When war is desk job, drone pilots burn out

nbcnews

Nidhi Subbaraman 

Driving a war drone is a stressful business. Shifts up to 12 hours long are stretches of dullness, watching and waiting, interrupted by flashes of intense activity in which pilots must make life-or-death decisions. Not their own life or death, however.

U.S. Air Force/ A pilot trainee flies an MQ-1 Predator simulator

Pilots may be thousands of miles away from the flying weapons system they're operating. They often head home at the end of the day, as if returning from any other office job, maybe picking up milk on the way. But while at work, their drones' onboard cameras put them in a unique position to watch people being killed and injured as a direct result of their actions.

As psychologists learn more about the mental scarring warfare leaves on drone pilots — caused by long shift hours, isolation, witnessing casualties and those Jekyll-and-Hyde days split between battlefield and home — experts from within the U.S. Air Force are calling for a review of drone pilot selection.

Brad Hoagland, an Air Force colonel and visiting researcher at the Brookings Institution, and a fighter-jet pilot and operations commander of 23 years himself, believes that drone pilots could be picked better, and that existing selection techniques are due to be updated now that the service has accumulated almost a decade of research into the psychological characteristics of drone pilots.

"The thrill of taking off from a runway, flying a mission and then coming back and landing at the end of the mission — that’s very exciting," he told NBC News. "But I think that’s a different type of person who can do that, than someone who is maybe wired to fly an unmanned system from a console 7,000 miles away. It’s a different psychological makeup requirement to execute the mission."

Right stuff, wrong stuff"I think we are still trying to figure out exactly what the 'right stuff' is," Wayne Chappelle, a clinical psychologist consulting for Air Force Medical at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, told NBC News. "We have a general idea ... but I certainly think we're probably more aware of what the wrong stuff is versus the right stuff."

The trouble is that spotting the known positive attributes in up-and-coming drone pilots is harder than spotting the negative attributes. To begin with, Chappelle drew up a portrait of the ideal drone pilot from the recorded testimony of 82 drone pilots and their supervisors in a 2011 report.

Good drone pilots, according to Chappelle's findings, have excellent memory for pictures and sounds. They are bombarded with sounds and images from multiple screens through their long shifts, but parse that data quickly, cutting through the noise. They're multitaskers and collaborators.

"These guys are very smart, very bright in a wide range of areas. They are emotionally resilient and highly stress tolerant and very motivated," Chappelle said.

People who have a history of abuse or dependence on alcohol, drugs or other substances, anxiety or depression, and cognitive impairments such as learning disabilities tend to make bad drone pilots.

Although the strengths of a drone pilot differ from the strengths of a manned fighter pilot, Chappelle said the psychological screening protocol for both is the same — and hasn't changed in a decade. "We're still looking at ways to improve and expand upon the screening procedures."

In his research, Hoagland has found that washout rates among undergraduate pilot trainees headed to crafts like the F-16 are traditionally about 10 to 15 percent. But drone pilot trainees exit at 30 percent (though that's down from 45 percent a few years ago). Pilots may drop out, but more often, they fail to meet some flight or academic criteria along the way, Hoagland said.

And when they do graduate, they receive mental health diagnoses at a rate on par with pilots who fly in aircraft, and at much higher rates than other non-pilot Air Force personnel, according to a February 2013 report by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center.

NBC News has requested to interview a pilot or pilot instructor at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where drone pilots are trained, but to date the Air Force has declined the request without further explanation.

Testing, testing
In an upcoming report headed to the Pentagon, Hoagland will suggest some fixes for his higher-ups to consider.

For one, though the Air Force has a test called the Pilot Candidate Scoring Method, not all pilot candidates — of drones or manned craft — are given the exam. (The Air Force Academy, for example, only recently started administering it, and only on an "experimental" basis.)

"I can't believe we as an Air Force haven't standardized this," Hoagland says. Once everyone's taking the test, and baseline scores are set, those scores can be mined for indicators as to who might be better suited to fly an F-16 and who might be destined for a drone. "It's a common sense approach."

Also, though it's been standard procedure to assess concentration, attention, psychomotor skills as part of the Medical Flight Screening-Neurosychiatric test in pre-screened pilots-to-be, that information is not used in the selection process. Tests do weed out the medically and psychologically unfit — Hoagland thinks it would be an easy next step to ask: "Is this person suited for an unmanned or manned system?"

The coming swarm
As the Air Force's drone program grows, so does the importance of pilot selection. What started in 2004 as five drone combat patrols — four aircraft each — will to swell to 65 patrols by 2014. By 2010, Predators had logged more than a million combat hours, more than any other military bird. And today's population of 1,300 combat drone pilots will be joined by 500 more in the next few years.

And as autonomous systems evolve, the capabilities of unmanned craft will, too. The Air Force will shift to a system with multiple vehicles flown in tandem, answering to a single pilot. These "swarm" handlers will have more complex tasks heaped on them earlier in their career.

"In terms of who we need to have, I think we're on a learning curve there," Anthony Tvaryanas, a doctor of aerospace medicine and technical advisor with the 711th Human Systems Integration Directorate at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, told NBC News.

"If [a pilot is] operating a swarm, what are you looking for in that person? I don't think anyone's looking into those concepts," Tvaryanas said.

"As we get from a pilot in an airplane to a pilot outside the airplane to a pilot controlling 100 airplanes, I think we're approaching the limits of what [prior experience and studies] can inform us. There's a need to look back at training," he added.

quittingtomorrow

When war is desk job, drone pilots burn out

U.S. Launches Drone from Aircraft Carrier for First Time

ExtraWorldNews 

breitbart

(AP) - A drone the size of a fighter jet took off from the deck of an American aircraft carrier for the first time Tuesday in a test flight that could eventually open the way for the U.S. to launch unmanned aircraft from just about any place in the world.

The X-47B is the first drone designed to take off and land on a carrier, meaning the U.S. military would not need permission from other countries to use their bases.

"As our access to overseas ports, forward operating locations and airspace is diminished around the world, the value of the aircraft carrier and the air wing becomes more and more important," Rear Adm. Ted Branch, commander of Naval Air Forces Atlantic, said after the flight off the Virginia coast. "So today is history."

The move to expand the capabilities of the nation's drones comes amid growing criticism of America's use of Predators and Reapers to gather intelligence and carry out lethal missile attacks against terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

Critics in the U.S. and abroad have charged that drone strikes cause widespread civilian deaths and are conducted with inadequate oversight.

Still, defense analysts say drones are the future of warfare.

The new Joint Strike Fighter jet "might be the last manned fighter the U.S. ever builds. They're so expensive, they're so complex, and you put a human at risk every time it takes off from a carrier," said James Lewis, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"This is the next generation of military technology _ the unmanned vehicles, the unmanned submersibles, the unmanned aircraft. This will be the future of warfare, and it will be a warfare that is a little less risky for humans but maybe a little more effective when it comes to delivering weapons and effect."

While the X-47B isn't intended for operational use, it will help Navy officials develop future carrier-based drones. Those drones could begin operating by 2020, according to Rear Adm. Mat Winter, the Navy's program executive officer for unmanned aviation and strike weapons.

The X-47B is far bigger than the Predator, has three times the range and can be programmed to carry out missions with no human intervention, the Navy said.

While the X-47B isn't a stealth aircraft, it was designed with the low profile of one. That will help in the development of future stealth drones, which would be valuable as the military changes its focus from the Middle East to the Pacific, where a number of countries' air defenses are a lot stronger than Afghanistan's.

"Unmanned systems would be the likely choice in a theater or an environment that was highly defended or dangerous where we wouldn't want to send manned aircraft," Branch said.

During Tuesday's flight, the X-47B used a steam catapult to launch, just as traditional Navy warplanes do. The unarmed aircraft then landed at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland.

The next critical test for the tailless plane will come this summer, when it attempts to land on a moving aircraft carrier, one of the most difficult tasks for Navy pilots.

Earlier this month, the X-47B successfully landed at the air station using a tailhook to catch a cable and bring it to a quick stop, just as planes setting down on carriers have to do.

The X-47B has a wingspan of about 62 feet and weighs 14,000 pounds, versus nearly 49 feet and about 1,100 pounds for the Predator.

While Predators are typically piloted via remote control by someone in the U.S., the X-47B relies only on computer programs to tell it where to fly unless a human operator needs to step in. Eventually, one person may be able to control multiple unmanned aircraft at once, Branch said.

The group Human Rights Watch said it is troubled by what it described as a trend toward the development of fully autonomous weapons that can choose and fire upon targets with no human intervention.

"We're saying you must have meaningful human control over key battlefield decisions of who lives and who dies. That should not be left up to the weapons system itself," said Steve Goose, director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch.

Developed by Northrop Grumman under a 2007 contract at a cost of $1.4 billion, the X-47B is capable of carrying weapons and providing around-the-clock intelligence, surveillance and targeting, according to the Navy, which has been giving updates on the project over the past few years.

The X-47B can reach an altitude of more than 40,000 feet and has a range of more than 2,100 nautical miles, versus 675 for the Predator. The Navy plans to show the drone can be refueled in flight, which would give it even greater range.

U.S. Launches Drone from Aircraft Carrier for First Time

Robo-bugs! World's smallest bot takes off

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Robo-bugs! World's smallest bot takes off

The Drone Shield:Tiny Device Will Detect Domestic Drones

Pat Dollard

Excerpted from US NEWS
By Jason Koebler

Worried about drones spying on you? Soon, a device might be able to send you text and email alerts that let you know when a drone is nearby.A Washington, D.C.-based engineer is working on the “Drone Shield,” a small, Wi-Fi-connected device that uses a microphone to detect a drone’s “acoustic signatures” (sound frequency and spectrum) when it’s within range.

The company’s founder, John Franklin, who has been working in aerospace engineering for seven years, says he hopes to start selling the device sometime this year. He is using the Kickstarter-like IndieGoGo to finance the project.

The device will cost $69 and will be about the size of a USB thumb drive. It will use Raspberry Pi – a tiny, $25 computer – and commercially available microphones to detect drones. He says he imagines that people will attach the Drone Shield to their fences or roofs to protect their home from surveillance.

“People will get the alert and then close their blinds,” Franklin says.He is currently working on an open-source database of drone sounds that the detector will check what it’s hearing against. Other devices with motors, such as lawn mowers and weed-whackers, will also be included to reduce false positives. Drone owners will be asked to record the sound of their drones to be included in the database. When the Drone Shield identifies a drone, it’ll flash and send an email and text message alert to a homeowner.

Franklin says that most commercially available drones have to come relatively close to a home in order to spy. More sophisticated drones, such as Predators, would fly too high to detect.

He got the idea for the device after getting into a bit of hot water with his neighbor, which Franklin says alerted him to the reality of people’s concerns about drones.”I bought a [drone] from Amazon and was going to use it to look at my roof. The wind took it and I crashed it into my neighbor’s yard. It freaked him out once he noticed it had a camera on it,” Franklin says. “It sort of dawned on me that it’s so easy to invade someone’s privacy with a couple hundred dollar drone.”

The Drone Shield:Tiny Device Will Detect Domestic Drones

Laser weapon takes out flying drone

Laser weapon takes out flying drone

Drones crash (a lot) but the military's safety lessons may help civilians

NBCNews

National Transportation Safety Board

The remains of a Predator B "Reaper" drone, sprinkled across the Arizona mountainside near Nogales, in this April 2006 photo released by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Around 9:30 on the night of May 1, 2011, an Air Force Predator that had been in the air for 18 hours suddenly hurtled towards the ground at 400 feet per minute, crashing near a U.S. base at Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

The soldiers who brought the craft back to camp had to cut off its wings so it would fit in their vehicles. Cause of crash? Engine failure, clogged oil filter.

Five years earlier, over American soil, a similar incident occurred. A Department of Homeland Security drone on a routine border patrol was destroyed after nosediving into hilly scrubland near Nogales, Ariz. Investigations revealed a number of causes: pilot errors, display failures, poor design.

Big drones actually crash a lot. Official statistics on large unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) accident rates vary, but drones are 30 to 300 times more likely to crash than small civil aircrafts, according to one estimate. According to a 2005 Department of Defense report, every 100,000 flight hours saw 191 AAI Shadow UAVs destroyed or in need of drastic repairs, compared to just four manned F-16s.

Drones suffer from the usual aircraft mechanical and pilot failures, but they also grapple with uniquely drone-ish issues: They're harder to launch and land, and lost communication links pose a problem. But as drones spend more time aloft, operators and craft manufacturers have had a chance to find and iron out kinks in the machinery. Most drones today are of the larger military variety, but that'll change. In 2015, regulators will begin granting permits to a wider array of small drone operators in U.S. airspace. Fortunately, they'll have detailed obituaries of hundreds of lost UAVs to help inform their safety guidelines.

Why do they fail?
Because they don't carry a human life, drones are sometimes pushed harder than piloted planes. In one instance, a Reaper drone was running perilously low on fuel as it neared its destination, but controllers felt that the target was important enough to sacrifice a drone. So they kept going, Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute told NBC News, citing a private Air Force briefing.

In another instance, a drone ran out of missiles. "But they really wanted the target, so they turned that system into a kamikaze," Singer said.

Like manned aircrafts, UAVs can run out of fuel or encounter mechanical failures, John Hansman, an aviation researcher at MIT, told NBC News. Though such problems aren't drone specific, they are significant — a DoD survey showed that 57 percent of accidents until 2005 were caused by flight control issues or engine or transmission problems.

National Transportation and Safety Board

Another 2006 photo of the downed Predator from Nogales, Ariz.

The same DoD survey said 14 percent of failures involved lost communication links. "Even if things move at the speed of light over fiber optics, there’s still a delay," Singer told NBC News.

It's getting better
These days, takeoffs and landings are controlled by a local crew within sight of the craft, while in-air maneuvers are controlled by mission control at a base in the U.S. To help drone pilots, researchers like MIT's Missy Cummings and Raza Waraich are studying ways to develop control systems and environments in which drone operators can operate more efficiently.

The unmanned craft are getting smarter, too. AeroVironment's small military drones can return to their launch point or land at a safe spot if their communication link falls silent, company spokesman Steve Gatlin told NBC News.

A tall tree or hill can interrupt the link, so some AeroVironment drones are programmed to climb in altitude and reestablish that link. If General Atomics' Predator or Grey Eagle UAVs lose contact, they can navigate to different air space and try connecting again. If that doesn't work, the crafts navigate back to the operating base. The Grey Eagle can even land itself.

Air Force stats reflect these improvements. In 2005, for every 100,000 hours of flight time, 22 drones cost the Air Force $2 million or more (each!). By 2012, that number fell to 3.5 per 100,000-hour interval, Air Force Safety Center spokesperson Masao Doi told NBC News via email. According to General Atomics, the original Predator now encounters 8.5 mishaps every 100,000 flight hours.

What about smaller flying robots?
The military tends to fly big UAVs, but the drones that may soon dot the skies over local municipalities are smaller, weighing under 55 lbs. For now, safety data on civil drones is scarce, Gerald Dillingham, a civil aviation expert at the Government Accountability Office told NBC News.

In preparation for a more drone-friendly U.S. airspace, the Federal Aviation Administration is working with the DoD. They signed an agreement in 2011, in which the DoD agreed to share military drone data on safety with the civilian regulatory agency.

Meanwhile, the FAA has begun collecting accident reports from companies that apply to test their drones domestically, and will set up six test sites within the U.S. to help establish the airworthiness of smaller UAVs.

"It’s still not black and white," Dillingham said about applying data from military crashes to civilian safety concerns. However, "I do still say that some information is a lot better than no information."

Drones crash (a lot) but the military's safety lessons may help civilians

Holder: No drone strikes on Americans in US, except in ’extraordinary circumstance’

Michael Reynolds / EPA

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

openchannel

By Michael Isikoff
National Investigative Correspondent, NBC News

The Obama administration has no intention of carrying out drone strikes against suspected terrorists in the United States, but could use them in response to “an extraordinary circumstance” such as the 9/11 terror attacks, according to a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder obtained by NBC News.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who received the March 4 letter from Holder, called the attorney general’s refusal to rule out drone strikes in the U.S. “more than frightening.” 

The letter from Holder surfaced just as the Senate Intelligence Committee was voting 12-3 to approve White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan to be CIA director. The vote came after the White House agreed to share additional classified memos on targeted drone strikes against U.S. citizens overseas.

Paul had threatened to hold up Brennan's confirmation on the floor of the Senate if the administration did not clarify whether targeted drone strikes could be used inside the U.S.

In his letter, Holder called the question of drone strikes inside the U.S. "entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur and we hope no president will ever have to confront. … As a policy matter, moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat."

But Holder then appeared to leave the door open to such strikes in extreme circumstances.

Read the full letter

"It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the president could  conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on Dec. 7, 1941 and Sept. 11, 2001."

Holder: No drone strikes on Americans in US, except in ’extraordinary circumstance’

Drones to be used to find lost dogs, cats?

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Drones to be used to find lost dogs, cats?

Inside the most dangerous place on Earth: Pakistan’s ground zero for terrorists

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Inside the most dangerous place on Earth: Pakistan’s ground zero for terrorists

Document Found Instructing al-Qaeda How to Evade Drones

breitbart

By William Bigelow 

An al-Qaeda document listing 22 ways for avoiding drones has been found inside a manila envelope in a building in Mali.

The associated press found the document in Timbuktu after Islamists fled from a French military assault. The document reveals that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghbreb saw that drones would eventually be used against them, and also reveals that information has been passed from al-Qaeda elements in one area of the world to another somewhere else.

Bruce Riedel, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institute, said, “This new document... shows we are no longer dealing with an isolated local problem, but with an enemy which is reaching across continents to share advice.” Col Cedric Leighton, who helped in the effort to find Osama Bin Laden by creating the Predator drone program, said, "These are not dumb techniques. It shows that they are acting pretty astutely. What it does is, it buys them a little bit more time - and in this conflict, time is key. And they will use it to move away from an area, from a bombing raid, and do it very quickly."

Among the techniques outlined was the idea of stretching a mat over a car, which would deceive a drone into thinking the mat was lying on the ground, as well as deceiving heat sensors by keeping a car it covered overnight the same temperature as the ground.

The author of the document is Abdallah bin Muhammad, the pseudonym for a senior commander of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. After the U.S. killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in September 2011 and al-Qaeda second-in-command Abu Yahya al-Libi in Pakistan in June 2012, the document was printed three times in Arabic on various jihadist sites. The latest publication of it was only two weeks ago.

Osama Bin Laden wrote some of the guidelines, including the admonition to hide under trees: "I want the brothers in the Islamic Maghreb to know that planting trees helps the mujahedeen and gives them cover. Trees will give the mujahedeen the freedom to move around especially if the enemy sends spying aircrafts to the area."

The al-Qaeda fighters did just that in Mali, fleeing to houses with large mango trees where they could hide their vehicles under the trees’ leaves. Another technique was to cover their cars in mud.

Document Found Instructing al-Qaeda How to Evade Drones

President Obama, Would You Send a Drone to Cuba to Kill the Weathermen?

Pjmedia
By Paula Bolyard

“Hello. This is Bernardine Dohrn. I’m going to read A Declaration of a State of War. This is the first communication from the Weatherman underground. All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire….Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way…”
“…We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground. Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks. If you want to find us, this is where we are. In every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope and loading guns—fugitives from Amerikan justice are free to go…

“…Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people.”
“Never again will they fight alone.”

With that announcement, broadcast on radio stations across the country on July 31, 1970, the Weather Underground, which included Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, and others, split from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and declared war on “Amerika.” This group already had a string of bombings, arsons, and other terrorist activities under its belt; two months before the announcement three members of the core group had  been killed building a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse. An FBI report later stated the group possessed enough explosives to level both sides of the street.

In the two years after the “Declaration of a State of War,” there would be two more high-profile bombings — a New York City police station and the Pentagon.

It’s rather fascinating to compare members of the Weathermen to Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen-turned-terrorist who is the subject of the leaked white paper defining the parameters for drone strikes against American citizens abroad. The Washington Post reports:

The U.S.-born Muslim cleric played key roles in the Fort Hood, Tex., shooting rampage in 2009 that killed 13 people, as well as last year’s foiled attempt to put bombs on cargo planes bound to the United States. His words led a young Nigerian to attempt to blow up a jetliner over Detroit, and inspired an unemployed Pakistani man to drive a bomb-laden vehicle into the heart of New York’s Times Square. … So effective was his message that the CIA last year put him on the agency’s official target list, making him the first American citizen to be designated for death, wherever he could be found, without judicial process.

The CIA targeted Awlaki and in 2011 he was killed by a drone strike in Yemen. The DOJ white paper defended such targeted killings of U.S. citizens, asserting

the inherent right of the United States to national self defense under international law, Congress’s authorization of the use of all necessary and appropriate military force against this enemy, and the existence of an armed conflict with al-Qa’ida under international law.

The paper laid out a three-part test for killing a U.S. citizen who is “an operational leader continually planning attacks against U.S. persons and interests” and who is outside the United States:

(1) A high-level official of the U.S. government must determine that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States;
(2) A capture operation would be infeasible–and those conducting the operation would continue to monitor whether capture becomes infeasible; and
(3) Such an operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war principles.

What does any of this have to do with domestic terrorists like Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers?

In October 1970, the Chicago Daily News reported (see FBI file) on the radical leftist activities of Americans traveling between the U.S. and communist Cuba, calling the country a “revolutionary factory.” Fidel Castro’s Cuba had become a veritable post-graduate training ground for radicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hardcore anarchists and left-wing professors visited alongside peaceniks who picked sugar cane and oranges for Castro’s collective. Some 4000 Americans visited Cuba for varying lengths of time during that decade.

The Chicago Daily News described the results:

Bernardine Dohrn, mini-skirted Weatherwoman and 30 fellow activists met with Vietnamese communists in Havana in July, 1969.
Three months later, with the fiery Bernardine in command, a shocked Chicago watched as several hundred ultra-radical Weathermen staged a wild window-smashing rampage which they called “Four Days of Rage” in protest against the Vietnam War.
Beyond any doubt, Cuba has shaped, supplied technical training to, given political indoctrination for and perhaps most important of all, served as the inspiration for the American radical movement in its avowed aim to bring down the American system that it so fiercely despises…
…The ubiquitous Miss Dohrn, a brilliant University of Chicago law school graduate, mapped her anti-war campaign during an eight-day semester with representatives of Hanoi and the Viet Cong. She journeyed to Havana at their request.
Now a fugitive sought by the FBI, Bernardine was heard from last week when she claimed credit for blowing up for the second time within a year, a police memorial statue in Chicago’s Haymarket Square.

So, would Dohrn and other Weathermen qualify for a visit from the U.S. Department of Drones? Let’s just imagine for a moment that instead of going “underground” in the U.S., Dohrn and other members of the group had taken refuge in Cuba and continued to plot against “Amerika.”

According to the Justice Department memo, she would need to be “an operational leader continually planning attacks against U.S. persons and interests.”

Check.

“A high-level official of the U.S. government must determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.”

Bernardine Dohrn: “I’m going to read A Declaration of a State of War. This is the first communication from the Weatherman underground. All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire….Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way…”

Government officials knew Dohrn and her comrades were very serious about their threats. Thirteen members had been indicted just a week before in a national bombing plot.

Check.

“A capture operation would be infeasible–and those conducting the operation would continue to monitor whether capture becomes infeasible.”

Would Castro have allowed American officials into Cuba to capture American domestic terrorists who were plotting to overthrow the U.S.? The math is easy on this one.

“Such an operation would be conducted consistent with applicable law of war principles.”

As long as you didn’t waterboard Dohrn before you droned her…

Of course, we can’t know what would have happened if the U.S. had possessed drones in 1970, but I’m just pointing out that the situation with the Weathermen wasn’t all that different than that of Awlaki.

Dohrn and other Americans spent time in Cuba during the Vietnam War. Communist Cuba supported the enemy during the war and Dohrn actually met with enemy Viet Cong  leaders “at their request.” She and others in her group planned and carried out acts of terror against public venues, including a New York City police headquarters and the Pentagon. And it could have been much, much worse. Harvey Klehr, professor of politics and history at Emory University, said of the Greenwich townhouse explosion, “The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence.”

So, Mr. President, Americans would like to know…

If your fugitive friends Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and the rest of the Weathermen had fled to Cuba in 1970, would you have sent a drone after them? Because I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the Weathermen and Anwar al-Awlaki, except that the Weathermen were more successful than most of Awlaki’s protégés.

While this may seem like a futile intellectual exercise, I think it’s important to answer the question of how broadly the sphere of Obama’s drone powers would extend. I don’t personally object to the use of drones to take down an enemy combatant hell-bent on killing Americans — even if he is an American citizen. You forfeit your right to due process, and any other rights as an American citizen, when you join forces with an enemy that is at war with our country.

But I want to know if President Obama will use these war powers consistently. We’ve already seen members of Occupy Wall Street plotting to blow up a bridge in Cleveland. Their group tolerated violent criminals and anarchists in their camp and the movement is built on the same ideology that led to the violent Weather Underground. If OWS reorganizes after a hiatus (as the SDS did) and returns with a new, violent “Black Bloc” iteration, will the Obama administration treat them as terrorists and hunt them down with drones if they flee by private jet with Michael Moore to some OWS Mecca like Venezuela or Cuba?

The answer, of course, should be “yes,” unless the purpose of the white paper on the use of drones was nothing more than an after-the-fact attempt by the Obama administration to cover their backsides in the wake of a drone assassination that sent the Left into a severe state of cognitive dissonance. Or unless they would refuse to attack enemy combatants with whom they share an ideology.

President Obama, Would You Send a Drone to Cuba to Kill the Weathermen?

Criminals and terrorists can fly drones too

kurzweilai

A scale model of a U.S. Navy F-86 Sabre fighter plane, similar to a device constructed by Massachusetts resident Rezwan Ferdaus, 26, who was accused of plotting attacks on the U.S. Pentagon and Capitol by using a remote-controlled aircraft filled with plastic explosives. The pictured aircraft, from a photo released by the U.S. Justice Department, is not the device constructed by the defendant. (Credit: U.S. Justice Department)

Drones are no longer the sole domain of the military, and just as with many new technologies, they can easily fall into the wrong hands,  global security advisor, writer and consultant Marc Goodman reports in Time.

Criminal organizations are early adopters of technology, and some have already used UAVs and other forms of robotics to violate the law while reducing their risk of arrest and apprehension.

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Criminals and terrorists can fly drones too

Iran releases alleged video from CIA spy drone

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Iran releases alleged video from CIA spy drone

Obama's Drones

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Obama's Drones

POWER TO KILL CITIZENS: Senators Threaten Obama Picks Over Drone Concerns

foxnews

Senators from both parties may be on a collision course with the White House over its top national security nominations, because of concerns over the Obama administration's drone program. 

A bipartisan group of 11 senators wrote a letter to President Obama Monday asking for "any and all legal opinions" that describe the basis for the authority to "deliberately kill American citizens." 

The questions come in advance of CIA director nominee John Brennan's confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate intelligence committee. Several of the authors of the drone letter sit on that committee. Obama's nominee for Defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, also had his confirmation hearing last week. 

The letter Monday made a blunt threat suggesting that withholding information on drones could imperil those nominations. 

"The executive branch's cooperation on this matter will help avoid an unnecessary confrontation that could affect the Senate's consideration of nominees for national security positions," the senators wrote. 

As the letter was released, one Justice Department document surfaced in news reports describing the administration's drone-attack authority. 

As first reported Monday night by NBC News, the memo says it is legal for the government to kill U.S. citizens abroad if it believes they are senior Al Qaeda leaders continually engaged in operations aimed at killing Americans -- even if there is no intelligence pointing to an active plot against America. 

The 16-page document says that delaying action against individuals continually planning to kill Americans would create an unacceptably high risk. It adds that the threat posed by Al Qaeda and its associated forces demands a broader concept of when a person continually planning terror attacks presents an imminent threat. 

It's unclear whether that will satisfy lawmakers' concerns. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the intelligence committee, said in a statement Tuesday that the document was already provided to the committee last year. 

"The committee continues to seek the actual legal opinions by the Department of Justice that provide details not outlined in this particular white paper," she said. Feinstein was not among the senators who signed the letter to Obama Monday. 

Under Obama, the U.S. drone program has ramped up dramatically. It has become one of the most important tools in the administration's counterterrorism campaign -- particularly in Pakistan, but also in the expanding fronts of the war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates. The senators' questions follow a 2011 drone strike in Yemen that killed two Americans -- Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. 

While Awlaki was considered a powerful terror operative for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, he was never charged. In their letter Monday, the senators said they believe there are "circumstances" where a U.S. president can use "lethal force" against Americans who "choose to take up arms" against their country, "just as President Lincoln had the authority to direct Union troops to fire upon Confederate forces during the Civil War." 

But they said "it is vitally important" for Congress and the public to understand how the administration interprets the limits on that power. They complained that the administration has ignored prior requests for legal opinions from the Justice Department. 

Brennan, a vocal supporter of the drone program and other controversial counterterrorism tools dating back to the George W. Bush administration, is facing a level of criticism from Democrats that no other Obama nominee has encountered. Eight Democrats and three Republicans penned the letter to Obama Monday. One of them, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has previously pressed Brennan on the drone issue. 

Another, Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., said last week he was "deeply disappointed" coming out of a meeting with Brennan. He claimed the White House counterterrorism adviser was "unprepared" to discuss a recent report on the CIA detention and interrogation program. 

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/02/05/senators-threaten-confrontation-with-obama-nominees-over-drone-concerns/#ixzz2K3K2pFpK

POWER TO KILL CITIZENS: Senators Threaten Obama Picks Over Drone Concerns

Justice Dept. memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans

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By Michael Isikoff National Investigative Correspondent, NBC News

A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” -- even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.

The 16-page memo, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration’s most secretive and controversial polices: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the  September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes.  

The secrecy surrounding such strikes is fast emerging as a central issue in this week’s hearing of White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, a key architect of the drone campaign, to be CIA director.  Brennan was the first administration official to publicly acknowledge drone strikes in a speech last year, calling them “consistent with the inherent right of self-defense.” In a separate talk at the Northwestern University Law School in March, Attorney General Eric Holder specifically endorsed the constitutionality of targeted killings of Americans, saying they could be justified if government officials determine the target poses  “an imminent threat of violent attack.”

But the confidential Justice Department “white paper” introduces a more expansive definition of self-defense or imminent attack than described  by Brennan or Holder in their public speeches.  It refers, for example, to what it calls a “broader concept of imminence” than actual intelligence about any ongoing plot against the U.S. homeland.    

Michael Isikoff, national investigative correspondent for NBC News, talks with Rachel Maddow about a newly obtained, confidential Department of Justice white paper that hints at the details of a secret White House memo that explains the legal justifications for targeted drone strikes that kill Americans without trial in the name of national security.

“The condition that an operational  leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.

Read the entire 'white paper' on drone strikes on Americans

Instead, it says,  an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American  has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is  no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.” The memo does not define “recently” or “activities.” 

As in Holder’s speech, the confidential memo lays out a three-part test that would make targeted killings of American lawful:  In addition to the suspect being an imminent threat, capture of the target must be “infeasible, and the strike must be conducted according to “law of war principles.” But the memo elaborates on some of these factors in ways that go beyond what the attorney general said publicly. For example, it states that U.S. officials may consider whether an attempted capture of a suspect  would pose an “undue risk” to U.S. personnel involved in such an operation. If so, U.S. officials could determine that the capture operation of the targeted American would not be feasible, making it lawful for the U.S. government to order a killing instead, the memo concludes.

The undated memo is entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force.”  It was provided to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees in June by administration officials on the condition that it be kept confidential and  not discussed publicly.

Although not an official legal memo, the white paper was represented by administration  officials as a policy document that closely mirrors the arguments of classified memos on targeted killings by the Justice Department’s  Office of Legal Counsel, which provides authoritative legal advice to the president and all executive branch agencies. The administration has refused to turn over to Congress or release those memos publicly -- or even publicly confirm their existence. A source with access to the white paper, which is not classified, provided a copy to NBC News. 

“This is a chilling document,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, which is suing to obtain administration memos about the targeted killing of Americans.  “Basically, it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen. … It recognizes some limits on the authority it sets out, but the limits are elastic and vaguely defined, and it’s easy to see how they could be manipulated.”

In particular, Jaffer said, the memo “redefines the word imminence in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning.”  

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the white paper. The spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, instead pointed to public speeches by what she called a “parade” of administration officials, including Brennan, Holder, former State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh and former Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson that she said outlined the “legal framework” for such operations. 

Pressure for turning over the Justice Department memos on targeted killings of Americans appears to be building on Capitol Hill amid signs that Brennan will be grilled on the subject at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. 

On Monday, a bipartisan group of 11 senators -- led by Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon — wrote  a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to release all Justice Department memos on the subject. While accepting that “there will clearly be circumstances in which the president has the authority to use lethal force” against Americans who take up arms against the country,  it said, “It is vitally important ... for Congress and the American public to have a full understanding of how  the executive branch interprets the limits and boundaries of this authority.”

The completeness of the administration’s public accounts of its legal arguments was also sharply criticized last month by U.S. Judge Colleen McMahon in response to a  lawsuit brought by the New York Times and the ACLU seeking access to the Justice Department memos on drone strikes targeting Americans under the Freedom of Information Act.  McMahon, describing herself as being caught in a “veritable Catch-22,”  said she was unable to order the release of the documents given “the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for the conclusion a secret.”

In her ruling, McMahon noted that administration officials “had engaged in public discussion of the legality of targeted killing, even of citizens.” But, she wrote, they have done so “in cryptic and imprecise ways, generally without citing … any statute or court decision that justifies its conclusions.”

In one passage in Holder’s speech at Northwestern in March,  he alluded – without spelling out—that there might be circumstances where the president might order attacks against American citizens without specific knowledge of when or where an attack against the U.S. might take place.

“The Constitution does not  require the president to delay action until some theoretical end-stage of planning, when the precise time, place and manner of an attack become clear,”  he said.

But his speech did not contain the additional language in the white paper suggesting that no active intelligence about a specific attack is needed to justify a targeted strike. Similarly, Holder said in his speech that targeted killings of Americans can be justified  if “capture is not feasible.” But he did not include language in the white paper saying that an operation might not be feasible “if it could not be physically effectuated during the relevant window of opportunity or if the relevant country (where the target is located) were to decline to consent to a capture operation.” The speech also made no reference to the risk that might be posed to U.S. forces seeking to capture a target, as was  mentioned in the white paper. 

The white paper also includes a more extensive discussion of why targeted strikes against Americans does not violate constitutional protections afforded American citizens as well as   a U.S. law that criminalizes the killing of U.S. nationals overseas.

It  also discusses why such targeted killings would not be a war crime or violate a U.S. executive order banning assassinations.

 “A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination,” the white paper reads. “In the Department’s view, a lethal operation conducted against a U.S. citizen whose conduct poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States would be a legitimate act of national self-defense that would not violate the assassination ban. Similarly,  the use of lethal force, consistent with the laws of war, against an individual who is a legitimate military target would be lawful and would not violate the assassination ban.”

Justice Dept. memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans

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Senior al-Qaida leader killed in drone strike in Pakistan, jihadis, US officials say

Flashpoint-intel.com

By Robert Windrem
NBC News

A senior al-Qaida official and potential successor to the group’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed Friday morning in a Predator drone strike, according to reports on jihadi web forums and U.S. officials.

Sheikh Khalid Bin Abdul Rehman Al-Hussainan, aka Abu-Zaid al Kuwaiti, was killed in Pakistan while eating breakfast, according to the accounts.  The 46-year-old cleric was seen as part of the “very top tier" of al-Qaida's remaining leaders in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden, according to one expert on the terror group.

The news was first announced on an al-Qaida web forum early Friday. “We celebrate to you the news of the martyrdom of the working scholar Shaykh Khalid al-Hussainan (Abu Zaid al-Kuwaiti) while eating his Suhoor (dawn time) meal, and we ask Allah to accept him in paradise," a post said.

Evan Kohlmann, an NBC News counterterrorism analyst, said al-Hussainan was at the forefront of a new wave of al-Qaida leadership.

“That's a big gap in the leadership,” said Kohlmann, who is also a Justice Department consultant. “He was the last senior Al-Qaida leader in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area who was, one, from the Arabian Peninsula and, two, who had serious clerical credentials.  Now there is no obvious publicly recognizable candidate left to succeed Zawahiri.”

In recent years, al-Hussainan was seen in numerous al-Qaida videos offering religious training to the group’s operatives. The videos were widely circulated by al-Shabab, al-Qaida’s media wing. He also authored several books of religious thoughts.

The U.S. killed three other up-and-coming members of the terror group’s next generation leadership in the months after bin Laden was killed in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by U.S. Navy SEALs in May 2011. Ilyas Kashmiri, the leader of a Pakistani group associated with al-Qaeda was killed June 3. Atiyah Abd-al Rahman, bin Laden’s chief of staff, was killed on Aug. 22 and Ayman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was a leader of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed Sept. 30. US officials say that hints about their whereabouts were found in materials gathered by the Navy SEALs in the raid on bin Laden’s compound.

Al-Hussainan is the highest ranking al-Qaida official to be killed since those leaders were killed. More >>

Senior al-Qaida leader killed in drone strike in Pakistan, jihadis, US officials say

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