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Cowardice Redeined, The New Face of American Serial Killers
4.18.13 Op-ed by Vic Pittman Salem-News.com
“I saw men, women and children die during that time. I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn’t kill anyone at all.” - Former US drone operator Brandon Bryant(SAN BLAS, Mexico) -
A little after 10:00 p.m., and a serial killer is getting ready to make his move. He has watched and waited for this moment for some time.
A little after 10:00 p.m., and a serial killer is getting ready to make his move. He has watched and waited for this moment for some time.
He watches his victim get out of a cab and dig in his pockets for money. Two of his children run out to the porch to greet their daddy. The killer presses a button and watches as the victim, the taxi driver and the two children are vaporized. Other people in the house, the man's wife, parents and three other children are badly injured and burnt by the high explosive.
The house next door partially collapses, killing an elderly woman and injuring her grandson. But this is just the beginning.
Neighbors and emergency personnel arrive and begin trying to help the victims. There is chaos...children screaming, people wailing and the cries of the burnt and injured. Several people are trapped under rubble.
When enough people have gathered, the killer presses the button again. Fifteen seconds later, all those at the scene are vaporized or blown to shreds. The killer high-fives his partner. In two hours he will be off work! They are planning on driving in to Las Vegas, have some cocktails maybe pick up some girls.
On the other side of the world, at the crime scene, the misery, grief and suffering is just beginning. The gathering and grouping of body parts, the burials, the amputations and lifetime medical traumas, the traumatized children, the destroyed lives. But tonight in Vegas, it is party party party for this 22-year old serial killer from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, some 7550 miles away from the carnage. The biggest threat he will face tonight is a hangover tomorrow.
He is a drone "pilot", the new face of American warfare, govt trained and equipped serial killer.
It is his job.
It is his job.
General Atomics build Predator drones.
V-2 rockets that Germany deployed during WWII were 46 feet long, nearly 6 feet in diameter, and had a 12 foot wingspan. Hellfire missiles, which US drones use, are less than five feet long, seven inches in diameter, and have a 13" wingspan.
When the CIA decided that they wanted to kill a 16-year old American kid named Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, they waited until he was in a Yemeni restaurant with two of his teenaged friends. A drone operator fired the missiles and not only the intended victim, but eight other people died.
This is from Wikipedia:
- "Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old American citizen who was killed while eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant in an airstrike by an armed C.I.A. drone in Yemen on October 14, 2011. The attack also killed two of his teenaged friends and five other people in the restaurant, which was reduced to rubble. He had no connection to terrorism and was searching for his father Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by an airstrike by an armed C.I.A. drone two weeks prior to the death of his son."
Obama approved that strike, according to the New York Times.
Imagine being afraid to throw a wedding for your child because a bored 22-year old "aviation warfare specialist" on the other side of the world may decide that it could be a terrorist get together and blow it up? That is the reality of life for many people in the world today, especially in Northern Pakistan.
Imagine being afraid to throw a wedding for your child because a bored 22-year old "aviation warfare specialist" on the other side of the world may decide that it could be a terrorist get together and blow it up? That is the reality of life for many people in the world today, especially in Northern Pakistan.
Sooner or later scenario in the U.S. A citizen shoots down a surveillance drone flying over his property. The govt responds with an armed drone and blows the citizen to shreds. No risk to "law enforcement", call the guy a terror suspect and classify the information so that no one can look any further into it.
If a drone fires a missile at a car in a crowded market and it explodes, it becomes a "car bomb"? In Gaza, shops, houses and cars blow up routinely and it is usually attributed by the Israelis to a bomb blowing up prematurely.
If Americans were digging through rubble of weddings, restaurants and schools looking for their victims of Chinese drone strikes, I think it is safe to say that we would hate the Chinese.
I would try to figure out a way to fight back if I could.
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This Is the American Drone Shot Down by Somali Insurgents
The Twitter feed for Islamic extremist group al-Shabaab lit up on May 27 publishing photos of aircraft wreckage and extolling the virtues of the group's fighters who, after several hours of shooting, brought down an unmanned drone near the town of Buulo Mareer. Pentagon confirmed that it did lose the UAS,
The downed UAS is a Camcopter S-100, produced by Austria's Schiebel company. Weighing just 440 pounds (200 kg) it measures 10 feet long with an 11 foot rotor diameter. Its 55 hp Austro AE50R Wankel rotary engine can run off of both gasoline and heavier fuels like JP-5 and JP-8, affording it a top speed of 138 mph and 6 hour endurance. What makes the S-100 interesting though is its payload.
In addition to the standard fare of armament, survey sensors, and optics like the Thales I-Master synthetic aperture radar, the S-100 is also capable of carrying out PSYOPs activities. In 2009, Schiebel and Boeing produced a demonstration for the US Army touting the S-100's usefulness as a crowd control/ISR tool:
The CAMCOPTER ® S-100 was equipped with an American Technology Corporation loudspeaker capable of addressing crowds at a distance of up to 2 km, a leaflet drop capability, as well as an IAI POP300 EO/IR camera payload.
[The system] was aimed at minimizing civilian unrest and preventing civilian casualties while apprehending a suspected terrorist cell. The S-100 was utilized to survey the area and provide real-time aerial intelligence, as well as to address the public and drop information leaflets.
The Pentagon stated that the craft was on a routine reconnaissance flight, however, Abdikadir Mohamed Nur, governor of Lower Shabelle, told Reuters that militants spent hours shooting at the S-100. "Finally they hit it and the drone crashed," he said. There's no word yet on whether it was shooting back at the insurgents at the time of impact..
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Privacy a looming issue as drone regulation loosens
5.30.13 Liz Goodwin Yahoo
ATLANTA—Earlier this month, a woman in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle noticed a small camera-equipped drone buzzing around outside the third-floor window of her home. She sent her husband out to tell the man operating the small aircraft by remote control to leave, but he insisted that it was legal for him to fly above their property.
“We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom,” the woman complained in a note to a local blog.So was the drone operator right when he insisted that it was legal for him to fly above this woman’s yard?
The question doesn’t have an easy answer, and it’s one that some drone researchers gathered this week in Atlanta for an international conference on unmanned aircraft are grappling with.
Paul Voss, an engineer at Smith College who entered the drone field through his work developing the world’s smallest altitude-controlled meteorological balloons, gave a talk at the conference Wednesday titled “The Case for Protecting Privacy and Property Rights in the Lowermost Reaches of the Atmosphere.” He argued that the drone community should be proactive in addressing privacy concerns now, before the number of drones in flight skyrockets when regulations are eased in the next few years.
At the beginning of his talk, Voss showed a photo of a drone hovering outside the second-floor window of a home, and asked the class, “How many of you think this is public airspace?” Only one person raised his hand.
Voss thinks that one student is probably right, though it's a legal gray area. The Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that the air above the minimum safe altitude of flight “is a public highway” and not subject to trespassing laws. The ruling reversed a lower court’s judgment in favor of a chicken farmer who lost 150 chickens due to fighter planes flying less than 100 feet over his roof on their way to a local airbase. (The chickens were so scared by the thunderous noise that they threw themselves against the wall and killed themselves.)
The court did, however, say that homeowners should have “exclusive control of the immediate reaches of the enveloping atmosphere” so that they can build homes, plant trees and erect fences, for example. It’s unclear how many feet in the air, exactly, that extends to, as Justice William O. Douglas did not go into detail in the opinion.
That’s been the court’s final word, and the ruling suggests that drones can fly quite close above people’s property and be on safe legal ground.
But the bigger threat to privacy is less likely to come from nosy neighbors with tiny camera-equipped model aircraft than from well-funded law enforcement agencies or businesses that can afford to launch sophisticated drones with high-power cameras.
Brandon Stark, a drone researcher at the University of California, Merced, told the scientists at a workshop Tuesday that smaller drones are not yet sophisticated enough to merit privacy advocates’ concerns about spying. “If you’re flying [a small drone] 100 feet into the sky, you’re lucky to see a tree. Actually spying on people is fairly difficult and fairly expensive,” he said.
Those who can actually afford the most powerful drones are likely to be law enforcement agencies with grants from the federal government, or businesses hoping to turn a profit. That could mean a big expansion in the ability of police to gather evidence and detect crime. A 1989 Supreme Court ruling held that police can use images from manned aircraft to aid their investigations without first obtaining a warrant. In that case, a sheriff discovered a man was growing marijuana in a greenhouse by sending a helicopter to fly overhead at just 400 feet without first having to prove to a judge he had good reason to search his home.
Privacy advocates are concerned that drones will take police power to another level, since drones could in theory hover around an area continuously, surveying from the skies and reporting any suspicious activity.
Drones are tightly regulated right now by the Federal Aviation Association, which prohibits people from using them in any commercial endeavor and requires public institutions to apply for authorization to use them. (Hobbyists can fly small drones as long as they're within sight at all times and stay under 400 feet.)
But that’s all expected to change in 2015, when the agency is required by Congress to open up the skies to commercial uses of drones and attempt to integrate unmanned and manned aircraft. The agency estimates that nearly 10,000 new drones will be in flight in just the first few years after the commercial ban is lifted.
It’s unclear whether the FAA will delve into any of the privacy issues when it issues its regulations on unmanned aircraft. Ted Wierzbanowski, a retired Air Force colonel who chaired a committee that made recommendations to the FAA on how to regulate small drones, said he believes the FAA should focus on safety, not privacy, in its regulations. “Someone else in the government should have to worry about privacy issues. Who that is, I don’t know,” he said.
Amie Stepanovich, director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said her organization is petitioning the FAA to require a publicly accessible registry of drones—where they’re flying, who is flying them, and what sort of data they are collecting—so that concerned citizens can look up their home and see who might be watching it.
Congress, meanwhile, has shown some willingness to step in, with some Republican representatives working on a bill that would limit the police’s ability to use drones without first obtaining a warrant.
Another possibility is that much of the privacy battles will be fought at the local level, with each state developing standards for how law enforcement can use drones and how to mediate disputes among neighbors who use drones. Dozens of states have introduced legislation just this year to limit the ways in which police departments can use drones.
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Drones deliver pizza 6.13
http://redicecreations.com/article.php?id=25467
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