Speaking of extinctions:
"Flashy drone strikes raise status of remote pilots" by LOLITA C. BALDOR | Associated Press, August 12, 2012
WASHINGTON — At the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, becoming a fighter pilot is still a hotly coveted goal.
But slowly, a culture change is taking hold.
Initially snubbed as second-class pilot wannabes, the airmen who remotely control America’s arsenal of lethal drones are gaining stature and securing a permanent place in the Air Force.
Drawn to the flashy drone strikes that have taken out terrorists including Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen and the terror group’s No. 2 strongman Abu Yahya al-Libi in Pakistan, airmen are beginning to target unmanned aircraft as their career of choice.
As far as this American is concerned, patrolling the world with drones really i$n't the kind of world I want to live in. This empire needs to quickly implode for the sake of the entire planet.
Related: AmeriKan Missiles Keep Things All in the Family in Yemen
More on that below.
More Yikes From Yemen
I'm sorry, readers, but a bunch of agenCy ghosts Is all I Am seeing.
Even the names they give us are so obviously bulls***.
I mean, YAH, YA, ALIBI? That's almost as much of a laugher as a Qaqa in the toilet.
Yup, all the mass-murder and whoooosh bangs are justified because the "terrorists" are out there. Too bad the "terrorists" ALWAYS TURN OUT TO BE a CREATION of WESTERN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES!
It’s a far cry from the grumbling across the air corps a few years ago when Air Force leaders — desperate to meet the rapidly escalating demand for drones — began yanking fighter pilots out of their cockpits and placing them at the remote controls of unmanned Predators and Reapers.
The shift is critical as the Air Force struggles to fill a shortfall of more than 300 drone pilots to meet the US military’s enormous hunger for unmanned aircraft around the world.
Frightening for any peace-loving, freedom-loving citizen anywhere in the world.
Some airmen are even volunteering to give up the exhilarating G-force ride in their F-16s for the desktop computer screens and joysticks that direct drones over battlefields thousands of miles away.
Yeah, I knew the VIDEO GAMES for the kids SERVED SOME PURPOSE.
But they were just toys, right?
The difference is often generational, but many pilots see drones as the future of air combat.
I give up, dear readers. I've failed. I failed to save my country and change its direction, and it's too far gone now. The window was the last four years, and our "elected" leader$ failed.
It's over. May the pages of history that I am a part condemn AmeriKa to damnation.
Drone pilot Major Ted began his Air Force career as an F-16 pilot, but shifted to flying drones and now says he will not go back to flying a fighter jet. He said piloting a drone is empowering because it has a direct impact supporting US troops in Afghanistan. The US military does not allow drone pilots to make their full names public because of concerns the pilots could be targeted.
Asked which is harder to do — manned or unmanned flight — he said that at times, he has been more overcome by the torrent of information pouring in during a drone flight than he was in the cockpit.
“In an F-16, to form a three-dimensional picture, I look outside,” said Ted, who flew F-16s for about four years before switching to armed Reapers, a drone that can carry Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs. “But here . . . I have multiple computer screens showing two-dimensional information that I have to then mentally build that picture.”
To attract more drone pilots, the Air Force has created a new career specialty within the service and is ending the system that forced drone assignments on fighter pilots. The new system creates a separate training pipeline for drone pilots.
In a recent survey, the Air Force asked 500 airmen who started out as pilots but had been shifted to drones if they would like to stay on in the unmanned aircraft field. There were 412 volunteers. Those results, Air Force leaders said, show that while a new career field may take 20 years to fully develop, this one is on its way.
And the world shudders.
Of course, given the current state of the world and the insane dash to get a world war off the ground that may be mute.
Besides, the AmeriKa will surely be reduced by bankruptcy by then.
Despite the end of the Iraq war and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, top military leaders staunchly defend plans to boost the drone fleet to meet intelligence, surveillance, and targeting needs of US commanders in other hot spots, including the Pacific, Africa, and South America.
Um, YOU LEFT ONE PLACE OUT! The HOME front!
Related: Navy tests ocean drones in Narragansett Bay
Of course, they will FIND the MONEY even in this AGE of AUSTERITY, won't they?
Budget cuts could slash that spending, but members of Congress have largely supported the unmanned aircraft programs and voiced little opposition to the drone fever that has gripped the military. The military’s spending on drones has grown from about $2.3 billion in 2008 to $4.2 billion this year.
Right now, drones complete 57 24-hour combat air patrols a day, mostly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and areas around Yemen and the Africa coast. The goal is to increase that to 65 patrols daily by mid-2014, with eight crews each. By 2017, the Air Force wants to have 10 crews per combat air patrol to meet staffing requirements and allow the drone pilots time for schooling, training, and other career-building time.
To staff 65 combat air patrols, the Air Force will need nearly 1,700 drone pilots and 1,200 sensor operators. Currently there are just 1,358 pilots and 949 sensor operators.
And this is ll going to cost how much going forward in this time of budget cutbacks for social services?
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After graduation:
"US drone kills 5 militants in Pakistan" by Munir Ahmed | Associated Press, August 19, 2012
ISLAMABAD — A missile launched from a US drone struck a suspected militant hideout in a tribal region in northern Pakistan where allies of a powerful warlord were gathered Saturday, killing five of his supporters, Pakistani officials said.
The strike in North Waziristan against allies of Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a militant commander whose forces frequently target US and other NATO troops in neighboring Afghanistan, comes amid speculation about whether Pakistan will launch an operation against militants in the tribal region.
The United States has urged Pakistan repeatedly to take such a step, and last week US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that Pakistan was preparing an operation targeting the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan.
Pakistan has been reluctant to undertake an offensive, saying its military is already overtaxed by fighting in other tribal areas of Pakistan.
But many in the United States believe Pakistan does not want to upset the many militant groups in that area, such as the Haqqani network, that could be useful allies in Afghanistan after foreign forces leave.
Yeah, ha-ha.... ha. Haqqanis are useful to who?
On Thursday, the top US commander in the region, General James Mattis, met with Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.
During the meeting the Pakistani general repeated his government’s stance that it would undertake an operation in North Waziristan only if it coincides with Pakistan’s interests and not in response to outside pressure, according to a military press release.
Oh, so it was pressure being applied through my newspaper, that's all.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry condemned the latest drone attack.
‘‘Pakistan has consistently maintained that these attacks are a violation of its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and are in contravention of international law,’’ the ministry said in a statement.
Drone attacks are very unpopular in Pakistan, where they are viewed as a violation of the country’s sovereignty and responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians.
Yeah, that never goes over well with people.
The United States maintains its targeted strikes are directed against militants and needed to combat groups like Al Qaeda.
Excuse me, readers. Every time I see that word now I need to use the hole.
Some Uzbek fighters were among the dead in Saturday’s strike, according to two Pakistan intelligence officials. Three people were also wounded, they said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media.
Meanwhile, five security officials died during a suicide bombing on a checkpoint in southern Pakistan.
Spokesman Murtaza Baig said the attacker detonated his explosives early Saturday after he was stopped at the checkpoint in a Quetta suburb. The slain troops were part of Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps.
Just as Pakistan is being pressured to act. What a coincidence.
Baluchistan Province and its capital, Quetta, have been the scene of an insurgency by Baluch nationalists who are demanding greater rights and share from the income generated from gas and minerals extracted from the province.
Various Baluch groups are blamed for attacks on the province’s security forces and are suspected of targeting other ethnic groups in the region.
Related: Mossad agents posed as CIA to recruit Jundallah members
US, Israel, India responsible for killings in Balochistan
Yes, you won't be finding anything about that in my newspapers or AmeriKan media for obvious reasons.
Taliban militants and the extremist group Lashker-e-Jhangvi are also active in the province.
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Time to go to a new format.
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"a flurry of missiles killing a total of 10"
US Drone Attacks Leave 21 Civilians Dead In Pakistan In Under 48 Hours
And from what I saw and heard on the radio, the Pakistanis are pissed -- as they well should be!!!
US 'should hand over footage of drone strikes or face UN inquiry'
Just look out for the lawsuits, fly boys:
"Families sue US in Yemen drone strikes" by Charlie Savage | New York Times, July 19, 2012
WASHINGTON — Relatives of three US citizens killed in drone strikes in Yemen last year filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against four senior national security officials Wednesday.
The suit, in the US District Court here, opened a new chapter in the legal battle about the Obama administration’s use of drones to pursue terror suspects away from traditional ‘‘hot’’ battlefields such as Afghanistan.
And since Obama personally signs off on the targets I hold him criminally responsible for mass murder.
The first strike, on Sept. 30, killed a group of people including Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico, and Samir Khan, a naturalized US citizen who lived at times in New York and North Carolina. The second, Oct. 14, killed a group of people including Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who was born in Colorado.
Accused in the lawsuit of authorizing and directing the strikes are Leon E. Panetta, the secretary of defense; CIA chief David H. Petraeus; and two senior commanders of the military’s Special Operations forces, Admiral William McRaven of the Navy and Lieutenant General Joseph Votel of the Army.
“The killings violated fundamental rights afforded to all US citizens, including the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law,’’ the complaint says.
Press officials with the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department declined to comment.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, was filed by Nasser Awlaki, who was Anwar’s father and Abdulrahman’s grandfather, and Sarah Khan, Samir’s mother. Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights are assisting them.
In 2010, the two groups helped Nasser Awlaki in an effort to obtain a court injunction against government efforts to kill his son. A federal judge threw out the case, primarily on the ground that Nasser Awlaki had no standing to sue in place of his son. Now Nasser Awlaki and Sarah Khan represent the estates of their sons and his grandson.
But the new lawsuit may face other procedural impediments before any substantive ruling on whether the strikes violated the Constitution — or even a public acknowledgment that the US government did carry them out.
The Justice Department which is expected to provide lawyers for the defendants, may ask a judge to dismiss the case by asserting that the evidence necessary to litigate it would disclose state secrets or that decisions about whom to kill in an armed conflict are ‘‘political questions’’ not fit for judicial review. The government asserted both arguments in the 2010 case, and the judge who dismissed that lawsuit also cited the ‘‘political question’’ doctrine.
Translation: the lawsuits are going nowhere here in AmeriKa.
Even if a judge declined to dismiss the case on those grounds, the officials could assert that ‘‘qualified immunity’’ protected them from lawsuits alleging that they violated someone’s constitutional rights while performing official actions that did not violate ‘‘clearly established law’’ at the time.
That is how this government excused and absolved torture.
While it has been widely reported that the United States carried out the strikes, the Obama administration has never officially acknowledged responsibility for them. The New York Times has described the details of a secret Justice Department memorandum that concluded it would be lawful to target Anwar Awlaki if capturing him was infeasible.
I have been told everything Hitler did was legal, too.
Several administration officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in a speech at Northwestern University in March, have also defended the targeting of citizens, without a trial, if they join terrorist groups and under certain conditions.
‘‘Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,’’ Holder said. ‘‘This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.’’
I know, I know, just let it go.
In 2010, reports surfaced that Anwar Awlaki had been placed on a ‘‘kill list’’ after the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner Dec. 25, 2009. The would-be bomber is said to have told his interrogators that Awlaki recruited him for the operation. Awlaki has also been accused of playing a role in other terrorist plots, but he was not indicted or tried.
The complaint says Awlaki should not have been designated ‘‘for death without the protections of a judicial trial’’ by the executive branch and contends that at the time of his killing, he did not present any immediate ‘‘concrete, specific and imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.’’ It also asserts that any threat he did present when he was found could have been mitigated without lethal force, although it does not say how.
Complicating matters, it is believed that the Sept. 30 strike specifically targeted Awlaki, making the people around him — including Samir Khan — collateral damage. Likewise, Awlaki’s son is said to have been a bystander in the Oct. 14 strike. Samir Khan was involved in producing propaganda for Al Qaeda’s Yemen branch, but Abdulrahman Awlaki had not been accused of joining the group.
Back to the hole.
So when does Obama start dumping drone missiles on AmeriKan media offices, huh?
I mean, NO ONE TOPS THEM when it comes to PRODUCING PROPAGANDA!
“Even in the context of an armed conflict, government officials must comply with the requirements of distinction and proportionality and take all feasible measures to protect bystanders,’’ the lawsuit indicates.
Unless they are a member of the EUSraeli empire. Then they can murder with impunity.
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Related:
"US drones killed 10 Al Qaeda militants — one believed to be a top bomb maker — in two strikes targeting moving vehicles in Yemen, officials and the country’s state-run agency said Tuesday."
While we are at the Air Force Academy I'll add this:
"Commander exits Air Force base mired in sex abuse scandal" by Lolita C. Baldor and Paul J. Weber | Associated Press, August 11, 2012
AUSTIN — The fallout from a sex scandal at Lackland Air Force Base widened Friday when the military ousted the top commander of the basic training unit in which dozens of female recruits were sexually assaulted or harassed by their male instructors, investigators say.
Colonel Glenn Palmer arrived at Lackland last year and was in charge when allegations involving more than a dozen instructors began to mount within his 737th training group. Collen McGee, spokeswoman for the Lackland training wing, said it was decided the unit needed new leadership.
‘‘But Colonel Palmer did not create the environment that created the misconduct,’’ McGee said.
Military prosecutors have investigated more than a dozen instructors at Lackland and charged six with crimes including rape and adultery. Officials said Palmer was not facing any criminal charges and that his new assignment had not yet been determined.
Lackland is where every new US airman reports for eight weeks of basic training. About 35,000 airmen graduate each year, and misdeeds in the ranks of nearly 500 instructors that are still being uncovered has reverberated all the way to Washington....
Palmer’s dismissal comes just months after the Air Force increased his profile as the allegations mounted. He invited reporters in June to a daylong tour of Lackland, offering a rare glimpse into the base’s academy for military training instructors and making his top lieutenants available for questions. It was intended to show the public the Air Force had nothing to hide.
Palmer also began delivering a ‘‘neighborhood watch’’ speech to every new busload of recruits, telling them to immediately report sexual assaults or any hint of sexual harassment.
The first allegations began a year ago with those levied against Staff Sergeant Luis Walker. As more trainees spoke up and the accusations became widespread, Lackland took the unusual step of halting training for an entire day in May to survey about 5,900 trainees. On a base that graduates a new class of airmen every Friday for 50 of the 52 weeks in the year, Palmer called the training shutdown so unprecedented he did not know whether it was possible.
Palmer was not the first Lackland commander removed since the scandal unfolded. In June, Axelbank relieved Colonel Mike Paquette, commander of the 331st Training Squadron, for what a military attorney described as a loss of confidence in Paquette’s leadership.
Lackland has about 475 military training instructors, who are the Air Force equivalent of Army drill sergeants and are assigned to turn raw recruits into airmen over eight weeks. More than three dozen instructors — including those facing criminal charges — have been removed from Lackland in the past year, but the Air Force said the majority of those dismissals were unrelated to the sex accusations.
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Also see: Pentagon Problems
More Pentagon Problems
And off we go into the wild blue yonde.... or well, into the dark drone room.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Ecology drones track wildlife, not terrorists; Conservationists cite advantages to technology" by Denis D. Gray | Associated Press, August 20, 2012
PRANBURI, Thailand — They are better known as stealthy killing machines to take out suspected terrorists with pinpoint accuracy. But drones are also being put to more benign use in skies across several continents to track endangered wildlife, spot poachers, and chart forest loss.
And HOW could you EVER BE AGAIN$T THAT, huh?
Although it is still the ‘‘dawn of drone ecology,’’ as one innovator calls it, these unmanned aerial vehicles are skimming over Indonesia’s jungle canopy to photograph orangutans, protect rhinos in Nepal, and study invasive aquatic plants in Florida.
Activists launched a long-range drone in December to locate and photograph a Japanese whaling ship as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society attempted to block Japan’s annual whale hunt in Antarctic waters.
Relatively cheap, portable, and earth-hugging, the drones fill a gap between satellite and manned aircraft imagery and on-the-ground observations, said Percival Franklin at the University of Florida, which has been developing such drones for more than a decade.
‘‘The potential uses are almost unlimited,’’ said Ian Singleton, director of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program, testing drones this year over Indonesia’s Tripa peat forest where fires set by palm oil growers are threatening the world’s highest density habitat of the great apes.
Conservation is one of the latest roles for these multitaskers, either autonomously controlled by on-board computers or under remote guidance of a navigator. Ranging in size from less than half a pound to more than 20 tons, drones have been used for firefighting, road patrols, hurricane tracking, and other jobs too dull, dirty, or dangerous for piloted craft.
Most prominently, they have been harnessed by the US military in recent years, often to detect and kill terrorism targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere....
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There are going to be so many of those f***ing things up there they will be crashing into each other.
