as the model plane with a 6.5-foot wingspan takes to the skies with a peculiar screech and an abrupt burst of energy.
The airframe was designed on a computer then printed on a 3-D printer. If you don’t know how that works, New Scientist fills you in:
To do this, the 3-D printer first slices up an object's computerised design into hundreds of easily printable layers. Each layer is then “printed" by training a laser beam on a bed of polyamide plastic, stainless steel or titanium powder -– depending on the object being created -– tracing out the entire 2-D shape required for that layer. The laser's heat fuses the particles together at their boundaries. Once each layer is complete, more powder is scattered over it and the process repeated until a complete artefact is produced.
The designers wanted the little aircraft “to be lightweight and strong, as it would be built in just four parts -– the main fuselage and rudder fins, the nose cone and two outer wings.”
They named it Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft, or SULSA. According to the engineers, it is “the world’s first all printed aircraft -- the resulting aircraft can be fully assembled from its component parts to flight ready in just 10 minutes without the use of any tools whatsoever.”
Impressive, considering building an aircraft of any size is typically labor-intensive and utilizes components that are custom-machined and tooled. The New Scientist article says the engineers are "hoping to show how 3-D printing will revolutionise the economics of aircraft design."
According to their website, the small SULSA plane is capable of reaching speeds up to 90 mph with an endurance of about 30 minutes.
A Homemade Drone Snoops on Wireless Networks
SourceAugust 5, 2011, 9:16 am
A Homemade Drone Snoops on Wireless Networks
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
It flies. It spies. It is the color of sunshine, and it has googly eyes.
Meet WASP, the Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform, one of the star attractions of this year’s Black Hat conference for computer security professionals in Las Vegas.
It’s a remote-controlled plane with a computer in its belly that can fly up to 400 feet above the ground, snoop quietly on wireless networks below and attack one if it wants to. It can also pretend to be a GSM cellphone tower, eavesdropping on calls and text messages that pass through.
The WASP was built by Richard Perkins and Mike Tassey using hobby materials, including Styrofoam plane body, plastic propeller and foam tires, along with circuit boards and wires. The materials are all off the shelf, costing $6,190 – a fraction of the cost of a spy plane, with cyber weapons included.
Its creators eschew the term “spy plane” for their device. “There’s a negative connotation to a spy plane,” Mr. Tassey said. “This was done in an attempt to prove a concept.”
What concept?
“That it can be done,” he said.
His sentiment perfectly embodied the ethos of Black Hat, a spirited gathering of technologists who sometimes make scary things to show that they can be made, and other times break things to show how badly they need to be fixed.
At the same conference, for instance, a diabetic hacked into his electronic insulin pump and demonstrated how easily it could be shut down remotely, depriving a patient of insulin or worse, pumping in far more insulin than he needed. And a pair of security researchers demonstrated how easy it was to extract money from stolen credit cards, using the card-reading device distributed by Square.
The bird conjured by Mr. Perkins and Mr. Tassey is barely four feet long and becomes an imperceptible, quietly humming little creature when it hovers overhead. Its vital assets are distance and anonymity. It would be easily deployed over, say, an office building to sniff out information going across its wireless network. Or if the office network is well secured, the plane could follow one of its employees on a trip to a neighborhood Starbucks to use the cafe’s Wi-Fi network. The WASP could mimic the cafe’s network, luring the unwitting employee and allowing access to a laptop or cellphone. As Mr. Tassey put it, “In Starbucks, no one can hear your laptop scream.”
Both men have day jobs helping the federal government keep their information systems secure. They say they have no plans to make money on their device, nor to snoop on anyone, only to show how cheap and easy it can be to snoop and attack.
Libyan freedom fighters use Canadian drones
SourceLibyan Rebels Reportedly Used Tiny Canadian Surveillance Drone
By IAN AUSTEN
Published: August 24, 2011
OTTAWA — Libyan rebels have been coordinating their attacks using a Canadian-made, unmanned surveillance aircraft, the drone’s manufacturer announced Tuesday.
Enlarge This Image
Aeryon Labs
A compact drone made by Aeryon weighs just 3 pounds.
David Kroetsch, the president and chief executive of the manufacturer, Aeryon Labs of Waterloo, Ontario, said in an interview that his company was first approached by a representative of the Libyan Transitional National Council early in June, after members of the group searching the Web saw the company’s surveillance aircraft — essentially a tiny, four-rotor helicopter dangling a pod carrying stabilized-image day- and night-vision cameras.
The drone is extremely compact — the company says that it weighs about three pounds and fits into a backpack — and its operator does not need any knowledge of flight. Mr. Kroetsch said such factors were crucial for the rebels. The device is simply controlled by tracing flight paths on maps displayed on a touch screen display. Its base price is $120,000.
“They knew that they needed air support of some kind because they were fighting blind on the ground,” Mr. Kroetsch said. “But they couldn’t afford helicopters.”
Aeryon notified the Canadian government about the potential sale, both to get approval and to verify the identities of the buyers. Mr. Kroetsch said the government had no objections, partly because the sale involved a civilian version of the battery-powered drone sometimes used by oil companies to survey spills. Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. There was no independent confirmation of the sale from the rebels in Libya.
Mr. Kroetsch described the process as involving “a series of connections” over several weeks.
“It was a very complicated set of people involved,” Mr. Kroetsch said. “It’s not the most organized group in general.”
Ultimately, the drone was purchased for the transitional council by a private security company based in Ottawa, Zariba Security, which has given training and operational support for other Aeryon customers.
Charles Barlow, the president of Zariba, said that he brokered the purchase, and that assembling the financing involved hundreds of e-mails among people in eight countries, suggesting considerable donations from outside of Libya.
Mr. Barlow delivered the drone himself in July, taking it on an 18-hour voyage from Malta to the Libyan port of Misurata on a former South Korean fishing ship chartered by the rebels. The ship was also carrying a BBC film crew, two ambulances from the German Red Cross, several cellphone engineers and some mine-removal experts.
Mr. Barlow said he stayed in Misurata for two days to train the drone’s operators while the city was under steady artillery and rocket assault.
When he left Misurata, Mr. Barlow said, he was told that the drone would first be used to survey the highway to Tripoli. Where it has been used since is unclear, but Mr. Barlow was told about three days ago that the drone was still flying.
U.S. to base Predators in Turkey to kill Kurds in Iraq?
SourceU.S. considering Ankara’s request to base Predators in Turkey to fight a Kurdish group in northern Iraq
By Craig Whitlock, Published: September 10
The Obama administration is considering a request from Turkey to base a fleet of Predator drones on Turkish soil for counterterrorism operations in northern Iraq, a decision that could strengthen a diplomatic alliance but drag the United States deeper into a regional conflict.
The U.S. military has flown the unarmed Predators from Iraqi bases since 2007 and shared the planes’ surveillance video with Turkey as part of a secretive joint crackdown against fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Unless a new home for the Predators is found, however, the counterterrorism partnership could cease by Dec. 31, when all U.S. forces are scheduled to withdraw from Iraq.
The Obama administration has not yet made a decision on the Turkish request, according to senior U.S. military officials.
Previously undisclosed diplomatic cables show Turkey has become highly dependent on the Predators, U-2 spy aircraft and other U.S. intelligence sources in its conflict with the PKK. The Kurdish group, which is fighting to create an autonomous enclave in Turkey, has launched cross-border attacks from its hideouts in northern Iraq for years. Turkey has responded with airstrikes and artillery attacks but has also sent ground troops into Iraq, further destabilizing an already volatile area.
Turkey’s request to host the Predators on its territory is an unexamined consequence of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, which some countries fear could leave a power vacuum in an unstable region. It also underscores how U.S. unmanned aircraft have swiftly become the leading tactical weapon against terrorist groups around the world, as well as a favored instrument of foreign policy.
Besides deploying armed drones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, the United States is expanding drone missions over Yemen and Somalia. It has sent surveillance drones into Mexico for counternarcotics operations and supplied small surveillance drones to the Colombian military for counterterrorism missions.
Moral and policy dilemmas
While the drones have proved to be a highly effective tool in waging unconventional warfare, their rapid proliferation presents the U.S. government with moral and policy dilemmas. The Predator missions in northern Iraq have bolstered relations with Turkey, for instance but have also further exposed the United States to a messy local war.
Although the U.S. government officially labels the PKK a terrorist organization, the group has not targeted American interests.
The classified diplomatic cables, obtained by the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks, reveal that Turkish officials have repeatedly pressed their American counterparts to escalate their involvement against the PKK and eradicate the group before U.S. forces leave Iraq.
“Before your withdrawal, it is our common responsibility to eliminate this threat,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Army Gen. Ray Odierno, then the top U.S. commander in Iraq, in a February 2010 meeting in Ankara, according to a cable summarizing the meeting.
Odierno and other U.S. officials agreed to Turkish requests to adopt an “enhanced joint action plan” against the PKK, according to other cables. But the U.S. military has tried to keep its involvement limited, while concealing the details. It has continued to fly surveillance missions, share intelligence and help select targets, but it has resisted Turkish pressure to bomb or attack Kurdish militants directly, the cables show.
Michael Hammer, a State Department spokesman, declined to answer specific questions about the role of the Predators. “Turkey is a long-standing ally and partner of the United States, and we continue to support Turkey in its struggle against PKK terrorism through various forms of cooperation,” he said.
“We support continued cooperation between Iraq and Turkey in combating the PKK, which is a common enemy of Turkey, Iraq and the United States,” he added.
Hammer also said the State Department “strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information” contained in the cables. “It threatens our national security and undermines our effort to work with countries to solve shared problems.”
Spokesmen for the Pentagon and the Turkish Embassy in Washington declined to comment.
Worsening war with militants
The conflict between Turkey and the PKK has worsened in recent weeks. In retaliation for PKK attacks on Turkish soldiers and convoys, Turkey has ordered a barrage of airstrikes that have killed more than 150 Kurdish militants since mid-August, according to the Turkish military. Human Rights Watch has reported that a handful of civilians in northern Iraq have been killed and that hundreds have been forced from their homes there.
More than 40,000 people have died in the conflict since 1984, when the PKK began a violent campaign for self-rule in southeastern Turkey.
Turkey asked the Obama administration this year to relocate the Predators to Incirlik Air Base, a joint U.S.-Turkish military installation, according to a senior U.S. military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks have not been made public. “They want to base them in Turkey and allow us to fly them across the border into Iraq,” the official said.
U.S. aircraft based at Incirlik played a pivotal role in enforcing a no-fly zone over northern Iraq after the first Gulf War until Saddam Hussein was deposed in 2003. About 1,500 U.S. military workers are stationed there.
It’s unclear whether U.S. or Turkish officials are seeking formal permission from Iraq to continue the drone flights, or whether Baghdad would simply turn a blind eye to the Predators when they cross into northern Iraq.
If Iraq objected to the drone flights as a violation of its sovereignty, the unmanned aircraft could hover in Turkish airspace and use cameras to peer miles across the border. There is little to prevent the Predators from making incursions, however; Iraq has only a fledgling air force to patrol its skies.
U.S. military officials favor the drone agreement with Turkey as a way of preventing the conflict with the PKK from spiraling out of control. They say U.S. cooperation has restrained Turkey from launching bigger offensives into northern Iraq to try to wipe out the PKK. The Turkish military sent tens of thousands of troops across the border in 1995 and 1997, and briefly deployed a smaller force in 2008.
“Our worry is that there would be some sort of humanitarian disaster up there,” said the senior U.S. military official. “It’s a real volatile area.”
U.S. officials have sought to serve as an intermediary between Ankara and Baghdad, as well as with Iraqi Kurdish leaders who control the northern part of the country, encouraging them to take a harder line against the PKK.
In many ways, however, Washington has been caught in a conflict between two allies. Turkey views the PKK as an existential threat. But Iraqi Kurdish leaders, who are strongly pro-American, are reluctant to crack down on fellow Kurds.
The U.S. government has publicly acknowledged providing broad intelligence and diplomatic support to Turkey to counter the PKK but has revealed little about the nature of the cooperation.
Joint intelligence cell
Fresh details, however, are contained in the U.S. diplomatic cables, which show that the hub of the effort is a “combined intelligence fusion cell” in Ankara that is staffed 24 hours a day by U.S. and Turkish military personnel.
The cell receives video feeds from Predators flying over suspected PKK camps in northern Iraq, according to the cables. The U.S. military usually operates the Predators between 12 and 16 hours a day, the cables show.
In addition to the drones, the U.S. military shares imagery from U-2 spy planes, RC-135 and EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft, as well as RQ-4 Global Hawks, a high-altitude surveillance drone.
The fusion cell in Ankara opened in November 2007 after then-President George W. Bush agreed in a meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan to help go after the PKK. Before that, Turkey had complained bitterly about a U.S. reluctance to use its forces in Iraq to hunt down PKK fighters.
In its first year of operation, the fusion cell enabled Turkey to launch more than 200 cross-border air and artillery strikes, according to a U.S. Embassy cable dated Dec. 4, 2008. The first salvo came on Dec. 16, 2007, when Turkish F-16 jets attacked 33 PKK targets in northern Iraq and the Qandil mountains, followed by combined air and artillery attacks on Dec. 17, 22 and 26.
The Turkish government claimed that 150 Kurdish militants were killed during the 11-day period, but a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara estimated that “a more likely number is around a dozen terrorists, along with housing, training sites and cave complexes.” The embassy also reported the death of a civilian in one of the strikes and the displacement of village families but acknowledged that officials lacked the ability to independently verify the damage.
According to the cables, U.S. personnel also assist the Turks “where appropriate” in selecting which PKK targets to attack. The Turkish military also provides advance warning of their air or artillery strikes to the U.S. military to avoid “conflicting” with U.S. forces in northern Iraq.
At times, however, those warnings arrive with little notice. On Dec. 15, 2007, for example, the Turkish military informed the U.S. Office of Defense Cooperation in Ankara at 11:47 p.m. that it would launch its fighter planes at 1 a.m. U.S. military officials in Iraq scrambled to ensure that U.S. troops and aircraft weren’t in the way and gave the Turks an all-clear at 2:55 a.m. Five minutes later, Turkish forces opened fire.
The joint efforts against the PKK caused an immediate improvement in U.S.-Turkish military relations, with Gen. Ilker Basbug, commander of the Turkish armed forces, pronouncing them “perfect” in 2008.
At the same time, Turkish officials have persistently pressed the U.S. government for more. The cables show that the Turkish military has asked that the Predators provide 24-hour surveillance on a permanent basis and that they guide Turkish jets by pinpointing PKK targets with lasers.
More significantly, Turkey has tried to buy its own armed drones from the United States, seeking to purchase MQ-9 Reapers, a larger and more modern version of the Predator. The Bush and Obama administrations have supported the request, but Congress has withheld approval so far. Some legislators are reluctant to sell the aircraft to Turkey given Ankara’s deteriorating relations with Israel, a close U.S. ally.
Selling armed drones to Turkey poses other risks. PKK leaders have made vague public threats against the United States, warning them not to supply Turkey with “special assassination aircraft.”
“If the U.S. gives these aircraft to Turkey and if we are hit by them, then we will hold the U.S. responsible,” PKK leader Murat Karayilan told an interviewer in February 2010, according to a U.S. Embassy cable. “This would mean that the U.S. directly is involved in this war.”
Uncle Sam's spying on us with Predator drones!
SourcePredator drones do domestic duty
By Brian Bennett, Reporting from Washington
September 12, 2011, 9:10 p.m.
Most days, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer David Gasho sends three unmanned spy planes into the skies over the rugged Sonora Desert to hunt for drug smugglers crossing into southern Arizona from Mexico.
But in mid-June, as the largest wildfire in Arizona history raged, Gasho sent one of the Predator B drones soaring over residential neighborhoods in search of another threat — rogue brush fires. Working from an air-conditioned trailer, his crew aimed an airborne infrared camera through thick smoke and spotted a smoldering blaze.
Using coordinates fed from the drone, airborne firefighters then doused the hot spot from helicopters and watched over a secure Internet feed as the heat signature of the flames cooled.
It was the latest example of once-secret military hardware finding routine civilian uses. Seven surveillance drones are chiefly used to help patrol America's northern and southern borders. But in recent months, they also have helped state and local authorities fight deadly fires, survey damage from floods and tornadoes, and inspect dams and levees.
"People are constantly coming up and wanting a piece of that Predator pie," said Gasho, a former commercial pilot who heads the Customs and Border Protection air operations in Sierra Vista, Ariz., standing beside one of the drones at Libby Army Airfield.
Between March and July, for example, dozens of drone missions were flown between Grand Forks, N.D., and Columbia, Mo. The Predators provided first responders and engineers with live video and radar images of widespread flooding along the Soris, Red and Missouri rivers.
During the summer, drones flew along the Louisiana Gulf Coast and up the Mississippi River to inspect flood damage and the integrity of levees.
Operators studying the drone feeds look for signs that a levee is bulging from pressure of floodwaters, and advise where a swollen river may first overflow its banks. Local officials can then order evacuations and direct help to vulnerable neighborhoods.
In addition to three Predators in Arizona, Customs and Border Protection crews operate two drone aircraft out of Grand Forks, N.D., one from Corpus Christi, Texas, and another in Cocoa Beach, Fla. Plans call for adding three more drones later this year.
But some see dangers as well as benefits in the arrival of the drones.
Privacy experts warn that few guidelines restrict eye-in-the-sky coverage. Jay Stanley, a senior analyst on privacy and technology at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the unregulated use of drone aircraft "leaves the gates wide open for a dramatic increase in surveillance of American life." The drones can detect all manner of activities: from its usual altitude of 20,000 feet, a drone camera can tell if a hiker eight miles away is carrying a backpack.
And aviation security experts worry that pilots operating drones from distant locations may not be able to see and avoid other aircraft in busy air corridors.
"The problem is safety [and] how to share airspace with manned aircraft," said Michael Barr, who teaches aviation safety at USC.
The Homeland Security Department's first drone crashed in 2006. When a console froze during the flight, the ground-based pilot accidentally switched off the fuel line to the engine.
"This was one of these instances where he would have been better off not touching it," said Gasho. "He just panicked. Hit the button and threw away a $7-million airplane."
The crash missed a residential area by 1,000 feet and brought additional scrutiny from the Federal Aviation Administration. It established a special board to approve airspace for use by unmanned aerial vehicles.
In emergencies, like floods and fires, the FAA will fast-track the approval process, said FAA spokesman Les Dorr.
"But that doesn't short-circuit any of the safety concerns," Dorr said. "We still evaluate it to make sure it can fly safely without danger to people on the ground or pilots in the air."
Indeed, the FAA has yet to approve a request to authorize use of a Customs and Border Protection drone to help firefighters in Texas battle fierce wildfires there last week.
The ability to sense and avoid other aircraft is the "big bugaboo with unmanned aircraft that has prevented them from meeting federal regulations to fly," said Bill English, senior air safety investigator at the National Transportation Safety Board. The FAA requires drone pilots to have direct eye contact with the plane during takeoff and landing to avoid collisions with other aircraft.
Yet because no pilots are on board and the planes can stay aloft for 20 hours at a time, the drones are well suited for dirty, dull and dangerous work.
In April, when ice piled up under bridges and caused the Red River to overflow its banks, a Customs and Border Protection drone flew out of Grand Forks to survey the river around Oslo, Minn. Watching the live footage from the unmanned plane, officials were able to spot a clay levee that appeared about to break and quickly shored it up.
Without the live footage, engineers and rescue teams might not have reached the right place in time, officials said.
"We would have lost a small town of 50 to 80 homes," said Kim Ketterhagen, the mutual aid coordinator for Minnesota's homeland security and emergency management department.
brian.bennett@latimes.com
More drone strikes in Yemen
American Empire increases drone bombings in YemenU.S. increases Yemen drone strikes
By Karen DeYoung, Published: September 16
The Obama administration has significantly increased the frequency of drone strikes and other air attacks against the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen in recent months amid rising concern about political collapse there.
Some of the the strikes, carried out by the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have been focused in the southern part of the country, where insurgent forces have for the first time conquered and held territory as the Yemeni government continues to struggle against escalating opposition to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 33-year rule.
Unlike in Pakistan, where the CIA has presidential authorization to launch drone strikes at will, each U.S. attack in Yemen — and those being conducted in nearby Somalia, most recently on Thursday near the southern port city of Kismayo — requires White House approval, senior administration officials said.
The officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter on the record, said intended targets must be drawn from an approved list of key members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula deemed by U.S. intelligence officials to be involved in planning attacks against the West. White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan last week put their number at “a couple of dozen, maybe.”
Although several unconfirmed strikes each week have been reported by local media in Yemen and Somalia, the administration has made no public acknowledgment of the escalated campaign, and officials who discussed the increase declined to provide numbers.
The heightened air activity coincides with the administration’s determination this year that AQAP, as the Yemen-based group is known, poses a more significant threat to the United States than the core al-Qaeda group based in Pakistan. The administration has also concluded that AQAP has recruited at least a portion of the main insurgent group in Somalia, al-Shabab, to its anti-Western cause.
From its initial months in office, the Obama administration has debated whether to extend the air attacks that have proved so effective in Pakistan to the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. Military and intelligence officials have long argued in favor of attacks against al-Shabab camps in Somalia, which have been under overhead surveillance for years. Other officials have questioned the legal and moral justification for intervening in what, until recently, has been a largely domestic conflict.
The administration has said its legal authority to conduct such strikes, whether with fixed-wing planes, cruise missiles or drones, derives from the 2001 congressional resolution authorizing attacks against al-Qaeda and protection of the U.S. homeland, as well as the international law of self-defense.
“The United States does not view our authority to use military force against al-Qaeda as being restricted solely to ‘hot’ battlefields like Afghanistan,” Brennan said in remarks prepared for delivery Friday night at Harvard Law School. “We reserve the right to take unilateral action if or when other governments are unwilling or unable to take the necessary actions themselves.”
“That does not mean we can use military force whenever we want, wherever we want,” Brennan said. “International legal principles, including respect for a state’s sovereignty and the laws of war, impose important constraints on our ability to act unilaterally — and on the way in which we can use force — in foreign territories.”
In Somalia, the administration backs a tenuous government whose control does not extend beyond the capital, Mogadishu.
In Yemen, Saleh has been a close counterterrorism ally, and Brennan said last week that Yemen’s political turmoil, which began in March as part of the upheaval known as the Arab Spring, has not affected that cooperation. U.S. officials have emphasized that violence between loyalist troops and those backing breakaway army officers and tribal leaders has not involved U.S.-trained Yemeni special operations forces. This week, government forces reportedly made gains fighting against entrenched insurgent fighters in the southern port town of Zinjibar.
In the Yemeni capital Sanaa, thousands of anti-government protesters have been camping out in what is known as Change Square for several months, demanding an end to Saleh’s rule. The camp has remained quiet for weeks, but Reuters, citing doctors, reported Saturday that soldiers opened fire near the camp overnight and wounded eight protesters. The troops shot in the air to stop demonstrators from trying to expand the area of protest.
As the political conflict drags on, concern has increased over insurgent expansion and future cooperation with whatever government emerges in Yemen.
For months, the administration has called on Saleh to sign an agreement put forward this summer by Persian Gulf states to transfer power to an interim government and hold early elections. His intransigence seems to have increased since June, when Saleh departed for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia after being severely injured in an attack on his presidential palace. He has repeatedly insisted he intends to return to Yemen and retake control of his government, currently being run by Vice President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
Last week, the ruling General People’s Congress sent a delegation to Riyadh and secured Saleh’s agreement to allow Hadi to negotiate with the opposition and implement a political transition. While the opposition called the deal a trick, the Obama administration has tried to push Hadi and the government to take the initiative and negotiate a deal with opponents.
In a statement released late Thursday, the State Department called on the Yemeni government to sign and implement the agreement “within one week.”
Until May, the first and only known drone strike in Yemen was launched by the CIA in 2002. As part of its stepped-up military cooperation with Yemen, the Obama administration has used manned aircraft to strike at targets indicated by U.S. and Yemeni military intelligence forces on the ground. In May, JSOC first used a drone to kill two AQAP operatives as part of its new escalation in Yemen.
This summer, the CIA was also tasked with expanding its Yemen operations, and the agency is building its own drone base in the region. It is not clear whether the unilateral strike authority the CIA has in Pakistan will be extended to Yemen.
Administration officials have described the expanded drone campaign as utilizing a “mix of assets,” and a senior military official said he knew of no plans or discussions “to change the nature of operations.”
“The new base doesn’t connote that [the CIA] will be in the lead,” the official said. “It offers better teamwork and collaboration between the agencies.”
Staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.
Troops battle for drone debris
SourcePakistan troops battle Taliban for US drone debris
Posted 9/18/2011 7:46 AM ET
By Ishtiaq Mahsud, Associated Press
DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan — Pakistani soldiers battled Taliban fighters in an attempt to seize precious debris from a suspected U.S. drone that crashed in a rugged tribal area near the Afghan border, Pakistani intelligence officials and militants said Sunday.
The Taliban said they shot down the unmanned aircraft, which crashed Saturday night near Jangara village in the South Waziristan tribal area.
Pakistani intelligence officials said they were not certain whether Taliban fire or technical problems brought down the drone. Drone crashes have happened before in Pakistan, but they are rare.
Pakistan first learned of the crash by intercepting Taliban radio communications, said the intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
The debris was first seized by the Taliban. Several hours later, the Pakistani army sent soldiers in to wrest it out of militant hands, sparking a fight with the Taliban in which three militants were killed, said the officials. Three militants and two soldiers were also wounded in the clash, they said.
The intelligence officials said the troops were successful in seizing the debris, but Pakistani Taliban commander Azmatullah Diwana claimed his fighters repelled the soldiers. The army then sent helicopter gunships into the area where the militants were holding the debris, Diwana told The Associated Press by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Nawab Khan, a government official in South Waziristan, confirmed the drone crash and the subsequent clash between militants and army troops. But he did not know whether the soldiers were successful in seizing the debris.
Neither the Pakistani army nor the U.S. Embassy responded to request for comment.
The U.S. normally does not acknowledge the covert CIA-run drone program in Pakistan, but U.S. officials have said privately that the attacks have killed many high-level militants -- most recently, al-Qaida's second in command, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, and its chief of operations in Pakistan, Abu Hafs al-Shahri.
President Barack Obama has dramatically increased the number of drone attacks against militants in Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal region since taking office in 2009 -- partly in response to Pakistan's failure to target militants who stage attacks against U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Pakistani officials regularly denounce the drone attacks as violations of the country's sovereignty, but the government is widely believed to have supported the strikes in the past and even allowed the aircraft to take off from bases within Pakistan.
That support has come under strain in recent months, especially in the wake of the U.S. commando raid that killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison town on May 2. The Pakistanis were outraged that the U.S. didn't tell them about the operation beforehand.
Elsewhere in Pakistan's tribal region, militants attacked a security checkpoint killing a policeman and two members of an anti-Taliban militia, said Farooq Khan, a local government administrator.
The attack took place late Saturday night in the Aka Khel area of the Khyber tribal region, said Khan. The checkpoint is located on a key route that NATO uses to transport supplies to forces in neighboring Afghanistan. Security forces and local tribesmen fought back against the militants, killing 10 of them, said Khan.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. But the Pakistani Taliban have staged frequent attacks against security forces and tribesmen who have opposed them.
____
Associated Press writer Riaz Khan contributed to this report from Peshawar, Pakistan.
A future for drones: Automated killing
No judge, no jury, no charges, a government written computer program decides to to kill and who to let live.My question is how long before these drones are used on American soil to blow up suspected "drug houses" in American's drug war, by the local cops.
A future for drones: Automated killing
By Peter Finn, Published: September 19
One afternoon last fall at Fort Benning, Ga., two model-size planes took off, climbed to 800 and 1,000 feet, and began criss-crossing the military base in search of an orange, green and blue tarp.
The automated, unpiloted planes worked on their own, with no human guidance, no hand on any control.
After 20 minutes, one of the aircraft, carrying a computer that processed images from an onboard camera, zeroed in on the tarp and contacted the second plane, which flew nearby and used its own sensors to examine the colorful object. Then one of the aircraft signaled to an unmanned car on the ground so it could take a final, close-up look.
Target confirmed.
This successful exercise in autonomous robotics could presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans. Imagine aerial “Terminators,” minus beefcake and time travel.
The Fort Benning tarp “is a rather simple target, but think of it as a surrogate,” said Charles E. Pippin, a scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, which developed the software to run the demonstration. “You can imagine real-time scenarios where you have 10 of these things up in the air and something is happening on the ground and you don’t have time for a human to say, ‘I need you to do these tasks.’ It needs to happen faster than that.”
The demonstration laid the groundwork for scientific advances that would allow drones to search for a human target and then make an identification based on facial-recognition or other software. Once a match was made, a drone could launch a missile to kill the target.
Military systems with some degree of autonomy — such as robotic, weaponized sentries — have been deployed in the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea and other potential battle areas. Researchers are uncertain how soon machines capable of collaborating and adapting intelligently in battlefield conditions will come online. It could take one or two decades, or longer. The U.S. military is funding numerous research projects on autonomy to develop machines that will perform some dull or dangerous tasks and to maintain its advantage over potential adversaries who are also working on such systems.
The killing of terrorism suspects and insurgents by armed drones, controlled by pilots sitting in bases thousands of miles away in the western United States, has prompted criticism that the technology makes war too antiseptic. Questions also have been raised about the legality of drone strikes when employed in places such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, which are not at war with the United States. This debate will only intensify as technological advances enable what experts call lethal autonomy.
The prospect of machines able to perceive, reason and act in unscripted environments presents a challenge to the current understanding of international humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to use discrimination and proportionality, standards that would demand that machines distinguish among enemy combatants, surrendering troops and civilians.
“The deployment of such systems would reflect a paradigm shift and a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities,” Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said at a conference in Italy this month. “It would also raise a range of fundamental legal, ethical and societal issues, which need to be considered before such systems are developed or deployed.”
Drones flying over Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen can already move automatically from point to point, and it is unclear what surveillance or other tasks, if any, they perform while in autonomous mode. Even when directly linked to human operators, these machines are producing so much data that processors are sifting the material to suggest targets, or at least objects of interest. That trend toward greater autonomy will only increase as the U.S. military shifts from one pilot remotely flying a drone to one pilot remotely managing several drones at once.
But humans still make the decision to fire, and in the case of CIA strikes in Pakistan, that call rests with the director of the agency. In future operations, if drones are deployed against a sophisticated enemy, there may be much less time for deliberation and a greater need for machines that can function on their own.
The U.S. military has begun to grapple with the implications of emerging technologies.
“Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions,” according to an Air Force treatise called Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047. “These include the appropriateness of machines having this ability, under what circumstances it should be employed, where responsibility for mistakes lies and what limitations should be placed upon the autonomy of such systems.”
In the future, micro-drones will reconnoiter tunnels and buildings, robotic mules will haul equipment and mobile systems will retrieve the wounded while under fire. Technology will save lives. But the trajectory of military research has led to calls for an arms-control regime to forestall any possibility that autonomous systems could target humans.
In Berlin last year, a group of robotic engineers, philosophers and human rights activists formed the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and said such technologies might tempt policymakers to think war can be less bloody.
Some experts also worry that hostile states or terrorist organizations could hack robotic systems and redirect them. Malfunctions also are a problem: In South Africa in 2007, a semiautonomous cannon fatally shot nine friendly soldiers.
The ICRAC would like to see an international treaty, such as the one banning antipersonnel mines, that would outlaw some autonomous lethal machines. Such an agreement could still allow automated antimissile systems.
“The question is whether systems are capable of discrimination,” said Peter Asaro, a founder of the ICRAC and a professor at the New School in New York who teaches a course on digital war. “The good technology is far off, but technology that doesn’t work well is already out there. The worry is that these systems are going to be pushed out too soon, and they make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes are going to be atrocities.”
Research into autonomy, some of it classified, is racing ahead at universities and research centers in the United States, and that effort is beginning to be replicated in other countries, particularly China.
“Lethal autonomy is inevitable,” said Ronald C. Arkin, the author of “Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots,” a study that was funded by the Army Research Office.
Arkin believes it is possible to build ethical military drones and robots, capable of using deadly force while programmed to adhere to international humanitarian law and the rules of engagement. He said software can be created that would lead machines to return fire with proportionality, minimize collateral damage, recognize surrender, and, in the case of uncertainty, maneuver to reassess or wait for a human assessment.
In other words, rules as understood by humans can be converted into algorithms followed by machines for all kinds of actions on the battlefield.
“How a war-fighting unit may think — we are trying to make our systems behave like that,” said Lora G. Weiss, chief scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
Others, however, remain skeptical that humans can be taken out of the loop.
“Autonomy is really the Achilles’ heel of robotics,” said Johann Borenstein, head of the Mobile Robotics Lab at the University of Michigan. “There is a lot of work being done, and still we haven’t gotten to a point where the smallest amount of autonomy is being used in the military field. All robots in the military are remote-controlled. How does that sit with the fact that autonomy has been worked on at universities and companies for well over 20 years?”
Borenstein said human skills will remain critical in battle far into the future.
“The foremost of all skills is common sense,” he said. “Robots don’t have common sense and won’t have common sense in the next 50 years, or however long one might want to guess.”
U.S. building new secret drone bases
SourceOfficials: U.S. building new secret drone bases
by Craig Whitlock and Greg Miller - Sept. 21, 2011 12:00 AM
Washington Post
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaida affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, U.S. officials said.
One of the installations is being established in Ethiopia, a U.S. ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the militant group that controls much of Somalia.
Another base is in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where a small fleet of "hunter-killer" drones resumed operations this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned aircraft could effectively patrol Somalia from there.
The U.S. military also has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in Djibouti, a tiny African nation at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In addition, the CIA is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula so it can deploy armed drones over Yemen.
The rapid expansion of the undeclared drone wars is a reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials view the activities of al-Qaida affiliates in Yemen and Somalia, even as al-Qaida's core leadership in Pakistan has been weakened by U.S. counterterrorism operations.
The U.S. government is known to have used drones to carry out lethal attacks in at least six countries. The negotiations that preceded the establishment of the base in the Republic of Seychelles illustrate the efforts the United States is making to broaden the range of its drone weapons.
The island nation of 85,000 people has hosted a small fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones operated by the U.S. Navy and Air Force since September 2009.
U.S. and Seychellois officials have previously acknowledged the drones' presence but have said that their primary mission was to track pirates in regional waters. But classified U.S. diplomatic cables show that the unmanned aircraft have also conducted counterterrorism missions over Somalia, about 800 miles to the northwest.
The cables reveal that U.S. officials asked leaders in the Seychelles to keep the counterterrorism missions secret. The Reapers are described by the military as "hunter-killer" drones because they can be equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided bombs.
U.S. officials said they had no plans to arm the Reapers when the mission was announced. The cables show, however, that U.S. officials were thinking about weaponizing the drones.
During a meeting with Seychelles President James Michel on Sept. 18, 2009, American diplomats said the U.S. government "would seek . . . specific discussions . . . to gain approval" to arm the Reapers "should the desire to do so ever arise," according to a cable summarizing the meeting.
U.S. assembling drone bases in Africa, Arabian Peninsula
SourceU.S. assembling secret drone bases in Africa, Arabian Peninsula, officials say
By Craig Whitlock and Greg Miller, Published: September 20
The Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, U.S. officials said.
One of the installations is being established in Ethiopia, a U.S. ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the Somali militant group that controls much of that country. Another base is in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where a small fleet of “hunter-killer” drones resumed operations this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned aircraft could effectively patrol Somalia from there.
The U.S. military also has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in Djibouti, a tiny African nation at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In addition, the CIA is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula so it can deploy armed drones over Yemen.
The rapid expansion of the undeclared drone wars is a reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials view the activities of al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia, even as al-Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan has been weakened by U.S. counterterrorism operations.
The U.S. government is known to have used drones to carry out lethal attacks in at least six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The negotiations that preceded the establishment of the base in the Republic of Seychelles illustrate the efforts the United States is making to broaden the range of its drone weapons.
The island nation of 85,000 people has hosted a small fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones operated by the U.S. Navy and Air Force since September 2009. U.S. and Seychellois officials have previously acknowledged the drones’ presence but have said that their primary mission was to track pirates in regional waters. But classified U.S. diplomatic cables show that the unmanned aircraft have also conducted counterterrorism missions over Somalia, about 800 miles to the northwest.
The cables, obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, reveal that U.S. officials asked leaders in the Seychelles to keep the counterterrorism missions secret. The Reapers are described by the military as “hunter-killer” drones because they can be equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided bombs.
To allay concerns among islanders, U.S. officials said they had no plans to arm the Reapers when the mission was announced two years ago. The cables show, however, that U.S. officials were thinking about weaponizing the drones.
During a meeting with Seychelles President James Michel on Sept. 18, 2009, American diplomats said the U.S. government “would seek discrete [sic], specific discussions . . . to gain approval” to arm the Reapers “should the desire to do so ever arise,” according to a cable summarizing the meeting. Michel concurred, but asked U.S. officials to approach him exclusively for permission “and not anyone else” in his government, the cable reported.
Michel’s chief deputy told a U.S. diplomat on a separate occasion that the Seychelles president “was not philosophically against” arming the drones, according to another cable. But the deputy urged the Americans “to be extremely careful in raising the issue with anyone in the Government outside of the President. Such a request would be ‘politically extremely sensitive’ and would have to be handled with ‘the utmost discreet care.’ ”
A U.S. military spokesman declined to say whether the Reapers in the Seychelles have ever been armed.
“Because of operational security concerns, I can’t get into specifics,” said Lt. Cmdr. James D. Stockman, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Africa Command, which oversees the base in the Seychelles. He noted, however, that the MQ-9 Reapers “can be configured for both surveillance and strike.”
A spokeswoman for Michel said the president was unavailable for comment.
Jean-Paul Adam, who was Michel’s chief deputy in 2009 and now serves as minister of foreign affairs, said U.S. officials had not asked for permission to equip the drones with missiles or bombs.
“The operation of the drones in Seychelles for the purposes of counter-piracy surveillance and other related activities has always been unarmed, and the U.S. government has never asked us for them to be armed,” Adam said in an e-mail. “This was agreed between the two governments at the first deployment and the situation has not changed.”
The State Department cables show that U.S. officials were sensitive to perceptions that the drones might be armed, noting that they “do have equipment that could appear to the public as being weapons.”
To dispel potential concerns, they held a “media day” for about 30 journalists and Seychellois officials at the small, one-runway airport in Victoria, the capital, in November 2009. One of the Reapers was parked on the tarmac.
“The government of Seychelles invited us here to fight against piracy, and that is its mission,” Craig White, a U.S. diplomat, said during the event. “However, these aircraft have a great deal of capabilities and could be used for other missions.”
In fact, U.S. officials had already outlined other purposes for the drones in a classified mission review with Michel and Adam. Saying that the U.S. government “desires to be completely transparent,” the American diplomats informed the Seychellois leaders that the Reapers would also fly over Somalia “to support ongoing counter-terrorism efforts,” though not “direct attacks,” according to a cable summarizing the meeting.
U.S. officials “stressed the sensitive nature of this counter-terrorism mission and that this not be released outside of the highest . . . channels,” the cable stated. “The President wholeheartedly concurred with that request, noting that such issues could be politically sensitive for him as well.”
The Seychelles drone operation has a relatively small footprint. Based in a hangar located about a quarter-mile from the main passenger terminal at the airport, it includes between three and four Reapers and about 100 U.S. military personnel and contractors, according to the cables.
The military operated the flights on a continuous basis until April, when it paused the operations. They resumed this month, said Stockman, the Africa Command spokesman.
The aim in assembling a constellation of bases in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula is to create overlapping circles of surveillance in a region where al-Qaeda offshoots could emerge for years to come, U.S. officials said.
The locations “are based on potential target sets,” said a senior U.S. military official. “If you look at it geographically, it makes sense — you get out a ruler and draw the distances [drones] can fly and where they take off from.”
One U.S. official said that there had been discussions about putting a drone base in Ethiopia for as long as four years, but that plan was delayed because “the Ethiopians were not all that jazzed.” Other officials said Ethiopia has become a valued counterterrorism partner because of threats posed by al-Shabab.
“We have a lot of interesting cooperation and arrangements with the Ethiopians when it comes to intelligence collection and linguistic capabilities,” said a former senior U.S. military official familiar with special operations missions in the region.
An Ethiopian Embassy spokesman in Washington could not be reached for comment Tuesday night.
The former official said the United States relies on Ethiopian linguists to translate signals intercepts gathered by U.S. agencies monitoring calls and e-mails of al-Shabab members. The CIA and other agencies also employ Ethiopian informants who gather information from across the border.
Overall, officials said, the cluster of bases reflects an effort to have wider geographic coverage, greater leverage with countries in the region and backup facilities if individual airstrips are forced to close.
“It’s a conscious recognition that those are the hot spots developing right now,” said the former senior U.S. military official.
Could model airplanes become a terrorist weapon?
The answer is it's highly unlikely. But that's won't stop the police from demonizing people that sell, manufacture, and fly model airplanes in an attempt to create a jobs program for the cops to regulated the planes.Remember it ain't about stopping terrorists, it's about creating easy jobs for overpaid do nothing cops. Source
Could model airplanes become a terrorist weapon?
(AP) BOSTON — Model airplanes are suddenly on the public's radar as potential terrorist weapons.
A 26-year-old man from a Boston suburb was arrested Wednesday and accused of plotting to attack the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol with remote-controlled model planes packed with explosives.
These are not balsa-wood-and-rubber-band toys investigators are talking about. The FBI said Rezwan Ferdaus hoped to use military-jet replicas, 5 to 7 1/2 feet long, guided by GPS devices and capable of speeds over 100 mph.
Federal officials have long been aware of the possibility someone might try to use such planes as weapons, but there are no restrictions on their purchase — Ferdaus is said to have bought his over the Internet.
Counterterrorism experts and model-aircraft hobbyists said it would be nearly impossible to inflict large-scale damage of the sort Ferdaus allegedly envisioned using model planes. The aircraft are too small, can't carry enough explosives and are too tricky to fly, they said.
"The idea of pushing a button and this thing diving into the Pentagon is kind of a joke, actually," said Greg Hahn, technical director of the Academy of Model Aeronautics.
Rick Nelson, a former Navy helicopter pilot who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Ferdaus would have had to hit a window or other vulnerable area to maximize damage, and that would have taken precision flying.
"Flying a remote-controlled plane isn't as easy as it actually looks, and then to put an explosive on it and have that explosive detonate at the time and place that you want it add to the difficulty of actually doing it," he said.
Ferdaus, a Muslim American from Ashland, was arrested after federal agents posing as al-Qaida members delivered what he believed was 24 pounds of C-4 explosive, authorities said. He was charged with attempting to damage or destroy a federal building with explosives. A federal affidavit claims he began planning "jihad" against the U.S. in early 2010 after becoming convinced through jihadi websites and videos that America was evil.
Ferdaus had a physics degree from Northeastern University and enjoyed "taking stuff apart" and "learning on my own," according to court papers.
The model planes Ferdaus eyed were the F-4 Phantom and the F-86 Sabre, small-scale versions of military jets, investigators said. The F-4 is the more expensive of the two, at up to $20,000, Hahn said. The F-86, one of which Ferdaus actually obtained, costs $6,000 to $10,000 new.
Ferdaus' plan, as alleged in court papers, was to launch three such planes from a park near the Pentagon and Capitol and use GPS to direct them toward the buildings, where they would detonate on impact and blow the Capitol dome to "smithereens." He planned to pack five pounds of plastic explosives on each plane, according to prosecutors.
James Crippin, an explosives and anti-terrorism expert, said that much C-4 could do serious damage — a half-pound will obliterate a car. But he said getting a stable explosive like C-4 to blow up at the right time would have been hugely difficult.
And there were slim prospects of causing any serious damage to buildings like the Pentagon and Capitol, which are undoubtedly hardened to withstand explosions, according to Crippin, director of the Western Forensic Law Enforcement Training Center.
"Basically, I think he's suffering from delusions of grandeur," he said.
Hahn said the heavier of the two models Ferdaus was allegedly planning to use could carry a maximum of two pounds of plastic explosive before malfunctioning. That's not including the weight of any GPS system, he added.
"It's almost impossible for him to get this done," he said.
Remote-controlled aircraft have been considered by terrorists before. In 2008, Christopher Paul of Worthington, Ohio, a Columbus suburb, pleaded guilty to plotting terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Europe using explosive devices. Prosecutors said he researched remote-controlled boats and a remote-controlled 5-foot-long helicopter.
And after Sept. 11, federal agents asked the Academy of Model Aeronautics' 143,000 members to watch for any fellow enthusiasts who might be buying planes with bad intentions.
Well before the Massachusetts arrest, police in Montgomery County, Md., put out a terrorist warning to hobby shops to be aware of customers "who don't appear to be hobbyists" buying model airplanes with cash and asking how they can be modified to carry a device.
The Federal Aviation Administration is devising new rules for model airplanes and other unmanned aircraft, but the restrictions are aimed primarily at preventing collisions. Under current FAA rules, such planes are generally limited to flying below 400 feet and away from airports and air traffic.
Massachusetts prosecutor Gerry Leone, who handled the prosecution of would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid, said terrorists are always building bombs out of common, legitimate items, and imposing restrictions on buying model aircraft would not make sense simply because of this one case.
But he said law enforcement might want be more vigilant about such purchases.
Similarly, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said recent advances in model airplane technology could make them more attractive to terrorists. But he said the answer is better intelligence, not trying to regulate hobbyists and their toys.
"Kids have them, people fly them, groups are organized just to engage in this type of pastime activity," the congressman said. "It would be almost impossible to regulate the little engines and things, propellers."
___
Associated Press writers Denise Lavoie in Boston and Chris Hawley in New York and AP broadcast correspondent Sagar Meghani in Washington contributed to this report.
Hurricane Drone
SourceTiny aircraft could improve hurricane forecasts
By Ken Kaye, Sun Sentinel
September 30, 2011, 7:41 p.m.
Reporting from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.— It's 3 feet long, weighs 8 pounds and looks a bit like a plastic airplane model. But by next year it will be flying into the eye of a hurricane, bucking incredibly violent winds and maneuvering within 100 feet of the ocean's surface.
Its primary mission: to help the National Hurricane Center improve intensity predictions, an area where forecasters have lagged for decades. It also will help improve the accuracy of real-time storm predictions.
Called GALE, the unmanned aircraft will be launched from the belly of a hurricane hunter turboprop, initially shot out of a tube as a cylinder. Then it will sprout wings and fly into the core of a hurricane, where it will feed wind speeds and other atmospheric data into computer models that project a storm's track and strength.
"It gives us a better understanding of how the ocean is interacting with the atmosphere," said Joe Cione, project leader with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Right now, the models are guessing at what's going on down there."
The $30,000 drone, the latest weapon in NOAA's hurricane-forecast arsenal, is made of hard composites and powered by an electronic motor. It cruises about 55 mph and can stay aloft for about 1.5 hours before falling into the ocean, never to be used again.
The first one will be flight-tested in coming weeks; then two will be flown into separate hurricanes next year. Pilots based on the ground will control them via satellite link, Cione said.
NOAA is undertaking the project in partnership with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach.
Considering the plane is so light and hurricane winds are so strong, how is it able to fly without getting tossed asunder?
Initially, it will be dropped into the eye of a hurricane, where the winds are usually calm, said Massood Towhidnejad, a professor of software engineering at Embry-Riddle. It will remain there collecting data until it is almost out of power. Then it will be directed into the hurricane's eye wall, where the winds are tumultuous.
At that point, the tiny plane will become uncontrollable, Towhidnejad said.
"We're basically hoping this thing will last as long as it can," he said. "The wind forces will take over and cause it to rotate. But that's exactly what we want."
That violent rotation, he said, will become another means to determine a storm's strength and structure.
It won't be the first time a drone has investigated tropical systems. A similarly small plane, called an aerosonde, was first flown in September 2005 into Hurricane Ophelia as it was threatening North Carolina.
More recently, a Global Hawk turbine-powered aircraft, designed to stay aloft more than 30 hours at high altitude, was deployed into some of last year's storms.
The major benefit of using unmanned aircraft: They can fly into places too dangerous for hurricane hunters and other research planes.
kkaye@tribune.com
Is it legal for Obama to murder American citizens?
SourceYEMEN: Does U.S. have the right to target and kill its citizens?
September 30, 2011 | 3:49 pm
News that U.S.-born radical cleric Anwar Awlaki was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Yemen on Friday has revived debate about the inclusion of Americans on a U.S. government "targeted killing" list.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented Awlaki’s father in a lawsuit last year against the Obama administration, argue that the United States does not have the authority to hunt down and kill one of its citizens without any judicial review, in a country where it is not at war.
“The targeted-killing program violates both U.S. and international law,” ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said in a statement posted Friday on the group's blog.
Vince Warren, the Center for Constitutional Rights executive director, said the program “essentially grants the executive the power to kill any U.S. citizen deemed a threat, without any judicial oversight or any of the rights afforded by our constitution."
The United States has used the program to target Al Qaeda, Taliban and associated leaders since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Such killings have escalated since President Obama took office in 2009, including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May and unmanned drone strikes like the one that killed Awlaki, according to a Council on Foreign Relations background report. The administration argues that the U.S. is in armed conflict with Al Qaeda and that its right to self-defense can include killing individuals who are planning attacks, whether or not they are in a declared war zone.
In an address Friday, Obama asserted that Awlaki was the leader of external operations for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which U.S. officials describe as the terrorist network's most active affiliate.
“In that role, he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans,” Obama said. “He directed the failed attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009. He directed the failed attempt to blow up U.S. cargo planes in 2010. And he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda.”
Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said it did not matter that Awlaki was born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents.
“Other than Bin Laden, he was probably the most dangerous person in Al Qaeda as regards attacks on the United States,” Ruppersberger said. “He was smart, he knew our culture, he understood the U.S. He knew Al Qaeda couldn’t mount another 9-11 because intelligence would detect it, so he tried to inspire lone-wolf plots.”
Regional experts agreed that Awlaki was a charismatic recruiter for global jihad who spread militant messages through the Internet and inspired attacks against the U.S. But they questioned the extent of his operational role in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
“He was not a military leader. Killing him is not a big loss inside Yemen,” said Saeed Ali Obaid Jamhi, an expert on Islamic militants in the region. “He was not so much involved in the Yemen struggle. He was more of an international figure. He was a spiritual inspiration for jihadis, and his death will increase the hatred against the Yemen government for allowing U.S. planes and drones to target people inside Yemen.”
xxx
SourceStrike Reflects U.S. Shift to Drones in Terror Fight
Christopher Griffin, via Reuters
WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for Al Qaeda’s rising franchise in Yemen, was one more demonstration of what American officials describe as a cheap, safe and precise tool to eliminate enemies. It was also a sign that the decade-old American campaign against terrorism has reached a turning point.
Disillusioned by huge costs and uncertain outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration has decisively embraced the drone, along with small-scale lightning raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden in May, as the future of the fight against terrorist networks.
“The lessons of the big wars are obvious,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has studied the trade-offs. “The cost in blood and treasure is immense, and the outcome is unforeseeable. Public support at home is declining toward rock bottom. And the people you’ve come to liberate come to resent your presence.”
The shift is also a result of shrinking budgets, which will no longer accommodate the deployment of large forces overseas at a rough annual cost of $1 million per soldier. And there have been improvements in the technical capabilities of remotely piloted aircraft. One of them tracked Mr. Awlaki with live video on Yemeni tribal turf, where it is too dangerous for American troops to go.
Even military officials who advocate for the drone campaign acknowledge that these technologies are not applicable to every security threat.
Still, the move to drones and precise strikes is a remarkable change in favored strategy, underscored by the leadership changes at the Pentagon and C.I.A. Just a few years ago, counterinsurgency was the rage, as Gen. David H. Petraeus used the strategy to turn around what appeared to be a hopeless situation in Iraq. He then applied those lessons in Afghanistan.
The outcome — as measured in political stability, rule of law and economic development — remains uncertain in both.
Now, Mr. Petraeus (he has chosen to go by his civilian title of director, rather than general) is in charge of the C.I.A., which pioneered the drone campaign in Pakistan. He no longer commands the troops whose numbers were the core of counterinsurgency.
And the defense secretary is Leon E. Panetta, who oversaw the escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan’s lawless tribal area as the C.I.A. director. Mr. Panetta, the budget director under President Bill Clinton, must find a way to safeguard security as the Pentagon purse strings draw tight.
Today, there is little political appetite for the risk, cost and especially the long timelines required by counterinsurgency doctrine, which involves building societies and governments to gradually take over the battle against insurgents and terrorists within their borders.
The apparent simplicity of a drone aloft, with its pilot operating from the United States, can be misleading. Behind each aircraft is a team of 150 or more personnel, repairing and maintaining the plane and the heap of ground technology that keeps it in the air, poring over the hours of videos and radio signals it collects, and gathering the voluminous intelligence necessary to prompt a single strike.
Air Force officials calculate that it costs $5 billion to operate the service’s global airborne surveillance network, and that sum is growing. The Pentagon has asked for another $5 billion next year alone for remotely piloted drone systems.
Yet even those costs are tiny compared with the price of the big wars. A Brown University study, published in June, estimates that the United States will have spent $3.7 trillion in Afghanistan and Iraq by the time the wars are over.
The drones may alienate fewer people. They have angered many Pakistanis, who resent the violation of their country’s sovereignty and the inevitable civilian casualties when missiles go awry or are directed by imperfect intelligence. But while experts argue over the extent of the deaths of innocents when missiles fall on suspected terrorist compounds, there is broad agreement that the drones cause far fewer unintended deaths and produce far fewer refugees than either ground combat or traditional airstrikes.
Still, there are questions of legality. The Obama administration legal team wrestled with whether it would be lawful to make Mr. Awlaki a target for death — a proposition that raised complex issues involving Mr. Awlaki’s constitutional rights as an American citizen, domestic statutes and international law.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel eventually issued a lengthy, classified memorandum that apparently concluded it would be legal to strike at someone like Mr. Awlaki in circumstances in which he was believed to be plotting attacks against the United States, and if there was no way to arrest him. The existence of that memorandum was first reported Saturday by The Washington Post.
The role of drones in the changing American way of war also illustrates the increasing militarization of the intelligence community, as Air Force drone technologies for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — and now armed with Hellfire missiles for strikes on ground targets — play a central role in C.I.A. operations. The blurring of military-intelligence boundaries includes former uniformed officers assuming top jobs in the intelligence apparatus and military commando units carrying out raids under C.I.A. command.
As useful as the drones have proved for counterterrorism, their value in other kinds of conflicts may be more limited. Against some of the most significant potential threats — a China in ascendancy, for example, or a North Korea or Iran with nuclear weapons — drones are likely to be of marginal value. Should military force be required as a deterrent or for an attack, traditional forces, including warships and combat aircraft, would carry the heaviest load.
Of course, new kinds of air power have often appeared seductive, offering a cleaner, higher-tech brand of war. Military officials say they are aware that drones are no panacea.
“It’s one of many capabilities that we have at our disposal to go after terrorists and others,” one senior Pentagon official said. “But this is a tool that is not a weapon for weapon’s sake. It’s tied to policy. In many cases, these weapons are deployed in areas where it’s very tough to go after the enemy by conventional means, because these terror leaders are located in some of the most remote places.”
In some ways, the debate over drones versus troops recalls the early months of George W. Bush’s administration, when the new president and his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, envisioned how a revolution in military technology would allow the Defense Department to reduce its ground forces and focus money instead on intelligence platforms and long-range, precision-strike weapons.
Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, in which ground forces carried out the lion’s share of the missions.
Mr. Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, worries about the growing perception that drones are the answer to terrorism, just a few years after many officials believed that invading and remaking countries would prove the cure. The recent string of successful strikes has prompted senior Obama administration officials to suggest that the demise of Al Qaeda may be within sight. But the history of terrorist movements shows that they are almost never ended by military force, he said.
“What gets lost are all the other instruments of national power,” including diplomacy, trade policy and development aid, Mr. Zenko said. “But these days those tools never get adequate consideration, because drones get all the attention.”
Some lame excuses for American murders with drones
Some lame excuses justifying American murders with drone airstrikes.Will drone strikes become Obama’s Guantanamo?
By John B. Bellinger III, Published: October 2
The killing of the U.S.-born al- Qaeda cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki on Friday along with another U.S. citizen and two other al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen is likely to fuel the international controversy over the legality and wisdom of the Obama administration’s dramatically increased use of drone attacks. For several years, U.S. allies have made no public comment even as U.S. drone strikes have killed twice as many suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members than were ever imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. But that acquiescence may change, as human rights groups and the media focus more attention on the legality and collateral damage of drone attacks. The U.S. drone program has been highly effective in killing senior al-Qaeda leaders, but the administration needs to work harder to explain and defend its use of drones as lawful and appropriate — to allies and critics — if it wants to avoid losing international support and potentially exposing administration officials to legal liability.
The U.S. position, under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, has been that drone strikes against al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are lawful under U.S. and international law. They are permitted by the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act, which empowered the president to “all necessary and appropriate force” against nations, organizations or persons who planned, committed or aided the Sept. 11 attacks.
The United States also believes that drone strikes are permitted under international law and the United Nations Charter as actions in self-defense, either with the consent of the country where the strike takes place or because that country is unwilling or unable to act against an imminent threat to the United States. U.S. officials have been understandably reluctant to confirm whether consent has been given by particular countries.
Obama administration officials have explained in the past that strikes against particular militant leaders are permissible, either because the individuals are part of the overall U.S. conflict with al-Qaeda or because they pose imminent threats to the United States. President Obama emphasized Awlaki’s operational role on Friday, stating that he was the “leader of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
The killing of Awlaki raises additional legal concerns because U.S. citizens have certain constitutional rights wherever they are in the world. Some human rights groups have asserted that due process requires prior judicial review before killing an American, but it is unlikely that the Constitution requires judicial involvement in the case of a U.S. citizen engaged in terrorist activity outside this country. Administration lawyers undoubtedly reviewed the targeting of Awlaki even more carefully than of a non-American, and the Justice Department reportedly prepared an opinion concluding that his killing would comply with domestic and international law. This is likely to be considered sufficient due process under U.S. constitutional standards.
But the U.S. legal position may not satisfy the rest of the world. No other government has said publicly that it agrees with the U.S. policy or legal rationale for drones. European allies, who vigorously criticized the Bush administration for asserting the unilateral right to use force against terrorists in countries outside Afghanistan, have neither supported nor criticized reported U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Instead, they have largely looked the other way, as they did with the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Human rights advocates, on the other hand, while quiet for several years (perhaps to avoid criticizing the new administration), have grown increasingly uncomfortable with drone attacks. Last year, the U.N. rapporteur for summary executions and extrajudicial killings said that drone strikes may violate international humanitarian and human rights law and could constitute war crimes. U.S. human rights groups, which stirred up international opposition to Bush administration counterterrorism policies, have been quick to condemn the Awlaki killing.
Even if Obama administration officials are satisfied that drone strikes comply with domestic and international law, they would still be wise to try to build a broader international consensus. The administration should provide more information about the strict limits it applies to targeting and about who has been targeted. One of the mistakes the Bush administration made in its first term was adopting novel counterterrorism policies without attempting to explain and secure international support for them.
White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan rightly acknowledged in a recent speech that “the effectiveness of our counterterrorism activities depends on the assistance and cooperation of our allies.” If the Obama administration wants to avoid losing the tacit support (and potentially the operational and intelligence assistance) of its allies for drone strikes and its other counterterrorism policies, it should try to ensure that they understand and agree with the U.S. policy and legal justification. Otherwise, the administration risks having its largely successful drone program become as internationally maligned as Guantanamo.
The writer is a partner at Arnold & Porter LLP and an adjunct senior fellow in international and national security law at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as legal adviser for the State Department from 2005 to 2009 and as legal adviser to the National Security Council from 2001 to 2005.
Combat drones hacked???
I wonder if this story was planted by the government? Or has the American Empire's latest murder weapon really been hacked?Combat drones' computer systems reportedly infected with virus
October 7, 2011 | 6:44 pm
A computer virus has infected the U.S.-based cockpits of the military’s Predator and Reaper drones, according to media reports.
The robotic planes are controlled remotely from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada as they fly above Afghanistan, Libya and other war zones. The drones are manufactured by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. at its sprawling campus in Poway.
The virus, first reported by Wired magazine's defense blog, is allegedly logging pilots' every keystroke as they carry out their missions. The article, which relies on unnamed sources, says the virus was first detected two weeks ago and has remained on Creech's computer system despite multiple efforts to remove it.
“Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called ‘keylogger’ payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks,” the article says. “The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread."
Reuters posted a story that says the drones continue to carry out missions even with the virus. The article also quotes an unnamed source who said: “Something is going on, but it has not had any impact on the missions overseas.”
The Creech Air Force Base public affairs office responded to inquiries about the reports with the following statement:
"We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach. We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover."
When will America start murdering suspected drug dealers with drones???
In Pakistan, strikes from [drones] have killed more than 2,000 militantsThe United States can [and does] send [drones] over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.
[The American Empire is] creating an international norm — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks
And of course I think the questions is not will the American Empire start using drones to kill suspected drug dealers, but when will the American Empire murdering suspected drug dealers with drones.
Coming Soon: The Drone Arms Race
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: October 8, 2011
WASHINGTON
AT the Zhuhai air show in southeastern China last November, Chinese companies startled some Americans by unveiling 25 different models of remotely controlled aircraft and showing video animation of a missile-armed drone taking out an armored vehicle and attacking a United States aircraft carrier.
The presentation appeared to be more marketing hype than military threat; the event is China’s biggest aviation market, drawing both Chinese and foreign military buyers. But it was stark evidence that the United States’ near monopoly on armed drones was coming to an end, with far-reaching consequences for American security, international law and the future of warfare.
Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.
“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”
What was a science-fiction scenario not much more than a decade ago has become today’s news. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military drones have become a routine part of the arsenal. In Pakistan, according to American officials, strikes from Predators and Reapers operated by the C.I.A. have killed more than 2,000 militants; the number of civilian casualties is hotly debated. In Yemen last month, an American citizen was, for the first time, the intended target of a drone strike, as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda propagandist and plotter, was killed along with a second American, Samir Khan.
If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them.
“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.”
The qualities that have made lethal drones so attractive to the Obama administration for counterterrorism appeal to many countries and, conceivably, to terrorist groups: a capacity for leisurely surveillance and precise strikes, modest cost, and most important, no danger to the operator, who may sit in safety thousands of miles from the target.
To date, only the United States, Israel (against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza) and Britain (in Afghanistan) are known to have used drones for strikes. But American defense analysts count more than 50 countries that have built or bought unmanned aerial vehicles, or U.A.V.’s, and the number is rising every month. Most are designed for surveillance, but as the United States has found, adding missiles or bombs is hardly a technical challenge.
“The virtue of most U.A.V.’s is that they have long wings and you can strap anything to them,” Mr. Gormley says. That includes video cameras, eavesdropping equipment and munitions, he says. “It’s spreading like wildfire.”
So far, the United States has a huge lead in the number and sophistication of unmanned aerial vehicles (about 7,000, by one official’s estimate, mostly unarmed). The Air Force prefers to call them not U.A.V.’s but R.P.A.’s, or remotely piloted aircraft, in acknowledgment of the human role; Air Force officials should know, since their service is now training more pilots to operate drones than fighters and bombers.
Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis for the Teal Group, a company that tracks defense and aerospace markets, says global spending on research and procurement of drones over the next decade is expected to total more than $94 billion, including $9 billion on remotely piloted combat aircraft.
Israel and China are aggressively developing and marketing drones, and Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and several other countries are not far behind. The Defense Security Service, which protects the Pentagon and its contractors from espionage, warned in a report last year that American drone technology had become a prime target for foreign spies.
Last December, a surveillance drone crashed in an El Paso neighborhood; it had been launched, it turned out, by the Mexican police across the border. Even Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, has deployed drones, an Iranian design capable of carrying munitions and diving into a target, says P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, whose 2009 book “Wired for War” is a primer on robotic combat.
Late last month, a 26-year-old man from a Boston suburb was arrested and charged with plotting to load a remotely controlled aircraft with plastic explosives and crash it into the Pentagon or United States Capitol. His supposed co-conspirators were actually undercover F.B.I. agents, and it was unclear that his scheme could have done much damage. But it was an unnerving harbinger, says John Villasenor, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. He notes that the Army had just announced a $5 million contract for a backpack-size drone called a Switchblade that can carry an explosive payload into a target; such a weapon will not long be beyond the capabilities of a terrorist network.
“If they are skimming over rooftops and trees, they will be almost impossible to shoot down,” he maintains.
It is easy to scare ourselves by imagining terrorist drones rigged not just to carry bombs but to spew anthrax or scatter radioactive waste. Speculation that Al Qaeda might use exotic weapons has so far turned out to be just that. But the technological curve for drones means the threat can no longer be discounted.
“I think of where the airplane was at the start of World War I: at first it was unarmed and limited to a handful of countries,” Mr. Singer says. “Then it was armed and everywhere. That is the path we’re on.”
Stealth Drone Soars in Navy Test Flight
SourceUFO-Like Stealth Drone Soars in Navy Test Flight
By InnovationNewsDaily Staff
Space.com | SPACE.com
Military drones have already begun edging out manned fighter jets and bombers over the past decade, and the U.S. Navy doesn't plan on being left behind. Its vision for unmanned aerial warfare includes a tailless robotic aircraft resembling a UFO that is scheduled to begin landing on aircraft carriers in 2013. As a step toward that goal, the X-47B drone recently made its first flight in cruise mode with retracted landing gear.
The Navy has enlisted the X-47B drone — a Northrop Grumman design with a stealthy profile — as more than just its very first carrier-based drone. It also wants to use the X-47B as a test platform for autonomous aerial refueling without human assistance in 2014.
"Last week's flight gave us our first clean look at the aerodynamic cruise performance of the X-47B air system … and it is proving out all of our predictions," said Janis Pamiljans, vice president and Navy UCAS program manager for Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector.
The flight test also served as a trial run for the robotic aircraft's onboard navigation hardware and software. Such robotic brains are designed to help the X-47B take off from and land on the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier.
Planned tests for the drone don't include weapon or sensor demonstrations, but there's no apparent reason why it might not carry weapons in the future. The U.S. military has already demonstrated the lethality of armed drone strikes with its Reaper and Predator unmanned aerial systems in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and the Navy has also announced plans to arm ship-based helicopter drones.
The latest test flight took place at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
This story was provided by InnovationNewsDaily, sister site to SPACE.com. Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.
Military's first cargo-carrying drone aircraft
SourceMilitary's first cargo-carrying drone aircraft is going to war
October 5, 2011
The Marine Corps will deploy its first-ever cargo-lifting drone into a war zone when it sends the K-MAX helicopter to Afghanistan next month.
The heavy-lift drone chopper, made by Lockheed Martin Corp. and Kaman Aerospace Corp., recently wrapped up a five-day evaluation study in Arizona to prove its cargo-carrying capability in conditions similar to those it would be expected to encounter in Afghanistan.
K-MAX exceeded the Navy and Marines’ requirement to deliver 6,000 pounds of cargo per day.
“K-MAX has the capability to quickly deliver cargo, thus getting troops off the roads and allowing them to focus on other missions," said Navy Rear Adm. Bill Shannon, division executive officer for unmanned aviation and strike weapons.
The K-MAX team of mission commanders and aircraft operators have been undergoing training and flight tests at a base in Twentynine Palms, according to a Lockheed release.
Lockheed and Kaman teamed in 2007 to transform Kaman’s manned power-lift helicopter into a drone capable of autonomous or remote-controlled cargo delivery. Kaman designed the airframe and Lockheed designed the helicopter’s mission management and control systems.
K-MAX is the latest robotic aircraft to join the military's expanding drone fleet, which include high-flying spy jets, small hand-launched planes and missile-firing hunter aircraft.
“We are extremely honored to have been selected for deployment by the Navy,” said Sal Bordonaro, division president at Kaman Helicopters. “We are committed to providing the Marine Corps with the life-saving unmanned capability of our proven airframe, reducing the risk to our forces by taking the cargo resupply mission from the ground to the air.”
Drones execute innocent people
"Friendly Fire" murder by drones
This article says this is the first case of drones executing innocent people. That's 100 percent BS. According to previous articles many innocent woman and children have been murdered by American drone strikes.U.S. deaths in drone strike due to miscommunication, report says
By David Zucchino and David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times
October 14, 2011, 9:15 p.m.
Reporting from Washington— A Marine and a Navy medic killed by a U.S. drone airstrike were targeted when Marine commanders in Afghanistan mistook them for Taliban fighters, even though analysts watching the Predator's video feed were uncertain whether the men were part of an enemy force.
Those are the findings of a Pentagon investigation of the first known case of friendly fire deaths involving an unmanned aircraft, the April 6 attack that killed Marine Staff Sgt. Jeremy Smith, 26, and Navy Hospitalman Benjamin D. Rast, 23.
The 381-page report, which has not been released, concludes that the Marine officers on the scene and the Air Force crew controlling the drone from half a world away were unaware that analysts watching the firefight unfold via live video at a third location had doubts about the targets' identity.
The incident closely resembles another deadly mistake involving a Predator in early 2009. In that attack, at least 15 Afghan civilians were killed after a Predator crew mistook them for a group of Taliban preparing to attack a U.S. special forces unit.
In that case, analysts located at Air Force Special Operations Command in Florida who were watching live battlefield video from the aircraft's high-altitude cameras also had doubts about the target. Their warnings that children were present were disregarded by the drone operator and by an Army captain, who authorized the airstrike.
Because names are redacted in the Pentagon report, it is unclear which Marine officer made the final decision to order the airstrike that killed Smith and Rast. But a senior Marine officer familiar with the investigation said commanders at the battalion or regimental level would have the ultimate authority, not the lieutenant who led the platoon during the battle.
The friendly fire deaths in April occurred at 8:51 a.m. in Helmand province after Smith and his platoon, members of a reserve unit from Houston, came under enemy fire. The platoon had split up while trying to clear a road near the crossroads town of Sangin, an area in which Marines were engaged in nearly daily combat with insurgents.
Smith, Rast and another Marine had separated from the others and had taken cover behind a hedgerow, where they were firing on insurgents in a cluster of nearby buildings.
Infrared cameras on the Predator overhead had picked up heat signatures of the three men and detected muzzle flashes as they fired their weapons at insurgents.
Air Force analysts who were watching the live video in Terre Haute, Indiana, noted that the gunfire appeared aimed away from the other Marines, who were behind the three. The analysts reported that gunshots were "oriented to the west, away from friendly forces," the Pentagon report says.
But the Predator pilot in Nevada and the Marine commanders on the ground "were never made aware" of the analysts' assessment.
Smith, a combat veteran on his fourth deployment, knew the airstrike was coming, but assumed the missile was aimed at a suspected Taliban position in a building 200 yards away. Smith declined to take cover in a canal with other Marines because he wanted to make sure the Predator hit the insurgent target, Pentagon officials told his father, Jerry Smith.
But the Predator crew didn't realize that Smith and the two others had separated from the other Marines, and assumed they were enemy, according to the report.
The pilot radioed "time of flight 17 seconds." A Marine at the scene suddenly radioed a warning: The missile was headed for "the wrong building." But the Hellfire exploded on Smith's position, killing him and Rast.
The analysts, who communicated with the Predator pilot via a written chat system, were never certain who Smith and Rast were. At one point, the analysts described the pair as "friendlies," but withdrew that characterization a few seconds later. They later wrote, "Unable to discern who personnel were."
Even a written assessment that the gunfire was aimed in the wrong direction was not passed along to the pilot by the Mission Intelligence Coordinator, a crew member responsible for relaying information to the pilot, the report says. The coordinator was a trainee supervised by a trainer.
The report blames the attack on a fatal mix of poor communications, faulty assumptions and "a lack of overall common situational awareness." It recommends that a Marine lieutenant and two sergeants in Smith's platoon be "formally counseled" and suggests detailed reviews of battlefield procedures, but it said no one involved in the attack was "culpably negligent or derelict in their duties."
"The chain of events … was initiated by the on-scene ground force commander's lack of overall situational awareness and inability to accurately communicate his friendly force disposition in relation to the enemy," the report said.
The report, which was originally classified secret and written by a Marine colonel, criticizes the analysts for failing to make sure the pilot understood that the gunfire was aimed away from the Marines. The analysts "should have been more assertive," it says, "and "should have persisted with their assessment until the crew either accepted or refuted the assessment."
The report also criticizes the Marine lieutenant who led the battle for lacking "a complete understanding" of where his forces were located, and the sergeant in charge of the element that included Smith and Rast for not giving clear reports during the fight.
The analysts in Indiana told investigators that they did not believe they should intervene to block an airstrike if U.S. troops were possibly in danger, even if they had doubts about the targets.
When U.S. troops were under fire, the analysts told investigators, "they were to adopt a non-interference role, unless they observed an imminent violation" of the laws of war or women and children were present, the report said.
The email chat system also contributed to the breakdown in communications, investigators said.
After the Afghan civilians were mistakenly targeted in early 2009, the Air Force began installing equipment so drone video analysts could talk directly with drone pilots. The new equipment was not in place at the Indiana base in April, however.
The investigation of the deaths of the Marine staff sergeant and Navy hospitalman was completed in May and the findings were presented to Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was in command in Afghanistan at the time. Military officers briefed Smith's father, Jerry, on Wednesday in Fort Worth and met with Rast's father, Robert, on Friday in South Bend, Ind.
"Everybody was convinced everybody knew where everybody else was — including Jeremy," Jerry Smith said in a telephone interview after he was briefed. "It was just a horrible set of circumstances."
Smith said he was briefed on the investigation for more than three hours by a Marine investigator and by Marine and Air Force officers. He said he has not yet read the report.
Smith was shown video images taken by the Predator, he said. He saw "three blobs in really dark shadows" — his son, Rast and the other Marine mistakenly identified by the Predator crew as Taliban. He said it was impossible to see uniforms or weapons.
"You couldn't even tell they were human beings — just blobs," he said.
Smith said he asked investigators about the reflective tags that U.S. forces wear on their uniforms to help identify them to friendly aircraft. He was told the tags didn't work in low-light conditions such as the shaded area where his son took cover.
Smith said he didn't blame anyone for his son's death, and did not want "scapegoats." He said he favored improved training and procedures to prevent future friendly fire attacks and counseling for those involved in the April 6 attack.
"I know whoever was at that [Predator] joystick is devastated," he said. "If I could meet them, I'd hug them and tell them I don't have any ill feelings toward them. I know their daddies are just as proud of them as I am of my son."
When Smith met his son's platoon and company commanders as the 1st Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment, returned to Houston this month, he said both men broke down and sobbed. He said he assured the officers he did not blame them.
"I'm sure everyone involved is second-guessing themselves worse than I ever could."
david.zucchino@latimes.com
david.cloud@latimes.com
Military robots offer protective solution for troops
It sure looks like the Afghan war is pretty much a clone of the Vietnam war. The American Empire learned nothing from that losing experience. In that war the Viet Cong were masters of using low tech equipment to defeat the American Empire's wealth and superior technology.Military robots offer protective solution for troops
By Tom Vanden Brook and Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – The military is rushing robots and other cutting-edge equipment to Afghanistan in an effort to protect troops on foot patrol who have been the target of a record number of attacks this year.
The equipment includes small robots that can be tossed over walls and through windows into homes, allowing troops to look for bombs in areas they cannot see. The robots transmit images to troops waiting at a safe distance.
The military is sending 650 of the small robots, called Recon Scouts, to Afghanistan at a cost of about $13.4 million. Some have already arrived.
Troops on foot patrol are particularly vulnerable to hidden bombs, which are the leading cause of casualties among U.S. troops. Afghanistan's primitive roads and mountainous terrain require Marines and soldiers to spend a lot of time walking.
Largely in response to the threat from roadside bombs in Iraq, the Pentagon has purchased large armored vehicles that protect troops traveling on roads. Afghanistan's terrain presents different challenges. A servicemember "needs something more than we have given him in the past," said Col. Peter Newell, director of the Army's Rapid Equipping Force.
The military, for example, is also dispatching a smaller version of a large armored vehicle that is used to clear roads of hidden mines and bombs. The small versions include the same technology, such as metal detectors and ground-penetrating radar, but can be used on narrow trails.
The military has also purchased an amphibious robot that can navigate irrigation canals, which are common in farming villages.
In August and September, the military also rushed $19 million worth of "ballistic underwear" to shield troops' abdomens and genitals from bomb blasts.
Severe battle wounds to U.S. troops who step on buried explosives in Afghanistan have reached record levels this year. The blasts cause thigh-high multiple amputations and destruction of genitals and lower abdomens. The bombs kill up to 40% of those who step on them, according to the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.
Amputations of all kinds are on a pace this year to surpass the 171 that occurred from battle wounds in 2010. Multiple amputations, at 79 through July, are already the most of any year since 9/11, Army records show. There were 1,294 improvised-bomb attacks against troops on foot — a 92% increase from June through August compared with the same three months in 2010.
Technological solutions last a short time, Newell acknowledged.
"Every solution has a half-life," Newell said. "If you're lucky, the insurgent will wait until you get it out there before he figures out a way to defeat it."
Myths or government propaganda?
SourceMyths or government propaganda?
Unfounded drone fears
By Michael W. Lewis
October 17, 2011
Almost since the United States began using the unmanned aerial vehicles known as drones, their use has drawn criticism. The latest criticism, which has received considerable attention in the wake of the drone strike on Anwar Awlaki, is that America's use of drones has sparked a new international arms race.
While it is true that some other nations have begun developing their own unmanned aerial vehicles, the extent of the alarm is unjustified. Much of it rests on myths that are easily dispelled.
Myth 1: Drones will be a threat to the United States in the hands of other nations. Drones are surveillance and counter-terrorism tools; they are not effective weapons of conventional warfare. The unmanned aerial vehicles are slow and extremely vulnerable to even basic air defense systems, illustrated by the fact that a U.S. surveillance drone was shot down by a 1970s-era MIG-25 Soviet fighter over Iraq in 2002. Moreover, drones are dependent on constant telemetry signals from their ground controllers to remain in flight. Such signals can be easily jammed or disrupted, causing the drone to fall from the sky. It's even possible that a party sending stronger signals could take control of the drone. The drones, therefore, have limited usefulness. And certainly any drone flying over the U.S. while being controlled by a foreign nation could be easily detected and either destroyed or captured.
Myth 2: Terrorists could effectively use drones to strike targets that are otherwise safe. Though it would be preferable if terrorist groups did not acquire drones, the technology required to support them is not particularly advanced. If organizations such as Al Qaeda were intent on acquiring the technology, they probably could. One of the reasons Al Qaeda may not have spent the time and resources necessary to do so is that drones would be of limited value. In addition to being very vulnerable to even basic air defense systems, drones require a great deal of logistical support. They have to be launched, recovered and controlled from a reasonably large and secure permanent facility. Wherever Al Qaeda's drones landed would immediately become a target.
It is true that a small, hand-launched drone capable of delivering a small warhead over a reasonably short distance could be, like radio-controlled model airplanes, launched in a public park or other open area and flown to a target several miles away. However, the amount of explosives that such a drone can carry is very limited (at most a few pounds) and pales in comparison to the amount of explosives that can be delivered by a vehicle or even a suicide bomber. It seems likely that terrorist groups will continue to deliver their explosives by vehicle or suicide bomber.
Myth 3: The U.S. use of drones in cases such as the Awlaki killing in Yemen serves to legitimize their use by China or Russia. International law places the same restrictions on the use of drones that it places on any other use of military force. The U.S. used a drone on Yemeni territory to kill Awlaki because it was given permission to do so by the Yemeni government, and because Awlaki was an active member of an Al Qaeda affiliate who had repeatedly been involved in operations designed to kill Americans at home and abroad. With such permission, the U.S. could instead have employed special forces or a conventional airstrike.
Numerous commentators have suggested that U.S. drone use legitimizes Russian drone use in Chechnya or Chinese drone use against the Uighurs. If China or Russia were facing genuine threats from Chechen or Uighur separatists, they might be allowed under international law to use drones in neighboring states if those states gave them permission to do so. However, given the fact that Chechen separatists declared an end to armed resistance in 2009, and that the greatest concern Russians currently have with Chechnya is with the lavish subsidies that Russia is currently providing it, the likelihood of armed Russian drones over Chechnya seems remote at best.
Likewise, there is no Uighur separatist organization that even remotely resembles Al Qaeda. Uighur unrest has taken the form of uprisings in Urumqi and other areas, similar to the Tibetan unrest of a few years ago. The Chinese eliminated such unrest with widespread arrests and disappearances, which raised serious human rights concerns. But there has been no time in which Uighur opposition has met the threshold established by international law that would allow for the use of armed drones in response to Uighur actions.
It is important to recognize drones for what they are: slow, relatively low-tech anti-terrorism tools that would be of limited use on most modern battlefields and are particularly unsuited to use by terrorist organizations.
Michael W. Lewis teaches international law and the law of war at Ohio Northern University School of Law. He is a former Navy fighter pilot and is the coauthor of "The War on Terror and the Laws of War: A Military Perspective."
American drones helped kill Moammar Gadhafi?
American drones helped rebels kill Moammar Gadhafi?As the rebels toppled Sirte, a U.S. drone, which was operated remotely from Las Vegas, alerted NATO of a fleeing 80-car convoy.
"The same facial recognition technology used to identify Osama bin Laden was used to confirm that the death photos in fact were of Ghadafi" - I wonder, was this done with the drones?
Don't get me wrong I dislike the evil American Empire as much as I dislike Moammar Gadhafi. But it is nice to see this evil tyrant meet his fate.
Moammar Gadhafi Dead: How Rebels Killed the Dictator
ABC NewsBy JEFFREY KOFMAN and KEVIN DOLAK | ABC News
Celebrations continued across Libya the day after Moammar Gadhafi was killed by rebel forces in his hometown of Sirte, while details of the hours and minutes that led up to his death begin to surface.
Gadhafi's grisly final moments were captured on a grainy cell phone video that shows the former Libyan leader surrounded by a frenzied mob of rebels. Men are seen grabbing at him, propping him up, and pummeling him while he can be seen dazed, attempting speech and bleeding profusely.
The final hunt for Gadhafi began around 8 a.m. Thursday in Sirte, which is the former leader's hometown and was one of the final loyalist strongholds of his regime. The rebels who took control of Libya in February began what they hoped would be their final offensive to conquer the town.
As the rebels toppled Sirte, a U.S. drone, which was operated remotely from Las Vegas, alerted NATO of a fleeing 80-car convoy.
Soon French fighter jets responded with an airstrike, which took out two of the vehicles. It is still unclear if these French fighters hit Ghadafi's car, but when the rebels poured in they told the BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse that the former leader was hiding in a drainage pipe.
"They say they discovered him [in the drainage pipe] just before 12 this afternoon. They pulled him out of the hole, and one fighter told me that Moammar Gadhafi said to him, 'What did I do to you?'" Gatehouse said.
This account of finding Ghadafi in the drainage pipe was confirmed by an English-speaking rebel fighter, who told ABC News, "We catch him there. We shot him."
In a video that surfaced Friday Gadhafi is heard repeatedly saying the phrase "Haram Aleiko," which is an Arabic expression that literally translated means "This is a sin for you." The phrase is generally used as a plea to convey the vulnerability of the victim.
The fatal shot that killed Ghadafi was reportedly fired by a young man donning a baseball cap with a Yankees logo. Afterwards he was photographed brandishing Gadhafi's vanquished golden gun.
Still unknown is the fate of Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam, who played a prominent role taunting rebels throughout the seven-month revolution. There had been reports he had been captured or killed, but there also reports that he was fleeing south in the Sahara Desert to Niger. It has been confirmed that one of Gadhafi's other sons, Muatassim, was also killed in Thursday's attack. He was a prominent military commander.
On Friday footage surfaced on Libyan television of Muatassim Gadhafi's body, which was being autopsied to determine his cause of death, according to Libyan TV.
Also dying alongside Gadhafi were some of his notorious female bodyguards -- who were often referred to as his Amazon Bodyguards.
Speaking with Al Arabya News, Ghadafi's former Internal Security chief Mansour Daw said that once national Transitional Council fighters destroyed all of their vehicles, Ghadafi and those with him began to flee Sirte on foot in different groups.
As news of the taking of Sirte and the death of Ghadafi spread across the globe, varying facts were reported by a number of sources; reports indicated that he had been taken alive and was wounded in both legs, while others said that he was killed.
U.S. officials used reliable sources on the ground from many different sources to confirm the facts. The same facial recognition technology used to identify Osama bin Laden was used to confirm that the death photos in fact were of Ghadafi , the self-styled "King of Kings."
Cameras captured the reaction of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- who on Tuesday was the first cabinet level official to visit the war-torn country since the uprising began . Clinton merely said "wow" as she received the news of the dictator's death via e-mail while on a trip to Afghanistan.
Clinton elaborated while in Islamabad on Friday after Ghadafi's death was confirmed.
"[The] death of Col. Ghadafi has brought to a close a very unfortunate chapter in Libya's history and it marks a new start for Libya's future ... I hope this is a continuation of what I saw on Tuesday -- eagerness of Libyans to start a new democracy... and the U.S. will support a new democratic path," Clinton said.
Clinton echoed President Obama's comments Thursday that the death of Gadhafi marks the end of a long and painful chapter for the people of Libya.
"Today's events prove once more that the rule of an iron fist inevitably comes to an end," Obama said.
Military reportedly uses 'kamikaze drones' in battle
SourceMilitary reportedly uses 'kamikaze drones' in battle
October 19, 2011 | 1:21 pm
U.S. Army and Air Force special forces have used a mini-cruise missile made by Monrovia-based AeroVironment Inc. to blast apart Taliban targets, according to a media report. Switchblade_launch_lg
In an article, Bloomberg BusinessWeek disclosed that the weapon, called Switchblade, “was secretly sent to Afghanistan for the first time last year.”
The self-destructing mini-drone is designed to fit into a soldier's rucksack and be fired from a mortar where it unfolds its wings as it takes to the skies, and begins sending live video and GPS coordinates to the soldier who launched it. Switchblade is remotely operated with a handheld controller.
The little missile, which looks less harmless than many Fourth of July fireworks, is tipped with a tiny warhead designed to explode upon hitting a target, which is why BusinessWeek dubbed it a “kamikaze drone.”
The 2-foot-long battery-powered drone is designed to fly above a war zone for at least five minutes for more than a mile at a time. We told you about the technology in a Times story about the miniaturization of military weaponry here.
Maj. Christopher Kasker, an Army spokesman, did not confirm whether Switchblade had been deployed above the war zone. However, he issued a statement that said:
"The Army has purchased a limited quantity of the Switchblade munition to support an urgent operational request. Quantities, fielding locations, dates and units involved are confidential to protect operational security."
U.S. Deploys Kamikaze Drones to Attack Afghan Taliban Targets
SourceU.S. Deploys Kamikaze Drones to Attack Afghan Taliban Targets
October 19, 2011, 12:24 AM EDT
By Tony Capaccio
Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Army and Air Force special operations forces have used miniature kamikaze drones against Taliban targets and plan to renew the attacks next year, according to documents and an Army official.
The tube-launched Switchblade drone, made by Monrovia, California-based Aerovironment Inc., was secretly sent to Afghanistan for the first time last year. “Under a dozen” were fired, said Army Deputy Product Director William Nichols.
“It’s been used in Afghanistan by military personnel” and “shown to be effective,” Nichols said. The drone’s GPS guidance is made by Rockwell Collins Inc. and the warhead by Alliant Techsystems Inc.
Disclosure of the Switchblade’s use in Afghanistan highlights the Pentagon’s expanding range of missions for remotely piloted aircraft. The fleet also includes broad-area surveillance aircraft such as the Northrop Grumman Corp. Global Hawk, the missile-firing General Atomics Co. Predator and Reaper drones, and hand-launched short-range surveillance models, such as the Aerovironment Raven.
Nichols declined to describe the Switchblade’s targets. He said the drone is “designed for open threats, something that’s on top of a building but you can’t hit it” with regular artillery or mortars for fear of collateral damage. The drone is less than 24 inches long and weighs about six pounds.
“It’s a ‘flying shotgun,’” Nichols said, not a “hit-to- kill” weapon that explodes on impact.
“The operator has control of how far away from the target it goes off -- preselected distances,” he said in an interview Oct. 12 at the Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington.
Into Shallow Caves
An Army fact sheet said the drone could be used against snipers, insurgents placing roadside bombs and those hiding on ridge lines, under rock overhangs and or in shallow caves.
Nichols said the first deployment laid the groundwork for another fielding early next year. He declined to identify what units requested the additional Switchblades.
Nichols said the Army is evaluating the results and may pursue a larger program, which would be open to competition.
Other potential targets are moving vehicles that can be tracked during the aircraft’s roughly 10 minutes of flight. It covers up to 20 kilometers, flying at about 500 feet. “It’s clearly not designed for armor,” he said.
Aerovironment announced at the AUSA convention a previous $4.9 million Army contract. It didn’t disclose the drone’s prior Afghanistan use.
Commando’s Drone
The Combined Forces Special Operations Command in October 2010 requested an additional 11 drones for use by Army and Air Force commandos, saying the drone “enhances the small unit’s ability to quickly identify and precisely engage combatants in rugged terrain.”
Fielding additional so-called Lethal Miniature Aerial Munitions “will enhance operations designed to deny insurgents access to the Afghanistan population,” Army Special Forces Colonel Donald Bolduc wrote in his previously undisclosed October 2010 request.
Bolduc, in his “operational needs statement” obtained by Bloomberg News, said recent operations “have demonstrated the need for a lightweight, precision-guided aerial munitions system to locate and neutralize enemy positions.”
Bolduc said the system will be used by small units of Army and Air Force Special Operations Command personnel “operating in complex urban terrain.”
Lethal Precision
The small size allows an individual to “carry, launch, maneuver in all terrain, and engage stationary and fleeting targets in the open or defending positions within building, bunker or mountainous regions while minimizing collateral damage.”
“Such positions are extremely difficult to neutralize” and U.S. forces run a “high risk” of killing civilians with current weapons such as the new MK47 “advanced lightweight grenade launcher,” M3 Carl-Gustaf recoilless rifle and AT-4 rocket launcher, Bolduc wrote.
“Given rules of engagement and the constraints of urban terrain, a lethal capability must be precise in order to minimize collateral damage,” wrote Bolduc, who is now assistant deputy director for special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.
--Editors: Steven Komarow, Jim Rubin.
To contact the reporter on this story: Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net
Japanese engineers develop flying robotic orb
SourceJapanese engineers develop flying robotic orb [Video]
October 25, 2011 | 5:28 pm
The research department at Japan’s Ministry of Defense has developed what it calls "the world’s first spherical flying machine" that can hover like a helicopter and fly in all directions.
Take a look at the video below posted on YouTube by DigInfo TV, a Tokyo-based online video news website. Watch as the orb zooms around a room to the amazement of the crowd.
The operator, who remotely controls the aircraft, gives it a few smacks and it still stays afloat -- thanks to onboard gyroscopes.
According to the video report, the machine weighs less than a pound, or about 12 ounces, and is made completely of off-the-shelf parts.
The cost? $1,400.
At the end of the video, the narrator says the gadget was made for rescue and reconnaissance.
“As it can take off and land anywhere, it’s hoped that this machine will be able to reach places that were hard to access by air before.”
Evidently, it wasn’t developed to train Jedis on their lightsaber skills.
Here is a cool video or the Orb
The American Empire, now bringing death and destruction to the world from Ethiopia!
U.S. drone base in Ethiopia is operational
By Craig Whitlock, Thursday, October 27, 1:49 PM
The Air Force has been secretly flying armed Reaper drones on counterterrorism missions from a remote civilian airport in southern Ethiopia as part of a rapidly expanding U.S.-led proxy war against an al-Qaeda affiliate in East Africa, U.S. military officials said.
The Air Force has invested millions of dollars to upgrade an airfield in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, where it has built a small annex to house a fleet of drones that can be equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided bombs. The Reapers began flying missions earlier this year over neighboring Somalia, where the United States and its allies in the region have been targeting al-Shabab, a militant Islamist group connected to al-Qaeda.
Mindful of the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle in which two U.S. military helicopters were shot down in the Somali capital of Mogadishu and 18 Americans killed, the Obama administration has sought to avoid deploying troops to the country.
As a result, the United States has relied on lethal drone attacks, a burgeoning CIA presence in Mogadishu and small-scale missions carried out by U.S. special forces. In addition, the United States has increased its funding for and training of African peacekeeping forces in Somalia that fight al-Shabab.
The Washington Post reported last month that the Obama administration is building a constellation of secret drone bases in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, including one site in Ethiopia. The location of the Ethiopian base and the fact that it became operational this year, however, have not been previously disclosed. Some bases in the region also have been used to carry out operations against the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen.
The Air Force confirmed Thursday that drone operations are underway at the Arba Minch airport. Master Sgt. James Fisher, a spokesman for the 17th Air Force, which oversees operations in Africa, said that an unspecified number of Air Force personnel are working at the Ethiopian airfield “to provide operation and technical support for our security assistance programs.”
The Arba Minch airport expansion is still in progress but the Air Force deployed the Reapers there earlier this year, Fisher said. He said the drone flights “will continue as long as the government of Ethiopia welcomes our cooperation on these varied security programs.”
Last month, the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry denied the presence of U.S. drones in the country. On Thursday, a spokesman for the Ethiopian embassy in Washington repeated that assertion.
“That’s the government’s position,” said Tesfaye Yilma, the head of public diplomacy for the embassy. “We don’t entertain foreign military bases in Ethiopia.”
But U.S. military personnel and contractors have become increasingly visible in recent months in Arba Minch, a city of about 70,000 people in southern Ethiopia. Arba Minch means “40 springs” in Amharic, the national language.
Travelers who have passed through the Arba Minch airport on the occasional civilian flights that land there said the U.S. military has erected a small compound on the tarmac, next to the terminal.
The compound is about half an acre in size and is surrounded by high fences, security screens and lights on extended poles. The U.S. military personnel and contractors eat at a cafe in the passenger terminal, where they are served American-style food, according to travelers who have been there.
Arba Minch is located about 300 miles south of Addis Ababa and about 600 miles east of the Somali border. Standard models of the Reaper have a range of about 1,150 miles, according to the Air Force.
The MQ-9 Reaper, known as a “hunter killer,” is manufactured by General Atomics and is an advanced version of the Predator, the most common armed drone in the Air Force’s fleet.
Ethiopia is a longtime U.S. ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the militant group that has fomented instability in war-torn Somalia and launched attacks in Kenya, Uganda and elsewhere in the region.
The Ethiopian military invaded Somalia in 2006 in an attempt to wipe out a related Islamist movement that was taking over the country, but withdrew three years later after it was unable to contain an insurgency.
The U.S. military clandestinely aided Ethiopia during that invasion by sharing intelligence and carrying out airstrikes with AC-130 gunships, which operated from an Ethiopian military base in the eastern part of the country. After details of the U.S. involvement became public, however, the Ethiopian government shut down the U.S. military presence there.
In a present-day operation that carries echoes of that campaign, Kenya launched its own invasion of southern Somalia this month to chase after al-Shabab fighters that it blames for kidnapping Western tourists in Kenya and destabilizing the border region.
Although U.S. officials denied playing a role in that offensive, a Kenyan military spokesman, Maj. Emmanuel Chirchir, said Kenya has received “technical assistance” from its American allies. He declined to elaborate.
The U.S. military deploys drones on attack and surveillance missions over Somalia from a number of bases in the region.
The Air Force operates a small fleet of Reapers from the Seychelles, a tropical archipelago in the Indian Ocean, about 800 miles from the Somali coast.
The U.S. military also operates drones — both armed versions and models used strictly for surveillance — from Djibouti, a tiny African nation that abuts northwest Somalia at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. About 3,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the only permanent U.S. base on the African continent.
The U.S. government is known to have used drones to mount lethal attacks in at least six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
The CIA is the judge, jury and executioner.
The CIA is the judge, jury and executioner.The CIA classifies its drone strikes into two categories. In one type, known as "personality strikes," the agency tracks and targets a specific person who has been placed on a "kill list" because he has been deemed a threat to the United States.
U.S. put new restrictions on CIA drone strikes in Pakistan
By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
November 7, 2011, 11:18 p.m.
Reporting from Washington— The White House over the summer put new restrictions on CIA drone strikes in the wake of concerns that the program was primarily targeting lower-level militants while provoking anger in Pakistan, U.S. officials said.
Since then, according to an independent analysis, the strikes have yielded a significant increase in the percentage of people killed whom the government considers "high-value targets." But the program is still killing mainly rank-and-file fighters, the study indicates.
And the adjustments in the program have not altered the fundamental character of the secret drone strikes: The CIA continues to attack identified Al Qaeda and Taliban militants as well as rank-and-file fighters whose names are not known.
Under the new rules, however, the State Department, which has been concerned about the anger the strikes have aroused in Pakistan, has more input on each attack. And the U.S. has promised to inform Pakistan if a strike will target a particularly large group of militants.
How much those policies have altered the program in practice remains unclear. "I don't think this really changed very much," said a congressional aide who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the classified program.
The changes grew out of an internal Obama administration debate in the wake of a March 17 drone attack that the government of Pakistan condemned as a mistake, saying it killed more than 40 civilians. The U.S. says the attack killed "a large group of heavily armed men … all of whom acted in a manner consistent with Al Qaeda-linked militants."
Dennis C. Blair, who was ousted in 2010 as President Obama's director of national intelligence, has criticized such strikes, saying there is little point in killing easily replaceable foot soldiers if the cost is public outrage in Pakistan. Similar concerns have been expressed within the administration, officials said.
The CIA classifies its drone strikes into two categories. In one type, known as "personality strikes," the agency tracks and targets a specific person who has been placed on a "kill list" because he has been deemed a threat to the United States.
The other type, known as "signature strikes," is the one primarily affected by the new rules. In those attacks, the CIA watches a group of suspected militants through drone surveillance video and other means until officials are satisfied that the targets are plotting or carrying out attacks against U.S. troops or American interests, officials have said. The names of those militants are not necessarily known.
On numerous occasions, senior militant figures on target lists were killed in signature strikes, U.S. officials say, and their identities were discovered only afterward.
Some legal experts contend that the strikes amount to illegal assassinations. The State Department and many international law experts, however, say drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas are legal because Afghan insurgents take refuge in those areas, making them part of the Afghanistan conflict zone.
Signature strikes are not allowed in Yemen, U.S. officials say, even though some U.S. counter-terrorism officials say they believe such attacks would be legal and potentially effective.
Since June, when some of the new strictures went into place, CIA drone strikes in Pakistan have killed 235 suspected militants. Thirteen of those, or 5.5%, were significant Al Qaeda figures or militant commanders, according to data compiled by Long War Journal, a website that tracks the strikes through Pakistani and Western news reports.
In 2010, just 2.2% of 801 militants killed were known significant figures, the numbers show. The percentage for the first half of 2011 was similar.
"We are removing leaders faster than they can be replaced. And even when they are replaced, it is with younger, less experienced individuals who lack the abilities and expertise of their predecessors," said a U.S. official regularly briefed on the program.
Estimates of noncombatants killed in the strikes vary widely. Long War Journal counted 14 civilians reported killed in 2010 and 30 in 2011. Some Pakistani and British activists say the number of civilian deaths is in the hundreds. U.S. officials, including Democrats in Congress who oversee the program, insist that the number is far lower. One U.S. official said there had been "a handful" of civilian deaths in 2011.
U.S. officials say they are confident they know who has been killed because they watch each strike on video and gather intelligence in the aftermath, observing funerals for the dead and eavesdropping on conversations about the strikes.
ken.dilanian@latimes.com
Times staff writer David S. Cloud contributed to this report.
This is at least the second time I have seen an
article where X box controllers are used to control
robots.
The other article said that the kids the military cons
into joining and becoming government slaves are
familiar with the XBOX controllers from playing games
with them and don't need much training to be taught how
to use the drones and robots that the military uses to
murder brown skinned folks in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Idea of civilians using drone aircraft may soon fly with FAA
By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times
November 27, 2011
Drone aircraft, best known for their role in hunting and destroying terrorist hide-outs in Afghanistan, may soon be coming to the skies near you.
Police agencies want drones for air support to spot runaway criminals. Utility companies believe they can help monitor oil, gas and water pipelines. Farmers think drones could aid in spraying their crops with pesticides.
"It's going to happen," said Dan Elwell, vice president of civil aviation at the Aerospace Industries Assn. "Now it's about figuring out how to safely assimilate the technology into national airspace."
That's the job of the Federal Aviation Administration, which plans to propose new rules for the use of small drones in January, a first step toward integrating robotic aircraft into the nation's skyways.
The agency has issued 266 active testing permits for civilian drone applications but hasn't permitted drones in national airspace on a wide scale out of concern that the pilotless craft don't have an adequate "detect, sense and avoid" technology to prevent midair collisions.
Other concerns include privacy — imagine a camera-equipped drone buzzing above your backyard pool party — and the creative ways in which criminals and terrorists might use the machines.
"By definition, small drones are easy to conceal and fly without getting a lot of attention," said John Villasenor, a UCLA professor and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation. "Bad guys know this."
The aerospace industry insists these concerns can be addressed. It also believes that the good guys — the nation's law enforcement agencies — are probably the biggest commercial market for domestic drones, at least initially.
Police departments in Texas, Florida and Minnesota have expressed interest in the technology's potential to spot runaway criminals on rooftops or to track them at night by using the robotic aircraft's heat-seeking cameras.
"Most Americans still see drone aircraft in the realm of science fiction," said Peter W. Singer, author of "Wired for War," a book about robotic warfare. "But the technology is here. And it isn't going away. It will increasingly play a role in our lives. The real question is: How do we deal with it?"
Drone maker AeroVironment Inc. of Monrovia, the nation's biggest supplier of small drones to the military, has developed its first small helicopter drone that's designed specifically for law enforcement. If FAA restrictions are eased, the company plans to shop it among the estimated 18,000 state and local police departments across the United States.
In the foothills north of Simi Valley, amid acres of scrubland, AeroVironment engineers have been secretly testing a miniature remote-controlled helicopter named Qube. Buzzing like an angry hornet, the tiny drone with four whirling rotors swoops back and forth about 200 feet above the ground scouring the landscape and capturing crystal-clear video of what lies below.
The new drone weighs 51/2 pounds, fits in the trunk of a car and is controlled remotely by a tablet computer. AeroVironment unveiled Qube last month at the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police conference in Chicago.
"This is a tool that many law enforcement agencies never imagined they could have," said Steven Gitlin, a company executive.
Plenty of police departments fly expensive helicopters for high-speed chases, spotting suspects and finding missing people. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said it recently bought 12 new helicopters at a cost of $1.7 million each.
Gitlin said a small Qube, by comparison, would cost "slightly more than the price of a police cruiser," or about $40,000.
Sheriff's Department Cmdr. Bob Osborne said that there's "no doubt" that the department is interested in using drones. "It's just that the FAA hasn't come up with workable rules that we can harness it. If those roadblocks were down, we'd want to use it."
Drones' low-cost appeal has other industries interested as well.
Farmers in Japan already use small drones to automatically spray their crops with pesticides, and more recently safety inspectors used them at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Archaeologists in Russia are using small drones and their infrared cameras to construct a 3-D model of ancient burial mounds. Officials in Tampa Bay, Fla., want to use them for security surveillance at next year's Republican National Convention.
But the FAA says there are technical issues to be addressed before they're introduced in civil airspace. Among them is how to respond if a communication link is lost with a drone — such as when it falls out of the sky, takes a nose dive into a backyard pool or crashes through someone's roof.
Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx Corp., the largest owner of commercial cargo jets, suggested using a fleet of package-laden drones led by a traditionally piloted plane that could keep an eye on the robotic aircraft.
"Think of it like a train where you have a locomotive and you put two or three or four or 10 cars — depending on what demand is — and the drones basically fly the exact same flight profile in formation," Smith said at a Wired magazine conference last year. "It's very efficient."
Drones could also be useful to real estate agents to showcase sprawling properties. Oil and gas companies want to utilize them to keep an eye on their pipelines. Even organizations delivering humanitarian assistance want to use drones.
Matternet, a Silicon Valley start-up, has proposed a network of drones to deliver food and medicine in isolated regions around the world that are now inaccessible because they have no roads.
But if the use of drones is so widespread in the future, it raises concern that they could fall into the wrong hands and be weaponized.
Small drones are not designed to carry weapons or explosive materials, and the extra weight makes the drones difficult to control, said Gretchen West, executive vice president of the Assn. for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a robotic technology trade group.
"Also, because the technology on these systems are state of the art," West said, they are controlled by "rules that govern the larger systems, which prohibit the systems and technology from falling into the wrong hands."
Still, there are vast privacy concerns to be confronted by government officials, such as what kinds of surveillance should be allowed and who should be permitted to use these drones.
"It's important that the FAA is scrutinizing the safety of the technology, but they should also make sure Americans' privacy is maintained," said Catherine Crump, an American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney. "Having cheap, portable, flying surveillance machines may have a tremendous benefit for law enforcement, but will it respect Americans' privacy?"
Other countries appear to have safely harnessed the technology. Brazil uses drones to scour the Amazon rain forest for drug trafficking. Researchers in Costa Rica are sending drones into clouds of volcanic ash to help predict future eruptions. Argentina, South Korea, and Turkey buy small drone helicopters for overhead views of their land and for crop dusting from Guided Systems Technologies Inc.
For now, the Stockbridge, Ga., company deals primarily with foreign countries, which don't have restrictive rules against drones, because it can't sell the aircraft at home.
That all might change, said West of the Assn. for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. The U.S. commercial market for drones has "untapped" potential, she said. The association estimates that 23,000 jobs could be added over the next 15 years if national airspace is opened to commercial drones.
"Industry is ready," she said. "We're all waiting to see what the FAA will do."
william.hennigan@latimes.com
U.S. drone 'downed' by Iran may have been lost over Afghanistan
December 4, 2011 | 12:09 pm
This report has been updated. See note below for details.
REPORTING FROM TEHRAN AND BEIRUT — A drone that Iranian officials claimed to have taken down may be an unarmed U.S. reconnaissance aircraft that went missing over western Afghanistan late last week, according to U.S.-led forces in that country.
"The operators of the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status," NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan said in a statement.
Iranian media reported Sunday that the country's armed forces had downed a U.S. drone that they said violated Iranian airspace along the eastern border. Iran borders Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east.
An Iranian military official quoted by the official Islamic Republic News Agency said the aircraft suffered minor damage and was in the possession of the armed forces. He identified the aircraft as an "RQ170" type drone and said Iranian forces were "fully ready to counter any aggression."
[Updated, 3.30 p.m., Dec. 4, 2011: Some initial reports out of Iran suggested the drone had been shot down. But the semi-official Fars news agency, which is close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, quoted a military official as saying that Iran’s electronic warfare unit had managed to take control of the aircraft and bring it “under their possession.”]
The claim came as Iran's already strained relations with the United States and its allies worsened over Tehran's disputed nuclear program.
On Thursday, the European Union imposed new sanctions on Iranian individuals, companies and organizations in response to a report alleging that Tehran had pressed ahead with ambitions to build a nuclear weapon. Iran says its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes.
Britain shut down its embassy in Iran on Wednesday and gave Iranian diplomats 48 hours to leave London after protesters angry about sanctions ransacked two diplomatic compounds in Tehran. Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have temporarily recalled their ambassadors from Tehran in solidarity with Britain.
Drone that crashed in Iran may give away U.S. secrets
By W.J. Hennigan, David S. Cloud and Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
December 6, 2011
Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington—
The radar-evading drone that crash-landed over the weekend in Iran was on a mission for the CIA, according to a senior U.S. official, raising fears that the aircraft's sophisticated technology could be exploited by Tehran or shared with other American rivals.
It was unclear whether the drone's mission took it over Iran or whether it strayed there accidentally because of technical malfunctions, the official said.
Though the drone flight was a CIA operation, U.S. military personnel were involved in flying the aircraft, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy involved.
The jet-powered, bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel drone is considered one of the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal, with stealth technology and sophisticated computer systems that enable it to penetrate deep into hostile territory without detection.
Its capabilities were demonstrated during the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, where it provided surveillance of the operation.
The aircraft's full abilities are a closely guarded secret, and the Pentagon has not revealed its price tag, size or top speed. But it has acknowledged this: The Sentinel may now be in Iranian hands.
"I think we're always concerned when there's an aircraft, whether it's manned or unmanned, that we lose, particularly in a place where we're not able to get to it," Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said to reporters Monday.
Peter W. Singer, author of "Wired for War," a book about robotic warfare, said it's not new to have drones downed in enemy territory, but the RQ-170 represents the next generation of drone aircraft.
"It carries a variety of systems that wouldn't be much of a benefit to Iran, but to its allies such as China and Russia, it's a potential gold mine," Singer said.
Other aviation experts weren't so sure.
"I don't think this is a dagger pointed at the heart of democracy," said Loren Thompson, defense policy analyst for the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "A lot of information about this aircraft was already known by foreign military intelligence officials."
On Sunday, Iran's armed forces said they brought down a Sentinel drone that violated the country's airspace along the eastern border. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's U.S.-led force in neighboring Afghanistan said Iranian authorities might be referring to an unarmed U.S. reconnaissance plane that went missing during a mission in western Afghanistan late last week, but did not confirm what kind of aircraft was downed.
The NATO force's statement was ambiguous about who was flying the aircraft.
"The operators of the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status," the statement said.
Spokesmen for the CIA, White House, Pentagon and congressional intelligence oversight committees declined to comment.
Although the Sentinel's capabilities remain largely classified, it is believed to carry the latest in cutting-edge cameras and sensors that can "listen in" on cellphone conversations as it soars miles above the ground or "smell" the air and sniff out chemical plumes emanating from a potential underground nuclear laboratory.
Ever since it was developed at Lockheed Martin Corp.'s famed Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, the Sentinel drone has been cloaked in tight secrecy by the U.S. government. But now the drone that the Iranian military claims to have brought down for invading its airspace might be made far more public than the Pentagon or Lockheed ever intended.
Another U.S. official with access to intelligence said that losing the Sentinel is a major security breach. The official, who was not authorized to publicly speak about the information, wouldn't say how the drone fell into Iranian hands, but confirmed that the downed drone was largely intact.
"It's bad — they'll have everything" in terms of the secret technology in the aircraft, the official said. "And the Chinese or the Russians will have it too."
Photographs of the Sentinel first surfaced online in 2009 at a remote airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The drone received the nickname "the beast of Kandahar."
The drone resembles a miniature version of the B-2 stealth bomber. The bat-wing design is meant to make it less likely to pop up on enemy radar screens. Also like the B-2 bomber, the Sentinel is thought to have high-tech coatings that act like a sponge to absorb radar waves as they strike the plane.
The Sentinel's design is a quantum leap from the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones well-known for hunting terrorists in the Middle East. Those drones, made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of Poway, Calif., are propeller powered, non-stealthy and not designed to be flown in contested airspace.
The Pentagon first publicly acknowledged the Sentinel's existence in late 2009. The craft is known to be an unarmed spy drone.
Kevin Gambold, director of operations for Unmanned Experts, a British company that specializes in unmanned aerial vehicles, said the Sentinel, carrying an array of classified surveillance systems, would have a self-destruct mechanism to disable or destroy it if operators lost control.
He said it's difficult to believe that Iran could have brought down the aircraft with electronic jamming or by taking the controls through a cyber attack as the country claims it did. "You never say never, but I would be gob-smacked and amazed if they even knew how," Gambold said.
John Bumgarner, chief technical officer for the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, an independent nonprofit research institute, said it's technically possible to jam the communication used to control a drone.
But in such cases, the drone should have a fail-safe mechanism that enables it to retrace its flight path and return to the base where it was launched, he said.
The most likely reason that the Sentinel didn't self-destruct or safely return is that it was lost because of an onboard mechanical malfunction, said Thompson of the Lexington Institute.
"That means what the Iranians have is a pile of wreckage — many small and damaged pieces from which they could glean little in the way of technological insights," he said.
Still, pieces of stealth technology may have found their way into foreign military hands before.
This year, China said it had developed and built a stealth fighter jet, dubbed Chengdu J-20. U.S. military officials believe that the Chinese used technology collected from a F-117 stealth aircraft that was shot down over Serbia in 1999 during the Kosovo war. Chinese agents were said to have purchased parts of the plane, covered in high-tech stealth coating, from local farmers.
"The cat's already out of the bag with stealth technology," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a website for military policy research.
"The materials have already been widely disseminated. One little drone isn't going to make a difference either way."
william.hennigan@latimes.com
ken.dilanian@latimes.com
david.cloud@latimes.com
Director of federal drone program targeted in ethics inquiry
By Brian Bennett, Los Angeles Times
December 5, 2011, 6:28 p.m.
Reporting from Washington—
The chief of the Homeland Security Department's drone aircraft program is facing an ethics investigation for joining the board of directors of the largest industry group promoting the use of unmanned aircraft, officials said Monday.
The internal affairs office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection is reviewing whether Tom Faller, director of unmanned aircraft systems operations, violated internal rules when he took an unpaid position as a board member of the Assn. for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International on Aug. 16.
Faller oversees eight Predator B surveillance drones that are chiefly used to help search for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers on the northern and southwestern borders.
In some cases, the drones also have been used to assist the Drug Enforcement Administration and other law enforcement agencies in criminal investigations, and to survey damage after floods and other natural disasters.
After inquiries from the Los Angeles Times last month, Faller notified the group on Nov. 23 that he was resigning from the board, said Melanie Hinton, a spokeswoman for the drone group. She said Faller did not attend any board meetings.
"Internal affairs is reviewing issues related to an employee's outside associations," Joanne Ferreira, a Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman, said Monday in response to questions about Faller. "We are unable to comment on any ongoing investigation."
If found in violation, Faller could be issued a written reprimand, suspended or dismissed from government. He has held the post since April 2009. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Over the last six years, Customs and Border Protection has spent more than $240 million to buy and operate eight drones. It's scheduled to add two more drones next summer.
"To the extent that the agency purchases any of this technology, there might be a conflict" of interest, said Stanley Brand, who was general counsel to the House of Representatives from 1976 to 1983, and is an expert on government ethics.
In September, a month after Faller joined the board, the association hosted a technology fair in the foyer of the Rayburn building, where members of the House maintain offices.
Drone aircraft companies were able to display their products and meet members of Congress. Faller's division, the Office of Air and Marine at Customs and Border Protection, took part in the exhibit.
Based in Arlington, Va., the drone association has a $7.5-million annual operating budget, including $2 million a year for conferences and trade shows to encourage government agencies and companies to use unmanned aircraft. It has 23 board members and claims about 6,000 members around the world.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., a private company in San Diego that builds the Predator B drone, and defense giant Raytheon Co., which develops the cameras and radar sensors used on the aircraft, each paid $10,000 in annual dues to the association in 2011, records show.
brian.bennett@latimes.com
X Box Controllers are used to control drones & robots
In the December 2011 issue of Popular Mechanics
they and this short article on how XBox 360 controllers
are being used to control robots used in mines.
Will cops execute suspected drug dealers with drones?
Will cops soon be using drones to executed suspected drug dealers, like the military uses drones to execute suspected terrorists? I hope not, but you can never know what our government masters will do in their insane and unconstitutional drug war.
Source
Lost US drone crashes in Iran?
Lost US drone crashes in Iran? I wonder,
was this drone really spying on Iran and the
American military doesn't want to admit it spies on Iran with drones!
Drone that crashed may give away U.S. secrets
Source
Conflict of interest? Who cares about any stinking conflict of interest?
Conflict of interest? Who cares about any stinking conflict of interest?
Drone crashed in Iran on CIA mission
Source
AP: Drone crashed in Iran on CIA mission
WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. officials say a drone that crashed inside Iran over the weekend was one of a fleet of stealth aircraft that have spied on Iran for years from a U.S. air base in Afghanistan.
They say the CIA stealth-version of the RQ-170 unmanned craft was also used to survey Osama bin Laden's compound before the May raid in Pakistan.
According to these officials, the U.S. has built up the air base Shindad, Afghanistan, with an eye to keeping a long-term presence there to launch surveillance missions and even special operations missions into Iran if deemed necessary. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.
The officials say that while no specific mission into Iran has been authorized, the military has contingency plans for such clandestine missions.
Stealth drone highlights tougher U.S. strategy on Iran
Emperor Obama seems to be just as big of a war monger as Emperor Bush wasStealth drone highlights tougher U.S. strategy on Iran
By Joby Warrick and Greg Miller, Published: December 7
The CIA’s use of surveillance drones over Iran reflects a growing belief within the Obama administration that covert action and carefully choreographed economic pressure may be the only means of coercing Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, current and former U.S. officials say.
The administration’s shift toward a more confrontational approach — one that also includes increased arms sales to Iran’s potential rivals in the Middle East as well as bellicose statements by U.S. officials and key allies — suggests deepening pessimism about the prospects for a dialogue with Iran’s leaders, the officials say.
Intelligence shows that Iran received foreign assistance to overcome key hurdles in acquiring technology that could lead to a nuclear weapon, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The administration’s evolving strategy includes expanded use of remote-controlled stealth aircraft, such as the one that came down in eastern Iran last week, as well as other covert efforts targeting Iran’s nuclear program, according to U.S. government officials and Western diplomats, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence-gathering efforts.
The U.S. officials said the stealth drone was part of a fleet of secret aircraft that the CIA has used for several years in an escalating espionage campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities.
As those efforts have surged, the White House also has boosted sales of bunker-busting munitions, fighter jets and other military hardware to Persian Gulf states as well as to Israel, building on long-running efforts to boost the military capabilities of key U.S. allies in the region, the officials say.
Underscoring the implied military threat, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta last week cited contingency plans for “a wide range of military options” to be used against Iran if necessary. He expressed the administration’s “determination to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons,” a phrase that suggested an intention to stop the Islamic republic from obtaining the technological building blocks of nuclear arms. Previous White House statements have vowed only to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.
The sharpened tone comes against a backdrop of increased diplomatic efforts to ratchet up the economic pain for the Iranian regime, as Washington enlists European and Asian allies in coordinated efforts to choke Iran’s economy.
But while endorsing the increased use of sanctions, U.S. officials also are growing increasingly aware of the limits of such measures. A congressional study released this week suggested that Iran has managed to limit the damage to its economy from international sanctions — in part because of immense profits gained from near-record oil prices in recent years. And the study warns that harsher sanctions targeting Iran’s petroleum and banking industries could drive oil prices still higher.
“The easy stuff has been done already,” said a senior administration official involved in strategy toward Iran. “The choices now are much harder.”
The more-robust measures stand in contrast with the administration’s early optimism that it could draw Iran’s ruling clerics into negotiations on curbing their country’s nuclear program. Although insisting that the door remains open to talks, administration officials see little evidence that top Iranian officials are interested in engaging, or capable of doing so.
“There’s greater skepticism now,” said Ray Takeyh, a former State Department official who advised the administration on Iran policy in 2009, when President Obama famously made direct appeals to Iran in an attempt to improve relations. Since Iran’s rebuff of numerous public and private overtures, the administration’s goal is to “press Iran further and isolate Iran further,” Takeyh said.
Current and former U.S. officials say the administration is ramping up its covert efforts inside Iran, even as the White House is seeking a thaw in bilateral relations.
Intelligence shows that Iran received foreign assistance to overcome key hurdles in acquiring technology that could lead to a nuclear weapon, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The officials say the RQ-170 Sentinel drone that went down over Iran was part of a fleet of secret aircraft that enabled the CIA to carry out dozens of high-altitude surveillance flights deep into Iranian territory without being detected.
A former senior Defense Department official said the stealth drone flights had been underway for “at least four years,” The aircraft, built by Lockheed Martin, is best known for its role in surveilling the compound in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was killed. “But it wasn’t only being flown in Pakistan,” the former official said.
The CIA is thought to have a dozen or so of the batwing-shaped, radar-evading aircraft, which are capable of being fitted with different “sensor payloads,” meaning they can be equipped to capture a range of intelligence material, including high-resolution images, radiation measurements and air samples.
U.S. officials have described the loss of the aircraft in Iran as a setback but not a fatal blow to the stealth drone program. “It was never a matter of whether we were going to lose one but when,” the former official said, indicating that the CIA had used technologies that it could afford to have exposed.
Among the main concerns is that Iran could use an intact aircraft to examine the vulnerabilities in stealth technology and take countermeasures with its air defense systems. Another is that China or other adversaries could help Iran extract data from the drone that would reveal its flight history, surveillance targets and other capabilities.
It is unclear whether the drone was programmed to destroy such data in the event of a malfunction. Nor is there agreement on how the aircraft went down. U.S. officials have dismissed Iranian assertions that it was shot or brought down by a cyberattack. Instead, explanations have focused on potential technical failures. The aircraft cover great distances and depend on satellite links. A lost connection or other malfunction could cause them to drift off course and crash when they run out of fuel or room to fly.
Officials said the stealth flights have contributed significantly to improved intelligence on Iran’s nuclear efforts.
Iran’s nuclear program has long been a focus of satellite flights and collection from human sources. But the drone flights have enabled the CIA to fill in substantial gaps, making it difficult for Iran to use windows between satellite passes to move material or conduct tests.
“It’s such a powerful tool to be able to keep eyes on a location for an extended period,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official. “If you can park something up there, you can get to a situation where somebody can’t do anything without being detected.”
The emphasis of covert measures over diplomacy is unsettling to some former U.S. officials who praised the White House’s earlier attempts at rapprochement with Iran. Greg Thielmann, a former State Department official, said he suspected that the administration was pulling back on its diplomacy because of intensifying pressure from the political right.
“Considering the stakes involved, I can’t accept the idea that we should accept failure and move on to other options,” said Thielmann, who is a senior fellow at the Washington-based Arms Control Association.
Officially, the Obama administration espouses what White House officials call a “dual-track strategy” of seeking diplomatic engagement with Iran while steadily applying increasing economic and political pressure. On Wednesday, after Iranian authorities blocked access to a Web-based “Virtual Embassy” where ordinary Iranians could access uncensored information about the United States, the State Department released a statement underscoring the U.S. preference for negotiations.
“The United States remains steadfast in our commitment to a dialogue with the Iranian people,” the statement read.
Iran releases video of downed U.S. spy drone
SourceIran releases video of downed U.S. spy drone – looking quite intact
By Laura Rozen | The Envoy
Iran's Press TV on Thursday broadcast an extended video tour of the U.S. spy drone that went down in the country late last week--and it indeed looks to be intact.
American officials have acknowledged that an unmanned U.S. reconnaissance plane was lost on a mission late last week, but have insisted that there is no evidence the drone was downed by hostile acts by Iran. Rather, they said, the drone likely went down because of a malfunction, and they implied the advanced stealth reconnaissance plane would have fallen from a high altitude--the RQ-170 Sentinel can fly as high as 50,000 feet--and as a result, wouldn't be in good shape.
Iranian military officials have claimed since Sunday they brought down an intact American spy drone--and now they are giving tours of the drone, in what is sure to be another humiliating poke in the eye for U.S. national security agencies.
"On Sunday December 4, the Iranian Army's electronic warfare unit downed the US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which was flying over the Iranian city of Kashmar, some 140 miles (225km) from the Afghan border," Iran's Press TV said in its report Thursday.
The New York Times reported Thursday that--unsurprisingly--the RQ-170 was lost while making the latest foray over Iran during an extended CIA surveillance effort of Iran's nuclear and ballistic weapons program.
"The overflights by the bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel, built by Lockheed Martin and first glimpsed on an airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2009, are part of an increasingly aggressive intelligence collection program aimed at Iran, current and former officials say," the Times' Scott Shane and David Sanger wrote. "The urgency of the effort has been underscored by a recent public debate in Israel about whether time is running out for a military strike to slow Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon."
Iran in turn has complained that the drone flights represent an act of aggression and violation of its sovereignty, and summoned the Swiss envoy--who represents U.S. interests in Iran--to register its complaints.
The video tour may also be a move to bid up the price Iran could receive for sharing the highly sophisticated American stealth drone technology with countries such as China and Russia.
Source
U.S. Made Covert Plan to Retrieve Iran Drone
By JULIAN E. BARNES
U.S. officials considered conducting a covert mission inside Iran to retrieve or destroy a stealth drone that crashed late last week, but ultimately concluded such a secret operation wasn't worth the risk of provoking a more explosive clash with Tehran, a U.S. official said.
Tehran said it shot down the unmanned craft.
But the U.S. official said the drone developed mechanical difficulties and remote pilots lost control of the aircraft, and said officials knew immediately it had crashed in eastern Iran.
Initially, officials in Washington didn't believe Iran had detected the drone crash.
The stealth drone was developed for the Air Force, but was flying under the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency when its remote pilots lost control of it late last week, said several U.S. officials.
The officials considered various options for retrieving the wreckage of the RQ-170 drone.
Under one plan, a team would be sent to retrieve the aircraft. U.S. officials considered both sending in a team of American commandos based in Afghanistan as well as using allied agents inside Iran to hunt down the downed aircraft.
Another option would have had a team sneak in to blow up the remaining pieces of the drone. A third option would have been to destroy the wreckage with an airstrike.
However, the officials worried that any option for retrieving or destroying the drone would have risked discovery by Iran.
"No one warmed up to the option of recovering it or destroying it because of the potential it could become a larger incident," the U.S. official said.
If an assault team entered the country to recover or destroy the drone, the official said, the U.S. "could be accused of an act of war" by the Iranian government.
Some officials argued in private meetings that because the drone crashed in a remote part of eastern Iran, it might never be discovered, and therefore, leaving the remains where they were could be the safest option.
But on Sunday, an Iranian military official quoted by the state news service claimed Tehran had shot down a U.S. stealth drone—alerting U.S. officials that the downed drone had been discovered.
U.S. officials denied that the drone had brought down by Iran, either through hacking its satellite link or by shooting it down.
Intelligence and military officials declined to comment on the specific mission the drone was flying when it crashed.
George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, declined to comment on the discussions over options to recover the drone.
The military frequently hands over parts of its fleet of drone aircraft to the CIA. Flying under CIA authority allows the U.S. to conduct operations covertly and if discovered deny the existence of the intelligence mission.
Officials said they were concerned about the remains of the craft falling into Iranian hands, but don't believe the aircraft's technology can be reverse engineered with ease.
The drone is a wing-shaped aircraft, like the stealth bomber, a design that is supposed to make it less visible to radar.
Iranian officials said the craft sustained minor damage.
Among U.S. officials, views vary on the likely extent of damage and the severity of any potential security breach.
Analyzing the materials that contribute to the craft's stealth qualities, for example, wouldn't tell Iranian scientists how to manufacture the necessary coatings.
After Iran claimed to have shot down the drone, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military command in Afghanistan issued a statement that said late last week the U.S. had lost control of one of its drones.
Iran's assertion that it had shot down the drone wasn't the first such claim it has made.
In January, Tehran said its forces shot down drones in the Gulf. In July, it said it shot down a drone near the city of Qom.
U.S. officials rebutted those claims, and Tehran produced no evidence.
Iran Shows Downed Spy Drone
The Iranians’ they brought it down -- by hacking into its controls and landing it themselves -- might be trueIran Shows Downed Spy Drone as U.S. Assesses Technology Loss
December 11, 2011, 7:20 AM EST
By John Walcott
Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The unmanned RQ-170 Sentinel is still highly classified, yet since one came down in Iran five days ago, it’s a lot less secret.
Three U.S. defense officials said the plane the Iranians displayed on television yesterday appears to be the Lockheed Martin Corp. RQ-170 that controllers lost contact with on Dec. 4. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have declined to comment on the matter.
Three U.S. intelligence officials said the greatest concern now is that the Iranians will give Russian or Chinese scientists access to the aircraft, which is designed to be virtually invisible to radar and carries advanced communications and surveillance gear.
Studying it may give two technologically sophisticated potential adversaries insight into the unmanned spy plane’s flight controls, communications gear, video equipment and self- destruct, holding pattern or return-to-base mechanisms, officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the RQ-170 is part of a Secret Compartmented Intelligence (SCI) program, a classification higher than Top Secret, and because the investigation into the loss of the drone is also classified.
Reverse Engineering
In addition, they said, the remains of the RQ-170 could help the Russians, Chinese, Iranians or others develop Infrared Surveillance and Targeting (IRST) or Doppler radar technology that under some conditions are capable of detecting stealth aircraft such as drones and the new Lockheed Martin F-35s.
There also is a danger that the fallen Sentinel’s shape, special coatings, control surfaces, engine inlet and other unique qualities could help other countries develop or improve their own radar-evading aircraft, such as China’s J-20 stealth fighter.
“There is the potential for reverse engineering, clearly,” Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz said yesterday during a taping of the television show “This Week in Defense News,” according to Air Force Times. “Ideally, one would want to maintain the American advantage. That certainly is in our minds.”
If the jet “comes into the possession of a sophisticated adversary, there’s not much the U.S. could do about it,” he said.
The intelligence officials said that Chinese or Russian access to the drone is a greater concern than a possible Iranian effort to reverse-engineer the RQ-170, which they said is unlikely given the drone’s special coatings and other materials.
Stealing Secrets
“Buy, Build or Steal: China’s Quest for Advanced Military Aviation Technologies,” a new report from the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington, says that stealth technology is a high priority for Beijing since “few things differentiate the lethality of an air force more than the level of technology in its most advanced aircraft.”
“China will likely rely more heavily on espionage to acquire those critical military aviation technologies it cannot acquire legitimately from foreign suppliers or develop on its own,” the report concludes.
Nevertheless, the Obama administration didn’t seriously consider bombing the wreckage or sending special operations forces into Iran to destroy or retrieve it because either would be an act of war, two U.S. officials said.
Hacking Claim
Reverse engineering the Sentinel or its components would be difficult and time consuming, the intelligence officials said. The most troubling prospect is that the Iranians’ second claim about how they brought it down -- by hacking into its controls and landing it themselves -- might be true, said one of the intelligence officials .
The official said the possibility that the Iranians, perhaps with help from China or Russia, hacked into the drone’s satellite communications is doubly alarming because it would mean that Iranian or other cyber-warfare officers were able to disable the Sentinel’s automatic self-destruct, holding pattern and return-to-base mechanisms.
Those are intended to prevent the plane’s secret flight control, optical, radar, surveillance and communications technology from falling into the wrong hands if its controllers at Creech Lake Air Force Base or the Tonopah Test Range, both in Nevada, lose contact with it.
Targeting Computer Networks
In recent years, one of the officials said, computer hackers thought to be part of extensive Chinese or Russian cyber espionage efforts have attacked the computer networks of numerous defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin; broken into two satellite ground stations and planted keystroke logging software in some military computers -- including some that are used to control some U.S. drones.
It isn’t known whether that malware has been found in RQ- 170 computers, or only in those used to control less advanced drones such as the Predator and Reaper, made by General Atomics Aeronautical of San Diego, that are used by the Air Force and CIA in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.
Two U.S. intelligence officials said that while the drones’ and other military and intelligence computer networks are kept separate from the public Internet, investigators have uncovered what they said are numerous instances when thumb drives containing Chinese and other malware have infected classified networks. Often, they said, such infections have spread quickly and proved very difficult to eradicate.
Television Debut
The drone made a 2 1/2 minute television debut yesterday on Iran’s state-owned Press TV channel. Two U.S. officials with knowledge of the RQ-170 program said that some details, including the seams on the drone’s fuselage, its access ports and its unusual air intake, appear to confirm that it’s genuine.
The official Iranian Republic News Agency reported that the Foreign Ministry protested the “violation of Iran’s airspace by a U.S. spy drone on Dec. 4,” the day Iranian forces claimed to have shot down the aircraft 140 miles inside the Iranian border from Afghanistan.
The RQ-170 was flying a reconnaissance mission inside Iranian airspace when its controllers lost contact with it, U.S. officials said.
The officials said that for three years the U.S. has been flying two types of unmanned surveillance missions over Iran and along the Afghanistan-Iran border from a 9,200-foot runway at a former Soviet airbase in Shindand in western Afghanistan’s Herat province.
In addition to monitoring construction and other activity at suspected Iranian nuclear facilities from high altitudes, the officials said, the CIA has been using drones to monitor cross- border traffic and Iranian support for insurgents.
The CIA, not the Air Force, flies the missions inside Iran so they are covert operations that the U.S. government can deny.
--Editors: Terry Atlas, Jim Rubin.
To contact the reporter on this story: John Walcott in Washington at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net
U.S. Drone Crashes in Seychelles
Source
U.S. Drone Crashes in Seychelles: Embassy
By REUTERS
Published: December 13, 2011 at 8:13 AM ET
VICTORIA (Reuters) - A U.S. drone aircraft crashed at Seychelles International Airport on Tuesday, the U.S. embassy in Mauritius said.
"A U.S. Air Force remote-piloted MQ-9 crashed at the Seychelles International Airport in Mahe. The MQ-9 was not armed and no injuries were reported," the embassy said in a statement.
The Seychelles Civil Aviation Authority (SCAA) confirmed the incident and said that the plane was on a "routine patrol" and had crashed because of mechanical failure.
The U.S. embassy did not comment on the plane's mission and said that the cause of the crash was unknown.
Iran announced on December 4 it had downed a U.S. drone in the eastern part of the country, near Afghanistan. It has since shown the plane on television and said it is close to cracking its technological secrets.
US drone crashes at Seychelles airport
SourceUS drone crashes at Seychelles airport
By MALKHADIR M. MUHUMED | AP
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — An American military drone which had been used to monitor piracy off the East African coast has crashed at an airport on the island nation of Seychelles during a routine patrol, officials said.
The U.S. Embassy in Mauritius said the unmanned U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper was not armed and that Tuesday's crash caused no injuries. The crash sparked a fire that was quickly extinguished.
Lina Laurence of Seychelles' civilian aviation authority said the drone developed engine problems minutes into its flight and needed to land as soon as possible Tuesday morning.
"But due to its accelerated landing speed, the aircraft was unable to stop before the runway's end," Laurence said.
The embassy's statement said the cause of the crash is being investigated.
"It has been confirmed that this drone was unarmed and its failure was due to mechanical reasons," Laurence said.
The affected runway was closed for about 10 minutes as a "precautionary measure," but was later reopened with no disruption to airport operations, Laurence said.
The U.S. military and the civilian aviation authority of Seychelles have coordinated to remove the debris, officials said.
The MQ-9 Reaper is a medium-to-high altitude unmanned aircraft system with sensors that can provide real-time data. The Seychelles-based MQ-9s, which are used to monitor piracy activities in and around the Indian Ocean, don't carry weapons, though they have the capability to do so.
Tuesday's crash follows last week's claim by Iran that it seized a drone identified as the RQ-170 Sentinel. Tehran said it was captured over the country's east. The nearly intact drone was displayed on state TV and flaunted as a victory for Iran in a complicated intelligence and technological battle with the U.S.
U.S. officials said the unmanned aircraft malfunctioned and was not brought down by Iran. President Barack Obama said Monday the U.S. wants the top-secret aircraft back and has delivered a formal request for the return of the surveillance drone, though it isn't hopeful that Iran will comply.
The U.S. has used drones to hunt down al-Qaida-linked militants in Somalia and Yemen, among other countries. Their humming is a constant feature in the sky in many of the major towns in southern Somalia, especially the capital city and the militant-controlled southern port of Kismayo. It was not clear if drones operated out of the Seychelles are used for that purpose.
U.S. Spy Plane Shot Video of Jamaican ‘Drug War Massacre’
These government murders in Jamaica were caused by the American "drug war".U.S. Spy Plane Shot Secret Video of Jamaican ‘Massacre’
By Spencer Ackerman
December 7, 2011
Somewhere in the bureaucratic bowels of the Department of Homeland Security is a videotape shot above the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica on May 24, 2010. It could reveal whether the Jamaican security forces, acting on behalf of U.S. prosecutors, killed 73 members of a notorious crime syndicate or innocent civilians caught in house-to-house fighting. That is, if anyone in a position of power actually wants that question answered.
Over 500 Jamaican soldiers rushed into the teeming Tivoli Gardens neighborhood that day for what became known as Operation Garden Parish, a mission to capture the local mafia don, Christopher “Dudus” Coke. The mission was the result of heavy U.S. pressure: Coke had been indicted in U.S. federal court for running an international marijuana and cocaine ring. It would become one of the bloodiest days in recent Jamaican history.
What happened on May 24, 2010 garnered international headlines. But what no one knew until now was that circling overhead was a P-3 Orion spy plane, operated by the Department of Homeland Security. A lengthy investigation by journalist Mattathias Schwartz (a Danger Room friend) reveals that the Orion took footage of the hours-long battle. It has never been publicly revealed.
“I don’t know what’s on the video,” Schwartz tells Danger Room. “But given all these credible allegations of extrajudicial killings taking place on the ground, it must be released.” Schwartz’s investigation of what he describes as the “massacre” in Tivoli Gardens has just been published by the New Yorker, although it’s not yet online.
Coke is a brutal man. According to prosecutors, he used a chainsaw to kill a man believed of stealing his drug proceeds. But he was beloved in Tivoli Gardens as well as feared, as often happens in places where gangsters replace the governing machinery of failing states, and the neighborhood became his fortress.
That is, until May 24, 2010, when the American pressure on a Coke ally, Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding, became overwhelming. The Jamaican soldiers who carried out Operation Garden Parish, had to overcome roadblocks set up by Coke soldiers prepared for the raid. And more than that. “I fired my AK until my finger was numb,” reads a passage from a Coke gunman’s diary unearthed by Schwartz.
Then the Jamaican soldiers went inside Tivoli houses, killing people — most of whom, locals insist, were unconnected to Coke. Some of the killings occurred outside in the open air. An American citizen, 25-year old Andre Smith, was among the dead. According to Smith’s great aunt, Smith was ordered up her stairs by soldiers, although he was hiding to avoid the battle; his body was carried out in a sheet, suggesting an execution.
Schwartz recounts many such stories. Seventy-three locals and one soldier died. Soldiers took over a thousand others to detention centers for interrogations. Coke escaped the battle.
Above the melee was the P-3 Orion, filming the events of May 24 with its onboard cameras. A Jamaican photographer snapped photos of it. Schwartz filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Homeland Security and confirmed its presence. “All scenes were continuously recorded,” a Homeland Security document Schwartz acquired confirms.
The video, said to have been screened in a joint U.S.-Jamaican operations center in Kingston, has never been released. Its contents are politically dangerous for a Jamaican government still reeling from Tivoli Gardens. (Coke was eventually arrested and convicted in New York; Golding resigned.) And the documents Schwartz acquired suggest that there might have been U.S. operatives on the ground during the raid, which the U.S. denies.
But there have been no charges brought against anyone involved in the massacre. A Jamaican detective, Gladys Brown, tells Schwartz, “Nobody is able to describe who saw and who did what. It’s very difficult to pinpoint one or two of these men who held a gun to the head and fired.”
The video can’t adjudicate every outstanding question about the Tivoli Square raid. It can’t see into houses to determine if soldiers executed unarmed civilians or defended themselves against Coke soldiers lying in wait.
But it might answer some of the questions about exactly how 73 residents of the neighborhood and one soldier died. “My belief is that the video could help identify exactly which members of the Jamaican security forces were where, and when,” Schwartz says. “Until the identities of these individuals are made known, and some court or other investigative body compels them to give public testimony, we will not have a final answer to these disturbing and credible allegations.”
How Iran hijacked the US drone - bogus GPS signals!!!
I thought this was really clever. Iran fed the US drone bogus GPS signals and made the drone think it was landing at it's US airbase in Afghanistan, when it was actually landing in Iran.
Last but not least I hope Iran gets nuclear weapons. That will certainly prevent the American government from invading them. Bullies never pick on countries that can defend themselves.
Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer
By Scott Peterson, Payam Faramarzi
Christian Science Monitor
Iran guided the CIA's "lost" stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone's systems inside Iran.
Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.
Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.
"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran's "electronic ambush" of the highly classified US drone. "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."
The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.
The revelations about Iran's apparent electronic prowess come as the US, Israel, and some European nations appear to be engaged in an ever-widening covert war with Iran, which has seen assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, explosions at Iran's missile and industrial facilities, and the Stuxnet computer virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program.
Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.
Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS spoofing indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible.
"Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, says former US Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore, adding that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn't say it's easy, but the technology is there.”
In 2009, Iran-backed Shiite militants in Iraq were found to have downloaded live, unencrypted video streams from American Predator drones with inexpensive, off-the-shelf software. But Iran’s apparent ability now to actually take control of a drone is far more significant.
Iran asserted its ability to do this in September, as pressure mounted over its nuclear program.
Gen. Moharam Gholizadeh, the deputy for electronic warfare at the air defense headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), described to Fars News how Iran could alter the path of a GPS-guided missile – a tactic more easily applied to a slower-moving drone.
“We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning ‘deception’ of the aggressive systems,” said Gholizadeh, such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”
Gholizadeh said that “all the movements of these [enemy drones]” were being watched, and “obstructing” their work was “always on our agenda.”
That interview has since been pulled from Fars’ Persian-language website. And last month, the relatively young Gholizadeh died of a heart attack, which some Iranian news sites called suspicious – suggesting the electronic warfare expert may have been a casualty in the covert war against Iran.
Iran's growing electronic capabilities
Iranian lawmakers say the drone capture is a "great epic" and claim to be "in the final steps of breaking into the aircraft's secret code."
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Fox News on Dec. 13 that the US will "absolutely" continue the drone campaign over Iran, looking for evidence of any nuclear weapons work. But the stakes are higher for such surveillance, now that Iran can apparently disrupt the work of US drones.
US officials skeptical of Iran’s capabilities blame a malfunction, but so far can't explain how Iran acquired the drone intact. One American analyst ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was “like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”
Yet Iran’s claims to the contrary resonate more in light of new details about how it brought down the drone – and other markers that signal growing electronic expertise.
A former senior Iranian official who asked not to be named said: "There are a lot of human resources in Iran.... Iran is not like Pakistan."
“Technologically, our distance from the Americans, the Zionists, and other advanced countries is not so far to make the downing of this plane seem like a dream for us … but it could be amazing for others,” deputy IRGC commander Gen. Hossein Salami said this week.
According to a European intelligence source, Iran shocked Western intelligence agencies in a previously unreported incident that took place sometime in the past two years, when it managed to “blind” a CIA spy satellite by “aiming a laser burst quite accurately.”
More recently, Iran was able to hack Google security certificates, says the engineer. In September, the Google accounts of 300,000 Iranians were made accessible by hackers. The targeted company said "circumstantial evidence" pointed to a "state-driven attack" coming from Iran, meant to snoop on users.
Cracking the protected GPS coordinates on the Sentinel drone was no more difficult, asserts the engineer.
US knew of GPS systems' vulnerability
Use of drones has become more risky as adversaries like Iran hone countermeasures. The US military has reportedly been aware of vulnerabilities with pirating unencrypted drone data streams since the Bosnia campaign in the mid-1990s.
Top US officials said in 2009 that they were working to encrypt all drone data streams in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – after finding militant laptops loaded with days' worth of data in Iraq – and acknowledged that they were "subject to listening and exploitation."
Perhaps as easily exploited are the GPS navigational systems upon which so much of the modern military depends.
"GPS signals are weak and can be easily outpunched [overridden] by poorly controlled signals from television towers, devices such as laptops and MP3 players, or even mobile satellite services," Andrew Dempster, a professor from the University of New South Wales School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems, told a March conference on GPS vulnerability in Australia.
"This is not only a significant hazard for military, industrial, and civilian transport and communication systems, but criminals have worked out how they can jam GPS," he says.
The US military has sought for years to fortify or find alternatives to the GPS system of satellites, which are used for both military and civilian purposes. In 2003, a “Vulnerability Assessment Team” at Los Alamos National Laboratory published research explaining how weak GPS signals were easily overwhelmed with a stronger local signal.
“A more pernicious attack involves feeding the GPS receiver fake GPS signals so that it believes it is located somewhere in space and time that it is not,” reads the Los Alamos report. “In a sophisticated spoofing attack, the adversary would send a false signal reporting the moving target’s true position and then gradually walk the target to a false position.”
The vulnerability remains unresolved, and a paper presented at a Chicago communications security conference in October laid out parameters for successful spoofing of both civilian and military GPS units to allow a "seamless takeover" of drones or other targets.
To “better cope with hostile electronic attacks,” the US Air Force in late September awarded two $47 million contracts to develop a "navigation warfare" system to replace GPS on aircraft and missiles, according to the Defense Update website.
Official US data on GPS describes "the ongoing GPS modernization program" for the Air Force, which "will enhance the jam resistance of the military GPS service, making it more robust."
Why the drone's underbelly was damaged
Iran's drone-watching project began in 2007, says the Iranian engineer, and then was stepped up and became public in 2009 – the same year that the RQ-170 was first deployed in Afghanistan with what were then state-of-the-art surveillance systems.
In January, Iran said it had shot down two conventional (nonstealth) drones, and in July, Iran showed Russian experts several US drones – including one that had been watching over the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom.
In capturing the stealth drone this month at Kashmar, 140 miles inside northeast Iran, the Islamic Republic appears to have learned from two years of close observation.
Iran displayed the drone on state-run TV last week, with a dent in the left wing and the undercarriage and landing gear hidden by anti-American banners.
The Iranian engineer explains why: "If you look at the location where we made it land and the bird's home base, they both have [almost] the same altitude," says the Iranian engineer. "There was a problem [of a few meters] with the exact altitude so the bird's underbelly was damaged in landing; that's why it was covered in the broadcast footage."
Prior to the disappearance of the stealth drone earlier this month, Iran’s electronic warfare capabilities were largely unknown – and often dismissed.
"We all feel drunk [with happiness] now," says the Iranian engineer. "Have you ever had a new laptop? Imagine that excitement multiplied many-fold." When the Revolutionary Guard first recovered the drone, they were aware it might be rigged to self-destruct, but they "were so excited they could not stay away."
* Scott Peterson, the Monitor's Middle East correspondent, wrote this story with an Iranian journalist who publishes under the pen name Payam Faramarzi and cannot be further identified for security reasons.
How Iran hijacked the US drone
How Iran caught the 'beast'
Source
Downed US drone: How Iran caught the 'beast'
By Scott Peterson, Staff writer / December 9, 2011
Istanbul, Turkey
Iran is pushing the propaganda advantage after showing it captured an intact US stealth drone on a spying mission 140 miles inside Iran.
Hours after Iran state TV displayed the cream-colored American bat-wing RQ-170 "Sentinel" drone – its undercarriage hidden by banners of a US flag, with stars replaced by skulls and marked with anti-US slogans – Iranian officials said the spy craft was proof of enduring US hostility toward Iran.
"Iran will target all US military bases around the world," in case of further violations, warned conservative lawmaker Mohammad Kossari today. Iran's response would be "terrifying."
US officials confirmed with "high confidence" that the drone displayed by Iran is almost certainly the one reported lost last by US forces in Afghanistan last week. It was on an intelligence mission to hunt evidence in Iran of nuclear weapons work.
Despite those and other intelligence-gathering efforts – which are reported to include even surreptitiously installing radiation detectors at suspect sites in Tehran – the drone flights have apparently not yielded new evidence that would change conclusions by the United States and the United Nations that Iran stopped systematic nuclear weapons-related work in 2003.
Loss of the stealth drone is "very significant," says Robert Densmore, a defense journalist and former US Navy electronic countermeasures officer contacted in London.
"These Sentinels are pretty rare technology still, and to have one in such good condition, to be lost to a potential adversary like this, is pretty significant, especially because Iran has open ties to Russia and has been courted by China," says Mr. Densmore. US loss
"Strategically, the US will suffer from the loss of this because ... it has radar, a fuselage, and coating that makes it low-observable, and the electronics inside are also very high-tech," says Densmore. "Diplomatically, Iran is really looking for a way to save some face," after the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from London, and increased scrutiny of its nuclear program, adds Densmore. "They are really looking for something to say to the world, to change public opinion, to say, 'Look, we're really the victims here.'"
Iran officially complained to the UN Security Council for the "blatant and provocative" violation of its airspace, and demanded "condemnation of such aggressive acts."
State-run PressTV said that international law made the clandestine US flights over Iran an "act of war."
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it had tracked and brought down the plane. After crossing into Iran,"this aircraft fell into the trap of our armed forces and was downed," said IRGC aerospace chief Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh. "Military experts are well aware how precious the technological information of this drone is," said General Hajizadeh.
Officials from Russia and China – which have close trade ties with Iran, and oppose Western efforts to increase pressure – "have asked for permission to inspect the US spy drone," Iranian media reported. How Iran got the 'beast'
Nicknamed the "Beast of Kandahar" after it was first spotted in 2009 on an airport runway in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the drone was used to monitor Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, undetected, before the raid to kill the Al Qaeda leader.
The Iranian video shows Hajizadeh and another Guard officer examining the craft with its radar-evading curves and wingspan which resembles the larger B-2 stealth bomber. It was placed on a platform with banners hiding the undercarriage and landing gear. The banners – fixed to either wing with clear packing tape – read: "The US can't mess with us," and "We'll crush America underfoot."
It was not clear how Iran acquired the drone intact. Some US experts dismiss the possibility that Iran could hack and then takeover the drone's controls, as Iran claims. And yet similar disruptions have proven possible in other battlefields, notably with the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and drones from Israel.
"Those jamming capabilities exist, and a lot of them are not as new as we would like to imagine," says former US Navy electronics warfare officer Densmore.
"Anything that has a sensor, that takes communications links – as does the RQ-170, which has two, one for the satellite, and the other is line-of-sight with the ground control station – all it takes is disrupting that," says Densmore.
Often flying at 50,000-foot altitude, the RQ-170 would have had a hard landing, some say. And yet the Iranian video shows little visible damage, except that wings appear to have been reattached, and there was a small dent on the front edge of the left wing.
A senior US military source "with intimate knowledge of the Sentinel drone" was paraphrased by Fox News days ago as saying that the lost craft was "presumed to be intact since it is programmed to fly level and find a place to land, rather than crashing."
"This is a big prize in terms of technology," the source told Fox.
$6 million drone
The unmanned $6 million stealth drone is made by Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Programs. It is the third high-profile loss of stealth technology: the first when a US F-117 jet fighter was shot down during the Kosovo conflict in 1999; the second when a stealth helicopter was damaged and largely destroyed in situ during the Bin Laden raid in Pakistan.
But this drone is not the most sophisticated stealth technology in the US arsenal, according to the website AviationIntel.com.
The RQ-170 was "most likely constructed with expendability in mind," and so had "dumbed-down stealth characteristics" that would mean the US military's "most sensitive stealth secrets" would not be compromised, the site says.
AviationIntel also says Iran recently received from Russia an advanced mobile jamming and intelligence system called "Avtobaza" that could have detected the drone and perhaps jammed its communications links.
"There is no reason why [that] system could not have detected the Sentinel's electronic trail and either jammed it and/or have alerted fighter aircraft and SAM [surface-to-air missile] installations as to its whereabouts," said AviationIntel on its site. "Further, these systems are supposed to be used in direct conjunction with Iran's nuclear development sites."
While the drone could have operated with limited electronic connectivity, making it less visible, AviationIntel indicates, a "more likely scenario" would be one of "actively transmitting live video, detailed radar maps, or electronic intelligence, in real-time," making detection easier by the Russian-made system.
Iranian officials said that this is not the first drone to be shot down in the region. Last January, Hazijadeh told an IRGC publication that Iran had "shot down a large number of their highly advanced spy planes." They were brought down outside Iranian airspace, and Iran "invited Russian experts" to see two of them," and later reproduced them through reverse engineering," reported the Fars News Agency, which is linked to the IRGC.
Iranian ability
Iran's own technical capacity is unknown. The country has excelled in some fields like nanotechnology, and stem-cell research, and created a sophisticated nuclear program that includes 8,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium – despite an array of sanctions.
But there are also limits, as evidenced by the launch of Iran's first Omid (Hope) satellite in 2009. While that event put Iran into an elite scientific club of just nine nations, the innards of the satellite appeared to be rudimentary.
State TV showed footage at the time of the satellite being assembled into a square silver box, its guts similar to those of a 1950s transistor radio, with D-size batteries and wires held in place with black electrical tape. Iran has also frequently made claims about advanced military systems that later proved exaggerated.
Aerial surveillance inside Iran is not new, according to a Washington Post report from early 2005 noted by the EAWorldview website. US officials said US drones were at the time "penetrating Iranian airspace" from bases in Iraq, using "radar, video, still photography and air filters designed to pick up traces of nuclear activity," the Post reported.
"We've always relied on [drones] as a force multiplier, a technological edge that we've had, and we've always known it wouldn't be a permanent advantage," says Densmore. Opponents "are expecting us now to deploy these things, they're looking for them, so a lot of that advantage has been lost."
Iran delayed announcement of US drone capture
SourceIran says it deliberately delayed announcement of US drone capture to test American reaction
ALI AKBAR DAREINI Associated Press
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran deliberately delayed its announcement that it had captured an American surveillance drone to test U.S. reaction, the country's foreign minister said Saturday.
Ali Akbar Salehi said Tehran finally went public with its possession of the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone to disprove contradictory statements from U.S. officials.
Iran, which put the aircraft on display last week, has tried to trumpet the downing of the drone as a feat of Iran's military in a complicated technological and intelligence battle with the U.S. Tehran also has rejected a formal U.S. request to return the plane, calling it's incursion an "invasion" and a "hostile act."
"When our armed forces nicely brought down the stealth American surveillance drone, we didn't announce it for several days to see what the other party (U.S.) says and to test their reaction," Salehi told the official IRNA news agency. "Days after Americans made contradictory statements, our friends at the armed forces put this drone on display."
Salehi said Iran's position is not to return the drone, but he didn't completely rule out the possibility of a deal.
"Any decision-making about this issue rests with the Supreme National Security Council," IRNA quoted Salehi as saying. The council is Iran's highest security decision-making body and handles the country's talks with the West over Iran's disputed nuclear program.
Salehi said Iran won a complicated technological battle with the U.S. by intercepting and taking control of the plane with an electronic ambush.
"Regardless of whether the U.S. believes it or not, the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran brought down the aircraft largely intact without assistance from any foreign country," he said.
American officials have said that U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that Iran neither shot the drone down, nor used electronic or cybertechnology to force it from the sky. They contend the drone malfunctioned.
Iranian state media has said the unmanned spy aircraft was detected over the eastern town of Kashmar, some 140 miles (225 kilometers) from the border with Afghanistan.
Official: U.S. limits intel value of drones
Uncle Sam - Trust us. The Iranians didn't get any military value out of that drone they captured. Yea, sure!!!!!Official: U.S. limits intel value of drones
WASHINGTON (AP) – A U.S. official says Iran will find it hard to exploit any data or technology aboard the captured CIA stealth drone because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones when they operate in hostile territory.
The Obama administration has delivered a formal request to Iran for the return of a U.S. surveillance drone captured by Iranian armed forces, but said it is not hopeful that Iran will comply.
The official also says the U.S. is convinced that the unmanned aircraft malfunctioned and came down on its own, rejecting Iran's claims that it used GPS and electronic warfare methods to hijack it. The U.S. says it lost control of the drone over eastern Iran earlier this month.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity Saturday to discuss classified matters publicly and offered no details. But experts say all the drone's data and communications are heavily encrypted.
U.S. experts disagree over whether Iran could have diverted the robot aircraft.
U.S. drone operators show signs of exhaustion
SourceU.S. drone operators show signs of exhaustion
By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY
By Kirsty Wigglesworth, AP
The airmen who operate drones from bases in Nevada and California complain of frequent shift changes, "mind-numbing" monotony, strains on families and ever-increasing workloads.
"There's just not enough people," says Wayne Chappelle, an Air Force psychologist who helped conduct a six-month study of drone operators from 2010 to 2011. "You have to constantly sustain a high level of vigilance, both visual and auditory information, and that would be really tough to do when there's a lot of monotony."
The aircraft — Predators, Reapers and Global Hawks — were used to track Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and are used to spy on Iran, locate and kill al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen and assist U.S. ground troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Researchers found slightly lower rates of clinical distress — those on the edge of mental illnesses such as anxiety or depression — among airmen, about 25% of the camera operators for the high-flying Global Hawk spy aircraft and 17% of pilots for Predator and Reaper attack drones.
Sixty-five percent to 70% of those with mental illness signs are not seeking treatment for it, researchers found.
About a third of drone pilots, camera operators and mission coordinators work 50 to 60 hours per week or more, data show. Many change shifts every 30 days. Burnout in this group was found among one in three, the research shows.
Lt. Gen. Larry James, Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said that there has been pilot error in the program but that he did not think any of those cases were tied to emotional burnout.
Recent accidents include a drone going down in Iran, a crash at an airport on Seychelles and, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, the accidental killing of two Marines in Afghanistan by a missile fired by a Predator drone.
For operators of Predators and Reapers — which fly at 20,000 feet and can kill terrorists with Hellfire missiles or guided bombs — daily combat missions have quadrupled from 10 to 15 in 2007 to 57 today, James says.
Concerns about job burnout led the Air Force in November to begin increasing staff for the drone programs, James says, and capping daily missions for Predator and Reaper patrols at 57.
"We've kind of been in this almost constant surge mode because there's such a demand for this capability, really for four to five years," James says.
The aircraft are flown remotely largely from Creech Air Force Base north of Las Vegas and Beale Air Force Base north of Sacramento. Air Force reservists and National Guard troops operate the aircraft from other locations and have lower rates of burnout, research data show.
In contrast to the job exhaustion rates, researchers found very low levels of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Nearly 900 Air Force personnel were surveyed. Seventeen percent are women and 60% married. When they were first asked broadly about burnout, nearly half admitted it. More precise questioning revealed that true rates of exhaustion were far lower.
The vast majority of combat drones are flown by the Air Force, James says. Other branches of service and the CIA also fly the aircraft.
"The folks that execute this mission day in and day
out truly are kind of the silent heroes out there that
you don't hear a lot about.
Secrecy defines Obama’s drone war
By Karen DeYoung, Published: December 19
Since September, at least 60 people have died in 14 reported CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions. The Obama administration has named only one of the dead, hailing the elimination of Janbaz Zadran, a top official in the Haqqani insurgent network, as a counterterrorism victory.
The identities of the rest remain classified, as does the existence of the drone program itself. Because the names of the dead and the threat they were believed to pose are secret, it is impossible for anyone without access to U.S. intelligence to assess whether the deaths were justified.
The administration has said that its covert, targeted killings with remote-controlled aircraft in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and potentially beyond are proper under both domestic and international law. It has said that the targets are chosen under strict criteria, with rigorous internal oversight.
It has parried reports of collateral damage and the alleged killing of innocents by saying that drones, with their surveillance capabilities and precision missiles, result in far fewer mistakes than less sophisticated weapons.
Yet in carrying out hundreds of strikes over three years — resulting in an estimated 1,350 to 2,250 deaths in Pakistan — it has provided virtually no details to support those assertions.
In outlining its legal reasoning, the administration has cited broad congressional authorizations and presidential approvals, the international laws of war and the right to self-defense. But it has not offered the American public, uneasy allies or international authorities any specifics that would make it possible to judge how it is applying those laws.
The rapid expansion in the size and scope of the drone campaign as the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been winding down has led to increased criticism from human rights and international law experts, many of whom dispute the legal justification for the program.
The criticism has struck a chord inside an administration that prides itself on respect for international law, and it has intensified an internal debate over how much information can and should be revealed.
“Everybody knows we’re using drones,” said a senior U.S. official familiar with the program, one of several who agreed to discuss intelligence matters on the condition of anonymity. “On the other hand, we’re doing it on a pretty systematic and standardized basis. Why don’t we just say what those standards are?”
In Pakistan, at least 240 CIA drone strikes have been reported since 2009. The CIA and the U.S. military carried out strikes this year in Yemen and Somalia, with at least two U.S. citizens among those killed.
As armed drones become “an increasingly usual tool of war,” said a second official, the public and U.S. allies have a right to ask “who makes these decisions. How are they made? Is there any sort of court or something that reviews them? Should there be?”
Even outside experts who believe the program is legal find the secrecy increasingly untenable. “I believe this is the right policy, but I don’t think [the administration] understands the degree to which it looks way too discretionary,” said American University law professor Kenneth Anderson.
“They’ve based it on the personal legitimacy of [President] Obama — the ‘trust me’ concept,” Anderson said. “That’s not a viable concept for a president going forward.”
Secrecy’s fierce defenders
Administration advocates of more openness about the drone program are in a minority. Many of them are in the State Department, where some officials argue that the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan is the primary cause of widespread anti-Americanism.
The Pakistani government charges the United States is wantonly killing far more militant foot soldiers and civilians than senior insurgent leaders. With no independent access to the region by journalists or humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, there is no way to verify the accuracy or effectiveness of the strikes.
Much of the resistance to increased disclosure has come from the CIA, which has argued that the release of any information about the program, particularly on how targets are chosen and strikes approved, would aid the enemy.
Among other variables, according to one source briefed on the program, those selecting targets calculate how much potential collateral damage is acceptable relative to the value of the target. An insurgent leader aware of such logic, they said, could avoid an attack simply by positioning himself in the midst of enough civilians to make the strike too costly.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has opposed the declassification of any portion of its opinion justifying the targeted killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen this year. Awlaki, a propagandist for the Yemen-based al-Qaeda affiliate whom Obama identified as its “external operations” chief, was the first American known to have been the main target of a drone strike. While officials say they did not require special permission to kill him, the administration apparently felt it would be prudent to spell out its legal rationale.
Many administration lawyers strongly disapprove of opinions written under President George W. Bush that justified detainee interrogation methods now widely regarded as torture. But they worry that Obama’s 2009 decision to make them public has set a precedent for the release of normally classified opinions.
The Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which has carried out strikes in Yemen and Somalia, refuses to discuss drones or any other aspect of its secret counterterrorism operations.
Senior administration officials say they deserve to be trusted on drones, in part because Obama kept his pledge to do away with the CIA’s secret prisons and the use of harsh interrogation techniques.
At home, the drone program has escaped serious public questioning because it is widely perceived as successful in eliminating insurgent leaders, has not put U.S. personnel at physical risk and has taken place largely out of sight.
Abroad, no other government has offered public support for the program.
“If you sat around a cabinet meeting in my country and asked the attorney general what he thought of the administration’s legal reasoning, he would say we disagree,” said a senior diplomat from a European ally. But public concerns in his country, he said, are not loud enough to force a confrontation with Washington.
When Harold Hongju Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, proposed delivering a speech last year laying out the legal justification, “the immediate reaction was you can’t talk about our covert programs,” said an official who participated in meetings chaired by the National Security Council’s legal counsel.
Disclosure foes argue that the need for secrecy is unquestioned in conventional wars. “In World War II, they were killing people all over the place, with lots and lots of mis-hits,” one official said. “The civil liberties community wasn’t saying we want to see targeting lists of what you’re hitting. George Washington did not turn over his targeting list of the British.”
Asked about the Awlaki case at an American Bar Association conference this month, top CIA and Pentagon lawyers declined to address it directly. Those allied with al-Qaeda, including U.S. citizens, are at war with the United States and are legitimate targets, said Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson and his CIA counterpart, Stephen Preston.
Others counter that such blanket assertions serve only to convince critics that wrongdoing is being concealed.
“We are groping our way toward a new paradigm in the use of force,” said Anderson. “We didn’t used to talk about covert action. Now that we have these programs that are barely deniable, we have to talk about it.”
A web of legal authorities
The drone program is actually three separate initiatives that operate under a complicated web of overlapping legal authorities and approval mechanisms.
The least controversial is the military’s relatively public use of armed drones in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently in Libya. The other two programs — the CIA’s use of drones in Pakistan, and counterterrorism operations by the CIA and the military in Yemen, Somalia and conceivably beyond — are the secret parts.
Under domestic law, the administration considers all three to be covered by the Authorization for Use of Military Force that Congress passed days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In two key sentences that have no expiration date, the AUMF gives the president sole power to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against nations, groups or persons who committed or aided the attacks, and to prevent future attacks.
The CIA has separate legal authority to conduct counterterrorism operations under a secret presidential order, or finding, first signed by President Ronald Reagan more than two decades ago. In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed an amendment, called a Memorandum of Notification, overriding a long-standing ban on CIA assassinations overseas and allowing “lethal” counterterrorism actions against a short list of named targets, including Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants. Killing was approved only if capture was not deemed “feasible.”
A week after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration amended the finding again, dropping the list of named targets and the caveat on “feasible” capture.
“All of that conditional language was not included,” said a former Bush administration official involved in those decisions. “This was straight-out legal authority. . . . By design, it was written as broadly as possible.
There was “no parsing of how do you kill them,” and no mention of drones or any other weapon, the former official said. For administration lawyers, he said, the only question was “how far could you take it, how far inside or down the structure of al-Qaeda could you go to conduct lethal actions?”
The authorization did not address targets’ nationality or set geographical boundaries, and there was “nothing about the permission of the government” of any country where a terrorist might be found, the former official said.
“Those were policy questions,” he said, with parameters to be set by the White House as it defined its friends and enemies in what it called a “global war.”
The first CIA drone strike under the new authorization took place more than a year later, when a Hellfire missile fired by a Predator drone struck a vehicle in Yemen, killing alleged al-Qaeda leader Abu Ali al-Harithi and five others, including a U.S. citizen. It would be more than eight years before the next drone attack in Yemen.
Keeping Bush’s drone policy
In 2004, the CIA began attacks against al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan. Unlike in Yemen, the CIA had authority there to fire at will, without prior authorization outside the agency, as long as targets were within the limits of geographic “boxes” in the tribal regions that abut Afghanistan’s eastern border.
The boxes had been agreed to by Pakistan’s then-president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who also insisted that he approve each strike in advance. By mid-2008, Musharraf had turned down nearly as many strikes as he had approved, and the administration believed that some insurgent leaders had been warned by the Pakistanis of their presence on the CIA target list.
According to tallies compiled by the Washington-based New America Foundation, more than half of the 44 attacks the Bush administration launched in Pakistan over a four-year period took place in the last four months of 2008, after an elected government headed by President Asif Ali Zardari replaced Musharraf.
Zardari, who voiced loud public disapproval of the attacks, was amenable in private. He received “no prior notice,” Zardari said in a Washington Post interview in November of that year. He said he gave the Americans “the benefit of the doubt” that they were targeting people who deserved to be killed and making every effort to avoid civilians.
Within days of Obama’s inauguration, the new White House legal team began examining all existing covert authorizations.
The new president had told the American Society of International law during his 2008 campaign that Bush had “put forward a false choice between adhering to domestic and international law and providing security to the American people. These legal regimes exist precisely to keep us safe, and I will make clear that my administration has faith in the rule of law.”
Obama quickly announced that he was shutting down Bush’s secret detention and interrogation programs. But the drone program seemed both effective and justifiable, and the existing authorities were left in place.
No new legal opinions were sought, said a former Obama official involved in the process, and there was no challenge to the CIA’s unilateral authority to choose targets and launch strikes in Pakistan. “Nothing was changed in terms of the review process,” the former Obama official said. Outside Pakistan, all strikes required White House approval, either by the CIA or the military’s JSOC, which has its own list of targets and a separate authorization.
White House and State Department lawyers who reviewed Bush’s international legal definition of an “armed conflict” against global terrorism narrowed the scope to apply it only to al-Qaeda and its associates who had actually attacked the United States or were planning attacks, and they accepted the Bush doctrine of the right to self-defense.
The United Nations Charter includes a right of response to an armed attack, and there is a generally recognized right to fend off an “imminent” assault, derived from an 1837 lawsuit over a skirmish between U.S. and British forces along the Canadian border. Some experts in international law have questioned that interpretation, saying that most of the drone strikes have nothing to do with defense against a previous assault or an “imminent” attack.
In Pakistan and Yemen, Obama lawyers determined, the governments in power had agreed to the attacks. In Somalia, the government controlled the capital and little else; there was no one to ask.
Challenging the secrecy
Some critics of the use of drones are discomfited by the relatively risk-free, long-distance killing via video screen and joystick. But the question of whether such killings are legal “has little to do with the choice of the weapon,” Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said this year in one of several think tank conferences where the subject was debated. “The question is about who can be killed, whether using this weapon or any other.” In a letter to Obama Monday, Human Rights Watch called the administration’s claims of compliance with international law “unsupported” and “wholly inadequate.”
Civil and human rights groups have been unsuccessful in persuading U.S. courts to force the administration to reveal details of the program. In September, a federal judge found for the CIA in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit alleging that the agency’s refusal to release information about drone killings was illegal.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, the ACLU asked for documents related to “the legal basis in domestic, foreign, and international law for the use of drones to conduct targeted killings,” as well as information about target selection, the number of people killed, civilian casualties, and “geographic or territorial limits” to the program.
When the CIA replied that even the “fact of the existence or nonexistence” of such a program was classified, the ACLU sued, saying that then-CIA Director Leon E. Panetta had made the classification argument moot with repeated public comments about the killings to the media and Congress.
But while Panetta spoke of successful “hits” and “strikes” against terrorist targets in Pakistan, U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer found that Panetta “never acknowledged the CIA’s involvement in such [a] program.”
When Koh, the State Department counsel, was finally cleared to give his speech last year, he told the American Society of International Law, without elaboration, that it was “the considered view of this administration . . . that U.S. targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war.”
Two months later, in May 2010, a U.N. report found that blanket statement wanting, at best, and noted that if safeguards are in place, the administration has not told anyone what they are.
“They have refused to disclose who has been killed, for what reason, and with what collateral consequences,” wrote U.N. Special Rapporteur Philip Alston, a New York University law professor. “The result has been a vaguely defined license to kill and the creation of a major accountability vacuum.”
Since Koh’s speech, the administration has said little on the issue. White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan acknowledged in September that “some of our closest allies and partners take a different view” of the administration’s assertion of the legal right to strike anyone, at any time and any place, who it secretly determines is associated with al-Qaeda.
And “because we are engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda,” Brennan said, “the United States takes the legal position that — in accordance with international law — we have the authority to take action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces without doing a separate self-defense analysis each time.”
Administration officials say they have moved quickly to stop abuses. When civilian casualties in Pakistan spiked during the first half of 2010, a year in which drone strikes there averaged one nearly every three days, Obama and Brennan “demanded that they keep tightening the procedures, so that if there were any doubt, they wouldn’t take the shot,” an administration official said. “There were flaws, and they fixed them.”
The White House intervened again this year to tighten the rules after a particularly destructive March 17 strike that Pakistani officials — and international organizations — said had killed two dozen or more civilians. There was no U.S. claim of a major target, although unnamed administration officials said that 20 unnamed “militants” were dead.
Cameron Munter, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, complained bitterly to Washington that the program was out of control, said a second former Obama administration official. As “chief of mission,” it was Cameron’s understanding that he was to be informed of attacks in advance and that he could veto them.
With no independent outside access to Pakistan’s tribal zones, the disconnect is near-absolute between those who charge the administration with unjustified killings and those in the administration who deny the allegations. On Dec. 2, a Pakistani lawyer backed by the British-based charity Reprieve notified Munter of plans to file murder charges in the deaths of Tariq Aziz, 16, and his cousin Waheed Rehman, 12, allegedly killed in an Oct. 31 drone strike on a vehicle in their home region of North Waziristan. According to Reprieve, its representatives had met with Tariq just days earlier in Islamabad to give him a camera to document drone deaths.
A U.S. official familiar with counterterrorism operations in Pakistan responded that there were “major problems with the charges from Reprieve.”
“It’s absolutely possible to tell the difference between an adult male and a 12-year-old child in these sorts of actions,” said the official, who was authorized to comment on the condition of anonymity. “On that day no child was killed; in fact, the adult males were supporting al-Qaeda’s facilitation network and their vehicle was following a pattern of activity used by al-Qaeda facilitators.”
Last summer, Brennan said in a statement that “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency [and] precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” When human rights organizations sharply disputed that assertion, Brennan clarified it to say there were no civilian deaths that the administration had confirmed.
The cost of secrecy can be high, warned John B. Bellinger III, who argued for more legal precision and disclosure when he was counsel to both the National Security Council and the State Department under George W. Bush.
“If we don’t explain our legal rationale and the limitations we apply now,” Bellinger said, “then we’re opening the door to other countries to do the same sort of thing.”
Possible UFO in Kansas mystery solved
By Eric Pfeiffer | The Sideshow
Residents of Cowley County, Kansas caused a sensation last week when they captured video of the military towing a concealed object on a flatbed truck down US Highway 77. It wasn't long before a wave of speculation hit, claiming the object was a UFO.
Depending on the angle from which you spotted it, the 30 foot-wide mysterious craft appeared to be saucer-shaped. It was so large that local law enforcement had to remove roadside signage so it could pass through. But it was covered in a tightly concealed tarp, making any further examination impossible.
However, as Gizmodo points out, the craft does not technically meet the definition of UFO. For starters, even if it were an alien craft, the object was not flying. And more important, it's no longer unidentified.
Local sheriff Don Read announced that the tarp was in fact covering a flying object, but one of decidedly Earthly origins. More specifically, it was a drone aircraft manufactured by Northrop Grumman. After Read's disclosure, Northrop Grumman senior manager of public relations Brooks McKinney stepped forward to provide more details, telling Life's Little Mysteries that the "UFO" is a X-47B unmanned combat drone designed to operate from aircraft carriers. It was headed to the Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland.
The X-47B unmanned drone (NorthropGrumman.com)
Drone technology, or Unmanned Systems (UMS) have become so commonplace, that Northrop Grumman has a section dedicated to them on its public website. There's even a page for the X-47B itself.
"Clearly people are interested in what's going through town. It's unusual to see a shrink-wrapped aircraft, especially one with that shape," McKinney said.
"We built two for the Navy, they were being tested at Edwards Air Force Base [in California] since March. One is on its way to Maryland, and the other will remain in California."
And the reason they weren't actually flying the high-tech aircraft was even simpler. "It's difficult to fly an unmanned drone through commercial airspace," McKinney said.
Finally, the question "What's the matter with Kansas?" can be answered: A painful lack of alien spaceships.
There is big money in making drones to help the American Empire kill brown skinned folks in Iraq and Afghanistan!
Rise of the drone: From Calif. garage to multibillion-dollar defense industry
By Peter Finn, Published: December 23
Lake Forest, Calif. — In 1980, Abraham Karem, an engineer who had emigrated from Israel, retreated into his three-car garage in Hacienda Heights outside Los Angeles and, to the bemusement of his tolerant wife, began to build an aircraft.
The work eventually spilled into the guest room, and when Karem finished more than a year later, he wheeled into his driveway an odd, cigar-shaped craft that was destined to change the way the United States wages war.
The Albatross, as it was called, was transported to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where it demonstrated the ability to stay aloft safely for up to 56 hours — a very, very long time in what was then the crash-prone world of drones.
Three iterations and more than a decade of development later, Karem’s modest-looking drone became the Predator, the lethal, remotely piloted machine that can circle above the enemy for nearly a day before controllers thousands of miles away in the southwestern United States launch Hellfire missiles toward targets they are watching on video screens.
The emergence of hunter-killer and surveillance drones as revolutionary new weapons in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in counterterrorism operations in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry, much of it centered in Southern California, once the engine of Cold War military aviation.
Over the next 10 years, the Pentagon plans to purchase more than 700 medium- and large-size drones at a cost of nearly $40 billion, according to a Congressional Budget Office study. Thousands more mini-drones will be fitted in the backpacks of soldiers so they can hand-launch them in minutes to look over the next hill or dive-bomb opposing forces.
This booming sector has its roots in the often unsung persistence of engineering dreamers who worked on the technology of unmanned aviation when the military establishment and most major defense contractors had little or no interest in it. Innovators such as Karem were often sustained by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a handful of early believers, including the CIA.
Karem said he imagined his drones involved in a “tactical conflict with the Warsaw Pact, be it on the plains of Germany or as part of our Navy and Marines.” He had to sell his company, and with it the prototype of the Predator, long before it became the icon of a new kind of warfare.
“I did not envision the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of warfare with non-state adversaries,” said Karem, an aeronautical engineer who served for nine years in the Israeli air force before settling in the United States in 1977.
In the past decade, drones have become an integral part of U.S. military doctrine — so much so that it is difficult to recall how marginal they once seemed. The military had less than 200 drones the day before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; today it has more than 7,000, including mini-drones.
Before Sept. 11, drones weren’t “on the road map,” said Tim Conver, chairman and chief executive of AeroVironment, which builds close-in surveillance drones for the military. “It wasn’t something that [the Defense Department] had said: ‘We need this. Let’s build a program around this.’ ”
Before 2001, AeroVironment, through various small contracts, sold a drone called the Pointer in small numbers to the military. “Nobody ever really used them,” Conver said. Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the company has sold the military thousands of small drones.
The companies that design and manufacture drones have experienced massive growth that shows no sign of slowing, even with the end of the war in Iraq and the planned drawdown in Afghanistan. The technology is significantly cheaper than traditional aircraft, and its potential uses increase as the craft become faster and stealthier.
Teal Group, a Fairfax market analysis firm, estimates that nearly $100 billion will be spent globally on drones between now and 2019.
“The needs for [unmanned aerial vehicles] are unsatisfied,” said Phil Finnegan, Teal Group’s director of corporate analysis. “The military wants a lot more. Worldwide you have very limited adoption of UAVs, but foreign militaries have seen the success in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they want them.”
The rise of drones has been a small boon for Southern California, where the aerospace industry has contracted painfully in the past two decades. About 10,000 state residents are directly employed in the drone sector. And for national security reasons, much of the supply chain is kept onshore, generating jobs among contractors and subcontractors.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which makes the Predator and the next-generation Reaper drone, is in Poway, north of San Diego. AeroVironment, which makes an array of backpackable mini-drones, such as the Raven and the Wasp, is in Simi Valley.
Northrop Grumman is testing the X-47B, a carrier-based fighter drone, for the Navy in Palmdale. The RQ-170, the stealth drone manufactured by Lockheed Martin and used by the military and the CIA, is believed to have emerged from the company’s classified facility, the Skunk Works, also in Palmdale, near Edwards Air Force Base.
The Gossamer Condor
In the mid-1970s, Paul MacCready, an aeronautical engineer and the first American to become a world gliding champion, needed cash fast to cover a bad loan he had guaranteed. MacCready, the founder of AeroVironment, and a team of engineers at the company decided to chase the Kremer Prize, the reward for besting a challenge that had gone unmet for 20 years: a human-powered aircraft capable of flying a figure eight around two markers half a mile apart. In 1977, MacCready’s Gossamer Condor, piloted by Bryan Allen, took the prize, then worth about $100,000. Two years, later Allen flew another version of the bird across the English Channel.
AeroVironment, which consulted on air quality, began a sideline in aviation firsts.
“You had these incredibly talented people attracted to something this cool,” Conver said. “All the airplanes were extraordinarily light. All were focused on things that hadn’t been done before.”
The group eventually flew a solar-powered craft from Paris to England, built a working model of Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine and created a flying model of a pterodactyl.
In 1987, AeroVironment flew the first backpack-portable unmanned military aircraft, a nine-pound plane with a camera in its nose. It was called the Pointer.
“They were bought for evaluation,” Conver said. “They were prototypes.”
When the first Special Operations teams went into Afghanistan in October 2001, they brought with them two Pointer systems that they used for low-altitude surveillance. Soon, word was going up the chain that the troops wanted more Pointers for Afghanistan’s difficult terrain. High above them, the Predator and Global Hawk were also proving themselves.
“The Predator is my most capable sensor in hunting down and killing al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership and is proving absolutely critical to our fight,” Gen. Tommy Franks wrote in a 2003 Air Force background paper.
The drive for drones was on, and the effect on companies such as AeroVironment was profound. In 2001, the company had annual revenue of $29.4 million. In the decade that followed, that number swelled to nearly $300 million, nearly 85 percent of it from the sale of drones. The company, which employs 768 people, up from 163 in 2001, went public in 2007.
Since 2003, AeroVironment has won four bidding contests for drone contracts. It now dominates the mini-drone industry with its Raven, Wasp and Puma systems. All are controlled by a common console that looks like a handheld video game. With it, soldiers maneuver the craft and view a stabilized picture of what the drone is circling.
AeroVironment continues to create new models. It recently received a $5 million contract for the Switchblade, a miniature killer drone laden with explosives that pinned-down troops could activate instead of calling in airstrikes. This flying bomb could be guided to a target from the console and then detonated.
The aerial torpedo
The concept behind the very first drones has a lot in common with that of the Switchblade. Toward the end of World War I, Charles Kettering, an American engineer and inventor, developed what was called an aerial torpedo. It was guided by a gyroscope and could be flown at a target 40 miles away. It never saw action.
During World War II, the Germans deployed drone bombs that were launched from planes and steered to the target by a pilot using a radio-controlled stick. The United States manufactured 15,000 drones for anti-aircraft practice at a plant in Southern California during the war, and the career of a woman then known as Norma Jean Dougherty, later Marilyn Monroe, was launched when an Army magazine published a photograph of her working in a drone factory. During the Vietnam War, unmanned craft were programmed to fly a particular route and take still photographs.
All this activity took place on the margins of warfare. The great problem afflicting drones was a lack of endurance in the air. The things kept crashing. That was the defect Karem set out to fix.
Karem wanted to increase the endurance of drones, some of which were crashing every 20 hours, by a factor of 100.
Karem was born in Baghdad, the son of a Jewish merchant who moved the family to Israel in 1951. He developed an early fascination with building aircraft and gravitated toward drones in the early 1970s when Israeli aviation engineers tried to satisfy an operational need for real-time, front-line intelligence.
“My preoccupation with UAVs continued for 30 years,” Karem said.
After leaving the Israeli air force and working for a defense contractor, Karem grew frustrated at his efforts to start his own business building drones in Israel and thought he would have more success in California.
The flight of the Albatross led Karem, with the support of DARPA, to develop the Amber drone, which was stocked with custom-built components, including a powerful flight control computer, and could be configured for surveillance or attack missions. He also developed a lower-technology, export version called the Gnat 750.
Karem’s drones were met with some skepticism. The military, he said, thought “they were skinny in shape” and unlikely to be robust enough for operations.
“Luckily for me, industry didn’t take my efforts all that seriously until Amber” proved successful, Karem said.
Karem began to scale up to full production but found himself overextended financially when the military decided not to pursue large-scale development of the Amber. Karem sold his company to Hughes Aircraft, which, in turn, sold it to General Atomics, a privately held firm that earns an estimated $600 million per year from defense contracts. Karem remained on as a consultant.
In 1993, James Woolsey, then the new director of the CIA, found himself frustrated by the intelligence from satellites flying over Bosnia. He had known Karem for several years and turned to General Atomics and Karem for a vehicle that could provide what drone builders call a “persistent stare.” Pentagon experts had said it would take years and many millions to develop a prototype.
The Gnat 750, operated from an abandoned airfield in Albania, first flew over Bosnia in February 1994.
“I could sit in my office, call up a classified channel and in an early version of e-mail type messages to a guy in Albania asking him to zoom in on things,” Woolsey said.
The data had a long way to go to reach Woolsey. It was relayed from the Gnat to a manned aircraft and then to the ground station and then to a satellite and from there to CIA headquarters in Langley.
To streamline the process, and fit in a satellite communications system, General Atomics enlarged the airframe and added a bulbous nose to the Gnat’s fuselage.
The Predator A was born. It first flew in July 1994.
By then, Karem had moved on. He later helped develop a drone helicopter, the A160 Hummingbird, a venture that was acquired by Boeing in 2004.
He has abandoned drones to pursue a new dream at his offices in Lake Forest: A Boeing 737-size passenger plane capable of taking off vertically and landing like a helicopter. Such an advance, Karem said, would scupper the need for high-speed rail and allow planes to commute between the downtowns of different cities.
Karem calls it an “aerotrain,” and the 74-year-old wants it built before he retires.
“I never fail,” he said.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
"The New America Foundation ... estimates that the CIA drones have killed at least 1,717 people ... Other estimates run considerably higher"
CIA has suspended drone attacks in Pakistan, U.S. officials say
By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
December 23, 2011, 4:48 p.m.
Reporting from Washington —
In an effort to mend badly frayed relations with Pakistan, the CIA has suspended drone missile strikes on gatherings of low-ranking militants believed to be involved in cross-border attacks on U.S. troops or facilities in Afghanistan, current and former U.S. officials say.
The undeclared halt in CIA attacks, now in its sixth week, is aimed at reversing a sharp erosion of trust after a series of deadly incidents, including the mistaken attack by U.S. gunships that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last month.
The pause also comes amid an intensifying debate in the Obama administration over the future of the CIA's covert drone war in Pakistan. The agency has killed dozens of Al Qaeda operatives and hundreds of low-ranking fighters there since the first Predator strike in 2004, but the program has infuriated many Pakistanis.
Some officials in the State Department and the National Security Council say many of the airstrikes are counterproductive. They argue that rank-and-file militants are easy to replace, and that Pakistani claims of civilian casualties, which the U.S. disputes, have destabilized the government of President Asif Ali Zardari, a U.S. ally.
And some U.S. intelligence officials are urging the CIA to cut back the paramilitary role it has assumed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to refocus on espionage. They suggest handing the mission to the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command, which flies its own drones and conducts secret counter-terrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia.
The policy remains intact for now. But the CIA has decided to temporarily suspend so-called signature strikes, missile attacks against fighters and others whose actions, after observation by surveillance drones or other intelligence, suggest support for the Taliban and other insurgent groups in neighboring Afghanistan.
Among those targeted this year were members of the Haqqani network, an insurgent group allied with the Taliban. U.S. officials say Haqqani fighters took part in September attacks on the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
The number of drone strikes in Pakistan has increased dramatically during the Obama administration. Under President George W. Bush, most of them targeted known Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. In July 2008, Bush gave the CIA additional authority to kill militants whose names were not known, but whose "pattern of life," as the CIA called it, suggested involvement with terrorists or insurgent groups.
Under President Obama, the CIA has expanded the drone war to target anyone in Pakistan's tribal areas it considers a potential threat. The CIA has authority to fire at will, without authorization from outside the agency, as long as targets are in approved geographic "boxes" near the Afghan border.
Saying the strikes violate national sovereignty, Pakistan's government wants a say in drone targeting and a degree of control over the CIA missions, a senior Pakistani defense official said in Washington. But the Obama administration has refused, citing cases in which targets escaped after intelligence was shared with Pakistan.
One of the main points of friction between the two countries was the U.S. raid in May that killed Osama bin Laden. U.S. officials launched the attack without telling Pakistan for fear of tipping off the Al Qaeda leader.
U.S. and Pakistani officials said the CIA is still flying armed Predator and Reaper drones over Pakistan, and will kill an Al Qaeda leader if the aircraft find one. But thanks in part to the drone war, only a few senior members of the core Al Qaeda group are believed to be still alive there, including Bin Laden's successor, Ayman Zawahiri.
The CIA keeps a list of 20 top targets and "there have been times where they've struggled a little bit coming up with names to fill that list," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who declined to be identified in discussing a classified program.
The former official is among those urging the CIA to reconsider its approach, arguing that the agency can't kill all the fighters and that drones alone won't solve the challenge from Islamic militants.
"A lot of people wonder whether we can keep trying to kill our way out of this problem," the former official said. "There are people who are really questioning, 'Where does all of this end?'"
When the current CIA director, David H. Petraeus, served as commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he was known to be concerned that the CIA conducted drone strikes without sufficient regard for the military or diplomatic repercussions in either Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Some State Department officials insist that airstrikes on low-level militants now hurt U.S. interests in Pakistan more than they help.
"What colored State's thinking was the impact that the drone operations were having on public opinion and its constraint on the evolution of a civilian government," said a former senior State Department official, who asked not to be identified as discussing a classified program. "The continued attacks probably give motivation to those who would fight us."
Shamila Chaudhary, who was Pakistan director in the National Security Council until July, said U.S. counter-terrorism operations were "one reason, though not the only reason, that the U.S.-Pakistan relationship has disintegrated. Until the conflicts over that policy are resolved, the two countries will continue to go from crisis to crisis."
CIA officials argue that the drones have helped save American lives by eliminating militants who have engaged in cross-border attacks or are supplying bomb-making networks. In some cases, they say, Al Qaeda leaders were killed in airstrikes on groups of militants, although their presence was not discovered until later.
There is no way to independently assess the accuracy or effectiveness of the strikes. Since they are classified, the Obama administration refuses to release details about them and Pakistan has barred access to the tribal areas by Western journalists or humanitarian agencies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross.
According to Long War Journal, a website that tracks the attacks through Pakistani news reports, the CIA launched 64 drone missile attacks in Pakistan this year, the last on Nov. 16. That compares with 114 last year and 53 in 2009. The agency launched 46 during the Bush administration, mostly in 2008.
The death toll is unclear. The New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, estimates that the CIA drones have killed at least 1,717 people, including 1,424 militants. Other estimates run considerably higher.
John Brennan, Obama's chief counter-terrorism advisor, said this summer that there "hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency and precision of the capabilities we've been able to develop."
When human rights groups and others challenged that assertion, citing numerous Pakistani accounts of civilian casualties, Brennan clarified his comments to say there were no civilian deaths that the administration had confirmed. U.S. officials later acknowledged a few civilian deaths this year.
The pause in the drone war comes after steadily worsening relations between Washington and Islamabad.
In January, the arrest of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who shot and killed two men in Lahore, stirred up anti-American sentiment. The raid by a CIA-led Navy SEAL team that killed Bin Laden enraged many in Pakistan's military. The mistaken attack Nov. 26, which killed the 24 soldiers, caused a near rupture in relations.
After the raid, Islamabad ordered the United States to vacate Shamsi air base in southwest Pakistan, which the CIA had used to stage lethal drone flights. U.S. officials say the agency now flies drones into Pakistan from bases in Afghanistan.
ken.dilanian@latimes.com
Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing
By Greg Miller, Published: December 27
The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.
In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.
The emergence of hunter-killer and surveillance drones as revolutionary new weapons in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in counterterrorism operations in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry.
Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.
The rapid expansion of the drone program has blurred long-standing boundaries between the CIA and the military. Lethal operations are increasingly assembled a la carte, piecing together personnel and equipment in ways that allow the White House to toggle between separate legal authorities that govern the use of lethal force.
In Yemen, for instance, the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command pursue the same adversary with nearly identical aircraft. But they alternate taking the lead on strikes to exploit their separate authorities, and they maintain separate kill lists that overlap but don’t match. CIA and military strikes this fall killed three U.S. citizens, two of whom were suspected al-Qaeda operatives.
The convergence of military and intelligence resources has created blind spots in congressional oversight. Intelligence committees are briefed on CIA operations, and JSOC reports to armed services panels. As a result, no committee has a complete, unobstructed view.
With a year to go in President Obama’s first term, his administration can point to undeniable results: Osama bin Laden is dead, the core al-Qaeda network is near defeat, and members of its regional affiliates scan the sky for metallic glints.
Those results, delivered with unprecedented precision from aircraft that put no American pilots at risk, may help explain why the drone campaign has never attracted as much scrutiny as the detention or interrogation programs of the George W. Bush era. Although human rights advocates and others are increasingly critical of the drone program, the level of public debate remains muted.
Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, described the program with a mixture of awe and concern. Its expansion under Obama was almost inevitable, she said, because of the technology’s growing sophistication. But the pace of its development, she said, makes it hard to predict how it might come to be used.
“What this does is it takes a lot of Americans out of harm’s way . . . without having to send in a special ops team or drop a 500-pound bomb,” Feinstein said in an interview in which she was careful to avoid explicit confirmation that the programs exist. “But I worry about how this develops. I’m worried because of what increased technology will make it capable of doing.”
Another reason for the lack of extensive debate is secrecy. The White House has refused to divulge details about the structure of the drone program or, with rare exceptions, who has been killed. White House and CIA officials declined to speak for attribution for this article.
Drone war’s evolution
Inside the White House, according to officials who would discuss the drone program only on the condition of anonymity, the drone is seen as a critical tool whose evolution was accelerating even before Obama was elected. Senior administration officials said the escalating number of strikes has created a perception that the drone is driving counterterrorism policy, when the reverse is true.
“People think we start with the drone and go from there, but that’s not it at all,” said a senior administration official involved with the program. “We’re not constructing a campaign around the drone. We’re not seeking to create some worldwide basing network so we have drone capabilities in every corner of the globe.”
Nevertheless, for a president who campaigned against the alleged counterterrorism excesses of his predecessor, Obama has emphatically embraced the post-Sept. 11 era’s signature counterterrorism tool.
When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation’s clandestine drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400 people dead, according to the New America Foundation. The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more than quadrupled.
The number of strikes in Pakistan has declined this year, partly because the CIA has occasionally suspended them to ease tensions at moments of crisis. One lull followed the arrest of an American agency contractor who killed two Pakistani men; another came after the U.S. commando raid that killed bin Laden. The CIA’s most recent period of restraint followed U.S. military airstrikes last month that inadvertently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan border. At the same time, U.S. officials have said that the number of “high-value” al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan has dwindled to two.
Administration officials said the expansion of the program under Obama has largely been driven by the timeline of the drone’s development. Remotely piloted aircraft were used during the Clinton and Bush administrations, but only in recent years have they become advanced and abundant enough to be deployed on such a large scale.
The number of drone aircraft has exploded in the past three years. A recent study by the Congressional Budget Office counted 775 Predators, Reapers and other medium- and long-range drones in the U.S. inventory, with hundreds more in the pipeline.
About 30 of those aircraft have been allocated to the CIA, officials said. But the agency has a separate category that doesn’t show up in any public accounting, a fleet of stealth drones that were developed and acquired under a highly compartmentalized CIA program created after the Sept. 11 attacks. The RQ-170 model that recently crashed in Iran exposed the agency’s use of stealth drones to spy on that country’s nuclear program, but the planes have also been used in other countries.
The escalation of the lethal drone campaign under Obama was driven to an extent by early counterterrorism decisions. Shuttering the CIA’s detention program and halting transfers to Guantanamo Bay left few options beyond drone strikes or detention by often unreliable allies.
Key members of Obama’s national security team came into office more inclined to endorse drone strikes than were their counterparts under Bush, current and former officials said.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former CIA director and current Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan seemed always ready to step on the accelerator, said a former official who served in both administrations and was supportive of the program. Current administration officials did not dispute the former official’s characterization of the internal dynamics.
The only member of Obama’s team known to have formally raised objections to the expanding drone campaign is Dennis Blair, who served as director of national intelligence.
During a National Security Council meeting in November 2009, Blair sought to override the agenda and force a debate on the use of drones, according to two participants.
Blair has since articulated his concerns publicly, calling for a suspension of unilateral drone strikes in Pakistan, which he argues damage relations with that country and kill mainly mid-level militants. But he now speaks as a private citizen. His opinion contributed to his isolation from Obama’s inner circle, and he was fired last year.
Obama himself was “oddly passive in this world,” the former official said, tending to defer on drone policy to senior aides whose instincts often dovetailed with the institutional agendas of the CIA and JSOC.
The senior administration official disputed that characterization, saying that Obama doesn’t weigh in on every operation but has been deeply involved in setting the criteria for strikes and emphasizing the need to minimize collateral damage.
“Everything about our counterterrorism operations is about carrying out the guidance that he’s given,” the official said. “I don’t think you could have the president any more involved.”
Yemen convergence
Yemen has emerged as a crucible of convergence, the only country where both the CIA and JSOC are known to fly armed drones and carry out strikes. The attacks are aimed at al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based affiliate that has eclipsed the terrorist network’s core as the most worrisome security threat.
From separate “ops centers” at Langley and Fort Bragg, N.C., the agency and JSOC share intelligence and coordinate attacks, even as operations unfold. U.S. officials said the CIA recently intervened in a planned JSOC strike in Yemen, urging its military counterpart to hold its fire because the intended target was not where the missile was aimed. Subsequent intelligence confirmed the agency’s concerns, officials said.
But seams in the collaboration still show.
After locating Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen this fall, the CIA quickly assembled a fleet of armed drones to track the alleged al-Qaeda leader until it could take a shot.
The agency moved armed Predators from Pakistan to Yemen temporarily, and assumed control of others from JSOC’s arsenal, to expand surveillance of Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric connected to terrorism plots, including the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009.
The choreography of the strike, which involved four drones, was intricate. Two Predators pointed lasers at Awlaki’s vehicle, and a third circled to make sure that no civilians wandered into the cross hairs. Reaper drones, which are larger than Predators and can carry more missiles, have become the main shooters in most strikes.
On Sept. 30, Awlaki was killed in a missile strike carried out by the CIA under Title 50 authorities — which govern covert intelligence operations — even though officials said it was initially unclear whether an agency or JSOC drone had delivered the fatal blow. A second U.S. citizen, an al-Qaeda propagandist who had lived in North Carolina, was among those killed.
The execution was nearly flawless, officials said. Nevertheless, when a similar strike was conducted just two weeks later, the entire protocol had changed. The second attack, which killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, was carried out by JSOC under Title 10 authorities that apply to the use of military force.
When pressed on why the CIA had not pulled the trigger, U.S. officials said it was because the main target of the Oct. 14 attack, an Egyptian named Ibrahim al-Banna, was not on the agency’s kill list. The Awlaki teenager, a U.S. citizen with no history of involvement with al-Qaeda, was an unintended casualty.
In interviews, senior U.S. officials acknowledged that the two kill lists don’t match, but offered conflicting explanations as to why.
Three senior U.S. officials said the lists vary because of the divergent legal authorities. JSOC’s list is longer, the officials said, because the post-Sept. 11, 2001, Authorization for Use of Military Force, as well as a separate executive order, gave JSOC latitude to hunt broadly defined groups of al-Qaeda fighters, even outside conventional war zones. The CIA’s lethal-action authorities, based in a presidential “finding” that has been modified since Sept. 11, were described as more narrow.
But others directly involved in the drone campaign offered a simpler explanation: Because the CIA had only recently resumed armed drone flights over Yemen, the agency hadn’t had as much time as JSOC to compile its kill list. Over time, officials said, the agency would catch up.
The administration official who discussed the drone program declined to address the discrepancies in the kill lists, except to say: “We are aiming and striving for alignment. That is an ideal to be achieved.”
Divided oversight
Such disparities often elude Congress, where the structure of oversight committees has failed to keep pace with the way military and intelligence operations have converged.
Within 24 hours of every CIA drone strike, a classified fax machine lights up in the secure spaces of the Senate intelligence committee, spitting out a report on the location, target and result.
The outdated procedure reflects the agency’s effort to comply with Title 50 requirements that Congress be provided with timely, written notification of covert action overseas. There is no comparable requirement in Title 10, and the Senate Armed Services Committee can go days before learning the details of JSOC strikes.
Neither panel is in a position to compare the CIA and JSOC kill lists or even arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the rules by which each is assembled.
The senior administration official said the gap is inadvertent. “It’s certainly not something where the goal is to evade oversight,” the official said. A senior Senate aide involved in reviewing military drone strikes said that the blind spot reflects a failure by Congress to adapt but that “we will eventually catch up.”
The disclosure of these operations is generally limited to relevant committees in the House and Senate and sometimes only to their leaders. Those briefed must abide by restrictions that prevent them from discussing what they have learned with those who lack the requisite security clearances. The vast majority of lawmakers receive scant information about the administration’s drone program.
The Senate intelligence committee, which is wrapping up a years-long investigation of the Bush-era interrogation program, has not initiated such an examination of armed drones. But officials said their oversight of the program has been augmented significantly in the past couple of years, with senior staff members now making frequent and sometimes unannounced visits to the CIA “ops center,” reviewing the intelligence involved in errant strikes, and visiting counterterrorism operations sites overseas.
Feinstein acknowledged concern with emerging blind spots.
“Whenever this is used, particularly in a lethal manner, there ought to be careful oversight, and that ought to be by civilians,” Feinstein said. “What we have is a very unique battlefield weapon. You can’t stop the technology from improving, so you better start thinking about how you monitor it.”
Increasing reach
The return of armed CIA Predators to Yemen — after carrying out a single strike there in 2002 — was part of a significant expansion of the drones’ geographic reach.
Over the past year, the agency has erected a secret drone base on the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. military began flying Predators and Reapers from bases in Seychelles and Ethiopia, in addition to JSOC’s long-standing drone base in Djibouti.
Senior administration officials said the sprawling program comprises distinct campaigns, each calibrated according to where and against whom the aircraft and other counterterrorism weapons are used.
In Pakistan, the CIA has carried out 239 strikes since Obama was sworn in, and the agency continues to have wide latitude to launch attacks.
In Yemen, there have been about 15 strikes since Obama took office, although it is not clear how many were carried out by drones because the U.S. military has also used conventional aircraft and cruise missiles.
Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab is based, is surrounded by American drone installations. And officials said that JSOC has repeatedly lobbied for authority to strike al-Shabab training camps that have attracted some Somali Americans.
But the administration has allowed only a handful of strikes, out of concern that a broader campaign could turn al-Shabab from a regional menace into an adversary determined to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.
The plans are constantly being adjusted, officials said, with the White House holding strategy sessions on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia two or three times a month. Administration officials point to the varied approach as evidence of its restraint.
“Somalia would be the easiest place to go in in an undiscriminating way and do drone strikes because there’s no host government to get” angry, the senior administration official said. “But that’s certainly not the way we’re approaching it.”
Drone strikes could resume, however, if factions of al-Shabab’s leadership succeed in expanding the group’s agenda.
“That’s an ongoing calculation because there’s an ongoing debate inside the senior leadership of al-Shabab,” the senior administration official said. “It certainly would not bother us if potential terrorists took note of the fact that we tend to go after those who go after us.”
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Arizona gets 4th drone to patrol border
Dec. 28, 2011 06:51 AM
Associated Press
TUCSON -- A new unmanned aircraft has arrived in Arizona and will be the fourth in the state's fleet to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Arizona Daily Star reports that the aircraft, also known as a drone, arrived Tuesday.
In all, six drones patrol the border from California to Texas, doing things most manned aircraft can't.
4th Predator B drone added to Ariz. fleet
Brady McCombs Arizona Daily Star
Posted: Wednesday, December 28, 2011 12:00 am
A new Predator B unmanned aircraft arrived Tuesday in Arizona, becoming the fourth in U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Arizona fleet.
The aircraft, also known as a "drone," will be used to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border.
The agency now has six Predator B's available to patrol the U.S.-Mexico borderland from the eastern tip of California and across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The two others are based in Corpus Christi, Texas, said a news release from Customs and Border Protection.
The aircraft, which are flown remotely by pilots in cockpits on the ground, are a valuable border enforcement tool because they can do things most manned aircraft cannot, agency officials say.
The Predator B can fly for 20 hours at a time. Its cameras can determine from as far as 10 miles away if a ground sensor was set off by armed drug smugglers or cows. And it can collect intelligence on suspicious behavior at houses without anybody below knowing because it flies so high and is quieter than other aircraft.
But critics question if this is the best use of taxpayer money and whether the Predator B might crash into other planes in the sky or people on the ground. The Federal Aviation Administration hasn't fully accepted unmanned aircraft into the national airspace because of safety concerns, limiting the hours and places they can fly.
The aircraft weighs 10,500 pounds, has a 66-foot wingspan and stretches 39 feet from front to back. The Predator B costs about $6 million, and the rest of the system needed to fly it - antennas, sensor, radar, satellite bandwidth, systems spares, maintenance and ground support - brings the per-unit total to $18.5 million.
Since the unmanned aerial system program was started in 2006, the Predator B's have flown 12,000 hours, helping to seize 46,600 pounds of drugs and apprehend 7,500 illegal border crossers and drug runners, the agency said.
Contact reporter Brady McCombs at 573-4213 or bmccombs@azstarnet.com
Are they killing innocent people? Probably!
But there crimes are no worse the the crimes
of the American government which has murdered
thousands of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pakistani death squads go after informants to U.S. drone program
By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times
December 28, 2011, 12:10 p.m.
Reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan—
The death squad shows up in uniform: black masks and tunics with the name of the group, Khorasan Mujahedin, scrawled across the back in Urdu.
Pulling up in caravans of Toyota Corolla hatchbacks, dozens of them seal off mud-hut villages near the Afghan border, and then scour markets and homes in search of tribesmen they suspect of helping to identify targets for the armed U.S. drones that routinely buzz overhead.
Once they've snatched their suspect, they don't speed off, villagers say. Instead, the caravan leaves slowly, a trademark gesture meant to convey that they expect no retaliation.
Militant groups lack the ability to bring down the drones, which have killed senior Al Qaeda and Taliban commanders as well as many foot soldiers. Instead, a collection of them have banded together to form Khorasan Mujahedin in the North Waziristan tribal region to hunt for those who sell information about the location of militants and their safe houses.
Pakistani officials and tribal elders maintain that most of those who are abducted this way are innocent, but after being beaten, burned with irons or scalded with boiling water, almost all eventually "confess." And few ever come back.
One who did was a shop owner in the town of Mir Ali, a well-known hub of militant activity.
A band of Khorasan gunmen strode up to the shop owner one afternoon last fall, threw him into one of their cars and drove away, said a relative who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. They took him to a safe house being used as a lockup for others the group suspected of spying for the drone program.
For the next eight weeks, they bludgeoned him with sticks, trying to get him to confess that he was a drone spy. He wasn't, said the relative. Unable to determine whether he was guilty, his captors released him to another militant group, which set him free 10 days later.
"In the sky there are drones, and on the ground there's Khorasan Mujahedin," said the relative. "Villagers are extremely terrorized. Whenever there's a drone strike, within 24 hours Khorasan Mujahedin comes in and takes people away."
Most of them are killed. The group, named after an early Islamic empire that covered a large part of Central Asia, dumps the bodies on roadsides, usually with scraps of paper attached to their bloodied tunics that warn others of the consequences of spying for the U.S. Executions are often videotaped and distributed to DVD kiosks in Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan's largest city, to hammer home the message.
In one video, an old man with a bruised and swollen face says he was paid $1,300 for information that led to a drone strike in a North Waziristan village last year. "I was misguided by the devil," says the man, who identifies himself as Subedar. "Khorasan Mujahedin never pressured me or used force against me. They showed me respect. May God give them victory."
Near the end of the video, he is shown with a bag over his head as a gunman first shoots him to death at point blank range with an AK-47 assault rifle, then pumps more than 30 rounds into his corpse.
Another suspected informant standing alongside a village road with his hands tied behind his back is killed by explosives detonated at his feet. Gunmen fire wildly into the sky to celebrate.
Despite such brutal treatment if they are caught, some people find it hard to resist the payoff of working as an informant for the Americans. North Waziristan, a mountainous, remote tribal area, is racked by poverty and joblessness.
Information about how much informants are paid, who finds and pays them, or how they operate is difficult to obtain, because few people want to risk discussing such matters. But interviews with tribal elders and a former Pakistani intelligence official suggest that the pay can range from $300 to $1,000 or more for information that helps pinpoint a target.
"When I spoke to informants, they said they did it for the money," said the former Pakistani intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "And most Pashtuns don't like Taliban. They want the Taliban out because their whole tribal system has been destroyed. More than 90% don't want the Taliban to be ruling them."
The vast majority of those killed by Khorasan Mujahedin are innocent, the former official added. "Most of them have never been spies."
Armed drone strikes conducted by the CIA have expanded dramatically in Pakistan's tribal areas under the Obama administration. According to the Long War Journal, a website that tracks the drone campaign, drone strikes have killed 18 senior Al Qaeda leaders and commanders and several Taliban commanders in the last two years.
It has counted 64 drone missile attacks in Pakistan this year, compared with 114 last year and 53 in 2009. Current and former U.S. officials say the CIA has decided to temporarily suspend so-called signature strikes — missile attacks against fighters and others whose actions suggest support for the Taliban and other insurgent groups — in an effort to mend relations with Pakistan.
Khorasan Mujahedin operates as a collective, drawing its members from Al Qaeda and North Waziristan militant groups, including the Punjabi Taliban, militants loyal to North Waziristan Taliban leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur, and the Haqqani network. Led by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of Afghan mujahedin commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, the Haqqani group is a wing of the Afghan Taliban and regarded as the deadliest threat to U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
Though the Pakistan army maintains a strong presence in North Waziristan, Khorasan Mujahedin operates virtually unhindered. The Pakistani intelligence official said the military doesn't act against Khorasan because of a peace pact that the government maintains with Bahadur, the North Waziristan Taliban leader.
In September, militants loyal to Bahadur disseminated a pamphlet announcing their disassociation with Khorasan after receiving complaints from tribesmen that Khorasan was kidnapping and executing innocent people.
"We tried time and again to reform [Khorasan Mujahedin] but could not succeed," read the pamphlet, which was signed by Bahadur and other North Waziristan Taliban leaders.
Despite Bahadur's stance, Pakistani security forces have given no indication they plan to act against Khorasan members.
Pakistani intelligence officials say Khorasan Mujahedin has an estimated 250 fighters and has been in existence since late 2009 or early 2010. The group operates like a commando team, swooping in to a village in squads of 40 to 60 and surrounding the area to prevent anyone from escaping. As they whisk away their suspect, one or two militants usually capture the event on video for propaganda purposes.
"They never flee fast," said one North Waziristan tribesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They always leave slowly, and sometimes fire shots into the air as they leave."
The shop owner in Mir Ali, who escaped serious injury and returned home after he was released, told his family he believed he was abducted because two other tribesmen that the militants had kidnapped had been seen spending time at his shop.
All through his detention, he maintained his innocence, the shop owner's relative said. There were moments when his captors were polite, and periods when they beat and kicked him. They videotaped his statement his first day there, then had him record a second statement three days later to see if there were any discrepancies between the two versions.
He had his own cell, the relative said, but could not venture out of it. He could hear other detainees elsewhere in the mud-brick house.
"He couldn't say how many others there were," the relative said. "But often he would hear them scream and cry."
alex.rodriguez@latimes.com
I have always called the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a jobs program for generals along with a corporate welfare programs for the companies in the military industrial complex.
And of course this drone program which the American Empire has used to murder a few thousand folks in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world is part of that welfare program.
Lets face it, it's not about freedom and democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's about jobs for generals and profits for companies in the military industrial complex.
Civilian contractors playing key roles in U.S. drone operations
By David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times
December 29, 2011, 10:34 p.m.
Reporting from Washington—
After a U.S. airstrike mistakenly killed at least 15 Afghans in 2010, the Army officer investigating the accident was surprised to discover that an American civilian had played a central role: analyzing video feeds from a Predator drone keeping watch from above.
The contractor had overseen other analysts at Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida as the drone tracked suspected insurgents near a small unit of U.S. soldiers in rugged hills of central Afghanistan. Based partly on her analysis, an Army captain ordered an airstrike on a convoy that turned out to be carrying innocent men, women and children.
"What company do you work for?" Maj. Gen. Timothy McHale demanded of the contractor after he learned that she was not in the military, according to a transcript obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
"SAIC," she answered. Her employer, SAIC Inc., is a publicly traded Virginia-based corporation with a multiyear $49-million contract to help the Air Force analyze drone video and other intelligence from Afghanistan.
America's growing drone operations rely on hundreds of civilian contractors, including some — such as the SAIC employee — who work in the so-called kill chain before Hellfire missiles are launched, according to current and former military officers, company employees and internal government documents.
Relying on private contractors has brought corporations that operate for profit into some of America's most sensitive military and intelligence operations. And using civilians makes some in the military uneasy.
At least a dozen defense contractors that supply personnel to help the Air Force, special operations units and the CIA fly their drones are filling a void. It takes more people to operate unmanned aircraft than it does to fly traditional warplanes that have a pilot and crew.
The Air Force is short of ground-based pilots and crews to fly the drones, intelligence analysts to scrutinize nonstop video and surveillance feeds, and technicians and mechanics to maintain the heavily used aircraft.
"Our No. 1 manning problem in the Air Force is manning our unmanned platforms," said Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, Air Force vice chief of staff. Without civilian contractors, U.S. drone operations would grind to a halt.
About 168 people are needed to keep a single Predator aloft for 24 hours, according to the Air Force. The larger Global Hawk surveillance drone requires 300 people. In contrast, an F-16 fighter aircraft needs fewer than 100 people per mission.
With a fleet of about 230 Predators, Reapers and Global Hawks, the Air Force flies more than 50 drones around the clock over Afghanistan and other target areas. The Pentagon plans to add 730 medium and large drones in the next decade, requiring thousands more personnel.
The Air Force is rushing to meet the demand. Under a new program, drone pilots get 44 hours of cockpit training before they are sent to a squadron to be certified and allowed to command missions. That compares with a minimum of 200 hours' training for pilots flying traditional warplanes.
The Air Force also has converted seven Air National Guard squadrons into intelligence units to help analyze drone video. About 2,000 additional Air Force intelligence analysts are being trained.
After the attack that killed the Afghan villagers in February 2010, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command questioned whether civilian contractors had a "potential conflict of interest" in analyzing drone video feeds.
A civilian "might be reluctant to make a definitive call, fearing liability or negative contractual action" if he or she passed on incorrect information that was used to call an airstrike, the command said.
McHale rejected that argument. "Although I recognize that a contractor will have a corporate interest separate and distinct from the military interest, in this instance I found no action or inaction by screeners that negatively influenced the engagement," he responded, according to Pentagon documents.
By law, decisions to use military force must be made by the military chain of command or, in the case of CIA strikes, by civilian officials authorized to conduct covert operations under presidential findings or other specific legal mandates.
Writing in a military law journal in 2008, Lt. Col. Duane Thompson, chief lawyer for the Air Force Operations Law Division, warned that allowing nonmilitary personnel to communicate targeting information directly to pilots would violate international laws of war.
Moreover, civilians are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which subjects military personnel to prosecution for war crimes or for violations of rules of engagement on when to use force.
"Persons who relay target identification for an imminent real-world mission to persons causing actual harm to enemy personnel or equipment should be uniformed military," Thompson wrote.
The "involvement of civilians in intelligence collection, analysis and planning" is "less objectionable" because it is "further removed" from actual combat, he added.
That involvement is now substantial. In a recent job advertisement, SAIC said it had 450 employees working for the Air Force Special Operations Command and other units analyzing video feeds from the battlefield.
BAE Systems Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of a British aerospace firm, posted an ad seeking an Air Force Special Operations Command veteran to manage "several hundred employees while conducting ISR/FMV missions." ISR and FMV are military abbreviations for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, and Full Motion Video, both of which commonly come from drones.
Michael D. Teegardin, a spokesman for BAE, said the "recruiting ad was for a [Department of Defense] customer, which I cannot name."
Pentagon officials say civilian contractors play a vital role.
"The civilians and the contractors are very important to what we do," said an Air Force colonel, who agreed to discuss the subject on condition of anonymity. "But they're not going to be making a call on any action. They're making an assessment, and that may generate a decision" by a military commander to launch a missile.
A ground-based Air Force pilot is in command of every drone flight, and has formal responsibility for any attack.
"Any contractor analysis contributing to operational decisions, such as targeting, must be reviewed" by someone in uniform, said Maj. Eric Hilliard, a spokesman for the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, which is based at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.
Contractors are especially common in the CIA, which has used armed Predators to kill dozens of Al Qaeda members and hundreds of insurgents in Pakistan since 2008. CIA drones also operate in Yemen, collect intelligence on Iran's nuclear facilities, and study other potential targets, current and former officials said.
The Air Force Special Operations Command flies armed drones in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. The command said in a statement that it employs 165 civilians to analyze video and other intelligence. Many work alongside uniformed military personnel in a vast facility at command headquarters at Hurlburt Field.
An additional 300 civilians support other Air Force drones at 10 military bases in the U.S., Germany and South Korea, although most work in technical jobs, officials said. Many are military retirees who kept their security clearances, enabling them to do the same classified work they did on active duty.
After the 2010 accident in Afghanistan, the SAIC employee described her role in a sworn interview with McHale, the chief investigator. Her name was not made public and SAIC declined to identify her. A company spokeswoman, Melissa Koskovich, said Thursday that the woman was still employed by SAIC.
As the mission's "primary screener," she oversaw six enlisted personnel trained in video analysis, including her husband, an active-duty airman. The analysts spent hours that night watching the live video feed as three vehicles neared the U.S. troops.
She condensed her team's observations and her own into minute-by-minute written reports, which she forwarded via a chat system to the Air Force pilot flying the drone from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. He passed the information to the Army unit in Afghanistan.
Others were watching the drone video, as well. In addition to the pilot, the military crew at Creech consisted of a camera operator, mission intelligence coordinator and a safety observer. A transcript shows they believed the convoy contained insurgents.
The SAIC analyst in Florida was more guarded in her assessment. She reported "military aged males" in the vehicles holding what she described as "possible weapons" — it was impossible from the video to tell what the men were carrying, she said.
"We thought they could have been hostile," she told McHale.
But she also reported seeing children in the convoy. Later, she changed that description and called them "adolescents" after deciding they appeared to be from 7 to 13 years old. She also reported at one point that the vehicles had turned off the road and were no longer moving toward the U.S. troops, suggesting the threat had receded, she said.
The civilian analyst was not in direct communication with the Army captain who called in the airstrike, and she was surprised when she learned later about the attack. But she added that it was not her job to second-guess military commanders.
"There have been a lot of times when someone has called out something that was later found to be a mistaken assessment," she told McHale. That's the danger of "real time" analysis, she added.
david.cloud@latimes.com
Air Force buys an Avenger, its biggest and fastest armed drone
By W.J. Hennigan
December 31, 2011
The Air Force has bought a new hunter-killer aircraft that is the fastest and largest armed drone in its fleet.
The Avenger, which cost the military $15 million, is the latest version of the Predator drones made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., a San Diego-area company that also builds the robotic MQ-9 Reapers for the Air Force and CIA.
The new radar-evading aircraft, also known as the Predator C, is General Atomics' third version of these drones. The Air Force picked up only one of them, strictly for testing purposes.
"There is no intention to deploy the aircraft in the war in Afghanistan at this time," said Pentagon spokeswoman Jennifer Cassidy.
The Avenger represents a major technological advance over the other Predator and Reaper drones that the Obama administration has increasingly relied on to hunt and destroy targets in Central Asia and the Middle East, defense industry analysts said. It may be several months — even years — away from active duty, but the Avenger represents the wave of the future, said Phil Finnegan, an aerospace expert with the Teal Group, a research firm.
"As the U.S. looks at threats beyond Iraq and Afghanistan — where it has complete air dominance — it needs aircraft that are going to be stealthier and faster so they won't be shot down by enemy air defense," Finnegan said.
With a length of 44 feet and a maximum takeoff weight of 15,800 pounds, the Avenger can carry more weaponry than its predecessors.
The Reaper, for example, is 36 feet long and has a maximum takeoff weight of 10,500 pounds. The largest bombs it carries weigh 500 pounds and hang from its wings.
The Avenger, on the other hand, has an internal bomb bay like other modern fighter and bomber jets. It was designed to carry 2,000-pound bombs, as well as missiles, cameras and sensor packages.
Both the Reaper and Avenger have 66-foot wingspans and can reach a maximum altitude of about 50,000 feet.
The Reaper can stay aloft for 30 hours at a time –- 10 hours longer than the Avenger. But with the power of a turbofan engine, the Avenger's top speed is about 460 mph, much faster than the propeller-driven Reaper's 276 mph.
The Avenger is considered one of the contenders to replace older Predators and Reapers. It's also likely to be in the running for the Navy's upcoming carrier-launched drone program.
General Atomics builds its drones in 10 buildings in Poway. The sprawling complex harks back to an era when Southland aerospace pioneers such as Lockheed Aircraft Co., Douglas Aircraft Co. and North American Aviation built aircraft from start to finish, manufacturing nearly all of the components in-house.
The company first flew the Avenger in April 2009 at the company's Gray Butte Flight Operations Facility in Palmdale. David A. Deptula, a retired three-star general who focused on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance during his career in the Air Force, said the military would check out how detectable the Avenger is when faced with radar. The military will also test the aircraft's weapon delivery system and its overall performance in a simulated battle environment.
"They're going to test out all of its capabilities before they make a commitment to buy more," he said.
william.hennigan@latimes.com
Other
articles
on radio controlled drone airplanes.
Even more
articles
on radio controlled air plane drones.
And here is an
article
about drones that Israel uses to murder Arabs in
Palestine.
And last but not least here are a bunch more
articles
on drones.
Secrecy defines Obama’s drone war
Didn't Obama give us a line of BS that he was going to run an "open" government without the secrets of the Emperor Bush? OK, I guess Emperor Obama lied.
Possible UFO in Kansas mystery solved
Source
There is big money in making killer drones!!!!
CIA has suspended drone attacks in Pakistan
"Bush gave the CIA .. authority to kill militants .. whose 'pattern of life,' suggested involvement with terrorists or insurgent groups ... Obama, ... expanded the drone war to target anyone ... it considers a potential threat" - Translation - authority to kill anybody with brown skin, anybody who is a Muslim, or anybody who has anti-American feelings.
Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing
I wonder how long it will be before the American Empire uses drones to murder suspected drug dealers??? First it will probably be in Mexico or Central America, then after it gets accepted by the media they will use some lame excuse to justify the murders in the USA.
Arizona gets 4th Predator B drone to patrol border
Source
Freedom fighters or terrorists????
I guess that is in the eye of the beholder.
George Washington was considered a terrorist by the British,
but a freedom fighter by the Americans.
Killing brown skinned folks for profit and fun.
Killing brown skinned folks for profit and fun.
A new toy to murder suspected criminals with!!!
The American Empire gets a new drone to murder suspected terrorists with.