Before I launch into an extended rant about the recent BP exploision, I wanted to highlight something that I thought was very important.

At a recent Washington Correspondents Association, President Barack Obama made an off-handed joke about using predator drones to keep the Jonas Brothers off his daughters. I know that this is one of those many times where I’m going to be told that I’m overreacting.

But let’s think for a second about the record of Barack Obama. A man who ran for office on promises of “hope and change” quickly proved that he was the same type of establishment hack as the man who sat in the chair before him. This was proven, above all, by maintaining the status quo in the Department of Defense, despite being elected in large part due to a massive backlash against American involvement in two imperialist wars.

There are real victims of American attacks on Pakistan with predator drones, many of them children. Over a thousand civilians are known to have been killed by predator drone attacks since they began in Pakistan. Further, Barack Obama has ordered not just predator drone attacks that kill civilians in Afghanistan. He is also the first President in world history to order an assassination against an American citizen.

Full Article at Black Sun Gazette

“The Jonas Brothers are here; they’re out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you, ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming.”

Hah! It’s funny because predator drone strikes in Pakistan have killed literally hundreds of completely innocent civilians, and now the president is evincing a casual disregard for those lives he is responsible for ending by making a lighthearted joke about killing famous young celebrities for the crime of attempting to sleep with his young daughters. (Really, everything about the joke is inappropriate. That’s why you shouldn’t analyze humor too much.)

But the problem isn’t specifically with the joke itself. It’s a sort of generic joke about the executive’s unconstrained power that any postwar president could’ve delivered. You know, it would’ve been Patriot missiles during the first Gulf War, or jokes about the CIA or Secret Service disappearing people during the Cold War. The problem is with the whole damn scene of the president delivering a stand-up comedy routine, on camera, to the press. The problem with the Bush joke about looking for WMD was that a roomful of journalists chuckled good-naturedly at it. It looks bad for everyone.

Read More on www.uruknet.info

What three-letter Internet acronym best fits the bizarre news out of Iraq and Afghanistan that militants there have been intercepting US Predator drone video feeds using laptops and a $30 piece of Russian software: LOL, WTF, or OMG?

Actually, all three are appropriate for something this farcical, horrible, and brain-numbing. The reason that the transmissions could be picked up easily by a cheap satellite recording program? They were broadcast in the clear between the drone and ground control. That’s right — no encryption was used.

Perhaps, you might be thinking to yourself in a mental bid to make the military seem competent here, no one could have suspected this would happen. But they did suspect it, because it had been happening for a decade already. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, included this tidbit in its report: “The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The US government has known about the flaw since the US campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.”

Read More: ars technica

Senior U.S. military officers working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed the danger of Russia and China intercepting and doctoring video from drone aircraft in 2004, but the Pentagon didn’t begin securing the signals until this year, according to people familiar with the matter.

The disclosure came after The Wall Street Journal reported insurgents in Iraq had intercepted video feeds from drones, downloading unencrypted communications from the unmanned planes. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, said a person familiar with reports on the matter.

Members of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff discussed the potential security shortfall of drone feeds in 2004 and 2005, according to two officers with direct knowledge of the deliberations.

Officers at the time weren’t concerned about adversaries intercepting the signals in Iraq or Afghanistan because drones weren’t yet common there and militants weren’t thought to be technically sophisticated.

Instead, some officers worried that such potential U.S. adversaries as Russia or China could manipulate the drone video feeds to hide battlefield movements. “The main concern was that the video feeds were being intercepted, manipulated and then fed to the commanders in the field,” one of the officers said. “The fear was a commander looking on a feed, seeing nothing, and then having an enemy tank brigade come roaring into your command post.”

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America’s enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

The drone intercepts mark the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led conflicts overseas. They also point to a potentially serious vulnerability in Washington’s growing network of unmanned drones, which have become the American weapon of choice in both Afghanistan and Pakistan…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

In “Capture or Kill? Lawyers eye options for terrorists” (National Public Radio, Oct. 11), exceptionally alert investigative reporter Ari Shapiro said: “Many national security experts interviewed for this story agree that it has become so hard for the U.S. to detain people that in many instances, the U.S. government is killing them instead.”

As I reported previously, CIA’s secret Predator drone attacks on suspected terrorists in Pakistan are already doing just that. But, wrote Jane Mayer in “The Predator War” (The New Yorker, Oct. 26):

“The embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion.

“That’s why I’m writing this series. Mayer continued: “(yet) it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. And, because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war.”

I make one essential correction in her powerfully valuable article. These secret official U.S. targeted killings are not new. If history classes ever resume in our public schools, it’s important — since global terrorism has no discernible end — for students to know and debate whether our history of extra-judicial killings accompanying deaths of innocent civilians, is at war with America’s values and our rule of law.

In 1977, an executive order by President Gerald Ford commanded that “no employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”

In 1981, acting on his own executive order, President Ronald Reagan ordered: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Before Reagan, President Jimmy Carter had expanded the Gerald Ford order to include all assassinations.

Then, based on a classified legal memorandum that gave President Bill Clinton authority to sidestep the three previous presidential bans on targeted assassinations, President George W. Bush — reported in Bob Woodward’s “Bush at War” book — issued a “Memorandum of Notification” on Sept. 17, 2001.

This Bush executive order “authorized the CIA,” Woodward reported, “to operate freely and fully in Afghanistan with its own paramilitary teams” — and to go after Al Qaeda “on a worldwide scale, using lethal covert action to keep the role of the United States hidden.”

As he has now continued other Bush-Cheney legacies, President Barack Obama, as I previously reported, has permitted the CIA to operate freely and fully, with its dread pilotless Predator drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

With regard to Afghanistan, the Associated Press (Nov. 7) reported that “Although the U.N. says most civilian casualties have been at the hands of militants” — why doesn’t the AP say it like it is, terrorists? — “deaths of men, women and children in NATO air strikes have raised tensions between Karzai’s government and the U.S.-led coalition.”

Again, say it plain that the United States is very much involved in the NATO air strikes — in addition to drone planes — that murder children, women and men who are not even suspected to be “militants.”

Just as Mayer’s “The Predator War” generated little follow-up in the press, so too has the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock’s revelations on Obama-authorized extra-judicial killings not of suspected terrorists but of dealers in opium in Afghanistan (“Afghans oppose U.S. hit list of drug traffickers,” Oct. 23).

[more at newtondailynews]