Just when you stopped being surprised about black
helicopters flying East and West to and from Mount Weather, we have Drones
(unmanned aircraft) in America, one crashing to the ground in Northern Virginia
recently, so we know they are no longer just in the Mid-East seeking out and
blowing up terrorist targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen; they’re also here
surveilling us.
Drone-mania started in the Bush White House and
continued, as enthusiastically, in the Obama White House. These flying drones can stay aloft for
sixteen hours, controlled by radio signals via satellite to the theater of war
8,000 miles from Nevada where the pilot sits, before a video screen, manipulating
“game controls,” from what looks like a portable ship container, relying on
live-feed super high resolution video, with ready real destructive power, Hellfire
missiles and bombs.
Indeed, every Tuesday, at the weekly
counterterrorism meeting, attended by a phalanx of our national security
apparatus, drone targets on cards and in PowerPoint presentations are
designated in a ghoulish “whack a mole” ritual.
The process is somewhat suspect insofar as we pay $5,000 in bounty for
intelligence from local nationals to inform us who the “real” terrorists are. At least, this has simplified the Guantanamo detention
question as to taking any more prisoners.
Our government has defined away the killing of “innocent
bystanders.” “Combatants,” by official
definition, are any “military age males in a strike zone …unless there is
explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” A “posthumous” judgment of innocence is awfully
Alice in Wonderlandish and disserves our avowed counter insurgency initiatives
in Pakistan and Yemen when we rain down Hellfire missiles transporting innocent
nationals to Allah.
When we killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, hiding
in Yemen, with a drone, we also killed Samir Khan, another American who was
with him but not on the “whack a mole” list.
There has been alleged disparity in our government’s
reports – that our targeted kills are overstated and the innocent dead are
grossly understated. U.S. Officials on
different occasions say we’ve killed “over 20,” then “closer to 50,” finally
conceding they really couldn’t say how many.
Another dangerous genie has escaped. Our drones manufacturers are selling them overseas
to other governments.
Closer to home, we shall be awash in some 15,000 drones
in the United States by 2018.
Public Intelligence, a non-profit, has released a
map that shows more than 60 bases in the United States with drone
activity. http://publicintelligence.net/dod-us-drone-activities-map/
There are 50 companies, universities and government
organizations producing and developing 155 unmanned aircraft designs. The FAA has recently disclosed all the public
and private entities that have asked to fly drones in the United States. https://www.eff.org/document/faa-list-special-airworthiness-certificates-experimental-categorysacs
State and county governments want these drones to view,
record and tape what we do and say.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell can’t get our drones
quickly enough; Fairfax County’s Police Chief, David Rohrer, proclaimed he wants
to use them “in this region…”
We have to be on guard for privacy violations. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) proposed a bill to outlaw
the use of drones in the United States without a warrant approved by the court. That’s a good start. The Supreme Court in Kyllo v. United States found
unlawful any warrantless search of a home conducted from outside the home using
thermal imaging. In United States v.
Jones, the Supreme Court objected to a warrantless GPS attached to a car for
24/7 surveillance. This trend may favor
further protection for any expectation of privacy from drones hovering above us,
dodging black helicoptors.
If you are interested in self-defense, you may want your
own more reasonably priced drone operated from your iPad or smart phone (a
Parrot AR Drone 2.0 Quadricoptor)(for $300) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqkklVI7WBo&feature=youtube_gdata_player
)
in order to watch the government watch you, or to broadcast a birds-eye view of
your next political demonstration, perhaps to bust the errant cop compromising someone’s
First Amendment rights, or, if you are unsavory, to catch your neighbor sunbathing.
The bottom line is that our public dialogue is arid when
we fail to object to how we use drones to kill innocents abroad, export them too
freely to other nation-states, and allow them to invade our privacy without our
express knowledge or consent.
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