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GLOBAL NEWS THE PREDATOR WAR What Are the Risks of the CIA's Covert Drone Program? oO 5 August, officials at the Central Intelligence Agency, in Langley, Virginia, watched a live video feed relaying close-up footage of one of the most wanted terrorists in Pakistan. Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, could be seen reclining on the rooftop of his father-in-law's house, in Zanghara, a hamlet in South Waziristan. 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. Mehsud was resting on his back. The image remained just as stable when the CIA remotely launched two Hellfire missiles from the Predator. 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's government considered Mehsud its top enemy, holding him responsible for the vast majority of recent terrorist attacks inside the country, including the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 and the bombing in September 2008 of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed more than 50 people. The US government runs two drone programs. The military's version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognised war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets enemies of US troops stationed there. As such, it is an extension of conventional warfare. The CIA's program is aimed at terrorrist suspects around the world, including in countries where US troops are not based. At any given moment the CIA has multiple drones flying over Pakistan, scouting for targets. 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. The Air Force's fleet has grown from some fifty drones in 2001 to nearly 200; the CIA will not divulge how many drones it operates. The government plans to commission hundreds more, including new generations of tiny "nano" drones, which can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window. With public disenchantment mounting over the US troop deployment in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration divided over whether to escalate the American military presence there, many in Washington support an even greater reliance on Predator strikes. It's easy to understand the appeal of a "push-button" approach to fighting al-Qaeda, but the embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. And, because of the CIA program's secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the US is not at war. Meanwhile, some social critics, such as Mary Dudziak, a professor at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law, argue that the Predator strategy has a larger political cost. As Dudziak puts it, "Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on...endless war." (Source: By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 26 October 2009, pp. 36-45) The European Commission is calling or a “common culture" of law enforcement to be developed across he EU and for a third of police officers o be given training in European affairs within the next five years. According to the Open Europe hink-tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and_ sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access O sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple. According to the official website for Project Indect, which began this year, its main objectives include "to develop a platform for the registration and exchange of operational data, acquisition of multimedia content, intelligent processing of all information and automatic detection of threats and recognition of abnormal behaviour or violence". It talks of the "construction of agents assigned to continuous and automatic monitoring of public resources such as: web sites, discus- sion forums, usenet groups, file servers, p2p [peer-to-peer] networks as well as individual computer sys- tems, building an internet-based intelligence gathering system, both active and passive". A separate EU-funded research project, called Adabts—Automatic Detection of Abnormal Behaviour and Threats in crowded Spaces—is seeking to develop models of "suspi- cious behaviour" so these can be detected automatically using CCTV and other surveillance methods. The system would analyse the pitch of people's voices and the way their bodies move, as well as track individuals within crowds. (Source: The Telegraph, 19 September 2009, http://tinyurl.com/mrsmwj) NEXUS ¢ 9 DECEMBER 2009 - JANUARY 2010 www.nexusmagazine.com