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Please welcome USA's New 51st State ! New Dronearado


Steven Gaal

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A 51st State for Armed Robotic Drones :blink: ? :blink: ? :blink: ?

================= :o what ?? =====================================

by David Swanson

Weaponized UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), also known as drones, have their own caucus in Congress, and the Pentagon's plan is to give them their own state as well.

Under this plan, 7 million acres (or 11,000 square miles) of land in the southeast corner of Colorado, and 60 million acres of air space (or 94,000 square miles) over Colorado and New Mexico would be given over to special forces testing and training in the use of remote-controlled flying murder machines. The full state of Colorado is itself 104,000 square miles. Rhode Island is 1,000 square miles. Virginia, where I live, is 43,000 square miles.

The U.S. military (including Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines) is proceeding with this plan in violation of the public will, new state legislation on private property rights, an exceptionally strong federal court order, and a funding ban passed by the United States Congress, and in the absence of any approved Environmental Impact Statement. Public pressure has successfully put the law on the right side of this issue, and the military is disregarding the law.

I spoke with Jean Aguerre, whose organization "Not 1 More Acre" ( http://not1moreacre.net ) is leading the pushback against this madness. Jean told me she grew up, during the 1960s, on the vast grasslands of southeast Colorado, where the Comanche National Grasslands makes up part of a system of grasslands put in place to help the prairie recover from the dust bowl. The dust bowl, Aguerre says, was the worst environmental disaster in the United States until BP filled the Gulf of Mexico with oil. The dust bowl had been brought on by the government's policy of requiring homesteaders to plow the prairie. The recovery programs created large tracts of land, of 100,000 acres and more, owned by "generational ranchers," that is families that would hand the ranches off to their children.

Aguerre said she grew up on a ranch of incredible beauty and natural wealth, with a 165-million-year-old dinosaur track way and petroglyphs from 12,000 years back. Grasslands are the most threatened ecosystems in the world because they are so accessible, Aguerre says, and the only intact short grassland left in this country is the one being targeted for the "51st state."

Round One began in the 1980s. Fort Carson, an Army base in Colorado Springs, had been kept open after World War II and now began looking for more land. The people of the area were opposed. The U.S. Congressman representing the area agreed to oppose any landgrab. But Senator Gary Hart took the opposite position. As a result, during the early 1980s, the Army Corps of Engineers started telling ranchers to sell out or risk seeing their land condemned and taken from them.

The ranch next to Aguerre's is called Wine Glass Rourke. It was sold to a shill, as Aguerre describes the buyer. He ran the place into the ground with too many cattle, she says, and then sold it to the military, "And they were off and running!" With condemnations the military put together 250 thousand acres. Ranchers, along with their cattle, were moved off their own land by federal marshals. "We didn't know when we'd be next," Aguerre says of her own family.

Luckily for the people of Colorado and New Mexico, and all of us, Aguerre got involved in politics. She became a political director for Congressman Tim Werth who later became a U.S. senator. Aguerre took him to see the Wine Glass Rourke ranch and told him "Let's take it back." Werth dedicated his staff to the effort for three years, resulting in the transfer to the Forest Service of 17,000 key acres.

The Army used its new land less than twice a year for maneuvers, but caused horrible environmental damage whenever it did. That was the case for about 30 years, until the activity of recent years made everything that came before look sensitive and sustainable.

In the meantime, people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were theorizing the transformation of the U.S. military into a force for robotic warfare. Aguerre believes it was in 1996 that a decision was made that the military would need a robotic warfare center. Around 1999 the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement was created. This precedes the more specific Site Environmental Impact Statements. The U.S. public, just like the public of any foreign nation where new U.S. bases are being planned, was told nothing.

In 2006, Aguerre was working in Oregon when friends started asking her to come home and help because something big was happening. An Army land expansion map had been leaked that showed plans for taking over 6.9 million acres, the whole southeast corner of the state. Aguerre thought she would come home for two weeks but has never left. An Environmental Impact Statement for the site was about to be released, and Aguerre knew that meant the project was pretty far along. She formed organizations and found a lawyer in Colorado Springs named Steve Harris to help. The two of them, she says, were absolutely dedicated to NEPA and FOIA. NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act of 1966. "NEPA is intended to prevent our government taking our world apart piece by piece without our knowing it," explains Aguerre.

Aguerre and others persuaded the area's county commissioners to vote against the military's plans in 2006, and the state legislature to pass a private property rights bill in January 2007 -- a bill that required approval of such plans by the state legislature.

Ken Salazar was the military's hired servant. He had been Attorney General of Colorado from 1999 to 2005. He was a U.S. Senator from 2005 to 2009. President Barack Obama has made him Secretary of the Interior. Around 2007, Jean Aguerre recounts, Salazar held a public meeting in Pueblo, Col., with about 300 ranchers packing the room. He turned his palms up to the ceiling and announced: "I will lift the golden curtain that falls at the end of El Paso county so that prosperity can flow onto the eastern plains." This meant that military spending was economically beneficial. Military expansion, people were being told, was good for them -- even if it stole their families' land, and regardless of what momentum it created for the launching and continuing of wars.

"Instead of putting together frameworks for nonproliferation," says Aguerre, "Ken Salazar worked to destroy the last intact short grass prairie because the money was too good."

Senators Wayne Allard, who would join the military lobbyist company the Livingston Group within weeks of leaving the Senate, and Ken Salazar passed an authorization for taking land as part of the 2007 John Warner Defense Authorization Act. "None of the ranchers knew they were in line to be condemned for the second damn time," says Aguerre.

John Salazar, Ken's brother, at this time represented Colorado's third congressional district, while Republican Marilyn Musgrave represented the fourth. Musgrave was persuaded by ranchers that there was no need for the government to take their land. Aguerre worked with Musgrave's staff to draft a one-sentence funding ban. Aguerre and her allies then organized massive public pressure to recruit John Salazar as a Democratic co-sponsor. Ken Salazar failed in his effort to block this measure in the Senate. The ban passed both houses and became law, but it must be renewed every year.

In 2009, Aguerre and her allies won a federal court ruling throwing out the military's Environmental Impact Statement with harsh and unequivocal language -- "one of the strongest court orders under NEPA," says Aguerre. By 2008, the military had begun using its land a lot more, and the court ruling did not stop them.

The funding ban, too, is not stopping increased activity. This past year, the funding ban was missing from a committee chairman's markup in which it had appeared in previous years. Not 1 More Acre and its allies pressured Third-District Congressman Scott Tipton. People from all over the country phoned his office. They were told that as non-constituents their views did not matter. Aguerre advised people to reply: "When you pick my pocket you don't ask what district I'm from." Tipton was won over, and the funding ban, for what it's worth, remains for now.

Nonetheless, says Aguerre, the military is proceeding with and increasing trainings and environmental destruction daily .

Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado and Tom Udall of New Mexico don't receive high marks from Jean Aguerre. "Mark Udall on Armed Services and Michael Bennet on Agriculture sit with their thumbs in their pie. Udall has never once come to southeastern Colorado and looked young ranchers in the eye and said 'this is why we need this military takeover of your lands.'"

Aguerre continues: "And Tom Udall puts out this pap the other day, mumbo jumbo about the Air Force. It's not Air Force; it's Special Operations. Aguerre said that her group and others are preparing a comment letter seeking legal standing to challenge the Air Force, and potentially to pry loose more information from the iron grip of our "transparent" government. Aguerre points out that the Air Force Special Operations Command Environmental Assessment was written by SAIC, a global military contractor that also makes voting machines.

"We found out that the state national guard is completely involved in UAV warfare," says Aguerre. "So when your house floods and you don't have the national guard there, they may be remotely piloting something somewhere else."

Aguerre says that in 2006 she knew of four countries that were manufacturing armed UAVs, and that now she knows of 56. So, the argument that drones keep "people" out of harm's way (with people redefined to mean U.S. citizens) doesn't hold up very solidly. We have also already had a suicide bomb attack on a drone piloting location and had drone pilots commit suicide, not to mention the risks of long-term blowback, the damage being done to the rule of law, and all the human beings killed and injured from among the non-U.S. 95% of humanity.

Aguerre asks scientists who love unarmed UAVs to consider the full effect of supporting such technology. I would ask environmentalists to consider the full effect of not resisting the destruction of what Not 1 More Acre describes as:

• unique bioregions of canyonlands, forested mesas, grasslands and riparian systems providing habitat for diverse flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth and the largest block of native prairie remaining on the High Plains;

• restored Dust Bowl lands – Comanche, Kiowa and Rita Blanca National Grasslands — offering robust safe haven to threatened and endangered species of plants and animals, including rare insects and reptiles yet to be named;

• wild rivers and complex wetlands vital to native fish, migrating birds, unique wildlife and environmental health.

I would ask opponents of drone warfare to consider the likely impact of setting aside 60 million acres of air space for testing drones.

"We cannot allow the sacrifice of our democracy to politicians who are bought by military contractors," says Aguerre. "If they are able to get this 51st state for robotic warfare, I think the economy will be irretrievably lost. These are unbelievably beautiful and pristine lands. Our rural areas are where the genetically modified seeds are being planted, where the lands and mountains are being mined, and where the military is going to destroy an area the size of a state, because the rural people are so few. Gary Hart was able to attack the last short grass prairie without political cost."

Why is there no political cost? Because "we can't get the word out."

Let's help get the word out by sharing this link: http://not1moreacre.org

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Amazing but not surprising as a logical extension of stuff. Interesting to me too is that at the beginning of reading it I kept in mind a study of the effects of war on participants through history that seemed to indicate that in olden days when war was very much up close and personal to more and more distant warfare permitted by modern armaments showed a correlation of post war reintegration and neurosis with 'distance', so the mention of suicide jumped out. Not only is this kind of warfare globally destructive and locally environmentally so, it is also destructive to the button pusher, possibly on a level previously unknown?

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Amazing but not surprising as a logical extension of stuff. Interesting to me too is that at the beginning of reading it I kept in mind a study of the effects of war on participants through history that seemed to indicate that in olden days when war was very much up close and personal to more and more distant warfare permitted by modern armaments showed a correlation of post war reintegration and neurosis with 'distance', so the mention of suicide jumped out. Not only is this kind of warfare globally destructive and locally environmentally so, it is also destructive to the button pusher, possibly on a level previously unknown?

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Dear John, Yes many,many problems.......but seen before === loss of compassionn,empathy,and soul. This loss to the person done in a new/novel way.

Study finds violent games emotionally desensitizing

--------------------o----------------------------

link http://gamepolitics.com/2009/03/04/raf-may-replace-pilots-gamers-combat-drone-sorties (gamers replace pilots to control drones)

link http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/study-finds-violent-games-emotionally-desensitizing-185852905.html

Edited by Steven Gaal
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Amazing but not surprising as a logical extension of stuff. Interesting to me too is that at the beginning of reading it I kept in mind a study of the effects of war on participants through history that seemed to indicate that in olden days when war was very much up close and personal to more and more distant warfare permitted by modern armaments showed a correlation of post war reintegration and neurosis with 'distance', so the mention of suicide jumped out. Not only is this kind of warfare globally destructive and locally environmentally so, it is also destructive to the button pusher, possibly on a level previously unknown?

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVoVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV=

Dear John, Yes many,many problems.......but seen before === loss of compassionn,empathy,and soul. This loss to the person done in a new/novel way.

Study finds violent games 'emotionally desensitizing'

--------------------o----------------------------

link http://gamepolitics....t-drone-sorties (gamers replace pilots to control drones)

link http://games.yahoo.c...-185852905.html

What' the problem with drones again?

Trying to ban drones is like trying to ban machine guns in warfare.

You take a knife to a gun fight and your going to lose. It's not the weapon, its the cause it is used for.

Not long ago they were considered toys - toy airplanes boys and grown men flew in the fields for fun.

Arthur Young, unlike Sikorsky and others, developed his helicopter - Bell 47A - the MASH helicopter - using remote controlled models - and no test pilots died or were injured in the process. He was also a pacifist, who was pleased with the use of his helicopter as a medivac in Korea, and disappointed it was weaponized in Vietnam, but acknowledged he had no control over how it was utilized.

As for the use of USA drones for surveillance and attack missions, they don't put anyone who controls them in direct jeopardy, and are very effective, as has been shown in their use in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and now Somalia (surveillance only), and give a significant advantage over the bad guys, who are also attempting to utilize armed drones to attack civilian targets, as the arrest of a suspect on such charges in USA last month shows.

Drones are here to stay and aren't going anywhere, whether or not people protest them and whether or not the people of Colorado allow the military to practice using them there.

BK

For more on Drones:

US sends drones to Libya

How the rebels bought a drone on the internet

The Drones Arms Race

Revolutionary Program: USA Sends DRONES to Libya

Revolutionary Program: Lost one MQ 8B Fire Scout

Edited by William Kelly
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Terribly biased and emotive. All those who agree were environmentally conscious, trying to do the right thing, guardian of truth and justice, whilst anyone who disagreed was a shill, a servant, etc.

The environmental impact will be the same as any weapons range, and I'm guessing this one will actually be a little smaller. I think there is going to be some type of weapons firing area, but the main thing is the airspace, so the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPAs) can operate without fear of a mid-air with a passenger plane or light aircraft, and if something happens to cause the RPA to crash then it won't be coming down on populated areas.

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Amazing but not surprising as a logical extension of stuff. Interesting to me too is that at the beginning of reading it I kept in mind a study of the effects of war on participants through history that seemed to indicate that in olden days when war was very much up close and personal to more and more distant warfare permitted by modern armaments showed a correlation of post war reintegration and neurosis with 'distance', so the mention of suicide jumped out. Not only is this kind of warfare globally destructive and locally environmentally so, it is also destructive to the button pusher, possibly on a level previously unknown?

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVoVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV=

Dear John, Yes many,many problems.......but seen before === loss of compassionn,empathy,and soul. This loss to the person done in a new/novel way.

Study finds violent games 'emotionally desensitizing'

--------------------o----------------------------

link http://gamepolitics....t-drone-sorties (gamers replace pilots to control drones)

link http://games.yahoo.c...-185852905.html

What' the problem with drones again?

Trying to ban drones is like trying to ban machine guns in warfare.

You take a knife to a gun fight and your going to lose. It's not the weapon, its the cause it is used for.

Not long ago they were considered toys - toy airplanes boys and grown men flew in the fields for fun.

Arthur Young, unlike Sikorsky and others, developed his helicopter - Bell 47A - the MASH helicopter - using remote controlled models - and no test pilots died or were injured in the process. He was also a pacifist, who was pleased with the use of his helicopter as a medivac in Korea, and disappointed it was weaponized in Vietnam, but acknowledged he had no control over how it was utilized.

As for the use of USA drones for surveillance and attack missions, they don't put anyone who controls them in direct jeopardy, and are very effective, as has been shown in their use in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and now Somalia (surveillance only), and give a significant advantage over the bad guys, who are also attempting to utilize armed drones to attack civilian targets, as the arrest of a suspect on such charges in USA last month shows.

Drones are here to stay and aren't going anywhere, whether or not people protest them and whether or not the people of Colorado allow the military to practice using them there.

BK

For more on Drones:

US sends drones to Libya

How the rebels bought a drone on the internet

The Drones Arms Race

Revolutionary Program: USA Sends DRONES to Libya

Revolutionary Program: Lost one MQ 8B Fire Scout

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVoVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV=oo=

VVVVVVVVVVVVVoVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

Bad guys.....eye of beholder...................

--------------o----------------........................

The civilian victims of the CIA's drone war

A new study gives us the truest picture yet – in contrast to the CIA's own account – of drones' grim toll of 'collateral damage'

Sameeda Gul, 6, who was injured in a drone strike in Pakistan in 2009. Photograph: Getty Images

I would not deny that the pilotless plane, flying bomb, or whatever its correct name may be, is an exceptionally unpleasant thing, because, unlike most other projectiles, it gives you time to think. What is your first reaction when you hear that droning, zooming noise? Inevitably, it is a hope that the noise won't stop. You want to hear the bomb pass safely overhead and die away into the distance …

– George Orwell, "As I Please", Tribune, 30 June 1944

George Orwell wrote of V2 attacks on London in 1944. Yet, there are many more in Britain who identify with that voice, speaking 67 years ago, than with events that are a regular reality in Pakistan today.

This week, a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism gives us the best picture yet of the impact of the CIA's drone war in Pakistan. The CIA claims that there has been not one "non-combatant" killed in the past year. This claim always seemed to be biased advocacy rather than honest fact. Indeed, the Guardian recently published some of the pictures we have obtained of the aftermath of drone strikes. There were photos of a child called Naeem Ullah killed in Datta Khel and two kids in Piranho, both within the timeframe of the CIA's dubious declaration.

The BIJ reporting begins to fill in the actual numbers. It's a bleak view: more people killed than previously thought, including an estimated 160 children overall. This study should help to create a greater sense of reality around what is going on in these remote regions of Pakistan. This is precisely what has been lacking in the one-sided reporting of the issue – and it doesn't take an intelligence analyst to realise that vague and one-sided is just the way the CIA wants to keep it.

The BIJ's study is everything that the CIA version of events is not: transparent, drawn from as many credible sources as possible and essentially open. It is clear about where its material comes from and what the margin of error may be. You should look, and you should engage, not just with the bare numbers, but also some of the stories: the attack on would-be rescuers by drones that had lingered, circling over the site of a previous strike, and opened fire – on the cruel assumption that any Good Samaritan must be a Taliban Samaritan; or the teenager who lost both legs when his family home was hit.

Sadaullah was 15 when the missiles, aimed at a militant leader who was never there, struck a family gathering, killing his wheelchair-bound uncle and two cousins. When he woke up in hospital, he was missing both legs and an eye. "The injured who survive with their severed limbs, they often tell me, 'you cannot really call me lucky'," says his lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar. "This is not London or Islamabad. There are no facilities for the disabled in Waziristan; such people can have zero opportunities ahead of them in life."

The primary question the CIA should answer is how it comes to be conducting an undeclared and illegal war in Pakistan, which is nominally a US ally. But beyond this, every time we read news of the latest drone strike in Pakistan, we need an honest assessment of the civilian casualties – and of whether we feel comfortable with an unaccountable spy agency carrying out killings on a military scale (the CIA's strikes now outweigh the firepower used in the opening round of the Kosovo war).

We also need to think about what it is like for ordinary people to live under George Orwell's circling threat, wondering whether it is going to strike, or to die away into the distance. And to note what lengths the CIA will go to silence human rights lawyers such as Akbar, who are trying to break the cycle of violence by bringing victims' cases against the CIA through the courts.

Or we could think in terms of enlightened self-interest: what do these strikes do to people's views of the US and its allies? Sixty-seven years after Orwell warily wondered whether he would be the next victim, how many angry relatives of a Waziristan child are plotting an attack on London or Washington, DC?

The BIJ study begins to bring the CIA's covert war out of the shadows. Since we may all become collateral damage, we should be grateful to them.

link http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/11/civilian-victims-cia-drones

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Somalia hot air from Bill Kelly, a prime DOD cheerleader. No fact check,just repeating State Dept. line.

========o===========

link http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27360

link http://www.presstv.ir/detail/204501.html

Edited by Steven Gaal
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I point out that drones are only a weapon that anyone can develop and use, even terrorists,

and Steve Gaal calls me a "DOD cheerleader"?

You don't know me Mr. Gaal.

You don't know that I am fighting the DOD on more than one front while you aren't fighting them at all.

I am up against the DOD and Navy regarding an a Congressional Resolution that's attached to the Defense Authorization Act,

and I'm currently writing articles that implicate the Office of Naval Intelligence in the assassination and cover up of records.

What do you do other than post BS on this forum?

BK

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----------------------------------------------------------

60% of Iraq women have 'less' freedom now (a lesser but high %age of Libyan womem will experince the same). The reaction to 911 should have been a special forces/police action. After 911 in Tehran Iran massive people came out in candle light vigils in solidarity for the dead of the WTC.(even beyond the soccer stadium event) link http://www.tehran24.com/tehran/photos/index.cfm?year=2001&month=9&day=18&theStart=1&keywords=&special=0ℑ=010918-001

__________________________________________ooo_____________________________

The Taliban Agreed To Extradite Osama Bin Laden To Another Country

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link http://www.j-n-v.org/AW_briefings/ARROW_briefing005.htm

link http://www.fff.org/comment/com0905c.asp

#####################v###########################=o

Do combat drones make it too easy to wage war?

------------------------------------o----------------------------

link http://www.macombdaily.com/articles/2011/05/01/online/srv0000011561292.txt

link http://www.spectacle.org/0309/vincent.html

maybe not the best ,anyway (below from the conservative 'Commentary')

The answer to that is obviously that it will. But the larger problem is not that using drones undermines the confidence of our allies in uniform. It is that drones vastly reduce our ability to fight a counterinsurgency campaign by protecting local populations and collecting intelligence that allows us to prosecute the war more effectively. Moreover, drones, by incinerating combatants and their cell phones from above, reduce our ability to gain through interrogations and analysis the intelligence we need to conduct counterinsurgency as well as counter-terrorism, and police operations. The problem with drones is not that they make us think war will be easy, but that they are being used to deny the realities of the war we are fighting.

------------------------------o-----------------

Edited by Steven Gaal
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  • 2 weeks later...

So you see a group of people you think might "know" terrorists......... you kill them by drone. If you think this is just act ,you are immoral.

====================================================================================================

As ongoing drone strikes from American officials continue to raise questions both home and abroad, a new report suggests that those with perhaps the fewest concerns for the missions are the very authorities that approve them.

According to a report published in the Wall Street Journal, a large number of the unmanned strikes carried out by robotic American drone aircraft are launched without officials identifying the targets of the plane. Rather, groups of men that are suspected of being associated with terrorist groups are fired upon in hopes of eliminating the enemy.

The Journal writes that those attacks, called “signature” strikes by the CIA, make up the “bulk” of the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missions.

-------------------------------------------------o-------------------------------------

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Drones kill first, ask later

Published: 08 November, 2011, 02:37

Signature drone strikes target suspects sometimes not identified by the CIA

As ongoing drone strikes from American officials continue to raise questions both home and abroad, a new report suggests that those with perhaps the fewest concerns for the missions are the very authorities that approve them.

According to a report published in the Wall Street Journal, a large number of the unmanned strikes carried out by robotic American drone aircraft are launched without officials identifying the targets of the plane. Rather, groups of men that are suspected of being associated with terrorist groups are fired upon in hopes of eliminating the enemy.

The Journal writes that those attacks, called “signature” strikes by the CIA, make up the “bulk” of the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missions. Signature strikes were first used under President George W Bush and continue under the Obama administration despite opposition from Pakistani authorities. An US counterterrorism official speaking on condition of anonymity to the Wall Street Journal says that double the number of wanted terrorists have been killed using signature strikes as opposed to attacks that signal out specific targets, “personality” strikes, but information about the death toll stemming from either is scarce outside of what the CIA offers publically.

American personnel claim that drone strikes in Pakistan have only taken 60 lives since the operations began a decade ago under President Bush. Other agencies are quick to criticize that statistic, however. In a report issued this summer by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism out of London, they make claims that at least 385 of the casualties caused by unmanned robotic America drones were of civilians. Actual casualties, say the Bureau, are at least 40 percent higher than previously reported by the US government.

Signature strikes are still carried out today despite growing opposition of American military action from Pakistan. After the unauthorized raid in May that killed former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Pakistanis have become more angered than ever over ongoing American operations in Pakistan. As the US continues its War on Terror, however, the deaths continue to add up.

Last month a strike in Yemen took out two American citizens suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda. With upwards of hundreds of civilians losing their lives on multiple front now, is it worth pursuing these missions?

"The question is, 'Is it even worth doing now? We've got the key leadership in al Qaeda, what is it that we're there for now?" one White House official tells the Wall Street Journal he overheard during internal meetings.

In 2011 so far, the United States has launched more than 50 drone strikes in Pakistan alone — despite being ordered off of bases by the country’s Defense Minister. Operations are far from limited to just Pakistan and Yemen, however; US drones carried around 23,000 spy missions in the first nine months of 2011 and airstrikes in Libya between April and November totaled 145.

It’s expected that even with the assassination of Gaddafi, drone strikes worldwide offered up by Americans will carry on. A Washington Post report from September 2011 alleged that the CIA was constructing drone bases in the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles to increase the number of strikes overseas.

Meanwhile, strikes will continue in Pakistan where the current plan is to act first, ask questions later. Under current drone strike policies, the latest report reveals that the White House is rarely asked for approval for CIA-led strikes. Instead, rather, Obama and company are only informed of attacks after they occur.

And as for Pakistani officials that are subjecting to ongoing American presence as the War on Terror continues? Current mandates, revealed now by the Journal, suggests that the CIA only must inform Pakistan of its signature strikes in advance if it believes it will kill more than 20 militants.

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