With New Mini-Satellites, Special Ops Takes Its Manhunts Into Space

Noah Shachtman reports:

In September, the U.S. government will fire into orbit a two-stage rocket from a Virginia launchpad. Officially, the mission is a scientific one, designed to improve America’s ability to send small satellites into space quickly and cheaply. But the launch will also have a second purpose: to help the elite forces of U.S. Special Operations Command hunt down people considered to be dangerous to the United States and its interests.

For years, special operators have used tiny “tags” to clandestinely mark their prey — and satellites to relay information from those beacons. But there are areas of the world where the satellite coverage is thin, and there aren’t enough cell towers to provide an alternative. That’s why SOCOM is putting eight miniature communications satellites, each about the size of a water jug, on top of the Minotaur rocket that’s getting ready to launch from Wallops Island, Virginia. They’ll sit more than 300 miles above the earth and provide a new way for the beacons to call back to their masters.

The officers in charge of SOCOM say their forces will soon do less manhunting, and more training of foreign troops. Perhaps so. But with senior Pentagon officials predicting “at least another 10 to 20 years” of combat with al-Qaida, these special operations forces will continue with their mission of “tagging, tracking, and locating” suspected militants. In this fiscal year alone, SOCOM will spend $88 million on new tagging gear.

This isn’t SOCOM’s first mini-satellite. In December of 2010, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket put into orbit a $25,000 special operations spacecraft small enough to fit into the palm of a hand. The satellite stayed more than 170 miles up for about a month. But that first flight was mostly a proof of concept that something so cheap and small could have any military value at all. (“Just to test the theory that we could do it,” Douglas Richardson, SOCOM’s executive in charge of Special Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Exploitation Technologies, explained in 2011.)

The Operationally Responsive Space-3 mission (.pptx) will carry eight satellites for SOCOM (plus another 20 for other government agencies). This array of configurable “cubesats” is designed to stay aloft for three years or more. Yes, it will serve as further research project. But “operators are going to use it,” Richardson promised an industry conference in Tampa last week. His presentation showed a cubesat under the heading “tagging, tracking, and locating.”

Special operators are already using a dizzying panoply of equipment in order to perform “TTL,” as it’s called within the military. Last fiscal year, SOCOM put into the field 7,000 TTL kits, Jennifer Powers, the project manager in charge of tags, tells Danger Room. Those kits are individually tailored to the environment – jungle or desert, urban or rural — and can be filled with a mix of 190 different pieces of gear. While SOCOM funds mid-term research to make the beacons more compact and less power-hungry, new gear can also be fielded in as little as three days.

Some of the beacons use infrared flashes to signal their location; in 2009, al-Qaida propagandists claimed they found them all over villages that had been hit with U.S. drone strikes. Others are implanted into seemingly-innocent commercial electronics. Under “TTL examples,” Richardson’spresentation (.pdf) showed pictures of a cell phone and a key fob, like the kind used to open a car. Still other tags are affixed to cars or people, and transmit their whereabouts using satellite or CDMA, GPRS, and other cellular networks.

Until 2009, the market for these tags was dominated by the secretive, Virginia-headuqartered Blackbird Technologies, Inc., which counts a former chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center as a executive. That year, the firm won a contract from the Navy for up to $450 million in TTL equipment.

But since then, SOCOM has decided to introduce some competition into the tagging market. (Blackbird, meanwhile, saw one of its employees fall victim to a gruesome murder-suicide last fall.)  Cobham Plc, a British firm, is now one of several firms supplying American special operators with TTL gear.

Cobham claims its UniTrac system can perform “tracking and command/control of over 70 different tracking devices and communications networks.” The 2.5-inch GPS tags themselves weigh about 2.5 ounces and can send out SMS messages when someone walks or drives nearby. ”These solutions give valuable intelligence as to the ‘pattern of life’ of subjects, as well as being used for live tracking, location and apprehension of criminals,” the company promises in an online brochure.

TTL also means keeping tabs on targets’ data, in addition to the people themselves. So Virginia-based EWA Government Solutions, Inc. not only markets a line of radio frequency tags for “High-Value Target Tagging Missions” and “Intelligence Operations.” (.pdf)  The firm also sells a “Black Hole” wi-fi intercept system (.pdf), which is allegedly able to crack the encryption keys protecting 802.11 networks, and suck up all the traffic being communicated therein.

That gives operators “the ability to filter, display, and reconstruct e-mail messages (POP3, SMTP, IMAP), instant messaging (Yahoo, ICQ, AOL, MSM), or web page (HTTP) activity,” EWA asserts. “A simple double-click will reconstruct e-mail messages, web pages, and instant message conversations.”

EWA says its technology is being used in “real-world operations with various Department of Defense and national- level agencies.” The company won’t say which agencies or which divisions of the Pentagon, exactly, have used their technologies. But a look in a federal purchasing database shows that the company has signed multi-million dollar contracts in recent years with the Army, Navy, and, of course, U.S. Special Operations Command.

The commandos were already using all the gear they could in order to zero in on their targets. Come September, they’ll have even more, orbiting at 300 miles up.

The Real Reason For U.S. Drone Attacks

Drone Attacks Kill Innocents and Create Enemies. This is precisely what the American war industry wants: endless supply of enemies for endless war.

Debate within the US about the use of killer drones has obfuscated the real purpose of such attacks. Using fancy expressions like “playbook” for authorizing drone strikes that kill people suspected by the US of being militants has added to the fog of confusion.

Amid all the verbal gymnastics, one point that has seldom if ever been raised is the real reason for drone strikes: to stoke anti-American sentiment that creates more militants thereby justifying the never-ending war on terror. After all, it is impossible to continue to wage war without identifiable enemies. 

Drone attacks are “helpful” from the US point of view because they kill innocent people in remote areas, especially the tribal areas of Pakistan that increase people’s resentment and anti-American feelings. This is precisely what the Washington warlords want. Endless war requires an endless list of enemies. If they do not exist, create them. Enter the killer drones.

The Washington-based New America Foundation report has said there have been 350 US drone strikes since 2004, most of them during Barack Obama’s presidency.

The foundation has put the death toll at between 1,963 and 3,293, with 261 to 305 civilians killed. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates the death toll at between 2,627 and 3,457 in Pakistan since 2004. These include 475 to 900 civilians.

The US Republican Senator Lindsay Graham said on February 20, 2013 that 4,700 people had been killed in drone strikes. He was unapologetic about the killings. “Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of al-Qaeda,” Graham added, without naming which al-Qaeda members had been eliminated.

Washington uses assassination drones in several countries — Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia — claiming that they target “terrorists.” According to witnesses, however, the attacks have mostly led to civilian casualties.

Jennifer Gibson, a staff lawyer with the British-based charity Reprieve asked: “how do you prove you’re innocent after they have killed you?”

The “excellent intelligence” the US cites for carrying out drone strikes is based on dubious information. Often, local informants that are given locator (targeting) chips to put near militants actually put them near the wall of the homes of those with whom they have family feuds. Sarah Holewinski, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Civilians in Conflict, has confirmed this in an interview. American officials as well as the CIA stubbornly deny any civilian casualties.

The Stanford Law School and New York University School of Law’s comprehensive report on Pakistan, “Living Under Drones” has listed scores of family members of civilians killed in drone strikes. The UN Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson, a British barrister, has launched an investigation into 25 cases of drone strikes and targeted killings. Emmerson’s investigtion includes US, Israeli and British drone strikes in Pakistan, Gaza and Afghanistan. In March, Emmerson issued a damning report about extraordinary renditions, waterboarding and other forms of torture by US forces and called for war crimes trial of those officials responsible for authorizing such practices. In the case of drone strikes, Emmerson will examine Washington’s “double tap” policy that attacks a target a second time, while rescuers and paramedics are working to save survivors. Such strikes deliberately target civilians and are categorized as murders.

Whether the US would be deterred by UN censure is debatable. After all, American officials know full well that they are involved in a murderous campaign in which killing civilians is part of a deliberate policy. Civilian casualties are not collateral damage, even though making such claims may mollify some Americans; they are an essential part of keeping the war going endlessly.

The Assassination Of American Citizens: Is Official and “Legal”

United States Attorney General Eric Holder has informed Congress that four American citizens have been killed in Yemen and Pakistan by US drones since 2009.

It has been widely reported but rarely acknowledged in Washington that three US citizens — Samir Khan, Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki — were executed in Yemen by missile-equipped drones in 2011. With Holder’s latest admission, however, a fourth American — Jude Kenan Mohammed — has also been officially named as another casualty in America’s continuing drone war.

“Since 2009, the United States, in the conduct of US counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda and its associated forces outside of areas of active hostilities, has specifically targeted and killed one US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki,” the letter reads in part. “The United States is further aware of three other US citizens who have been killed in such US counterterrorism operations over that same time period,” Holder said before naming the other victims.

“These individuals were not specifically targeted by the United States,” the attorney general wrote.

The news of the admission broke Wednesday afternoon when New York Times reporter Charlie Savage published the letter sent from Holder to congressional leaders in a clear attempt to counter critics who have challenged the White House for falling short of US President Barack Obama’s campaign plans of utmost transparency. Upon a growing number of executive branch scandals worsened by the Department of Justice’s recently disclosed investigation of Associated Press journalists, Holder wrote that coming clean is an effort to include the American public in a discussion all too often conducted in the shadows cast by the US intelligence community.

“The administration is determined to continue these extensive outreach efforts to communicate with the American people,” continued Holder. “To this end, the president has directed me to disclose certain information that until now has been properly classified. You and other members of your committee have on numerous occasions expressed a particular interest in the administration’s use of lethal force against US citizens. In light of this face, I am writing to disclose to you certain information about the number of US citizens who have been killed by US counterterrorism operations outside of areas of active hostilities.”

The letter, dated Wednesday, May 22, was addressed to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Drone strikes have become a signature counterterrorism tool used by the Obama administration and his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and have been attributed with killing roughly 5,000 persons abroad, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). But under the covert and protective umbrella of the Central Intelligence Agency, little has been formally acknowledged from Washington as to the details of these strikes.

As part of the vaguely defined ‘War on Terror,’ the US has reportedly waged drone strikes outside of Afghanistan where the Taliban once harbored al-Qaeda. In recent years, those strikes have targeted towns in neighboring Pakistan, as well as Yemen, Somalia and perhaps elsewhere.

But despite growing criticism over escalating use of drones, the president and his office has remained adamant about defending the operations.

“It’s important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash,” Obama said last January, adding that his administration does not conduct “a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly.”

Others have argued quite the opposite, though, and have opposed these drone strikes over the lack of due process involved and the habit of accidently executing civilians in the strikes. When researchers at Stanford University and New York University published their ‘Living Under Drones’ report last September, they found that roughly 2 percent of drone casualties are of top militant leaders. The Pakistani Interior Minister has said that around 80 percent of drone deaths in his country were suffered by civilians.

Earlier this year, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) led a marathon filibuster on the floor of Congress to oppose the CIA’s drone program and demand the administration explain to elected lawmakers why the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is warranted in executing suspects, often killing innocent civilians as a result.

Of particular concern, Paul said, was whether or not the Obama administration would use the 2011 Yemen strike as justification to kill American citizens within the US. For 13 hours, he demanded the White House respond.

“I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination for the CIA,” Sen. Paul said. “I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”

One day after the filibuster, both Attorney General Holder and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney reached out to Sen. Paul to say the president lacks the authority to issue such a strike within the US. With this week’s letter, however, Holder admits that at least four Americans have met their demise due to US drones. He also explains why the administration felt justified in using UAVs to execute its own people.

“Al-Awlaki repeatedly made clear his intent to attack US persons and his hope that these attacks would take American lives,” wrote Holder. “Based on this information, high-level US government officials appropriately concluded that al-Awlaki posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.”

Later, Holder says the decision to strike al-Awlaki was “not taken lightly” and was first put into plan in early 2010. Additionally, Holder said the plan was “subjected to exceptionally rigorous interagency legal review” and that Justice Department lawyers and attorneys for other agencies agreed that it was the appropriate action to take.

According to Holder, the senior al-Awlaki and Mr. Khan were killed in the same September 2011 drone strike in Yemen. The following month, 16-year-old Abdulrahman Anwar Al-Awlaki was killed in a strike in the same country. Mohammed, a North Carolina resident born in 1988, was killed by a drone likely in November 2011 within a tribal area of Pakistan. Mohammed was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2009 for conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons in a foreign country, and was considered armed and dangerous by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both Khan and the older al-Awlaki were suspected members of al-Qaeda and were affiliated with the group’s magazine, Inspire.

Last February, friends of Mohammad told a North Carolina newspaper that they believed he was dead.

“Farhan Mohammed says he heard in November that his friend was killed in a drone strike,” Raleigh’s WRAL News reported in 2012. “Jude Mohammad’s pregnant wife was hysterical about her husband’s death and called her mother-in-law in the Triangle to break the news, according to Sabra. The US government hasn’t confirmed Mohammad’s death, but the people who knew him in North Carolina say it’s probably true.”

Holder declined to explain why either Mohammad or the teenage al-Awlaki were killed.

How CounterTerrorism Equals Terrorism

DOUGLAS VALENTINE writes:

Obama’s speech yesterday was totally predictable.

He played the usual word games, defining the situation in self-serving terms like Counter-Terrorism.

You know that song by heart: Counter-Terrorism in general, and drone warfare and facilities like Guantanamo in particular, are moral, legal, and necessary to defend America.

Obama can never say that Counter-Terorism is an aggressive form of political warfare that is necessary to expand and police the American Empire, coerce and weaken strategic enemies (Russia and China), and control the American people by expanding government surveillance, reducing civil liberties, and through the type of propaganda he spewed yesterday, shaping the political attitudes of the American people.

By political attitudes, I do not mean Republican and Democratic Party politics. I mean the politics of the State imposing its will on the people, and how much authority the people grant the State in the name of security.

Obama can never explain that the State has been waging political warfare for 65 years, expanding the empire and warping American minds, as the executive branch incrementally increases its extra-legal powers through the member agencies of the National Security Council, primarily the super secret CIA.

Most importantly, Obama will never say that Counter-Terrorism = Terrorism. That it is pure political violence.

His speeches – indeed, all of stated National Security policy regarding Counter-Terrorism – is designed to deflect attention from the fact that America engages in terrorism and imperial aggression on a massive scale.

I’ll give you an example. A few weeks ago I went to the FBI office in Springfield, Massachusetts, about ten minutes from where I live. I asked a Special Agent what constitutes terrorism and support for terrorism. He referred me to Washington, DC. The PR person in DC sent me excerpts from a law book defining terrorism and support for terrorism.

As a follow up question I noted that the Syrian rebels, including associates of Al Qaeda, are engaged in documented acts of terrorism against the Syrian government. I asked the FBI if the CIA, which supports the Syria rebels, is not by definition engaged in support for terrorism?

The FBI said it has no authority over the CIA. It did not dispute that the CIA engages in terrorism.

The only thing that means anything to the FBI is that the United States government claims that the Syrian government terrorizes Syrians. Thus, CIA aid to the rebels constitutes Counter-Terrorism.

And that’s how Counter-Terrorism = Terrorism.   Always has, always will.

Drone warfare is the ultimate form of terrorism. It is political warfare designed to terrify foreign enemies and American citizens alike. It demonstrates to foreign enemies that the President can kill them and their supporters like a god hurling a lightning bolt from the sky. He knows each and everyone one of them by name and address, and he knows what they’re thinking.   He knows what you’re thinking too. Drone warfare lets Americans know that Obama is omnipotent, remorseless, and above the law.

Despite what Obama says, you know this to be true.

Drone warfare is no longer experimental, either. It’s here to stay, and you have been conditioned to accept it.

Kidnapping people, rendering them, and holding them without due process in torture centers like Guantanamo is also terrorism, designed for all the same psychological reasons as drone warfare.   Like drone warfare, administrative detention is not going away.

You know that too, and you know that you are powerless to do anything about it..

Doesn’t matter that you are more likely to be killed by a bee sting than a terrorist attack.

Doesn’t matter that 30,000 Americans die every year in automobile accidents. You will climb into your car and hurtle down the highway at 80 MPH, heedless of the danger. Fearlessly.

But you will fear Obama.

DOUGLAS VALENTINE is the author of five books, including The Phoenix Program and The Strength of the Wolf, which are available at his websites http://www.members.authorsguild.net/valentine/ and http://www.douglasvalentine.com/index.html . Valentine co-authored a detailed essay on US death squads in the Iraq War for the March issue of CounterPunch magazine. 

US Government Admits Extrajudicial Murder Of 4 American Citizens

Courtesy Of Democracy Now

“Since 2009, the United States, in the conduct of US counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda and its associated forces outside of areas of active hostilities, has specifically targeted and killed one US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki,” the letter reads in part. “The United States is further aware of three other US citizens who have been killed in such US counterterrorism operations over that same time period.” 

“The administration is determined to continue these extensive outreach efforts to communicate with the American people,” continued Holder. “To this end, the president has directed me to disclose certain information that until now has been properly classified. You and other members of your committee have on numerous occasions expressed a particular interest in the administration’s use of lethal force against US citizens. In light of this face, I am writing to disclose to you certain information about the number of US citizens who have been killed by US counterterrorism operations outside of areas of active hostilities.”

Drone strikes have become a signature counterterrorism tool used by the Obama administration and his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and have been attributed with killing roughly 5,000 persons abroad, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). But under the covert and protective umbrella of the Central Intelligence Agency, little has been formally acknowledged from Washington as to the details of these strikes.

Earlier this year, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) led a marathon filibuster on the floor of Congress to oppose the CIA’s drone program and demand the administration explain to elected lawmakers why the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is warranted in executing suspects, often killing innocent civilians as a result.

Of particular concern, Paul said, was whether or not the Obama administration would use the 2011 Yemen strike as justification to kill American citizens within the US. For 13 hours, he demanded the White House respond.

“I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination for the CIA,” Sen. Paul said. “I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”

Probing Obama's Drone Wars

A leaked US government document sets out a legal justification for President Barack Obama's policy of extrajudicial killing, as the United Nations is preparing its own investigation into drone strikes.

Obama's policy of using lethal force against suspected terrorists is coming under further scrutiny after a document alleged to be a Justice Department white paper was obtained by the US media. 

"The vast majority of people who have lost their lives through the use of targeted killing technology are not Americans. They are citizens of different states in which this technology is being used on the sovereign territory of another nation. And there does now need to be, absolutely clearly with the proliferation of this technology, an immediate and focused debate within the international community in which the US plays its proper and active part in seeking to achieve consensus." - Ben Emmerson, the UN special rapporteur for human rights

The document moves the goalposts in regards to when the government is authorised to carry out the killing of a US citizen, like Anwar al-Awlaki or his teenage son in Yemen in 2011. 

Specifically, it broadens the criteria of who might be considered an "imminent threat" to the US.

According to the white paper, there are three criteria for the legally acceptable extrajudicial killing of a US citizen who is identified as a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or an associated force.

Firstly, an "informed, high-level official" must conclude that a US citizen poses what it calls an imminent threat of violent attack against the US. Secondly, the government must conclude that capture is not feasible. And finally, the operation should be conducted under the applicable laws of war.

US citizens who are targeted need not have been charged with a crime, the paper states. Those targeted also do not need to be informed of the allegations against them. The US paper also contends that the government's actions cannot be reviewed by any court.

The Obama administration has made repeated use of targeted killings. Most of these killings are conducted through drone strikes.

"I get much more concerned about the policy itself, rather than the technology used to carry out that policy. Because ultimately if you start restricting the terms of the technology used ... there are other easy ways of striking people beyond just a remotely piloted aircraft; you don't have to rely on a drone strike. So that decision to kill people is what I really get concerned about." - Joshua Foust, a foreign policy analyst

Last week, the UN announced a major investigation into drone strikes.

Led by the UN's special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, the study will examine the extent of civilian casualties, and the wider consequences of an expanding global drone war.

It is estimated that, of the more than 3,000 people killed in US drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, 500 were civilians.

While US officials say that the strikes exclusively target terrorists, critics argue that drone strikes cause high civilian casualties. Critics also say the lethal attacks are illegal under international law.

From 'I Have A Dream' To 'I Have A Drone'

By Norman Solomon,
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

A simple twist of fate has set President Obama’s second Inaugural Address for January 21, the same day as the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday.

Obama made no mention of King during the Inauguration four years ago — but since then, in word and deed, the president has done much to distinguish himself from the man who said “I have a dream.”

After his speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, King went on to take great risks as a passionate advocate for peace.

After his Inaugural speech in January 2009, Obama has pursued policies that epitomize King’s grim warning in 1967: “When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.”

But Obama has not ignored King’s anti-war legacy. On the contrary, the president has gone out of his way to distort and belittle it.

In his eleventh month as president — while escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, a process that tripled the American troop levels there — Obama traveled to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. In his speech, he cast aspersions on the peace advocacy of another Nobel Peace laureate: Martin Luther King Jr.

The president struck a respectful tone as he whetted the rhetorical knife before twisting. “I know there’s nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naive — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King,” he said, just before swiftly implying that those two advocates of nonviolent direct action were, in fact, passive and naive. “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” Obama added.

Moments later, he was straining to justify American warfare: past, present, future. “To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason,” Obama said. “I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.”

Then came the jingo pitch: “Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

Crowing about the moral virtues of making war while accepting a peace prize might seem a bit odd, but Obama’s rhetoric was in sync with a key dictum from Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Laboring to denigrate King’s anti-war past while boasting about Uncle Sam’s past (albeit acknowledging “mistakes,” a classic retrospective euphemism for carnage from the vantage point of perpetrators), Obama marshaled his oratory to foreshadow and justify the killing yet to come under his authority.

Two weeks before the start of Obama’s second term, the British daily The Guardian noted that “U.S. use of drones has soared during Obama’s time in office, with the White House authorizing attacks in at least four countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is estimated that the CIA and the U.S. military have undertaken more than 300 drone strikes and killed about 2,500 people.”

The newspaper reported that a former member of Obama’s “counter-terrorism group” during the 2008 campaign, Michael Boyle, says the White House is now understating the number of civilian deaths due to the drone strikes, with loosened standards for when and where to attack: “The consequences can be seen in the targeting of mosques or funeral processions that kill non-combatants and tear at the social fabric of the regions where they occur. No one really knows the number of deaths caused by drones in these distant, sometimes ungoverned, lands.”

Although Obama criticized the Bush-era “war on terror” several years ago, Boyle points out, President Obama “has been just as ruthless and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor.”

Boyle’s assessment — consistent with the conclusions of many other policy analysts — found the Obama administration’s use of drones is “encouraging a new arms race that will empower current and future rivals and lay the foundations for an international system that is increasingly violent.”

In recent weeks, more than 50,000 Americans have signed a petition to Ban Weaponized Drones from the World. The petition says that “weaponized drones are no more acceptable than land mines, cluster bombs or chemical weapons.” It calls for President Obama “to abandon the use of weaponized drones, and to abandon his ‘kill list’ program regardless of the technology employed.”

Count on lofty rhetoric from the Inaugural podium. The spirit of Dr. King will be elsewhere.

Death By Algorithm

In a paper to be presented later this month before the Academy of Science and Engineering’s International Conference on Social Informatics, Shakarian and his West Point colleagues argue for a new way of using social-network analysis to target militants. Forget going after the leader of an extremist group, they say. At least right away.

“If you arrest that guy, the number of connections everyone else has becomes more similar. They all become leaders. You force that terror group to become more decentralized. You might be making it harder to defeat these organizations,” Shakarian says.

This chart shows how West Point’s “GREEDY_FRAGILE” algorithm renders a network brittle by removing relatively few nodes.

The second illustration depicts a terror network, as the algorithm centralizes it — and makes it easier to break. Photos: West Point

Instead, counterterrorists should work to remove militant lieutenants in such a way that terror leaders actually become morecentral to their organizations. That’s because a more centralized network is a more fragile one. And a fragile network can ultimately be smashed, once and for all.

The West Point team — which includes professors Devon Callahan, Jeff Nielsen, and Tony Johnson – wrote up a simple (less than 30-line) algorithm in Python they named GREEDY_FRAGILE. It looks for nodes that can be taken out to “maximize network-wide centrality” — concentrate connectivity in the terror leader, in other words. The professors tested GREEDY_FRAGILE against five data sets. the first is the social network of the al-Qaida members involved in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam; the other four are derived from real-world terror groups, but anonymized for academic use.

“In each of the five real-world terrorist networks that we examined, removal of only 12% of nodes can increase the network-wide centrality between 17% and 45%,” the West Point authors note in their paper. In other words, taking out just a few mid-level players make the whole organization much, much more fragile.

Interestingly, GREEDY_FRAGILE works even when the exact shape of the network is unknown — or when certain nodes can’t be targeted, for political or intelligence reasons. In other words, it takes into account some real-world complications that counterterrorists might face.

Now, this is just a lab experiment. No actual terrorists were harmed in the writing of this paper. The algorithm only looks at “degree” centrality — the number of ties a node has. It doesn’t examine metrics like network “closeness,” which finds the shortest possible path between two nodes. Nor does it take into account the different roles played by different nodes — financier, propagandist, bomb-maker. That’s why the work is funded by the Army Research Office, which handles the service’s most basic R&D efforts.

What’s more, the authors stress that their network-breaking techniques might not be a good fit for every counterterror plan. “It may be desirable to keep certain terrorist or insurgent leaders in place to restrain certain, more radical elements of their organization,” they write.

In fact, the authors strongly hint that they’re not necessarily on board with the Obama administration’s kill-don’t-capture approach to handling terror networks.

“We would like to note that the targeting of individuals in a terrorist or insurgent network does not necessarily mean to that they should be killed,” Shakarian and his colleagues write. “In fact, for ‘shaping operations’ as the ones described in this paper, the killing of certain individuals in the network may be counter-productive. This is due to the fact that the capture of individuals who are likely emergent leaders may provide further intelligence on the organization in question.”

Via: "Wired"

Special Operations Forces Are No Silver Bullet

SEALs and Rangers Are No Answer To Our Military Woes

William S. Lind conveys the following wisdom:

In the face of the failure of America’s conventional military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Washington establishment seeks a silver bullet, a “force of choice” that can win. It thinks it has found one in Special Operations Forces, which include most famously the Navy’s SEALs and the Army’s Green Berets.

Experience is the best teacher, as the old saying goes, but she kills all her pupils. Experience is likely to teach us that against Fourth Generation non-state enemies Special Operations Forces are no silver bullet. We could learn the same lesson beforehand through a bit of reflection, without expending the lives of some of our best and most admirable men.

The first reason is that the strategic objectives the foreign-policy establishment sets are unattainable by any military. Not even an army of elves and ents could remake Third World hellholes into Switzerland. And as Russell Kirk wrote, there is no surer way to make a man your enemy than to tell him you are going to remake him in your image for his own good.

Second, while there is wide variance within the Special Operations community, most SOF units share the same problems that afflict our conventional forces. They, too, are stuck in the Second Generation of modern war, with an inward-focused culture of order that reduces the complex art of war to putting firepower on targets.

SOF are more skilled at techniques than their conventional counterparts, but techniques are not a typical American weakness. Our armed forces are technically capable across the board.

Techniques and tactics are not only different but opposite in nature—the first is formulistic and the second should be situational—and like our conventional forces, SOF are mostly not tactically competent, at least from what I have seen of them. Few American Special Operations units know light-infantry (“Jaeger”) tactics, without which they depend tactically on massive fire support (usually air strikes) that in Fourth Generation war works to the enemy’s advantage. They do not even know the basic Third Generation maneuver-warfare tactics the German army evolved late in World War I. They use their superior techniques merely to put more fire more accurately on more targets in wars of attrition against enemies who are not sensitive to losses.

SOF’s tactical obsolescence is doubly harmful in that they are often employed to train the forces of the weak states we are attempting to support. By teaching them Second Generation firepower/attrition war, we undermine their effectiveness while making them dependent on firepower they are unlikely to have once we depart. Beyond the level of techniques, we are too frequently the Typhoid Mary of military advice.

The picture at higher levels of war is also grim. SOF understand operational art no better than the rest of the American military, which is to say they can spell it. (This is now evident in the increasingly desperate attempts of the American command in Afghanistan to respond to green-on-blue attacks. They are trying to counter an operational move by the Taliban at the tactical level, which is doomed to failure.) This is an especially serious failing for Special Operations Forces because what makes an operation “special” is that it is operational, not just tactical. The result is that most American “special operations” are merely tactical actions with fancy techniques, the equivalent of raids by police SWAT teams. Our Special Operations Forces get dribbled away in minor events that, again, add up to a war of attrition. Night raids to kill or capture Taliban squad leaders are a long way from Otto Skorzeny’s rescue of Mussolini, which was the model special operation.

SOF fare no better at the strategic level. There, attrition has been and remains the American way of war, and Special Operations Forces are employed accordingly.

In Fourth Generation war, Special Operations Forces share yet another weakness with our conventional forces: they are American. With the important exception of Special Forces (the Green Berets), they take America with them wherever they go to war. After an action, they go back to a base that is “little America,” with air conditioning, steak, and the Internet. The locals, whether enemies or allies, look on with envy that soon shades into hatred.

This feeds a central problem in Fourth Generation war, what Martin van Creveld calls the power of weakness. With our overwhelming technical and equipment advantages, luxurious (by local standards) way of life, and nice country to go home to after we have wrecked someone else’s, we are Goliath. Our opponents, however repulsive, become David. How many people identify with Goliath?

In the end, Special Operations Forces differ from the conventional armed forces that have failed repeatedly against Fourth Generation opponents primarily by putting on a better show. Their techniques can be dazzling. But few wars are won by superiority in technique.

A general rule of warfare is that a higher level trumps a lower, and technique is the lowest level of all. Our SEALs, Rangers, Delta, SF, and all the rest are vastly superior to the Taliban or al-Qaeda at techniques. But those opponents have sometimes shown themselves able at tactics, operations, and strategy. We can only defeat them by making ourselves superior at those higher levels of war. There, regrettably, Special Operations Forces have nothing to offer. They are just another lead bullet in an obsolete Second Generation arsenal.

Via: "The American Conservative"

UK Support For US Drones May Be War Crime

By Ian Cobain,

The British government's support for US drone operations over Pakistan may involve acts of assisting murder or even war crimes, the high court heard on Tuesday.

In the first serious legal challenge in the English courts to the drones campaign, lawyers for a young Pakistani man whose father was killed by a strike from an unmanned aircraft are seeking to have the sharing of UK locational intelligence declared unlawful.

The British government has declined to state whether or not its signals intelligence agency GCHQ passes information in support of the CIA drone operations over Pakistan, although the court heard that media reports suggest that it does.

The case opened as the RAF confirmed that it is to double the number of its own drones flying combat and surveillance operations over Afghanistan. The five additional aircraft will be operated from the UK for the first time, rather than the US. The UK's existing Reaper drones, which are used to target suspected insurgents in Helmand province, have been operated from Creech air force base in Nevada because the RAF has not had the capability to fly them from Britain.

Martin Chamberlain, counsel for Khan, said that a newspaper article in 2010 had reported that GCHQ was using telephone intercepts to provide the US authorities with locational intelligence on leading militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

The report suggested that the Cheltenham-based agency was proud of this work, which was said to be "in strict accordance with the law".

On the contrary, Chamberlain said, any GCHQ official who passed locational intelligence to the CIA knowing or believing that it could be used to facilitate a drone strike would be committing a serious criminal offence.

"The participation of a UK intelligence official in US drone strikes, by passing intelligence, may amount to the offence of encouraging or assisting murder," he said. Alternatively, it could amount to a war crime or a crime against humanity, he added.

Between June 2004 and September this year, according to research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone strikes killed between 2,562 and 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom between 474 and 881 were civilians, including 176 children.

With the number of drone strikes increasing sharply under the Obama administration, the London case is one of several being brought by legal activists around the world in an attempt to challenge their legality of the programme.

In Pakistan, lawyers and human rights activists are mounting two separate court claims: one is intended to trigger a criminal investigation into the actions of two former CIA officials, while the second is seeking a declaration that the strikes amount to acts of war, in order to pressurise the Pakistani air force into shooting down drones operating in the country's airspace.

Via: "The Guardian"

The US and Honduras

 US Financial Aid To A Police and Army Linked To A Campaign Of Extra-Judicial Killings

Honduras has become the newest front in the US war on drugs in Latin America. The US has provided financial support for both the police and the military there in spite of its deep corruption issues.

Furthermore, members of both institutions have been linked to a range of killings. Political dissidents, human rights workers and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community have all been killed at alarming rates.

In May, a mission in the Moskitia region, which was led by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), left four innocent civilians killed and four others wounded. It was followed by two more incidents where a US DEA agent shot and killed an alleged drug trafficker. Local communities have demanded a thorough investigation but so far nothing has been done.

The US has a long and controversial history in Honduras. In the 1980s, the US built a base there and trained an elite Honduran military unit. That unit went on to carry out tortures, kidnappings and killings.

Who is responsible? What should be the role of the US in Honduras? And what happened that night in the Moskitia when a US raid ended up leaving innocent people dead?

Thousands Of Clandestine Operatives Fueling A Shadow War

There are now many thousands of clandestine operatives, nearly all of them armed and equipped with a license to kidnap, torture and kill, working overseas or domestically with little or no oversight and virtually no transparency.

Chris Hedges writes,

A Swedish documentary filmmaker released a film last year called “Last Chapter—Goodbye Nicaragua.” In it he admitted that he unknowingly facilitated a bombing, almost certainly orchestrated by the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which took the lives of three reporters I worked with in Central America. One of them, Linda Frazier, was the mother of a 10-year-old son. Her legs were torn apart by the blast, at La Penca, Nicaragua, along the border with Costa Rica, in May of 1984. She bled to death as she was being taken to the nearest hospital, in Ciudad Quesada, Costa Rica.

The admission by Peter Torbiornsson that he unwittingly took the bomber with him to the press conference was a window into the sordid world of espionage, terrorism and assassination that was an intimate part of every conflict I covered. It exposed the cynicism of undercover operatives on all sides, men and women who lie and deceive for a living, who betray relationships, including between each other, who steal and who carry out murder. One knows them immediately. Their ideological 

allegiances do not matter. They have the faraway eyes of the disconnected, along with nebulous histories and suspicious and vague associations. They tell incongruous personal stories and practice small deceits that are part of a pathological inability to tell the truth. They can be personable, even charming, but they are also invariably vain, dishonest and sinister. They cannot be trusted. It does not matter what side they are on. They were all the same. Gangsters.

All states and armed groups recruit and use members of this underclass. These personalities gravitate to intelligence agencies, terrorist cells, homeland security, police departments, the special forces and revolutionary groups where they can live a life freed from moral and legal constraints. Right and wrong are banished from their vocabulary. They disdain the constraints of democracy. They live in this nebulous underworld to satisfy their lusts for power and violence. They have no interest in diplomacy and less in peace. Peace would put them out of business; for them it is simply the temporary absence of war, which they are sure is inevitable. Their job is to use violence to purge the world of evil. And in the United States they have taken as hostages our diplomatic service and our foreign policy establishment. The CIA has become a huge private army, as Chalmers Johnson pointed out in his book “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” that is “unaccountable to the Congress, the press or the public because everything it does is secret.” C. Wright Mills called the condition “military metaphysics”—“the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military.”

Since the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)—which includes the Green Berets, the Army Rangers and the Navy SEALs—has seen its budget quadrupled. There are now some 60,000 USSOCOM operatives, whom the president can dispatch to kill without seeking congressional approval or informing the public. Add to this the growth of intelligence operatives. As Dana Priest and William M. Arkin reported in The Washington Post, “Twenty-four [new intelligence] organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips, and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008, and 2009. In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11.”

There are now many thousands of clandestine operatives, nearly all of them armed and equipped with a license to kidnap, torture and kill, working overseas or domestically with little or no oversight and virtually no transparency. We have created a state within a state. A staggering 40 percent of the defense budget is secret, as is the budget of every intelligence agency. I tasted enough of this subterranean world to fear it. When you empower these kinds of people you snuff out the rule of law. You empower criminals and assassins. One of these old CIA operatives, Felix Rodríguez, was in El Salvador when I was there during the war in the early 1980s. He wore Che Guevara’s Rolex watch. He had removed it from Guevara’s body after ordering Guevara to be executed in the Bolivian jungle. I would later run into clandestine operatives in the Middle East, Africa or Yugoslavia I knew from the wars in Central America. We would invariably chat briefly in Spanish. It was a strange fraternity, even if I was the outsider. The Great Game.

These black forces have created as much havoc, or blowback, in the Middle East as they did in Latin America. And by the time they are done there will be so many jihadists willing to blow themselves up to vanquish America, the Islamic radicals will be running out of explosives. These clandestine operatives peddle a self-fulfilling prophecy. They foment the very instability that allows them to continue to proliferate like cockroaches. The dozens of CIA kidnappings—“extraordinary renditions”—of radical Islamists in the late 1990s, especially from the Balkans, many shipped to countries such as Egypt where they were tortured and murdered by our allies, was the fuse that lit the al-Qaida bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the attacks on the Navy destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden on Oct. 12, 2000. Militant Islamists had publicly vowed reprisals for these renditions.

“Let me tell you about these intelligence guys,” President Lyndon Johnson is quoted as saying in Robert M. Gates book “From the Shadows.” “When I was growing up in Texas, we had a cow named Bessie. I’d get her in the stanchion, seat myself, and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day, I’d worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn’t paying attention and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that’s what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it.”

These operatives invariably prey on the useful idiots, those naive idealists who bind themselves to a cause and are oblivious to the evil they serve, or to those simply greedy for money and a little power. Joseph Conrad got it right in “The Secret Agent,” his novel about anarchist revolutionaries who recruit the mentally disabled Stevie to place a bomb at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Al-Qaida repeated this scenario when it convinced Richard Reid, a petty criminal who was challenged mentally, to get on an airplane with a shoe bomb. The CIA is no different. When the CIA could not induce the Chilean army commander, General René Schneider, to overthrow the elected government of Salvador Allende, it recruited Chilean soldiers to assassinate him. The CIA provided submachine guns, ammunition and $50,000 to the group. It shipped the money and weapons from Washington to Santiago in the regular diplomatic pouch and then hand-delivered the cash and guns to the hit men. On the afternoon of Oct. 22, 1970, the killers surrounded Schneider’s car and shot him. He died three days later. Allende was overthrown in a U.S.-orchestrated coup on Sept. 11, 1973. And this is, basically, what happened in the La Penca bombing in Nicaragua in 1984. Torbiornsson, one of those dimwitted “internationalists” who showed up in Managua under the guise of journalism or solidarity, allowed himself to be used by the Sandinista intelligence service. The target of the bombing was the mercurial rebel leader Eden Pastora, once a commander with the Sandinistas who had defected to fight for the U.S.-backed Contras (the CIA found him as unmanageable as the Sandinistas had) before returning to become part of the Sandinista government in Managua. Pastora was wounded in the blast.

I was in El Salvador in May 1984 when Pastora offered to hold a meeting with journalists in La Penca. It was a long way to travel for one story. I decided in the end not to make the trip with my colleagues. It was a decision that may have saved my life.

What none of us knew until Torbiornsson’s admission is that he had been approached by Sandinista intelligence officials and asked to take along a Sandinista spy whose name was supposedly Per Anker Hansen. When the bombing was first investigated, Torbiornsson lied. He told investigators that he had met Hansen, who passed himself off as a Danish photographer, six weeks before the bombing, when they stayed in the same hotel in Costa Rica. Now Torbiornsson concedes he was introduced to Hansen in Managua. He said that though he knew Hansen was a spy, he had no inkling he was an assassin.

“It took me a long time to understand that it was my friends who put the bomb,” Torbiornsson told the BBC in speaking of the Sandinistas. “It has been like a wound in my soul. … I cannot emphasize how sorry I am.”

Hansen was, according to an investigation carried out by reporters Juan Tamayo and Doug Vaughn at The Miami Herald, in fact a man named Vital Roberto Gaguine. He worked clandestinely with the Sandinistas in the 1980s and was a member of the Argentine People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP). He brought and ignited the bomb. He reportedly died in 1989 while carrying out an armed assault with 18 others on army barracks outside Buenos Aires. Enrique Haraldo Gorrioran, who was the commander of the ERP cell in Managua and who ordered the barracks attack, but who did not take part, is reputed to have been a double agent, sending Gaguine and his companions to assured slaughter. He is reportedly living in Brazil from the earnings the revolutionary group made from kidnappings and bank robberies. Trust is exiled in this world. Those who willingly sacrifice others are often themselves sacrificed.

The Newsweek correspondent Susan Morgan, standing in the front, shielded Torbiornsson from the full force of the blast. Morgan suffered serious injuries in one arm, her legs and face. The BBC recently ran a video clip of Morgan confronting the hapless Torbiornsson, who seems still unable to fully understand his culpability.

The killers and the paymasters, the spies and gangsters, the terrorists and jihadists, on all sides of the divide, have grown in numbers to carry out a vast war in the shadows. They are determined to perpetuate the senseless violence and mayhem that are the currency of their profession. And they make peace and diplomacy impossible. That is their goal. Sen. Frank Church in 1975, after chairing a Senate committee investigation into U.S. intelligence activities, defined “covert action” as a “semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.”

The multitudes of crimes these killers, torturers, kidnappers, propagandists, special operations units and spies have carried out in our name are well known to those outside our gates. There are hundreds of millions of people who have a tragic intimacy with the twisted and brutal soul of American imperialism. Okinawans. Guatemalans. Cubans. Congolese. Brazilians. Argentines. Indonesians. Iranians. Palestinians. Panamanians. Vietnamese. 

Cambodians. Filipinos. South Koreans. Taiwanese. Nicaraguans. Salvadorans. Afghans. Iraqis. Yemenis. Somalis. They can all tell us who we are, if we can listen. But we do not. We are as ignorant, gullible and naive as children. We celebrate fictitious red-white-and-blue virtues while our clandestine armies, which at times achieve short-term objectives but always finally plunge us deeper into violence, have steadily weakened and discredited the nation as well as the purported values for which it stands. These clandestine armies travel the globe, awash in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, sowing dragon’s teeth that rise up later, like the warriors in the myth of the Golden Fleece, to become mirror images of our own monstrosities.