See All Advisories *Media credentials for the listed events are managed through the News Office. Many more events take place on campus that are. InformationWeek.com: News, analysis and research for business technology professionals, plus peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Engage with our community. NetSmartz offers free, multimedia Internet safety presentations tailored for specific audiences – parents and communities, tweens, teens, and younger children. The Predator War What are the risks of the C.I.A.’s covert drone program? The Predator War - The New Yorker. The . Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, could be seen reclining on the rooftop of his father- in- law. It was a hot summer night, and he was joined outside by his wife and his uncle, a medic; at one point, the remarkably crisp images showed that Mehsud, who suffered from diabetes and a kidney ailment, was receiving an intravenous drip. The video was being captured by the infrared camera of a Predator drone, a remotely controlled, unmanned plane that had been hovering, undetected, two miles or so above the house. Rehman Malik, told me recently that Mehsud was resting on his back. Malik, using his hands to make a picture frame, explained that the Predator. We thought it was a fairy tale. Authorities watched the fiery blast in real time. After the dust cloud dissipated, all that remained of Mehsud was a detached torso. Eleven others died: his wife, his father- in- law, his mother- in- law, a lieutenant, and seven bodyguards. Pakistan. Mehsud was also thought to have helped his Afghan confederates attack American and coalition troops across the border. Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official on the National Security Council, who is now a partner at Good Harbor, a consulting firm, told me, . The furor grew when the Times reported that the C. I. A. Members of the Senate and House intelligence committees demanded investigations of the program, which, they said, had been hidden from them. And many legal experts argued that, had the program become fully operational, it would have violated a 1. President Gerald R. Ford, banning American intelligence forces from engaging in assassination. Hina Shamsi, a human- rights lawyer at the New York University School of Law, was struck by the inconsistency of the public. Employees of Xe Services maintain and load the Hellfire missiles on the aircraft. Vicki Divoll, a former C. I. A. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, observed, . As such, it is an extension of conventional warfare. The united nations environment programme (UNEP) is the voice for the environment in the united nations system. See the President's daily schedule, explore behind-the-scenes photos from inside the White House, and find out all the ways you can engage with the most interactive. It was initiated by the Bush Administration and, according to Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism adviser in the Bush White House, Obama has left in place virtually all the key personnel. The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed. Nevertheless, reports of fatal air strikes in Pakistan emerge every few days. Such stories are often secondhand and difficult to confirm, as the Pakistani government and the military have tried to wall off the tribal areas from journalists. But, even if a precise account is elusive, the outlines are clear: the C. I. A. Within hours, it was clear that the morning. In one strike, four Arabs, all likely affiliated with Al Qaeda, died. But in the second strike a drone targeted the wrong house, hitting the residence of a pro- government tribal leader six miles outside the town of Wana, in South Waziristan. The blast killed the tribal leader. According to a just completed study by the New America Foundation, the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President. During his first nine and a half months in office, he has authorized as many C. I. A. Bush did in his final three years in office. So far this year, various estimates suggest, the C. I. A. Critics say that many of the victims have been innocent bystanders, including children. In the last week of September alone, there were reportedly four such attacks. At any given moment, a former White House counterterrorism official says, the C. I. A. According to the official, . The government plans to commission hundreds more, including new generations of tiny . In this view, the U. S., rather than trying to stabilize Afghanistan by waging a counter- insurgency operation against Taliban forces, should focus purely on counterterrorism, and use the latest technology to surgically eliminate Al Qaeda leaders and their allies. In September, the conservative pundit George Will published an influential column in the Washington Post, . And, because of the C. I. A. Should something go wrong in the C. I. A. According to a former counterterrorism official, the contractors are . One set of pilots and operators works abroad, near hidden airfields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, handling takeoffs and landings. Once the drones are aloft, the former counterterrorism official said, the controls are electronically . Using joysticks that resemble video- game controls, the reachback operators. From their suburban redoubt, they can turn the plane, zoom in on the landscape below, and decide whether to lock onto a target. A stream of additional . The White House has delegated trigger authority to C. I. A. People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe- inspiring and horrifying. Singer, the author of . Nearly all the victims have remained faceless, and the damage caused by the bombings has remained unseen. In contrast to Gaza, where the targeted killing of Hamas fighters by the Israeli military has been extensively documented. As a result, no videos of a drone attack in progress have been released, and only a few photographs of the immediate aftermath of a Predator strike have been published. The seeming unreality of the Predator enterprise is also felt by the pilots. Some of them reportedly wear flight suits when they operate a drone. When their shifts end, of course, these cubicle warriors can drive home to have dinner with their families. Critics have suggested that unmanned systems, by sparing these combatants from danger and sacrifice, are creating what Sir Brian Burridge, a former British Air Chief Marshal in Iraq, has called . According to Singer, some Predator pilots suffer from combat stress that equals, or exceeds, that of pilots in the battlefield. This suggests that virtual killing, for all its sterile trappings, is a discomfiting form of warfare. Meanwhile, some social critics, such as Mary Dudziak, a professor at the University of Southern California. The American Ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, said at the time, . They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that. Daniel Benjamin, the State Department. George Tenet, then the agency. Within days, President Bush had signed a secret Memorandum of Notification, giving the C. I. A. Congress endorsed this policy, passing a bill called the Authorization for Use of Military Force. By classifying terrorism as an act of war, rather than as a crime, the Bush Administration reasoned that it was no longer bound by legal constraints requiring the government to give suspected terrorists due process. In November, 2. 00. Bush Administration officials publicly announced a successful Predator strike against an Al Qaeda target, Qaed Salim Sinan al- Harethi, a suspect in the 2. U. S. S. Harethi was killed after a Hellfire missile vaporized the car in which he and five other passengers were riding, on a desert road in Yemen. Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Defense Secretary, praised the new tactic, telling CNN, . In 2. 00. 2, Jeffrey Smith, a former C. I. A. Hersh, for an article in this magazine, . Assassination as a norm of international conduct exposes American leaders and Americans overseas. Now, he notes, nobody in the government calls it assassination. The Predator program is described by many in the intelligence world as America. In May, Leon Panetta, the C. I. A. Counterterrorism officials credit drones with having killed more than a dozen senior Al Qaeda leaders and their allies in the past year, eliminating more than half of the C. I. A. In addition to Baitullah Mehsud, the list includes Nazimuddin Zalalov, a former lieutenant of Osama bin Laden; Ilyas Kashmiri, Al Qaeda. Though he acknowledges that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al- Zawahiri, the group. Surviving militants are forced to operate far more cautiously, which diverts their energy from planning new attacks. And there is evidence that the drone strikes, which depend on local informants for targeting information, have caused debilitating suspicion and discord within the ranks. Four Europeans who were captured last December after trying to join Al Qaeda in Pakistan described a life of constant fear and distrust among the militants, whose obsession with drone strikes had led them to communicate only with elaborate secrecy and to leave their squalid hideouts only at night. As the Times has reported, militants have been so unnerved by the drone program that they have released a video showing the execution of accused informants. Pakistanis have also been gripped by rumors that paid C. I. A. Michael Walzer, a political philosopher and the author of the book . The military operates under a legal code, and it has judicial mechanisms. People are being killed, and we generally require some public justification when we go about killing people. When he asked, in formal correspondence, for the C. I. A. That careful, precise approach has brought major success against a very dangerous and deadly enemy. Human Rights Council, but, he says, the U. S. You start by saying we. It becomes standard operating procedure. It becomes all too easy. Planners start saying, . Finally, the foreign nation in which such targeted killing takes place has to give its permission. Many lawyers who have looked at America. But they are nevertheless troubled, as the U. S. Last March, the Obama Administration made an unannounced decision to win support for the drone program inside Pakistan by giving President Asif Ali Zardari more control over whom to target. According to the New America Foundation. Eighteen were directed at Taliban targets in Pakistan, and fifteen were aimed specifically at Baitullah Mehsud. Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani lieutenant general and an authority on security issues, says that the U. S. But, given that many of the targeted Pakistani Taliban figures were obscure in U. To learn more, visit our Privacy Policy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |