COLUMN: IT’S A BIRD, IT’S A PLANE … NO IT’S A DRONE by John P. Flannery

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.

GAZETTE COLUMN: THAT TAKES THE PRIZE by John P. Flannery

When President Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, everyone asked what had he done to deserve it?

Now we can all fairly ask what has he done to deserve to keep it?

In 2009, the Nobel Committee said that it was honoring Obama for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

Oh really.

Our peace president let fly many more drones into Pakistan, and made Afghanistan his war of choice, while remaining in the Iraq theater that he promised he’d leave.

President Obama signed an 007 shoot-to-kill death warrant, very James-Bond-like, on an American citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki) without any judicial review - and not so much as a rubber-stamping grand jury ever considered the charge or the Alice in Wonderland ?sentence-first-no-trial-to-follow.

President Obama sent missiles to kill crazy Qaddafi (a precedent for taking out heads of state that will yet have somebody trying to send drones into the West Wing).  Did I overlook to mention the carpet bombing we’ve unleashed on Libya?  We kill and destroy to save other lives.  At least, that’s how I understand our rules of engagement in a civil war that threatened us not at all.

I hate to imagine what a warring president would be like if this is the peace president.

Nor should my chortling friends in the Republican party take heart from this critique of the Democratic incumbent - as if their plowshares to weapons side show offers this nation any better hope of peace.

The Republican leadership and its candidates don’t want us out of Iraq. 

They can’t stand the thought of us reducing troops in Afghanistan.  They insist we are going to “win” that war in Afghanistan - when someone defines what “win” means.

The Republican’s beef about Libya - is that we don’t have “boots on the ground,” meaning putting more American service men and women at risk of life and limb in another war theater for an uncertain military objective when we have hardly the resources or treasure to continue the wars that we have elsewhere.

When we had imperial adventures in the recent past, the barely concealed message was that, we did so because we could - and no one had the chutzpah or resources to stop us.

By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office tells us that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost $2.4 Trillion and it’s costing us more because we are fighting these wars on the American family credit card.  

Think of that the next time you buy that product from China in its toxic card board wrapping; appreciate that you are funding our nation’s major creditor. 

The former chief economist of the World Bank and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics said more recently that it could cost us $3 Trillion.

Wow!

Our elected “leaders” are debating how to cut $3 Trillion dollars from the budget over the next decade. 

If it’s not from war spending, it will be from your Social Security, Medicare, Education, Infrastructure and other services now taken for granted.

We need a peace dividend to avoid a surplus of despair. 

Speak up now or regret at your leisure.