I was curious about the etymology of the term "drone" applied to military (& DHS) Unmanned Aerial Surveillance aircraft, these days, mostly Armed. Obviously Armed UAS are not named after the stingless unproductive bees whose task it is to impregnate the queen, nor lazy idlers, nor clueless computer sales techies, nor thankless menial worker drones. Anyone who's been around Radio Controlled model planes knows drones are named for the sound they make, a steady drone as they labor across the sky. While military aerial surveillance predates the Wright Brothers, and RC model airplanes have been around for half that time, it took the advent of asymmetric warfare to open the window to military drones. Their constant buzz offering the most intractable reason. 10511
Tag: Armed UAS
What happens on the dark side of the moon, stays on the dark side of the…
What was NASA's unmanned drone codenamed L-CROSS? A Cape Canaveral thrillcraft? A military space fighter? After the moon dust has cleared --the moon dust that didn't plume as expected-- LCROSS was all of the above. The US space program is administered by the Department of Defense. What happened yesterday on the Dark Side of the Moon depends on who you believe.
Protest at discreet AFB for drones
COLORADO SPRINGS- Local non-confrontational peace activists held a protest today where they knew no one would see them, and to be doubly sure, they timed it so that no commuter traffic would be passing either. Schriever AFB administrates world GPS systems, critical for military drone attacks. Local protesters feel the drones are immoral, but shhh, don’t tell anybody!? ?The action was the latest of the PPJPC antiwar pacification agenda to ensnare well intentioned students and exasperated members. The program, which holds civil disobedience at a reverential arms-length, comprises regular tutoring by liberation theologists, martyr eulogists, CIA-sewn “democracy movements” and AIPAC-directed “humanitarian campaigns.”
Military drones mirror public retreat
CLOSE GUANTANAMO is being interpreted literally, meaning close just the facility, but move the detainees to illegal incarceration elsewhere. Likewise, BRING THE TROOPS HOME means pacing a withdrawal with an increased deployment of military drones to keep up the killing. That's what the antiwar voice gets for pandering to the American preoccupation with only our own casualties. The latest Adbusters juxtaposes these surrogate killing machines with the western public's retreat into virtual communities. 9525
Attack Drones: Freedom is so fucked
Armchair freedom fighters like me count on there remaining some parity between the forces of oppression and man's inexorable drive to be free. Masses can repel the few, nonviolence can shame the hesitant, terrorism can haunt the genteel, IEDs can pick off the occupiers, training can dispatch the sentries, but how to overcome automatons? We've confronted impregnable drones in scifi movies, and now such drones have become reality. They're bits of nothing in the air really, but a literal boatload of firepower has got their back. 8997
US extrajudicial reach extends to assassination of spouses and progeny
In a demonstration that they are closing in on Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, the US military is claiming success with a drone attack on his father-in-law's Waziristan home, where a missile killed Mehsud's second wife, three unidentified civilians, and wounded four children. 8314
Barack Obama reverses to better cover up torture so that he can continue his pogrom in Northern Pakistan
Now you see them, now you don't! The Magician, Mr CHANGE, is playing the American liberal public as a motley gang of rubes and is getting away with it. All is silent on the liberal front. So that is why the Obama U-turn on abuse photographs can happen as liberals sit by with thumbs up their rear ends as their president escalates GWOT (the so-called global war on terrorism) into Pakistan. He has now put up to 1,500,000 people out of their homes and on the road to nowhere. 7740
What happens in Vegas, kills in Pakistan
Happening in Las Vegas this week: the Armed UAS Unmanned Aerial Surveillance Conference, May 12-13, where military brass can catch up on the latest remote killing devices proving so, so popular with Pakistanis right now. (I heard a correspondent relate that the US drone attacks in Pakistan were making the people there "very, very, very, very angry.") Wouldn't what happens in Vegas --at a conference center or a climate controlled, video-console barcalounger at a base nearby-- be akin to a terrorist training camp in the remote Hindu Kush mountains, where militants made plans to terrorize a civilian populace from afar?
Pioneering human shields since 9-11-01
Ward Churchill called them Little Eichmanns, but if that's giving the World Trade Center workers too much credit, at minimum they were human shields, masking the Command & Control Center of America's economic war machine. The US military is quick to blame its foes for using human shields, to explain the collateral damage we always inflict --Iraq, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah-- but who more deliberately than the USA? The huge weapons industry makes all fifty states legitimate military targets, and now because armed drones are piloted from US soil, the homeland war zone extends into our homeland, for which the American public is the human shield.
Greg Mortenson encircles Swat Province, US drones launched from Baluchistan
Not many maps show the location of the Pakistani airport from which US drones are launched against targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To plot the Shamsi Airport in Baluchistan, I started with a graphic supplied by the Central Asian Institute (CAI) showing Greg Mortenson's school building projects, which appear to encircle the Taliban resurgent Swat Province, where schools are a battleground. 6578
Air National Guardsmen are aiming Preditor and Reaper Drones from home
Bush has brought the Global War On Terrorism to American shores! Air National Guardsmen deployed at stateside bases are piloting and aiming the Predator and Reaper drones against peoples in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and victims yet unreported. Do you doubt they might be Filipinos, Colombians, Bolivians and South Georgians? If any of those aforementioned want to defend themselves, they could only attack those shooting at them from Arizona, California, Nevada and Texas. 4147