Tag: drones

A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA

The New York Times reported that, “in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama forged with Mr. [John] Brennan,”[5] an architect of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.

Obama’s worldview meshed so closely with this “unsentimental intel warrior” and “terrorist hunter” that Obama “found himself finishing Brennan’s sentences.”

An anonymous Cabinet member explained that “presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community [but] Obama was more smitten than most—this has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t seen maybe since Eisenhower.”[6]

The consequences could be seen in Obama’s boosting funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which promotes regime change in countries defiant of the New World Order, and his drastic expansion of the use of drones—for both surveillance and targeted killings.

The Obama administration further; a) backed coups in Ukraine and Honduras; b) pivoted the U.S. military to Asia, ramped up arms sales to Saudi Arabia and expanded military bases in Africa; c) helped suppress evidence about CIA torture, d) refused to pursue a criminal case against the CIA’s money laundering bank, HSBC, e) eavesdropped on U.S. allies and a U.S. congressman (Dennis Kucinich) who opposed his administration’s illegal invasion of Libya that devastated that country, f) stepped up surveillance and efforts to destroy Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange, and g) presided over the prosecution of a record number of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917.

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The inventor of taser and the body cam wants to put them on drones

Rick Smith, whose inventions changed the way millions of people understand modern policing, now wants to send them to war.

Smith invented the Taser, the stun gun that is often the first thing police officers reach for when things get tense. As public concern mounted that cops were maybe a bit too eager to tase people, Smith invented the police-worn body camera, which has become a staple of U.S. police departments and plays a starring role in our national conversation about police reform.

So what’s next? Smith says AI and robotics will dramatically change how police departments do what they do. They could also reshape the American way of war.

Smith’s company, Axon, is already using machine learning on body camera footage. The company has access to huge amounts of body-camera video because police departments pay Axon to host it on Microsoft Azure. “Basically every big department you can think of, NYPD, LA, Chicago, D.C., we host all their data in the cloud for them,” Smith said during the recent AUSA conference in Washington, D.C.

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Government Eyes In the Sky

In August 2016, Bloomberg Businessweek revealed the existence of a pilot program being operated by the Baltimore Police Department in which small manned aircraft circled over the city all day, using cameras to continuously photograph a 32-square-mile area and giving police the ability to retroactively track any vehicle or pedestrian within that area. It was the ultimate Big Brother “eye in the sky”—and yet the Baltimore police had not notified the public or even the mayor or city council about the program. Revelation of the secret program generated a storm of controversy, and eventually it was put on hold—though in December 2019, the city’s police commissioner announced that the program would be revived.

The technology behind the Baltimore program involves pointing multiple cameras toward the ground and stitching those images together into a single, larger photograph. It also uses computers to automatically correct for the changing camera angles of the circling planes as well as factors such as topographic variances and lens distortion.

The result is a surveillance system of enormous power, able to reconstruct the movements of all visible vehicles and pedestrians across a city—where they start and finish each journey and the paths they take in between. It can allow tracking of a great proportion of people’s movements throughout a city.

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Psaki Invokes Biden’s Dead Son When Confronted on Drone Strike that Killed Afghan Civilians, Including Seven Children

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Monday was confronted about the Biden Admin’s drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians, including 7 children.

Not one “high-level ISIS” terrorist was killed in Biden’s drone strike.

The US military conducted a drone strike one day after a suicide bomber in Kabul killed 13 US service members and wounded 15 more.

The Pentagon immediately came out and claimed the drone strike killed “high-level ISIS handlers,” however they refused to name the terrorists.

It was all lies.

Biden droned 7 children and a few innocent aid workers.

When confronted about these war crimes, Psaki invoked Biden’s dead children.

Biden’s son Beau passed away from Cancer in 2015.

Joe Biden’s first wife and daughter, Naomi died in a car accident in 1972.

“As a human being, as a president, as somebody who has overseen loss in a variety of scenarios… his reaction is — every loss is a tragedy,” Psaki said.

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Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years?

The Pentagon has finally admitted to the long-obvious fact that it killed ten Afghan civilians, including seven children, in an airstrike in Kabul last month.

In an article with the obscenely propagandistic title “Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians,” the New York Times pats itself on the back for its investigative journalism showing that the so-called “ISIS-K facilitator” targeted in the strike was in fact an innocent aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi:

“The general acknowledged that a New York Times investigation of video evidence helped investigators determine that they had struck a wrong target. ‘As we in fact worked on our investigation, we used all available information,’ General McKenzie told reporters. ‘Certainly that included some of the stuff The New York Times did.’”

Indeed, the Pentagon only admitted to the unjust slaughter of civilians in this one particular instance because the mass media did actual investigative journalism on this one particular airstrike. This is an indictment of the Pentagon’s airstrike protocol, but it’s also an indictment of the mass media.

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Biden May Have Droned Innocent Family in Kabul; Possible War Crime

The New York Times published the results of an investigation on Friday that suggests the Biden administration targeted an innocent man who worked for a U.S. organization in a drone strike that killed several civilians. If true, the airstrike could constitute a violation of international law governing such targeted killings in wartime — in other words, a war crime.

The airstrike, which took place on August 29, was presented by the Biden administration as an attack on a potential ISIS-K terrorist who had been driving an explosive-laden vehicle that was to be detonated at the international airport in Kabul. It was the second such strike, following one on Aug. 28 in Nangarhar province against suspected Islamic State terrorists.

The Times report suggests that the U.S. killed “the wrong person” in a report accompanied by security camera footage that shows the target, Zemari Ahmadi, filling water canisters for his family that the military may have mistaken for explosives.

Astonishingly, the Times reports that “[m]ilitary officials said they did not know the identity of the car’s driver when the drone fired.” But in the wake of an August 26 suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers as well as scores of Afghan civilians, they believed that he posed an imminent danger based on “how they interpreted his activities that day.”

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US Airstrikes Have Killed Up to 48,000 Civilians Since 9/11

Airstrikes conducted by the United States have killed between 22,000 and 48,000 civilians since September 11, 2001, according to a report published Monday by Airwars, a military watchdog that monitors and seeks to reduce civilian harm in violent conflict zones.

The new analysis, released ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the retaliatory launch of the so-called “War on Terror,” came just days after a U.S. drone strike killed at least 10 members of a single family in Kabul amid the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Most media accounts point out that more than 7,000 U.S. service members have died in post-9/11 wars, but only some go on to state the massive civilian death toll, and “almost exclusively in generalities,” researchers lamented.

While Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that over 387,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the War on Terror, Airwars sought to answer a specific question: How many civilians have likely been killed by U.S. airstrikes in the last 20 years?

The answer, Airwars found, is least 22,679, and potentially as many 48,308 civilians.

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