Rap It - Tap it

Rap music for the Surveillance State. I wish I found this to be as funny as some others have.

Patriot Sights Great White Shark

Check out his tee shirt.

View more videos at: http://nbcphiladelphia.com.

Push Button Tyranny

The bulk of the public debate on the Edward Snowden revelations is missing the point. We hear and read about the use of the Prism system in the hunt for Islamist terrorists, but we hear precious little of what a failure it has been in that application. We hear that it can only be used by authorization from the secret FISA court, but the court has only ruled on the collection of the data, not on the method used to make sense of it.

Snowden has not warned us about what has already been done with this appliance. It is all about what its abilities are, what it can be used to do - in the words of Snowdon, "Turnkey tyranny."

Snowden has revealed that our government is building a machine, a system that will make profiling any single one of us a trivial task. This is not about bugging every single one of us. This is about the government acquiring and retaining far more data on us that that. Simple conversations would tell something about us, but a data profile that shows where we have been, who we communicated with and how much money we have spent tell a far more detailed story about us than hundreds of hours of conversation might.

 Defenders of the status quo are on all sides of the political spectrum, from social conservatives and neo-cons to populists to members of the hard and institutional left. The only way that any American can support the creation and continued existence of such a system is by pretending that we can trust the executive. This, after all, something that comes strictly out of the executive branch. It was never authorized by specific legislation, never discussed in an open congressional committee meeting, no court has ruled on its constitutionality.

It seems to me that if we wish to have a debate on this, we should at least listen to Edward Snowden himself. He makes his own case pretty well, and to argue this on any side one at least should take a few minutes to hear him out.

USA Spying on ALL Citizens

I have heard and read the various official and unofficial apologies and explanations for the recently confirmed spying on electronic communications activities by our government. What surprises me is how sanguine are most accounts. It is as if a simple explanation and declaration that it is all about keeping us safe from our enemies is all that is required.

Now, many of us have believed for years that this sort of stuff has been going on, that government will do whatever it can to keep tabs on and to control its citizens, but the recent revelations have confirmed that belief, and fleshed the program out. Apparently Orwell shortchanged the breathtaking chutzpah of our minders in "1984," plus he failed to foresee the technologies that would be brought to bear.

What we know:
The government's intelligence agencies have, for some time, been collecting intelligence on each and every one of us. They have every phone call you have made, the content of all emails, and your browsing history. They even collect your credit card transactions. While we have been assured that this is all about terrorism, the facts are that they have the ability to assemble a pretty detailed dossier on each American. Consider the algorithms available to marketing companies, and figure that the government will have none of that squeamishness about anonymizing and aggregating the data. They have:

Inputs:
Telephone calls and location of phone when made.
Internet surfing activity
Content of all email communications
Social network interactions
Credit card transactions

Output:
A detailed dossier on each person, including who you know, what you do, and, perhaps most importantly, how you feel about THEM. They not only have a general profile on you, they have the ability to search your whereabouts at any point in time. James Clapper, director of DNI, claims that they restrain themselves from abusing this power.

All this without a warrant, any suspicion whatsoever, or any evidence of any kind that you were doing anything wrong. They collect everything on everyone. All they need to see the most detailed analysis of your life and activities, in this new redefinition of the government's power over us, is a bit of curiosity about you. Maybe you wrote a nasty email or blog post that some anonymous government employee took notice of, or you surfed over to a government website to look something up. (they have admitted that they place cookies on the computers of all visitors)

You must realize that the effort required to do the looking is trivial. The cost is in the collection and storage of the data. That cost is borne by the black budgets and appropriations already made for our protection.

But, is this for our protection, or theirs? Do we have any protection from them? Any 4th or 5th amendment protections at all? Or do we just have to trust that presidents like Bush and Obama will be all the protection from the government we need?

-Update-

Today, in a news conference, president Obama said: 

If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

Bingo!

-Update 2-

Two whistleblowers in amazing interview on Fox News today.

“Aggregated metadata can be more revealing than content. It’s very important to realize that when an entity collects information about you that includes locations, bank transactions, credit card transactions, travel plans, EZPass on and off tollways; all of that that can be time-lined. To track you day to day to the point where people can get insight into your intentions and what you’re going to do next. It is difficult to get that from content unless you exploit every piece, and even then a lot of content is worthless,”

Muslims Must Reject Islam

Pat Condell's latest. This time he makes even more sense than usual.

The New Antisemitism - Episode 1

The New Antisemitism - Episode 2

The new Antisemitism - Episide 3

Bully, Badger, and Berate American Success

I may be less than a committed fan of senator Rand Paul, but he has this one issue exactly right. Here we have a body of senators who have created a monster of a tax code, and today they order before them one of America's best success stories, Apple Corp., for the crime of following those very same laws passed by this congress. This type of charade is, or at least it has been. standard operating procedure for the US government. But today, at least one senator, Rand Paul, calls them out on it. This video makes for four minutes well spent.

Landing on the Moon

I just experienced what may well be the best eighteen minutes you could spend online. This website puts you in the cockpit of Apollo 11, from lunar orbit to landing. All the telemetry has been duplicated, and you can see and hear most everything.

As a youngster, the thrill of the landing was experienced by me (and the rest of the world) with merely the voices of Walter Cronkite and Mission Control along with some really crummy graphics on a black and white TV. This presentation is as close as you can get to actually being there with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.

This is some great stuff, if you like this sort of stuff in the first place. As I do. If all you want to do is waste your time, this is the place to go. If you wish to spend some quality time with Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, go here.


 HT: Watts Up With That

Is Thinking Obsolete?

Thomas Sowell is one of the finest philosophers alive today. I never miss one of his writings - own all his books, read all his columns. He is a member of the smallest and most reviled of minorities in America today - black conservatives. His column (up today) is here. I agree with him wholeheartedly.

I attended one of the finest (I believe THE finest) public high schools in the country and excelled on the debate team. One of the things that make organized debate a great preparation for organizing one's thoughts is that, after preparation, the teams are assigned sides. I found that the very best teams (my team won at state level almost every year) did better when they took the unpopular side. I am certain that I did better when I had to defend a side that I absolutely abhorred - won the state championship on the side of Hitler, and as a Jew that was a bit of a surprise. After that I attended three different universities.

This all happened in the 60s, and I can say with no doubt that the level of critical thinking at those 3 centers of "higher" learning was nowhere near what I saw in Stuyvesant. Groupthink has permeated our society, and I must agree, one more time, with Tom Sowell. Thinking has gone out of style. What we have now is tribalism, or what I call the baseball style of debate, as in, my team is better than your team, whatever your team does sucks and whatever mine does is the pinnacle of achievement. Assertion has won out over argument. I wonder if anything can be done about it.

Turnabout is Fair Play

I am always amused when we see the tools of the statist left turned against them. While this is a rare occurrence, it appears that the freedom loving right has learned to use some of the same tools. We can see this happening today.

Not so long age we saw the coverage of the horrific shooting in a school in Newtown Connecticut. In true Alinsky style the entire democrat elite went wide and loud with their effort to use the tragedy for their partisan political purposes, hoping to enact yet another part of their agenda - more onerous controls on firearm sales. When freedom loving Americans protested that the laws being proposed would have done nothing to stop the massacre, they cackled and wailed, calling names, pretending that the polls were on their side, lying about everything they could, and showing their complete ignorance of the rest of the issues they wished to control.

This was an emotional appeal, devoid of logic or fact. Not so long ago the right would have eschewed using such tactics themselves and fallen to the attack, or "compromised" (the fashionable term used by elite republicans when they fail to uphold their oath to preserve, protect, and defend constitutional rights.)

Today we are all still shocked that the Boston Marathon was bombed, and coincidentally congress is just about to take up an immigration "reform" package. The right is using that shock to say we need to slow the passage of a reform package down, we need to take our time before we produce more bombings through our immigration law changes. Lefties are out on the hustings crying like raped apes over this, using much the same language they had just used (to no avail) in the gun control debate.

The fact is, immigration has more to do with the Boston bombing than Newtown had to do with gun control. While no law was seriously proposed that might have deterred the Newtown shooter. the marathon bombers were immigrants. They were allowed, indeed welcomed into this country under political asylum provisions. But our asylum laws allowed these refugees to travel back and forth to the very place from which they had fled. Some members of that family even moved back there permanently. Our borders are porous, such that more terrorists can freely come into this country, yet the reform being proposed would, if anything, make it easier for unknown foreign citizens to take up permanent residence here, and asylum law reform is not even on the table.

When members of congress and the commentariat make pleas to go slow and consider these things the democrats cry foul, and deny our right to use the emotion of the bombing to sway the debate. I find it all very amusing. Political types tend to believe in the power of legislation to do most everything. They fail to realize that there are powers that are beyond their control, that laws only affect the already law abiding. Evil people will act in evil ways, and denying them their preferred tools will only make them switch to other tools, or other means of acquiring them.

Congress can no more control what lies in the hearts of men than they can legislate the weather, but it is futile to tell them that. Control over the lives of others is their raison d'etre.The only way to interfere with their penchant for control is using political tactics. Saul Alinsky codified some effective political tactics into thirteen rules, and Andrew Breitbart was the first prominent member of the right side of American politics to get traction in calling for members of the freedom loving right to use those tactics, especially rules 4, 5, 8, 11, and especially 13, his favorite.

So far it appears to be working for the immigration issue It may be that the rush to mint twelve million fresh new democrat voters may be stalled because of use of the crisis, in true democrat and Alinsky style, to sway the political zeitgeist. As a hero of the political left was fond of saying, (although Chairman Mao stole the quote from Lao-tzu) "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

From heaven, Andrew is looking down at this, and smiling.

The rules

1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have."
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.”
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
10. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Why the Boston Bombers Succeeded

April 23, 2013
By Scott Stewart
Vice President of Analysis, Stratfor


When seeking to place an attack like the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing into context, it is helpful to classify the actors responsible, if possible. Such a classification can help us understand how an attack fits into the analytical narrative of what is happening and what is likely to come. These classifications will consider factors such as ideology, state sponsorship and perhaps most important, the kind of operative involved.

In a case where we are dealing with an apparent jihadist operative, before we can classify him or her we must first have a clear taxonomy of the jihadist movement. At Stratfor, we generally consider the jihadist movement to be divided into three basic elements: the al Qaeda core organization, the regional jihadist franchises, such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and grassroots operatives who are radicalized, inspired and perhaps equipped by the other two tiers but who are not members of either.

Within the three-tier jihadist movement there exist two distinct types of operatives. One of these is the professional terrorist operative, a person who is a member of the al Qaeda core or of one of the regional franchises. These individuals swear loyalty to the leader and then follow orders from the organization's hierarchy. Second, there are amateur operatives who never join a group and whose actions are not guided by the specific orders of a hierarchical group. They follow a bottom-up or grassroots organizational model rather than a hierarchical or top-down approach.

There is a great deal of variety among professional terrorists, especially if we break them down according to the functions they perform within an organization, roles including that of planners, finance and logistics specialists, couriers, surveillance operatives, bombmakers, et cetera. There is also a great deal of variety within the ranks of grassroots operatives, although it is broken down more by their interaction with formal groups rather than their function. At one end of the grassroots spectrum are the lone wolf operatives, or phantom cells. These are individuals or small groups that become radicalized by jihadist ideology but that do not have any contact with the organization. In theory, the lone wolf/phantom cell model is very secure from an operational security standpoint, but as we've discussed, it takes a very disciplined and driven individual to be a true lone wolf or phantom cell leader, and consequently, we see very few of them.

At the other end of the grassroots spectrum are individuals who have had close interaction with a jihadist group but who never actually joined the organization. Many of them have even attended militant training camps, but they didn't become part of the hierarchical group to the point of swearing an oath of allegiance to the group's leaders and taking orders from the organization. They are not funded and directed by the group.

Indeed, al Qaeda trained tens of thousands of men in its training camps in Afghanistan, Sudan and Pakistan but very few of the men they trained actually ended up joining al Qaeda. Most of the men the group instructed received basic military training in things like using small arms, hand-to-hand combat and basic fire and maneuver. Only the very best from those basic combat training courses were selected to receive advanced training in terrorist tradecraft techniques, such as bombmaking, surveillance, clandestine communications and document forgery. But even of the students who received advanced training in terrorist tradecraft, only a few were ever invited to join the al Qaeda core, which remained a relatively small vanguard organization.

Many of the men who received basic training traveled to fight jihad in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya or returned home to join insurgent or militant groups. Others would eventually end up joining al Qaeda franchise groups in places like Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Algeria. Still others received some basic training but then returned home and never really put their new skills into practice.

Most grassroots jihadists fall along a continuum that stretches between the lone wolf and someone who received advanced terrorist training but never joined al Qaeda or another formal militant group.

Whether the two men suspected of carrying out the April 15 Boston Marathon attack knowingly followed al Qaeda's blueprint for simple attacks by grassroots actors, their actions were fairly consistent with what we have come to expect from such operatives. Certainly based upon what we have seen of this case so far, the Tsarnaev brothers did not appear to possess sophisticated terrorist tradecraft.

For example, regarding the bombs employed in the attack and during the police chase, everything we have seen still points to very simple devices, such as pipe bombs and pressure cooker devices. From a bombmaking tradecraft standpoint, we have yet to see anything that could not be fabricated by reading Inspire magazine, spending a little bit of time on YouTube and conducting some experimentation. As a comparison, consider the far larger and more complex improvised explosive device Anders Behring Breivik, the Oslo bomber, constructed. We know from Breivik's detailed journal that he was a self-taught bombmaker using directions he obtained on the Internet. He was also a lone wolf. And yet he was able to construct a very large improvised explosive device.
 Also, although the Tsarnaev brothers did not hold up a convenience store as initially reported, they did conduct an express kidnapping that caused them to have extended contact with their victim while they visited automatic teller machines. They told the victim that they were the bombers and then allowed the victim to live. Such behavior is hardly typical of professional terrorist operatives.

Grassroots Theory

As it has become more difficult for professional terrorists to travel to the United States and the West in general, it has become more difficult for jihadist organizations to conduct attacks in these places. Indeed, this difficulty prompted groups like al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to attempt to attack the United States by dispatching an operative with an underwear bomb and to use printer cartridge bombs to attack cargo aircraft. In response to this difficulty, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula began to adopt the grassroots into their operational doctrine. They first began promoting this approach in 2009 in their Arabic-language magazine Sada al-Malahim. The al Qaeda core organization embraced this approach in May 2010 in an English-language video featuring Adam Gadahn.

In July 2010, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula launched an English-language magazine called Inspire dedicated to radicalizing and equipping grassroots jihadists. Despite the losses that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has experienced on the battlefield, it has continued to devote a great deal of its limited resources toward propagating this concept. It has continued to publish Inspire even after the magazine's founder and editor, Samir Khan, was killed in an American missile strike in Yemen.

The grassroots strategy was perhaps most clearly articulated in the third edition of Inspire magazine, which was published in November 2010 following the failed October 29, 2010, printer bomb operation. In a letter from the editor in which Khan explained what he referred to as "Operation Hemorrhage," he wrote:

"However, to bring down America we do not need to strike big. In such an environment of security phobia that is sweeping America, it is more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve fewer players and less time to launch and thus we may circumvent the security barriers America has worked so hard to erect. This strategy of attacking the enemy with smaller, but more frequent operations is what some may refer to the strategy of a thousand cuts. The aim is to bleed the enemy to death."

In Adam Gadahn's May 2010 message entitled "A Call to Arms," Gadahn counsels lone wolf jihadists to follow a three-pronged target selection process. They should choose a target with which they are well acquainted, a target that is feasible to hit and a target that, when struck, will have a major impact. The Tsarnaev brothers did all three in Boston.

Implications

Yet despite this clearly articulated theory, it has proved very difficult for jihadist ideologues to convince grassroots operatives to conduct simple attacks using readily available items like in the "build a bomb in the kitchen of your mom" approach, which they have advocated for so long.

This is because most grassroots jihadists have sought to conduct huge, spectacular attacks -- attacks that are outside of their capabilities. This has meant that they have had to search for help to conduct their plans. And that search for help has resulted in their arrest, just as Adam Gadahn warned they would be in his May 2010 message.
There were many plots disrupted in 2012 in which grassroots operatives tried to act beyond their capabilities. These include:

• On Nov. 29, 2012, two brothers from Florida, Raees Alam Qazi and Sheheryar Alam Qazi, were arrested and charged with plotting attacks in New York.
• On Oct. 17, 2012, Bangladeshi national Quazi Nafis was arrested as part of an FBI sting operation after he attempted to detonate a vehicle bomb outside New York's Federal Reserve Bank.
• On Sept. 15, 2012, Adel Daoud was arrested after he parked a Jeep Cherokee outside a Chicago bar and attempted to detonate the bomb he thought it contained. This was also an FBI sting operation.

But the carnage and terrorist theater caused by the Boston attack have shown how following the simple attack model can be highly effective. This will certainly be pointed out in future editions of Inspire magazine, and grassroots operatives will be urged to follow the model established by the Tsarnaev brothers. Unlike operatives like Faisal Shahzad who attempted to go big themselves and failed, the brothers followed the blueprint for a simple attack and the model worked.

It is quite possible that the success of the Boston bombing will help jihadist ideologues finally convince grassroots operatives to get past their grandiose plans and begin to follow the simple attack model in earnest. If this happens, it will obviously have a big impact on law enforcement and intelligence officials who have developed very effective programs of identifying grassroots operatives and drawing them into sting operations. They will now have to adjust their operations.

While these grassroots actors do not have the capability of professional terrorist operatives and do not pose as severe a threat, they pose a much broader, amorphous threat. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies generally do not deal well with ambiguity.

There are simply too many soft targets to protect and some of these simple attacks will inevitably succeed. This means that this low-level broad threat will persist and perhaps even intensify in the immediate future.

As we've previously discussed, the best defense against the grassroots threat are grassroots defenders. These include the police and alert citizens who report suspicious activity -- like people testing bomb designs -- a frequent occurrence before actual bomb attacks. The slogan "If you see something, say something," has been mocked as overly simplistic, but it is nonetheless a necessity in an environment where the broad, ambiguous threat of grassroots terrorism far outstrips the ability of the authorities to see everything. Taking a proactive approach to personal and collective security also beats the alternative of living in terror and apprehensively waiting for the next simple attack.

It is also very important for people to maintain the proper perspective on terrorism. Like car crashes and cancer and natural disasters, terrorism is part of the human condition. People should take prudent, measured actions to prepare for such contingencies and avoid becoming victims (vicarious or otherwise). It is the resilience of the population and its perseverance that will ultimately determine how much a terrorist attack is allowed to terrorize. By separating terror from terrorism, citizens can deny the practitioners of terror the ability to magnify their reach and power.


Why the Boston Bombers Succeeded is republished with permission of Stratfor.

CA Tries Law to Force Insurance to Cover Homosexual 'Infertility'

In California even biology must take a back seat to political correctness. AB 460 would retain its current standard for infertility: either a “demonstrated condition” causing infertility or a year of sex without conception, including non-heterosexual vaginal intercourse.

No wonder California is going bankrupt. In the Land of Fruits and Nuts, even biology must take a back seat to lefty political insanity now.

Bretbart has the story

Five Chistian children killed in Egypt

We don't always realize how great we have it here. We go nuts when a child is suspended for doing something like eating a Pop-Tart into the shape of something that some idiot believes to be somewhat similar to the outline of a gun, But yesterday in Cairo, 5 Christian children were killed in the street for drawing something similar to a cross.

Savages.

Five die in Christian-Muslim clashes in Egypt | Reuters

Defense contractor finds method for cheap, clean water

Defense contractor finds method for cheap, clean water

So the last commodity that was in world wide shortage may not be a problem after all.  Lockheed Martin's use of Graphene technology has apparently made unlimited fresh water available to all the peoples of the world within range of salt water. Now the only thing we need to address is the willful enslavement of the world's poor by artificial fuel exploitation policy by the anti-science "green" movement.

(Reuters) - A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.

The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin - just one atom in thickness - it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water, they said.

The development could spare underdeveloped countries from having to build exotic, expensive pumping stations needed in plants that use a desalination process called reverse osmosis.

"It's 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger," said John Stetson, the engineer who has been working on the idea. "The energy that's required and the pressure that's required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less."

Kudos to Lockheed Martin. Graphene promises to revolutionize technology in other ways as well, and it is now that we are now seeing some of that promise fulfilled.

Hellfire, Morality and Strategy

Hellfire, Morality and Strategy

Guest Post by George Friedman, Founder and Chairman of Stratfor

Airstrikes by unmanned aerial vehicles have become a matter of serious dispute lately. The controversy focuses on the United States, which has the biggest fleet of these weapons and which employs them more frequently than any other country. On one side of this dispute are those who regard them simply as another weapon of war whose virtue is the precision with which they strike targets. On the other side are those who argue that in general, unmanned aerial vehicles are used to kill specific individuals, frequently civilians, thus denying the targeted individuals their basic right to some form of legal due process.

Let's begin with the weapons systems, the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper. The media call them drones, but they are actually remotely piloted aircraft. Rather than being in the cockpit, the pilot is at a ground station, receiving flight data and visual images from the aircraft and sending command signals back to it via a satellite data link. Numerous advanced systems and technologies work together to make this possible, but it is important to remember that most of these technologies have been around in some form for decades, and the U.S. government first integrated them in the 1990s. The Predator carries two Hellfire missiles -- precision-guided munitions that, once locked onto the target by the pilot, guide themselves to the target with a high likelihood of striking it. The larger Reaper carries an even larger payload of ordnance -- up to 14 Hellfire missiles or four Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound bombs. Most airstrikes from these aircraft use Hellfire missiles, which cause less collateral damage.

Unlike a manned aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles can remain in the air for an extended period of time -- an important capability for engaging targets that may only present a very narrow target window. This ability to loiter, and then strike quickly when a target presents itself, is what has made these weapons systems preferable to fixed wing aircraft and cruise missiles.

The Argument Against Airstrikes

What makes unmanned aerial vehicle strikes controversial is that they are used to deliberately target specific individuals -- in other words, people who are known or suspected, frequently by name, of being actively hostile to the United States or allied governments. This distinguishes unmanned aerial vehicles from most weapons that have been used since the age of explosives began. The modern battlefield -- and the ancient as well -- has been marked by anonymity. The enemy was not a distinct individual but an army, and the killing of soldiers in an enemy army did not carry with it any sense of personal culpability. In general, no individual soldier was selected for special attention, and his death was not an act of punishment. He was killed because of his membership in an army and not because of any specific action he might have carried out.

Another facet of the controversy is that it is often not clear whether the individuals targeted by these weapons are members of an enemy force. U.S. military or intelligence services reach that conclusion about a target based on intelligence that convinces them of the individual's membership in a hostile group.

There are those who object to all war and all killing; we are not addressing those issues here. We are addressing the arguments of those who object to this particular sort of killing. The reasoning is that when you are targeting a particular individual based on his relationships, you are introducing the idea of culpability, and that that culpability makes the decision-maker -- whoever he is -- both judge and executioner, without due process. Those who argue this line also believe that the use of these weapons is a process that is not only given to error but also fundamentally violates principles of human rights and gives the state the power of life and death without oversight. Again excluding absolute pacifists from this discussion, the objection is that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is not so much an act of war as an act of judgment and, as such, violates international law that requires due process for a soldier being judged and executed. To put it simply, the critics regard what they call drone strikes as summary executions, not acts of war.

The Argument for Airstrikes

The counterargument is that the United States is engaged in a unique sort of war. Al Qaeda and the allied groups and sympathetic individuals that comprise the international jihadist movement are global, dispersed and sparse. They are not a hierarchical military organization. Where conventional forces have divisions and battalions, the global jihadist movement consists primarily of individuals who at times group together into distinct regional franchises, small groups and cells, and frequently even these groups are scattered. Their mission is to survive and to carry out acts of violence designed to demoralize the enemy and increase their political influence among the populations they wish to control.

The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals -- particularly the commanders -- isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible. Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.
The argument for using strikes from unmanned aerial vehicles is that it is not an attack on an individual any more than an artillery barrage that kills a hundred is an attack on each individual. Rather, the jihadist movement presents a unique case in which the individual jihadist is the military unit.

In war, the goal is to render the enemy incapable of resisting through the use of force. In all wars and all militaries, imperfect intelligence, carelessness and sometimes malice have caused military action to strike at innocent people. In World War II, not only did bombing raids designed to attack legitimate military targets kill civilians not engaged in activities supporting the military, mission planners knew that in some cases innocents would be killed. This is true in every military conflict and is accepted as one of the consequences of war.

The argument in favor of using unmanned aerial vehicle strikes is, therefore, that the act of killing the individual is a military necessity dictated by the enemy's strategy and that it is carried out with the understanding that both intelligence and precision might fail, no matter how much care is taken. This means not only that civilians might be killed in a particular strike but also that the strike might hit the wrong target. The fact that a specific known individual is being targeted does not change the issue from a military matter to a judicial one.

It would seem to me that these strikes do not violate the rules of war and that they require no more legal overview than was given in thousands of bomber raids in World War II. And we should be cautious in invoking international law. The Hague Convention of 1907 states that:

The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps fulfilling the following conditions:
To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
To carry arms openly; and
To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

The 1949 Geneva Convention states that:

Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfill the following conditions:
(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) that of carrying arms openly;
(d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

Ignoring the question of whether jihadist operations are in accordance with the rules and customs of war, their failure to carry a "fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance" is a violation of both the Hague and Geneva conventions. This means that considerations given to soldiers under the rules of war do not apply to those waging war without insignia.

Open insignia is fundamental to the rules of war. It was instituted after the Franco-Prussian war, when French snipers dressed as civilians fired on Germans. It was viewed that the snipers had endangered civilians because it was a soldier's right to defend himself and that since they were dressed as civilians, the French snipers -- not the Germans -- were responsible for the civilian deaths. It follows from this that, to the extent that jihadist militants provide no sign of who they are, they are responsible under international law when civilians are killed because of uncertainty as to who is a soldier and who is not. Thus the onus on ascertaining the nature of the target rests with the United States, but if there is error, the responsibility for that error rests with jihadists for not distinguishing themselves from civilians.

There is of course a greater complexity to this: attacking targets in countries that are not in a state of war with the United States and that have not consented to these attacks. For better or worse, the declaration of war has not been in fashion since World War II. But the jihadist movement has complicated this problem substantially. The jihadists' strategy is to be dispersed. Part of its strategy is to move from areas where it is under military pressure to places that are more secure. Thus the al Qaeda core group moved its headquarters from Afghanistan to Pakistan. But in truth, jihadists operate wherever military and political advantages take them, from the Maghreb to Mumbai and beyond.

In a method of war where the individual is the prime unit and where lack of identification is a primary defensive method, the conduct of intelligence operations wherever the enemy might be, regardless of borders, follows. So do operations to destroy enemy units -- individuals. If a country harbors such individuals knowingly, it is an enemy. If it is incapable of destroying the enemy units, it forfeits its right to claim sovereignty since part of sovereignty is a responsibility to prevent attacks on other countries.

If we simply follow the logic we laid out here, then the critics of unmanned aerial vehicle strikes have a weak case. It is not illegitimate to target individuals in a military force like the jihadist movement, and international law holds them responsible for collateral damage, not the United States. Moreover, respecting national sovereignty requires that a country's sovereignty be used to halt attacks against countries with which they are not at war. When a country cannot or will not take those steps, and people within their border pose a threat to the United States, the country has no basis for objecting to intelligence operations and airstrikes. The question, of course, is where this ends. Yemen or Mali might be one case, but the logic here does not preclude any country. Indeed, since al Qaeda tried in the past to operate in the United States itself, and its operatives might be in the United States, it logically follows that the United States could use unmanned aerial vehicles domestically as well. Citizenship is likewise no protection from attacks against a force hostile to the United States.

But within the United States, or countries like the United Kingdom, there are many other preferable means to neutralize jihadist threats. When the police or internal security forces can arrest jihadists plotting attacks, there quite simply is no need for airstrikes from unmanned aerial vehicles. They are tools to be used when a government cannot or will not take action to mitigate the threat.

The Strategic Drawback

There are two points I have been driving toward. The first is that the outrage at targeted killing is not, in my view, justified on moral or legal grounds. The second is that in using these techniques, the United States is on a slippery slope because of the basis on which it has chosen to wage war.

The United States has engaged an enemy that is dispersed across the globe. If the strategy is to go wherever the enemy is, then the war is limitless. It is also endless. The power of the jihadist movement is that it is diffuse. It does not need vast armies to be successful. Therefore, the destruction of some of its units will always result in their replacement. Quality might decline for a while but eventually will recover.

The enemy strategy is to draw the United States into an extended conflict that validates its narrative that the United States is permanently at war with Islam. It wants to force the United States to engage in as many countries as possible. From the U.S. point of view, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because they can attack the jihadist command structure without risk to ground forces. From the jihadist point of view as well, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because their efficiency allows the jihadists to lure the United States into other countries and, with sufficient manipulation, can increase the number of innocents who are killed.

In this sort of war, the problem of killing innocents is practical. It undermines the strategic effort. The argument that it is illegal is dubious, and to my mind, so is the argument that it is immoral. The argument that it is ineffective in achieving U.S. strategic goals of eliminating the threat of terrorist actions by jihadists is my point.
Unmanned aerial vehicles provide a highly efficient way to destroy key enemy targets with very little risk to personnel. But they also allow the enemy to draw the United States into additional theaters of operation because the means is so efficient and low cost. However, in the jihadists' estimate, the political cost to the United States is substantial. The broader the engagement, the greater the perception of U.S. hostility to Islam, the easier the recruitment until the jihadist forces reach a size that can't be dealt with by isolated airstrikes.

In warfare, enemies will try to get you to strike at what they least mind losing. The case against strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles is not that they are ineffective against specific targets but that the targets are not as vital as the United States thinks. The United States believes that the destruction of the leadership is the most efficient way to destroy the threat of the jihadist movement. In fact it only mitigates the threat while new leadership emerges. The strength of the jihadist movement is that it is global, sparse and dispersed. It does not provide a target whose destruction weakens the movement. However, the jihadist movement's weakness derives from its strength: It is limited in what it can do and where.  

The problem of unmanned aerial vehicles is that they are so effective from the U.S. point of view that they have become the weapon of first resort. Thus, the United States is being drawn into operations in new areas with what appears to be little cost. In the long run, it is not clear that the cost is so little. A military strategy to defeat the jihadists is impossible. At its root, the real struggle against the jihadists is ideological, and that struggle simply cannot be won with Hellfire missiles. A strategy of mitigation using airstrikes is possible, but such a campaign must not become geographically limitless. Unmanned aerial vehicles lead to geographical limitlessness. That is their charm; that is their danger.

Hellfire, Morality and Strategy is republished with permission of Stratfor.

Piers Morgan Fail

Piers Morgan Fail

Thoughts On Current Gun Control Efforts

Thoughts On Current Gun Control Efforts

Guest post by Ol' Remus at Woodpile Report. 

As Napoleon said, never interrupt an enemy when he's making an error. Gun control activists are taking a tall dive into a blue pool, not realizing the rocks are only a few inches below the surface. AR-15 platform guns are the de facto home defense and sporting arm, yet they argue a return to another era. They've been told times have passed them by but they continue to weld themselves to the past, not even knowing bolt-action hunting rifles were originally state of the art weapons of war. It's understandable. They live in a chat-cocoon and say things like, "clips that hold twenty bullets", which to knowledgeable ears sounds like, "them thar fancy shootin irons what reloads their own selves right out of a little box." Yet somehow they're qualified to tell others what they "need." What's next, gas lights? Vacuum tube computers?

 Urban voting blocs are used to weilding command and control based on a steady input of spoon-fed misinformation. They think semi-auto rifles are some fantastic Superweapon Of Tomorrow, not understanding the AR-15 is well over fifty years old, the AK-47 even older. They'd be surprised to learn Mexico's first semi-auto was the Mondragón of 1887—yes, 1887—a capable arm in 7mm Mauser typically equipped with a 20-round magazine. Over a million were made. It was still in service sixty years later when the first AK-47 was issued—in 1947, duh—and even saw use in the Viet Nam War. 1887, the year Doc Holliday died and the Sherlock Holmes stories were born. Civil War veterans were around 40 years old. Grover Cleveland was president. Space Age technology it ain't.

 Nor do they understand a modestly equipped garage shop could turn out a half dozen good quality AK-like guns per day, with a late start and a long lunch. Hint: they were designed for just that. Pakistani mountain villagers can do it. STEN Guns and the like, even easier. Moonshiners make whiskey every day too, with no help from industrial distillers. Prohibitions don't work, won't work and never have worked. But just to be sure, let's see how the War on Drugs is doing. It's going on eighty years now and =>1000s CONVICTED 1000s<=. We must be down to our very last Reefer Madman by now, and if not, a redoubling of effort is indicated.

 Nor do they understand the 5.56 NATO is but a variation of the elderly .222, a mid-range varmint round of no particular distinction, certainly not the dazzling super-killer of journalist's imagination. An ammo prohibition? Dream on, Zeppelin fans. Aside from the billions of rounds on hand, deep-drawing cartridge brass was a mature technology in Lincoln's time. Which would be before electric lights and even the "easy availability" of modern steel. While it's not trivial, it's something a cottage industry could handle.

 The 9mm cartridge, of 1902 by the way, is particularly unchallenging. It's what the Uzi uses for one, and the 9mm launches bullets twice as heavy as the AR-15 does. Oh my! Cast lead bullets—bullets are the thingy that comes whizzing out of the barrel, Spanky—work just fine in most any cartridge. And common match heads are near enough to primer powder. Magazines? Rollforming by preference, but standard equipment will suffice. And so on. It's all antique technology. The future they fear and loathe arrived before their parents were born. But shhh, let them cling to their crank-start car mentality. It seems to comfort them.

 They've been told and told, yet they chose to take this swan dive. So far they're having a great time. You may want to avert your eyes when they smack against reality.

Reprinted with permission from Woodpile Report.

The Talk You Need to Have With Your Kids

"The Talk" You Need to Have With Your Kids.