Drones could patrol in U.S., FAA says

BY W.J. HENNIGAN - Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES -- 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 Association. "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.
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?"

"This is a tool that many law enforcement agencies never imagined they could have," said Steven Gitlin, a company executive. 

Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/11/29/1677472/drones-could-patrol-in-us-faa.html#ixzz1gWqKwUOL

US: End CIA Drone Attacks | Human Rights Watch

US: End CIA Drone Attacks | Human Rights Watch:

Members of the Abida tribe point to a drone aircraft flying over Wadi Abida,

Yemen on October 13, 2010. © 2010 Reuters

Demonstrate ‘Targeted Killings’ Adhere to International Law

DECEMBER 19, 2011

(Washington, DC) – The US government should transfer Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) command of aerial drone strikes to the armed forces and clarify its legal rationale for targeted killings, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to President Barack Obama and in a questions and answers document. A dramatic increase in the use of CIA drone strikes underscores the need for the US to demonstrate that the CIA adheres to international legal requirements for accountability, Human Rights Watch said.

“CIA drone strikes have become an almost daily occurrence around the world, but little is known about who is killed and under what circumstances,” said James Ross, legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch. “So long as the US resists public accountability for CIA drone strikes, the agency should not be conducting targeted killings.”

In the decade since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush and Obama administrations have engaged in a campaign of “targeted killings” – deliberate, lethal attacks aimed at specific individuals under the color of law. Estimates of the number of deaths of alleged al Qaeda members, other armed group members, and civilians from US targeted killings range from several hundred to more than two thousand. Most of these attacks are believed to have occurred in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen using unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, armed with missiles and laser-guided bombs.

The lawfulness of a targeted killing hinges in part on the applicable international law, which is determined by the context in which the attack takes place, Human Rights Watch said. The laws of war permit attacks during situations of armed conflict only against valid military targets. Attacks causing disproportionate loss of civilian life or property are prohibited. During law enforcement situations, international human rights law permits the use of lethal force only when absolutely necessary to save human life. Individuals cannot be targeted with lethal force merely because of past unlawful behavior, but only for imminent or other grave threats to life when arrest is not reasonably possible.

The CIA’s increasing role in targeted killings using drones in Pakistan and other countries with no transparency or demonstrated accountability raises grave concerns about the lawfulness of the attacks, Human Rights Watch said. While the laws of war do not prohibit intelligence agencies from participating in combat operations, states are obligated to investigate credible allegations of war crimes and provide redress for victims of unlawful attacks. The US government’s refusal to acknowledge the CIA’s role in targeted killings or to provide information on strikes where there have been credible allegations of laws-of-war violations leaves little basis for determining whether the US is meeting its international legal obligations.

“Unsupported claims by administration officials that all US agencies involved in targeted killings are complying with international law are wholly inadequate,” Ross said. “By failing to adopt policies and practices that demonstrate compliance with international law, the US raises doubts among its allies about the lawfulness of its actions and creates a dangerous model for abusive governments.”

Since the US has not demonstrated a readiness to hold the CIA to international legal requirements, the use of drones for attacks should be exclusively within the command responsibility of the US armed forces, Human Rights Watch said. The military has more transparent procedures for investigating possible wrongdoing, although it too needs to make clear that it is conducting attacks in accordance with international legal requirements.

Ending the CIA’s command of targeted killing operations would be consistent with the recommendations of the independent 9/11 Commission, which in 2004 specifically urged that “[l]ead responsibility for directing and executing paramilitary operations, whether clandestine or covert, should shift to the Defense Department.” In November, former director of national intelligence Dennis Blair called for military control over the armed drone program, noting that the armed forces have an open set of procedures, while CIA operations require secrecy, which is not sustainable over the long term: “If something has been going for a long period of time, somebody else ought to do it, not intelligence agencies."

Human Rights Watch also called upon the US government to clarify fully and publicly its legal rationale for conducting targeted killings and the legal limits on such strikes. The US should explain why it believes that specific attacks are in conformity with international law and make information public, including video footage, on how particular attacks comply with those standards. To ensure compliance with international law, the United States should conduct investigations of all targeted killings where there is credible evidence of wrongdoing, provide compensation to all victims of unlawful strikes, and discipline or prosecute as appropriate those responsible for conducting or ordering illegal attacks.

The Obama administration, through public statements by senior officials, has provided an outline of its legal justification for using force against al Qaeda and associated organizations. However, the administration has yet to clearly explain where it draws the line between lawful and unlawful targeted killings, Human Rights Watch said.

In asserting that targeted attacks on alleged anti-US militants anywhere in the world are lawful, the US undermines the international rules it helped craft over the past half-century. This sets a dangerous precedent for abusive regimes around the globe to conduct drone attacks or other strikes against anyone labeled a terrorist or militant, and undercuts the ability of the US to criticize such attacks.

About 40 other countries currently possess basic drone technology, and the number is expected to expand significantly in coming years. These drones are primarily used for surveillance. China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Russia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom either have or are currently seeking drones with attack capability.

http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/12/19/us-end-cia-drone-attacks 'via Blog this'

RELATED MATERIALS:

Q & A: US Targeted Killings and International Law

Letter to President Obama: Targeted Killings by the US Government

CIA drone strikes have become an almost daily occurrence around the world, but little is known about who is killed and under what circumstances. So long as the US resists public accountability for CIA drone strikes, the agency should not be conducting targeted killings.

James Ross, legal and policy director

FCC plan to ease media ownership rules will further limit type of news and opinions that Americans get

By Marc Jampole

The Obama Administration is once again displaying its conservative feathers as proudly as any peacock might. The same group of pseudo-progressives who overruled distribution of Plan B birth control without an I.D. and executed an about-face to gut proposed higher pollution emission standards now plans to make another assault on freedom of speech.

Obama’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to overturn its longstanding rule that limits companies from owning both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same local market.

This rule will surely lead to greater concentration of media outlets in the hands of fewer companies. The same thing happened after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled companies to own more stations. Larger companies bought smaller ones and suddenly instead of hundreds of owners of TV and radio stations across the country, there were only dozens. We saw the impact on radio as Clear Channel and other companies owned by rightwingers gained control of the editorial policies of more and more stations. Pretty soon the range of opinion on radio narrowed and moved extremely right. While Rush Limbaugh began making a name for himself before 1996, it was the consolidation of media ownership that led to the domination of talk radio by Rush and his clones—Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved, ad nauseum.

The FCC is arguing that it’s absurd not to let companies own both broadcast and print properties in one market since every TV and radio station is printing on the Internet and most newspapers run video on their websites. That argument doesn’t answer the objections to consolidation because the issue is not the distribution of news, but the sourcing of it. With fewer collective owners, there are fewer opinions and fewer definitions of what is newsworthy. With consolidation, the owners will tend to resemble each other even more than they do now, so that the articles and opinions will come to be similar across the various media.

Freedom of speech is useless unless there is a pulpit for every opinion. Each owner represents one possible pulpit for a variety of notions regarding our economy, political system, distribution of wealth, cultural ideas and belief systems, but each pulpit will be available to only one of each type—one set of views on the economy and politics, one idea about wealth distribution, one set of social priorities. We need many owners to ensure that we have many pulpits for every facet of economic, political and social interaction. Right now, a handful of companies already control most of the TV and radio stations, newspapers, movie studios and publishing houses in the country and around the world. The Internet does offer free access to the marketplace of ideas, but successful websites that are not affiliated with big companies draw in the hundreds of thousands, a drop in the bucket. The pulpit is there, but the tent is small compared to The Wall Street Journal or ABC-TV news.

The long suffering newspaper, as a recent Pew study showed, is the whole game, since newspapers originate 50% of all news, and a much higher percentage if we discount celebrity and local crime news and focus on political, economic, social trend and breaking news. As newspapers decline, they are covering less news and presenting fewer opinions, so less news and fewer opinions are getting out to people.

It may be that the FCC is thinking that revenues from TV will enable companies to keep the newspaper viable, something that seems less and less possible under current operating assumptions. But isn’t it just as likely that television advertising and programming departments could begin to dictate the terms of coverage in newspapers, leading to a rapid debasement of content.

If the Obama Administration and the FCC really want to help newspapers survive, a better approach might be to put a limit on the number of media properties one company can own. Make the large media conglomerates divest for the good of the country, like federal law and regulation once made oil conglomerates divest for the good of the country. The more companies there are controlling the media, the freer we will be as a people and as a society, and the less possible it will be for one group to steer the country in the wrong direction by controlling the news and opinion. Each of these smaller media companies after divestiture might be more fragile, but the industry itself would be stronger and more diverse.

Greater government support for the news operations of local public broadcasting stations would also help to create a freer marketplace of ideas.

Finally, government could subsidize newspapers that report original news and are making the transition to the Internet model, perhaps with a tax on Internet news aggregators such as Yahoo! and Google News that make so many stories of local and national newspapers available to the public free of charge.

I urge all readers to go to the FCC website and make a comment. Tell the Obama Administration that you do not want it to concentrate media ownership further. Instead, ask the Obama Administration to develop new laws and regulations that will break up the big media companies and diversify ownership.

In class war, House Republicans must think they’re the 300 Spartans dying politically so wealth inequality can survive

By Marc Jampole

House Republicans persist in stonewalling an agreement to extend and expand the temporary cut in Social Security and Medicare taxes (AKA payroll taxes). After holding the U.S. economy hostage time and again to maintain temporary tax cuts for the wealthy and paying for them by gutting programs for everyone else, the Republicans are now opposing a little more help for the other 99%.

This move should convince any doubters that there is a class war going on in the United States, and it’s being waged by the wealthy against the middle class and poor. The foot soldiers are conservative pundits and politicians, primarily Republicans. The House Republicans, led by the nose by its Tea Party wing, remind me of the small Greek army led by Spartans that held the Persian Army at the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, recently fictionalized as the movie 300.

The analogy to the Spartans, who sacrificed their lives for the greater cause (Sparta was a proto-fascist state), fits like a glove: The Republicans are taking heat for stonewalling the continuation of this tax cut. Virtually all reputable economists agree that consumers have spent almost all of the extra money in their pockets from the payroll tax cut. This temporary tax cut has thus served as a boost to the struggling economy. Take that boost away, and we will slip back into recession and the Republicans will be blamed. The House Republicans know that they’re putting their jobs and political lives on the line, but I imagine they are “just following orders:” like good soldiers always do.

The reluctance of Republicans in general to extend this tax cut unless we pay for it with cuts in benefits to other poor or middle class people demonstrates clearly that class war is the appropriate term to describe not only the current Republican agenda, but the agenda of conservatives for the past 30 years.

One of the most powerful tools of warfare has always been to cut off the enemy’s supply lines. Information and facts are perhaps the most vital supplies in this violent class war (unless you consider it nonviolent to cause deaths from inadequate medical care or children going to bed hungry). Speaker of the House John Boehner tried to cut that valuable resource the other day when he had someone from his office order C-SPAN to stop videotaping the live battle on the House Floor after he and other Republicans walked out of the chamber. At the time, Maryland Democratic Representative Stenny Hoyer was lambasting the House Republicans for walking away from their responsibility to the unemployed, the middle class, the poor and those on Medicare.

This obnoxious censorship demonstrates that the Republicans are willing to do anything to preserve and exacerbate the current inequality of wealth in this country.

The war analogy illuminates many conservative actions over the past three decades, and especially since the ascendancy of Bush II:

• Pulling C-SPAN’s plug was a minor skirmish, but Republicans have been trying to reduce supplies of another precious resource—votes—for the past few years by proposing bills in virtually all states to make it harder both to register to vote and to vote.


• Warfare often shows a complete disregard for innocent bystanders, and who can be more innocent than the millions of children who have seen funds cut for public schools, early childhood education and children’s healthcare?


• Victors in war claim booty, and the booty in the case of the 30-year war against the middle class and poor is increased corporate profits from gutted regulations and government contracts that privatize traditional government services such as data processing, schools, prisons and military support services, replacing good-paying-rich government jobs with low-paying private sector jobs.


• What else is the constant denigration of unions and unionized public workers than guerilla warfare? Taking pot shots at unions, impeding their ability to organize and feeding the public a steady stream of anti-union cant can all be compared to the attack-and-run strategies of guerilla warfare. And just as Viet Cong guerilla war divided the U.S. ruling elite and just as American guerilla war divided British ruling elite, so the right wing has managed to divide the middle class against itself with its constant sniping at unions.

We can only hope that the House Republican’s reenactment of the Battle of Thermopylae has the same effect that the original battle did: Although the Greek army held off the Persians for a few days, the Persians overran much of Greece and captured Athens, that ancient democracy for rich white men. Let’s hope the Republicans lose both the battle and the war, although I wouldn’t compare America’s other 99% to the Persians. No, after 30 years of unmitigated class warfare, we’re more like shell-shocked victims of massive bombing.

   (mediaite.com)

Mitt Romney Makes $10,000 Bet in Republican Debate

By: MARC JAMPOLE
Published: December 12, 2011

I’m betting that Mitt Romney gave his campaign for the Republican nomination a deadly wound in last night’s umpteenth debate between the Republican candidates to face President Obama in November 2012.

O'Reilly Hits Organizer and Tries to Get Him Arrested

By: RIGHT WING WATCH
Published: December 8, 2011

Bill O’Reilly, reportedly walking out of a Newt Gingrich fundraiser held last night in DC (see update below), is asked by Wisconsin community organizer Brendan Lane if he attended the fundraiser. O’Reilly ignores him and then, with no prompting, strikes Lane with his umbrella.