Political Assassin Robots Flying In African Skies

November 1, 2009

Political Assassin Robots Flying In African Skies

Posted by xcroc under Africa command, AFRICOM, Somalia, spies and mercenaries | Tags: hellfire missile, MQ-9 Reaper, predator drone, Seychelles |
[11] Comments

Somalia is a counterterrorism planner`s dream.
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“We’ve moved from using UAVs primarily in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance roles … to a true hunter-killer role with the Reaper.”
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… there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.

Predator MQ-9 Reaper

These predator drones are now being deployed over East Africa and the adjacent waters, based by the US in the Seychelles. At present we are told the drones are unarmed, and are part of anti-piracy surveillance. But that is only the toe in the door. The CIA uses these drones for extrajudicial killings in Pakistan, a country that is supposedly a US friend, and with whom the US is not at war. In Pakistan the CIA is probably assassinating some genuine international terrorists. It may also be assassinating innocent individuals, or local political leaders. The CIA appears accountable to no one in the US or the world at large for these actions. In all cases these are assassinations.

The CIA and the US Africa Command now appear ready to expand this predation in East Africa, most likely in order to continue efforts to destabilize Somalia (called stability operations). The US has been pushing the notion that Islamist fighters in Somalia are allied with al-Qaeda. There is no real evidence for this, see the commentary about halfway+ down this page, in response to a comment. But since it is repeated over and over in the US media, many people believe it. Just as the New York Times pushed the bogus story of weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war, it is pushing the supposed link between al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab.

From the:

UNITED NATIONS: US drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan could be breaking international laws against summary executions, the UN’s top investigator of such crimes said. “My concern is that drones/Predators are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law,” he [UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions Philip Alston] said.
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“The onus is really on the United States government to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary extrajudicial executions aren’t in fact being carried out through the use of these weapons,” he added.
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… you have the really problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws,” Alston said.

Since August 2008, around 70 strikes by unmanned aircraft have killed close to 600 people in northwestern Pakistan.

“I would like to know the legal basis upon which the United States is operating, in other words… who is running the program, what accountability mechanisms are in place in relation to that,” Alston said.

“Secondly, what precautions the United States is taking to ensure that these weapons are used strictly for purposes consistent with international humanitarian law.

“Third, what sort of review mechanism is there to evaluate when these weapons have been used? Those are the issues I’d like to see addressed,” the UN official said.

b real provides more research in his africa comments, where you can read in more detail the information from the following sources:

AP: US drones protecting ships from Somali pirates

Military officials said Friday the drones would not immediately be fitted with weaponry, but they did not rule out doing so in the future.

Analysts said they expected the Reapers would also be used to hunt al-Qaida and other Islamist militants in Somalia. While Moeller said the aircraft would “primarily” be used against pirates, he acknowledged they could also be used for other missions.
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“The long-term solution to the piracy issue is basically [us] getting the conditions right in Somalia,” he said.

More information about the Reaper here: MQ-9 Reaper Hunter/Killer UAV

… the [Reaper] aircraft can carry up to 14 Hellfire missiles, compared with two carried on the Predator. The Reaper can stay airborne for up to 14 hours fully loaded.

Trading off some of the missiles, Predator B can carry laser guided bombs, such as the GBU-12. MQ-9 is equipped with both Lynx II SAR and the MTS-B 20″ gimbal, an improved, extended range version of the MQ-9’s EO payload. The availability of high performance sensors and large capacity of precision guided weapons enable the new Predator to operate as an efficient “Hunter-Killer” platform, seeking and engaging targets at high probability of success.

The Wikipedia entry adds:

Then U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley said, “We’ve moved from using UAVs primarily in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance roles before Operation Iraqi Freedom, to a true hunter-killer role with the Reaper.”

The New York Times adds its voice to the war machine fear mongering: In Somalia, a New Template for Fighting Terrorism. The NYT starts with the popular but unsubstantiated assertion that: “Al-Qaeda is working feverishly to turn Somalia into a global jihad factory”.

So a new template for fighting terrorism may be emerging as the United States shows less desire to get involved in the local intricacies of nation building and more interest in narrowing its focus to Al Qaeda. …
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To Mr. Nagl, in fact, Somalia is a counterterrorism planner`s dream, with its desert terrain, low population density and skinny shape along the sea; no place is more than a few minutes` chopper flight from American ships bobbing offshore. “It`s far, far harder to do counterterrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan than in Somalia,” he said.

And from an abstract of Jane Mayer’s article in the October 26th issue of The New Yorker: The Risks of the CIA’s Predator Drones: The Predator War:

Hina Shamsi, a human-rights lawyer at the New York University School of Law … said of the Predator program, “These are targeted international killings by the state.”

The Predator program, as it happens, also uses private contractors for a variety of tasks, including “flying” the drones.
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According to a new study by the New America Foundation, the number of drone strikes has gone up dramatically since Obama became President. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the defense contractor that manufactures the Predator and its more heavily armed sibling, the Reaper, can barely keep up with the government’s demand.
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… there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.

Somalia will make a convenient African practice field for targeted killings by robot assassins. There is no government to stand up for the Somali people in this, especially as the United States claims to be the one standing up for Somalia. As Mr. Nagi said above, Somalia is a counterterrorism planners dream. As long as Somalia is kept destabilized, aka stability operations, it will be an easy target.

Somalia is just the beginning, it may have oil, but it looks like there is a lot more oil in the African great lakes region, beginning with the recent finds in Uganda. Southern Sudan has oil and is the site of US corporate and international land grabs. The DRC has vast quantities of minerals including 80% of the world’s coltan. Its mineral resources are considered a US strategic interest. That is why the US helped overthrow Lumumba and installed Mobutu, dismissing Mobutu’s 30 years of failed government as an African problem. For US purposes, Mobutu was a success, he was a faithful client. When he was no longer useful, the US helped overthrow him.

The term terrorist is evolving to mean anyone who questions or stands up to the US in its quest to coopt and control oil, minerals, and other natural resources, or who stands up to the forces of global capitalism. A “terrorist” is a political or economic opponent, only a few of them have violent intentions towards the US.

A robot assassin looks like just the tool to eliminate an obstructive political opponent. It appears risk free and cost free to the US. Few outside the neighborhood will care about the collateral damage, the many innocent civilians killed at the same time. The term terrorist is necessary to give political assassination a figleaf of legality.

From africa comments:

… US targeted killings of Al Qaeda terrorists is a legal act of self defense under international law. (You can get a free pdf download, here, at SSRN, “Targeted Killing in US Counterterrorism and Law.”
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… US law and regulation contains a ban on “assassination.” Assassination in that specific legal sense is prohibited – but also not defined in US law or regulation. However, successive administrations dating from the 1980s have taken the position – e.g., the speech in 1989 to which the article refers – that a targeted killing is not (prohibited) “assassination” if it meets the requirements for self-defense under international law, including self defense against terrorists.

The Reaper may be a perfect tool for global capitalism to assassinate and decapitate any growing movements and civil society groups with economic or democratic aspirations. Jeremy Keenan reminds us that an estimated 55% of the world population are left out of global capitalism, neither producers or consumers. Many of these live in Africa. If these people continue to be marginalized, the profits and benefits will continue and increase for the elites controlling their resources now. So the elites have strong incentives to prevent and crush democratic movements.

Jeremy Keenan describes this use of the war on terror and the reason for the Africa Command in: Demystifying Africa’s Security:

[The] Bush administration decided to use a military structure to secure access to and control over African oil and opted to use the GWOT as the justification, rather than acknowledging that US military intervention in Africa was about resource control.
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… emphasizing the threat posed by the marginalised and excluded, Africa’s ‘dangerous classes’, and the role of aid and ‘development’ … merging the development and security agendas so that the two have become almost indistinguishable
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The securitisation of Africa has been further promoted by drawing attention to the association between underdevelopment and conflict and the various discourses on ‘failed states’, which, in no time at all, were linked directly to the 9/11 attacks. It took only a few steps – from ‘poverty’ and ‘underdevelopment’ to ‘conflict’, ‘fear’, ‘failed states’ and the black holes of the ‘ungoverned areas’ – to recast Africa as the ‘Heart of Darkness’ and to transpose the GWOT into its vast ungoverned spaces: the DRC, Sudan, Somalia and EUCOM’s infamous ‘swamp of terror’, the Sahara.
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Far from bringing ‘peace and security’ to Africa, AFRICOM is directly instrumental in creating conflict and insecurity.
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Social scientists unfamiliar with the new ‘security development’ discourse may find its emphasis on ‘security’ and ‘development’ seductive. What more does Africa need? However, as Abrahamsen (2005) has already pointed out, London and Washington have used this discourse to link Africa’s underdevelopment with the threat of terrorism. And the regimes of Africa have followed suit: many are now using the pretext of the GWOT to repress legitimate opposition by linking it with ‘terrorism’. … Above all, the ‘security-development’ discourse explicitly links Africa’s poor, her ‘dangerous classes’ as Abrahamsen calls them, the marginalised and excluded to international security ‘problems’ and ‘terrorism’.

And so the war on terror becomes the war on the poor and marginalized, the “dangerous” classes. Keenan gives us a number of examples of countries in Africa where this is already happening. If the US is using the Reaper to kill, and is not engaged in open war with a country, it is using the Reaper as a tool of political assassination, killing opposing leaders and their families to control the economy and the politics.

11 Responses to “Political Assassin Robots Flying In African Skies”

Political Assassin Robots Flying In African Skies « Crossed Crocodiles « Yahyasheikho786's Blog Says:

November 2, 2009 at 5:45 am
[…] via Political Assassin Robots Flying In African Skies « Crossed Crocodiles. […]

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xcroc Says:

November 2, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Just came across this in The Register:

US military tracker-droids to ‘consider humans as fluid’
algorithm upgrade for airborne spyeyes
By Lewis Page
2nd November 2009 14:56 GMT

Pentagon propellerhead chiefs have hatched another sinister surveillance scheme. The plan is to add “flow based” theories of urban traffic movement – which assume that humans en masse behave like fluid moving through a network of pipes or channels – to conventional radar/camera based tracking of vehicles.

One need hardly say that the body behind the Flow-based Information Theory Tracking (FITT) scheme is none other than DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. When you’re a hammer, all the problems start to look like nails; when you’re DARPA, all the problems start to look like insignificant fleshies scurrying like cockroaches among their inefficient human warrens as your automated aerial robo-surveillance network peers down god-like from above.

The DARPA boffinry chiefs explain their aspirations to enhance their aerial spy networks thus:

The FITT program assumes that a sensor (e.g., radar or a set of cameras) observes a ground area…
As ground target densities increase in more urban areas, existing trackers often lose target track due to nearby confusers, and operate with limited hypothesis depths to avoid computational overload. In addition, urban traffic offers many constraints that conventional trackers do not exploit. For example, ground vehicles cannot pass thru each other, they cannot go beyond the bounds of typical urban roads, and they generally obey cultural conventions and traffic laws. Under these constraints, ground traffic behaves somewhat like a fluid, and the FITT Program expects to develop new tracking algorithms based on this fluidic viewpoint.

Thus, even if all the radar blips representing moving cars etc. start to run together, or if a car could no longer be seen visually due to an intervening building, lorry etc., a FITT-enhanced tracker system would still cope. It would be able to follow the position of a target vehicle at least for a while by monitoring the traffic flowing along.

Likewise, a FITT algorithm might be able to infer behaviour. If it was watching a vehicle approaching a T junction, but couldn’t observe the junction itself, it might note the vehicle slowing down and work out that it planned to turn at the junction rather than carrying straight on. Etc etc.

The initial DARPA workshop for people who’d like to design such kit takes place in a couple of weeks, and will among other delights feature a probably very interesting “Tracking State-of-the-Art” presentation. Full details from DARPA here in pdf. Strangely, it doesn’t seem to be classified top secret, as you might expect.

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b real Says:

November 8, 2009 at 4:43 pm
from james bamford’s 2008 book, the shadow factory: the ultra secret nsa from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on america (pp. 135-6, emphases added)

For years, one of the people near the top of the NSA’s target list was Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a native Yemeni suspected of belonging to al-Qaeda and of being one of the masterminds behind the attack on the USS Cole two years before. After listening to hours of tape recordings of his conversations, the small team assigned to locate al-Harethi was very familiar with the sound of his voice. But like most of the NSA’s targets, al-Harethi know that the United States was searching for him with an electronic dragnet, hoping to snag a brief satellite phone call and pinpoint his location. As a result he always carried with him up to half a dozen phones, each with multiple cards that could change the number. The NSA had a list of at least some of the numbers, and because he was a high-priority target, an alarm would go off if one of them was used.

On the afternoon of November 3, 2002, the alarm sounded, surprising one of the analysts on the team. “He knew this guy’s phone number and he [al-Harethi] hadn’t used it for a period of time – it was a satellite phone,” said one knowledgeable source. “Then it came up.” Using global positioning satellites, he was able to pinpoint al-Harethi in the Yemeni province of Mar’ib, a remote, sand-swept landscape controlled by well-armed tribal chiefs and largely off-limits to Yemeni police. The analyst quickly contacted a CIA team based across the Red Sea in Djibouti. From the small country on the Horn of Africa, the CIA operated a battery of unmanned Predator drones, each armed with deadly Hellfire missiles. From there, the drones could easily reach anywhere in Yemen, where at least one was already on patrol. Thus, almost immediately the CIA in Djibouti began directing the Predator toward the target.

But the NSA analyst, eavesdropping on the satellite call in near real time, was disappointed. Having listened to tape of al-Harethi’s voice many times over the years, he was convinced the person on the other end of the phone was not him. “This guy is listening and he realizes it’s not the guy,” said the source. “And all of sudden he hears like a six-second conversation and it’s the guy, he’s in the backseat and he’s giving the driver directions and it was picked up over the phone, and the analyst was that good that he heard over all the other stuff. He said, ‘That’s him.’ But because they have to have dual recognition, he called in the second guy, they played the tape, and they said, ‘It’s him.’ Forty minutes later a Hellfire missile hit that car. The Predator was already up doing surveillance. The CIA said to the Predator team, ‘Here’s the general location – from NSA – that we have the satellite phone, go find the damn car and get the guy.’ Those analysts get that good, they can recognize the voice. The CIA took credit for that because it was a CIA Predator that fired the shot that killed the guy. But the way they killed him was an NSA analyst listening.”

The black all-terrain vehicle instantly burst into a ball of flames, killing all five of the occupants and leaving little more than charred metal and a sprawling oil stain on the desert sand. Also in the car was Kamel Derwish, an American citizen who had grown up in the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna, New York, emigrated with his family to Saudi Arabia, and returned to Lackawanna in the late 1990s. He later recruited half a dozen other American Muslims to travel to Afghanistan, where they took part in an al-Qaeda training camp in 2001, months before the attack on 9/11.

It would be a milestone of sorts for the NSA – its first assassination. But it would not be the last. The agency created to passively eavesdrop on targets was now, with the CIA, actively assassinating targets.

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xcroc Says:

November 17, 2009 at 6:18 pm
It was an assassination tool right from the beginning, and remains an assassination tool. Although this appeared in the East African We won’t arm drones in East African waters – US. The article then goes on to say:

But he did not rule out other missions for the long-range drones, including flights over Somalia to track Islamist militants fighting to overthrow a government backed by the US, the United Nations and the African Union.

Mr Crawley said deployment of the drones reflects “a commitment to counter-piracy, maritime security, border security, deterrence of international terrorism, and other security-related issues impacting the residents of Seychelles and neighbouring countries.”

So reassuring.

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JP Says:

December 3, 2009 at 11:24 am
So what of the terrorists? Are they given immunity simply because they are not part of the DOD and as such must CERTAINLY not be evil in any way?

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xcroc Says:

December 7, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Hi JP, According to our present method of evaluation, if they are dead, they are terrorists. You too may find it comforting to view it that way.

That is simple and convenient, but hardly truth or justice. Nor does it fight terrorism, it breeds it. Undoubtedly some very evil people are dead due to the strikes. Also dead are children, family, neighbors, who may be unrelated, or even unsympathetic. There appears no oversight of the selection, targeting, and evaluation of the targets hit. Certainly there is no legal evaluation, due process, or judicial review. In many cases selection of targets may be made and strikes carried out by contractors with no accountability at all.
Selection of targets may be made according to information received from local sources. According to practices we have seen during the current war in Afghanistan, information received may be received by the US from angry neighbors or business rivals who want to settle a grudge, or eliminate competition. Individuals and governments can also “assist” the US by informing on their political rivals, making the predator strikes a tool of internal and local politics. By using US weapons, it is easy to eliminate the competition and the informer keeps his hands clean in the neighborhood. The US gets the blame and receives the ill will.
For contractors the incentive is that the more their products and services are used, the more it demonstrates a need for those products and services. The more strikes they make, the more the US will buy more drones and contract more strikes. This is entirely unrelated to terrorism or security or the country where the US strikes, except that the people there are vulnerable.

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xcroc Says:

December 22, 2009 at 5:48 pm
as many as 50 civilians die for every two militants

According to Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, between 35-40 percent of those killed by drone strikes are civilians, and that’s a middle-of-the-road estimate. David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum estimated that as many as 50 civilians die for every two militants. The drones have been used in such an indiscriminate way that British legal expert Lord Bingham, a senior law lord, said:

the aircraft could follow other weapons considered “so cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance” in being consigned to the history books. He likened drones, which have killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Gaza, to cluster bombs and landmines.

Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter expresses a similar sentiment in his recent Truthdig column:

Rather than furthering the U.S. cause in the “war on terror,” the [remotely piloted vehicle] RPV program, which President Obama seeks to expand in the Af-Pak theater, in reality represents a force-enhancement tool for the Taliban
link

and

Why Do Airstrikes in Afghanistan Keep Killing Exactly 30 People? Dec. 11
Another blogger, Joshua Foust of the Central Asia blog Registan, seemingly stumbled upon the answer. In a tweet, he noted:

In 2003, an air strike killing 30 civilians could be launched w/o issues. 31 dead civilians and Rummy had to approve.

Foust then linked to an LA Times article from last July by Nicholas Goldberg that documented what field commanders were told.

In a grisly calculus known as the “collateral damage estimate,” U.S. military commanders and lawyers often work together in advance of a military strike, using very specific, Pentagon-imposed protocols to determine whether the good that will come of it outweighs the cost.

We don’t know much about how it works, but in 2007, Marc Garlasco, the Pentagon’s former chief of high-value targeting, offered a glimpse when he told Salon magazine that in 2003, “the magic number was 30.” That meant that if an attack was anticipated to kill more than 30 civilians, it needed the explicit approval of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or President George W. Bush. If the expected civilian death toll was less than 30, the strike could be OKd by the legal and military commanders on the ground.

In other words, the Pentagon determined that 30 casualties, even if they were civilian, were too few to matter politically or to attract the attention of the press for more than a few words. If commanders expected more civilian casualties than that, political leaders had to sign off on the attack in advance to make sure they were prepared for the PR fall-out.

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xcroc Says:

January 26, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Domestic use may not be far behind.
from The Guardian:

CCTV in the sky: police plan to use military-style spy drones

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.

Documents from the South Coast Partnership, a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE, have been obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

They reveal the partnership intends to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics. They also indicate that police claims that the technology will be used for maritime surveillance fall well short of their intended use – which could span a range of police activity – and that officers have talked about selling the surveillance data to private companies. A prototype drone equipped with high-powered cameras and sensors is set to take to the skies for test flights later this year.

The Civil Aviation Authority, which regulates UK airspace, has been told by BAE and Kent police that civilian UAVs would “greatly extend” the government’s surveillance capacity and “revolutionise policing”.
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The surveillance data is fed back to control rooms via monitoring equipment such as high-definition cameras, radar devices and infrared sensors.

Previously, Kent police has said the drone scheme was intended for use over the English Channel to monitor shipping and detect immigrants crossing from France. However, the documents suggest the maritime focus was, at least in part, a public relations strategy designed to minimise civil liberty concerns.

“There is potential for these [maritime] uses to be projected as a ‘good news’ story to the public rather than more ‘big brother’,” a minute from the one of the earliest meetings, in July 2007, states.

Behind closed doors, the scope for UAVs has expanded significantly. Working with various policing organisations as well as the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Maritime and Fisheries Agency, HM Revenue and Customs and the UK Border Agency, BAE and Kent police have drawn up wider lists of potential uses.

One document lists “[detecting] theft from cash machines, preventing theft of tractors and monitoring antisocial driving” as future tasks for police drones, while another states the aircraft could be used for road and railway monitoring, search and rescue, event security and covert urban surveillance.

Under a section entitled “Other routine tasks (Local Councils) – surveillance”, another document states the drones could be used to combat “fly-posting, fly-tipping, abandoned vehicles, abnormal loads, waste management”.
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Partnership officials have said the UAVs could raise revenue from private companies. At one strategy meeting it was proposed the aircraft could undertake commercial work during spare time to offset some of the running costs.
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Military drones have been used extensively by the US to assist reconnaissance and airstrikes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But their use in war zones has been blamed for high civilian death tolls.

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b real Says:

January 26, 2010 at 11:02 pm
nick turse had an article up at tomdispatch.com the other day – The Drone Surge – that had some interesting info in it

unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

Drones are the hot weapons of the moment and the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review — a soon-to-be-released four-year outline of Department of Defense strategies, capabilities, and priorities to fight current wars and counter future threats — is already known to reflect this focus.

…

This means bigger, badder, faster drones — armed to the teeth — with sensor systems to monitor wide swathes of territory and the ability to loiter overhead for days on end waiting for human targets to appear and, in due course, be vaporized by high-powered munitions. It’s a future built upon advanced technologies designed to make targeted killings — remote-controlled assassinations — ever more effortless.

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The year 2047 is the target date for the Air Force’s Holy Grail, the capstone for its long-term plan to turn the skies over to war-fighting drones. In 2047, the Air Force intends to rule the skies with MQ-Mc drones and “special” super-fast, hypersonic drones for which neither viable technology nor any enemies with any comparable programs or capabilities yet exist. Despite this, the Air Force is intent on making these super-fast hunter-killer systems a reality by 2047. “Propulsion technology and materials that can withstand the extreme heat will likely take 20 years to develop. This technology will be the next generation air game-changer. Therefore the prioritization of the funding for the specific technology development should not wait until the emergence of a critical COCOM [combatant command] need,” says the Air Force’s 2009-2047 UAS “Flight Plan.”

If anything close to the Air Force’s dreams comes to fruition, the “game” will indeed be radically changed. By 2047, there’s no telling how many drones will be circling over how many heads in how many places across the planet. There’s no telling how many millions or billions of flight hours will have been flown, or how many people, in how many countries will have been killed by remote-controlled, bomb-dropping, missile-firing, judge-jury-and-executioner drone systems.

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xcroc Says:

January 27, 2010 at 11:19 pm
I hadn’t seen that and appreciate the tip. And speaking of remote-controlled, bomb-dropping, missile-firing, judge-jury-and-executioner drone systems, they are already acting as judge jury and executioner for US citizens. A WP story about strikes in Yemen mentions:

… a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC …

U.S. military teams, intelligence deeply involved in aiding Yemen on strikes

We can dream about democracy and the rule of law with sentimental nostalgia.

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Drones & Aerial Surveillance In Africa – Map « tamoudre Says:

March 20, 2013 at 3:16 am
[…] The United States is now carrying out surveillance all along the coasts of Africa and continually increasing surveillance from the air. The map above is just the beginning. There will be more political assassin robots flying in African skies. […]

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