Following the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in East Africa, the ‘New Jackal’ Osama Bin Laden became a designated enemy of the state. For the final two years of the Clinton administration and the first year or so of Bush II, Osama was tracked as he moved around Afghanistan, and in and out of Afghanistan. As the story goes a land-based assault i.e. sending in a Special Forces unit to find Bin Laden and gun him down, was considered too risky and fundamentally very difficult to carry out. Instead, we got the Predator drone program. There were apparent disputes as to who would pay for the drones, since they were a DoD technology but it was essentially the CIA’s mission to track Osama. The drones enabled much more update information about where Bin Laden was, thus shortening the ‘kill cycle’, the time taken to confirm where a target is and then launch a missile or two to blow up that farm/camp site/aspirin factory.
Shortly before 9/11 they hit upon the idea of arming the drone aircraft itself, rather than relying on some warship to launch missiles from potentially hundreds of miles away. They tested this technology in the summer of 2001 - too late to stop Bin Laden doing 9/11 ( 
) but so that there was an established program in place that could be used after 9/11. Phase one of the ‘War on Terror’ involved full scale invasions, massive military expenditure. The current energy and credit economies can’t support that so instead of another Bush we got Obama, who firmly identified with the drones (how ironic). From 2008-2010 we saw increasing use of these unmanned killing machines, supposedly used to kill all kinds of miscellaneous Muslims/alleged Al Qaeda bigwigs/Pentagon intelligence assets. It has become the default way to write a character out of the story, Anwar Al Awlaki being the most obvious example.
During this same period we saw an expansion of the remit of the War on Terror beyond just Al Qaeda, and the notion that it was some kind centralised hierarchical organisation was widened so that any remotely radical Muslim was considered a physical threat and hence a target. In the two years or so since then the mythical terrorism umbrella has been widened yet further and now encompasses almost anyone who opposes the state. The Occupy movement, the Ron Paul movement, Anonymous - all have been associated with terrorism despite none of them being violent. They’ve also dug up some old friends in terms of the Irish here in the UK and the white militia over there in the US.
We now have drones hovering over our cities here in the West, spying on us. They are even talking about arming them, though to my knowledge that hasn’t happened yet. In any case, it is a steady march towards constant surveillance and near-total political control by a central state. One story I read the other day showed that there’s something a bit more insidious in the works, a sort of hybrid of the nightmares offered by Orwell and Huxley.
fas.org/blog/secrecy/2012/09 … onomy.html
One line in the DSB report itself stood out: ‘Unmanned systems have blurred the distinction between operations and intelligence.’ On the face of it, simply an observation that by having weaponised surveillance drones the same machine can both spy on people and kill them. However, consider that the report also cites the problem of having human analysts looking at all the video taken by these drones:
The logical conclusion, therefore, is to have machines analysing the images. Another human limitation is also addressed, this directly from the DSB’s report:
Use the machines to train the men how to use the machines. What could possibly go wrong with that? It is in the drones that we the conjunction of the Orwellian security state and the Huxlian transhuman AI agenda more than in any other aspect of all this. I find that deeply worrying and aside from buying stinger missiles I’m fresh out of ideas of what to do about it. Hack the drones, maybe, and use them to deliver food supplies to remote areas.
