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Domestic Drones Stir Imaginations, and Concerns

Domestic Drones Stir Imaginations, and Concerns

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: March 17, 2013 134 Comments

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — On the pilot’s computer screen, planted at ground level a few yards from the airport runway here, the data streaming across the display tracked an airplane at 1,300 feet above a small city on the coast, making perfect circles at 150 miles per hour.

To the pilot’s right, a sensor operator was aiming a camera on the plane to pan, tilt and zoom in a search among the houses on the ground for people who had been reported missing.

On his screen, cartoonlike human figures appeared in a gathering around a camp fire between the houses.

“There they are,” Andrew Regenhard, the pilot and a student, said in a flat tone that seemed out of place with a successful rescue mission.

In fact, no one was missing; the entire exercise used imaginary props and locales. Mr. Regenhard was taking part in a training session at the University of North Dakota. The first to offer a degree program in unmanned aviation, the university is one of many academic settings, along with companies and individuals, preparing for a brave new world in which cheap remote-controlled airplanes will be ubiquitous in civilian air space, searching for everything from the most wanted of criminal suspects to a swarm of grasshoppers devouring a crop.

“The sky’s going to be dark with these things,” said Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, who started the hobbyist Web site DIY Drones and now runs a company, 3D Robotics, that sells unmanned aerial vehicles and equipment. He says it is selling about as many drones every calendar quarter — about 7,500 — as the United States military flies in total.

The burst of activity in remotely operated planes stems from the confluence of two factors: electronics and communications gear has become dirt cheap, enabling the conversion of hobbyist radio-controlled planes into sophisticated platforms for surveillance, and the Federal Aviation Administration has been ordered by Congress to work out a way to integrate these aircraft into the national airspace by 2015.

The rapidly expanding market has not gone unnoticed by lawmakers and privacy watchdogs. On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the privacy implications of drones like the ones being developed at Grand Forks.

Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said this year: “This fast-emerging technology is cheap and could pose a significant threat to the privacy and civil liberties of millions of Americans. It is another example of a fast-changing policy area on which we need to focus to make sure that modern technology is not used to erode Americans’ right to privacy.”

Some fans of the technology wince at the word “drone,” which implies that there is no pilot. And they have grown resentful about the alarms raised over privacy issues, noting that a few city and state governments have begun banning drones even where they do not yet operate.

Tom K. Kenville, chairman of the North Dakota chapter of the trade association, Unmanned Applications Institute, International, said such bans would discourage technological progress. “I don’t think we had rules for the road before we had roads,” he said.

Back in the university lab, Rico Becker, a software developer with Corsair Engineering, which had written a program for the students, emphasized that the “missing persons” exercise was just one of many hypothetical missions that students would fly, and was purely theoretical. “We’re not training pilots to spot people camping in their backyards,” he said.

Aside from the missing persons mission, experts here outline a number of uses for the planes: “precision agriculture,” with tiny planes inspecting crops several times a week for the first sign of blight or insect invasion; safety missions by semiautonomous flying machines that could cruise the two-mile length of a freight train and examine the air brakes on each car, far faster than a person could, and be available for accident assessment in case of derailment; inspection operations of pipelines or power lines, a job that is notoriously dangerous for helicopters, and scouting out fires or car crashes.

Volunteer fire departments in places like Grand Forks, Mr. Kenville said, would provide a clear market. An unmanned vehicle, he said, was “going to beat all the cars there,” to determine the scope of a problem.

“If it’s a chemical fire, it will tell us to stay away, or it’s just some hay bales, drive slower,” he said.

Remote control equipment might even displace some human pilots, in the cockpits of cargo planes.

“This is money,” said Matthew L. Opsahl, in another part of the University of North Dakota simulation lab, at a work station where an operator could coordinate the activities of several remotely operated planes. One person could handle six cargo planes at a time, he said, or direct ground-based crews of several remotely operated planes that were scanning a large-scale event, like a spreading forest fire. The operator could compare the aerial images with those from Google maps, identifying street names and addresses to forward to a 911 call center.

Mr. Opsahl, a former pilot on a regional jet, is now an instructor in the North Dakota program, where Mr. Regenhard, 21, a junior from Prescott, Wis., has a double major in commercial aviation and in unmanned aerial systems. Mr. Regenhard is also building a six-rotor helicopter that will beam pictures back to the ground, one that might inspect rooftop air-conditioners or offer a bird’s-eye view of a crime scene.

Equipped with a GPS sensor and a $220 autopilot, it can be programmed to fly to a sequence of coordinates, at various altitudes, much the way an airliner can. Or it can simply broadcast its position to a distant ground station, where an operator can use a computer keyboard and mouse, or a joystick, to direct it.

The unresolved question is how to avoid midair collisions, because the operator on the ground cannot see other traffic in the air. The F.A.A. plans to have a system ready by 2015 called “sense and avoid” in which each plane in the sky, manned or unmanned, uses GPS equipment to locate itself, and sends that information to a computer on the ground that draws a map showing all targets. The computer then rebroadcasts that map to every pilot in the air — or at a computer workstation on the ground, as the case may be.

The progress of electronics seems relentless. Mr. Anderson, of 3D Robotics, said that all the components in a drone — a fast processor, a good battery, a GPS receiver and microelectromechancial sensors — were present in an iPhone.

The rapid progress has driven a burst of commercial activity, along with a lot of anxiety. Mr. Regenhard was teamed up one recent afternoon with Mr. Becker, whose company had written a program that simulated a Cessna 182, a single-engine plane familiar to generations of student pilots, and was integrated with a variety of computer-drawn landscapes, some real, some artificial.

Among the software tricks, the terrain map on Mr. Regenhard’s screen showed a moving red cone, like a searchlight, that was sometimes broad and sometimes a pinpoint, indicating the field of view through the camera controlled by Mr. Becker, giving the pilot a good idea of what the sensor operator was looking at, and thus how to direct the plane.

As demonstrated here, the technology seems whiz-bang but unthreatening. The unmanned aerial systems include a ground station, usually a laptop with some communications gear attached, and some of the flying vehicles weigh only a few pounds. Even many of the larger ones will fit into molded cases that go comfortably into the trunk of a car. Some take off when the operator throws them, like a javelin or a football; some of the larger ones are intended to be launched from a catapult that could sit in the bed of a pickup truck.

The field is embryonic. “We’re in the Wilbur Wright years of the U.A.S. industry,” said Bruce Gjovig, director of the Center for Innovation, a business incubator, at the University of North Dakota.

Benjamin M. Trapnell, an associate professor and a mainstay of the unmanned aircraft systems program here, one of only three nationwide to offer a bachelor’s in the field, said the trick was not just in learning to fly such vehicles, but also in designing them, including the cameras or other sensors they could carry, and the ground stations from which they can be controlled.

The technology seems so flexible and promising that even some companies involved in conventional aviation are interested. For example, at Applebee Aviation, which flies 11 helicopters out of Banks, Ore., mostly to spray crops, Warren Howe, the sales manager, said a remotely piloted vehicle might never replace a conventional one for that purpose. In a drone, he said, “you’re limited to looking with a camera; you wouldn’t be able to see necessarily the wind changes that control drift, or a spotted owl or something, or beehives in a neighboring yard.”

“You may not see that kid coming down the street to take a look because he thinks a helicopter is really cool,” Mr. Howe said.

But at the same time, he said, his light helicopters cost $1,100 an hour to charter, and a lot of survey work could be done with a drone instead, mapping out what a manned helicopter would be needed for.

Mr. Anderson, in contrast, said that later this year, his company would introduce a helicopter for agricultural surveillance that would sell for less than $1,000. “That’s not per hour, that’s for the helicopter,” he said.

Federal court rejects CIA's denial of drone strikes as 'fiction'

Federal court rejects CIA's denial of drone strikes as 'fiction'

Source

Federal court rejects CIA's denial of drone strikes as 'fiction'

By David G. Savage

March 15, 2013, 10:22 a.m.

WASHINGTON—A federal appeals court said Friday that it will no longer accept the “fiction” from the Obama administration’s lawyers that the CIA has no interest or documents that describe drone strikes.

“It is neither logical nor plausible for the CIA to maintain that it would reveal anything not already in the public domain to say the Agency at least has an intelligence interest in such strikes,” said Chief Judge Merrick Garland. “The defendant is, after all, the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The decision gave a partial victory to the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that seeks documents on the government’s still-secret policy on drone strikes. The three judges did not say any particular documents must be released, but they rejected the administration’s position that it could simply refuse to “confirm or deny” that it had any such documents.

A federal judge had rejected the ACLU’s suit entirely, but the three-judge appeals court revived the suit. The agency’s non-response does not pass the “straight face” test, Garland concluded.

He cited public statements from President Obama, new CIA Director John Brennan and former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that discussed the use of drone strikes abroad. In the past, the courts have sometimes allowed government agencies in sensitive cases to refuse to say whether they have certain documents in their files.

“In this case, the CIA has asked the courts to stretch that doctrine too far — to give their imprimatur to a fiction of deniability that no reasonable person would regard as plausible,” Garland wrote in ACLU vs. CIA.

ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer called the decision a victory. “It requires the government to retire the absurd claim that the CIA’s interest in targeted killing is a secret,” he said. “It also means that the CIA will have to explain what records it is withholding and on what grounds it is withholding them.

“We hope that this ruling will encourage the Obama administration to fundamentally reconsider the secrecy surrounding the drones program,” said Jaffer, a deputy legal director for the ACLU.

david.savage@latimes.com

Justice Department wins the Rosemary Award - Again

The Rosemary Award, a distinction given by the National Security Archive annually to a public agency whose performance on transparency and openness is downright dismal.

The Rosemary Award is named after Rose Mary Woods, secretary to President Richard Nixon. Woods who famously erased a crucial 18 minutes of White House tapes.

Source

Posted at 08:00 AM ET, 03/15/2013

Justice Department ‘wins’ award for secrecy

By Emily Heil

In the category of dubious achievements, the Justice Department is now a back-to-back winner of the Rosemary Award, a distinction given by the National Security Archive annually to a public agency whose performance on transparency and openness is downright dismal.

Congrats, or something to the Justice Department (as our colleagues at The Fix say to the winners of their Worst Week in Washington)!

To merit the eighth-annual award, Justice obstructed and cloaked its doings in secrecy, the Archive says, much like the award’s namesake, Rose Mary Woods, secretary to President Richard Nixon. Woods famously erased a crucial 18 minutes of White House tapes (an innocent mistake, she claimed, that accidentally happened when she stretched to answer a phone call).

Justice “clinched the intensely competitive award “ just this week with its performance at a Senate hearing in which an official refused to answer questions about litigation that could undermine an open-government law Congress adopted in 2007 to speed up requests from the public filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

And Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy might have tipped the scales in the Rosemary sweepstakes when got in this zing chiding Justice for slow-walking its rewrite of its own FOIA policies to comply with the 2007 law:

“It’s been five years since we changed the law,” Leahy said. “It took me less time to get through law school.”

A friendly reminder that your taxes are due next month

Cheap Drones Made in China Could Arm US Foes

Cheap Drones Made in China Could Arm US Foes

By Jeremy Hsu, TechNewsDaily Senior Writer | LiveScience.com

Cheap drones made in China could end up arming potential U.S. foes such as North Korea, Iran and terrorist organizations.

China already makes drones that don't quite match up to U.S. military drones, but for a fraction of the cost. The Chinese military envisions such unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) scouting out battlefield targets, guiding missile and artillery strikes, and swarming potential adversaries, such as U.S. carrier battle groups.

"In whatever future conflict scenario we're in five or 10 years from now, the proliferation of UAVs is going to complicate things for the U.S. military," said Ian Easton, a research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute.

China has built a huge military-industrial complex to support its growing drone fleet, which consisted of about 280 military drones as of mid-2011, according to a report released by the Project 2049 Institute on March 11. Chinese manufacturers supplying the military and state agencies also have begun seeking foreign buyers in a global drone market that aerospace and defense market research firm Teal Group estimates to be worth $89 billion over the next 10 years.

Retired Chinese generals have stated on Chinese state television station CCTV that Chinese drone technology lags American technology by about five years, Easton said. However, Chinese manufacturers are touting their plans to build drones five or even 10 times cheaper than comparable U.S. drones, whose hardware alone costs $5 million to $10 million. [Video: RoboBees: Design Poses Intriguing Engineering Challenges]

The idea of cheap, China-made drones may not tempt countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia or NATO allies that want to buy the best U.S. or Israeli drone hardware. Instead, China is seeking buyers in the Middle East and Africa at glitzy expositions such as China’s biennial Zhuhai Air Show.

"In the area of the Middle East, there could be direct competition, and the Chinese would have an advantage because they can apparently make UAVs cheaper," Easton told TechNewsDaily. "For countries that don't demand the best technology, good enough would be good enough."

That means countries such as Syria might obtain Chinese drones for the surveillance or oppression of their own citizens, Easton said. He added that Chinese drones also could end up in the hands of North Korea or Iran — regional hotspots where the U.S. military may potentially find itself embroiled in future conflicts.

Iran has already sold its own crude drones to countries such as Syria and organizations such as Hezbollah, a militant group based in Lebanon and backed by Iran. In addition, China-made drones would allow countries like Iran and North Korea to obtain technology which Western countries refuse to sell.

"It's bad enough that China has that kind of capability, but the same capability could end up in the hands of the Iranians or North Koreans or a terrorist group like Hezbollah that Iran is cooperating with," Easton said.

The U.S. has already shown the world how battlefield drone surveillance and drone strikes can prove both effective and controversial. Still, the U.S. military faces a new challenge in detecting swarms of China-made drones during future conflicts, Easton said. Some drones may go undetected by radar because they can fly extremely low and may come in small sizes.

This story was provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow TechNewsDaily on Twitter @TechNewsDaily, or on Facebook.

A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood

A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood

By MARK MAZZETTI

Published: April 6, 2013 Comment

The C.I.A. has carried out hundreds of strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas.

On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.

Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.

That was a lie.

Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the C.I.A., the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.

That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the C.I.A. to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.

The C.I.A. has since conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike. While it was not the first country where the United States used drones, it became the laboratory for the targeted killing operations that have come to define a new American way of fighting, blurring the line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war.

Neither American nor Pakistani officials have ever publicly acknowledged what really happened to Mr. Muhammad — details of the strike that killed him, along with those of other secret strikes, are still hidden in classified government databases. But in recent months, calls for transparency from members of Congress and critics on both the right and left have put pressure on Mr. Obama and his new C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, to offer a fuller explanation of the goals and operation of the drone program, and of the agency’s role.

Mr. Brennan, who began his career at the C.I.A. and over the past four years oversaw an escalation of drone strikes from his office at the White House, has signaled that he hopes to return the agency to its traditional role of intelligence collection and analysis. But with a generation of C.I.A. officers now fully engaged in a new mission, it is an effort that could take years.

Today, even some of the people who were present at the creation of the drone program think the agency should have long given up targeted killings.

Ross Newland, who was a senior official at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., when the agency was given the authority to kill Qaeda operatives, says he thinks that the agency had grown too comfortable with remote-control killing, and that drones have turned the C.I.A. into the villain in countries like Pakistan, where it should be nurturing relationships in order to gather intelligence.

As he puts it, “This is just not an intelligence mission.”

From Car Thief to Militant

By 2004, Mr. Muhammad had become the undisputed star of the tribal areas, the fierce mountain lands populated by the Wazirs, Mehsuds and other Pashtun tribes who for decades had lived independent of the writ of the central government in Islamabad. A brash member of the Wazir tribe, Mr. Muhammad had raised an army to fight government troops and had forced the government into negotiations. He saw no cause for loyalty to the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani military spy service that had given an earlier generation of Pashtuns support during the war against the Soviets.

Many Pakistanis in the tribal areas viewed with disdain the alliance that President Pervez Musharraf had forged with the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They regarded the Pakistani military that had entered the tribal areas as no different from the Americans — who they believed had begun a war of aggression in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets had years earlier.

Born near Wana, the bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Mr. Muhammad spent his adolescent years as a petty car thief and shopkeeper in the city’s bazaar. He found his calling in 1993, around the age of 18, when he was recruited to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and rose quickly through the group’s military hierarchy. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield with his long face and flowing jet black hair.

When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001, he seized an opportunity to host the Arab and Chechen fighters from Al Qaeda who crossed into Pakistan to escape the American bombing.

For Mr. Muhammad, it was partly a way to make money, but he also saw another use for the arriving fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string of attacks on Pakistani military installations and on American firebases in Afghanistan.

C.I.A. officers in Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesman to hand over the foreign fighters, but under Pashtun tribal customs that would be treachery. Reluctantly, Mr. Musharraf ordered his troops into the forbidding mountains to deliver rough justice to Mr. Muhammad and his fighters, hoping the operation might put a stop to the attacks on Pakistani soil, including two attempts on his life in December 2003.

But it was only the beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery pounded Wana and its surrounding villages. Government troops shelled pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreign fighters. The Pakistani commander declared the operation an unqualified success, but for Islamabad, it had not been worth the cost in casualties.

A cease-fire was negotiated in April during a hastily arranged meeting in South Waziristan, during which a senior Pakistani commander hung a garland of bright flowers around Mr. Muhammad’s neck. The two men sat together and sipped tea as photographers and television cameras recorded the event.

Both sides spoke of peace, but there was little doubt who was negotiating from strength. Mr. Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a religious madrasa rather than in a public location where tribal meetings are traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my place,” he said. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”

The peace arrangement propelled Mr. Muhammad to new fame, and the truce was soon exposed as a sham. He resumed attacks against Pakistani troops, and Mr. Musharraf ordered his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.

Pakistani officials had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing armed C.I.A. Predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further criticism of Mr. Musharraf as being Washington’s lackey. But Mr. Muhammad’s rise to power forced them to reconsider.

The C.I.A. had been monitoring the rise of Mr. Muhammad, but officials considered him to be more Pakistan’s problem than America’s. In Washington, officials were watching with growing alarm the gathering of Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas, and George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director, authorized officers in the agency’s Islamabad station to push Pakistani officials to allow armed drones. Negotiations were handled primarily by the Islamabad station.

As the battles raged in South Waziristan, the station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the C.I.A. killed Mr. Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas?

In secret negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets. And they insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas — ensuring that they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans going: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India.

The ISI and the C.I.A. agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the C.I.A.’s covert action authority — meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.

"In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time." PERVEZ MUSHARRAF, the Pakistani president whose government reached a deal with the C.I.A., allowing it to carry out secret drone strikes in Pakistan.

Mr. Musharraf did not think that it would be difficult to keep up the ruse. As he told one C.I.A. officer: “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time.”

A New Direction

As the negotiations were taking place, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.

The greatest impact of Mr. Helgerson’s report was felt at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, which was at the vanguard of the agency’s global antiterrorism operation. The center had focused on capturing Qaeda operatives; questioning them in C.I.A. jails or outsourcing interrogations to the spy services of Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and other nations; and then using the information to hunt more terrorism suspects.

Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether C.I.A. officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners — like confining them in a small box with live bugs — violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

“The agency faces potentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result of the CTC detention and interrogation program,” the report concluded, given the brutality of the interrogation techniques and the “inability of the U.S. government to decide what it will ultimately do with the terrorists detained by the agency.”

The report was the beginning of the end for the program. The prisons would stay open for several more years, and new detainees were occasionally picked up and taken to secret sites, but at Langley, senior C.I.A. officers began looking for an endgame to the prison program. One C.I.A. operative told Mr. Helgerson’s team that officers from the agency might one day wind up on a “wanted list” and be tried for war crimes in an international court.

The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.

Before long the C.I.A. would go from being the long-term jailer of America’s enemies to a military organization that erased them.

Not long before, the agency had been deeply ambivalent about drone warfare.

The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the C.I.A. were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad’s death, and one year before the C.I.A. carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone — in Yemen in 2002 — a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.

A new generation of C.I.A. officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive C.I.A. plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the C.I.A. chose to conduct.

The debate pitted a group of senior officers at the Counterterrorism Center against James L. Pavitt, the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, and others who worried about the repercussions of the agency’s getting back into assassinations. Mr. Tenet told the 9/11 commission that he was not sure that a spy agency should be flying armed drones.

John E. McLaughlin, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director, who the 9/11 commission reported had raised concerns about the C.I.A.’s being in charge of the Predator, said: “You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining lethal authority.

“When people say to me, ‘It’s not a big deal,’ ” he said, “I say to them, ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’

“It is a big deal. You start thinking about things differently,” he added. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, these concerns about the use of the C.I.A. to kill were quickly swept side.

The Account at the Time

After Mr. Muhammad was killed, his dirt grave in South Waziristan became a site of pilgrimage. A Pakistani journalist, Zahid Hussain, visited it days after the drone strike and saw a makeshift sign displayed on the grave: “He lived and died like a true Pashtun.”

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told reporters at the time that “Al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other “militants” had been killed in a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.

Any suggestion that Mr. Muhammad was killed by the Americans, or with American assistance, he said, was “absolutely absurd.”

This article is adapted from “The Way of the Knife: The C.I.A., a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” to be published by Penguin Press on Tuesday.

The IRS is monitoring your Facebook and Twitter accounts???

I discovered that the FBI, Homeland Security, TSA, DEA, BATF, Secret Service, or some other Federal agency is spying on me after I installed Google Analytics on my website.

Every day I get one or two hits from an IP address in the Washington, DC suburb of Shady Side, Maryland which I suspect is a headquarters for some Federal government site that spies on Americans.

I should say the city and the IP address changes over time, but it is pretty obvious that somebody in the Federal government is spying on me.

For those of you who wish to use Google Analytics to see if the government is spying on you it is free and this link will tell you how to install the software.

To get Google Analytics working on your web site all you have to do is create a free account with them and then put the following lines of code on each of your web pages.

Google will give you the following code, which you will have to cut and paste on to your web pages. The account number which has been replaced with "*************" will be replaced with your account number.

Last but not least you don't need to understand any of this computer mumbo jumbo to use Google Analytics.

Just cut and paste the code Google gives you and you will be on your way to seeing the government thugs that are spying on you.

Once you create the Google account you can visit the Google Analytics site and get reports on who is visiting your websites on an hour by hour basis.

I suspect if enough people start doing this Uncle Sam's goons will cut a deal with Google Analytics and order them not to tell you when Uncle Sam's goons visit your website.

BP murdered 16 year old Jose Rodriguez????

Source

New details in Mexico teenager's death by Border Patrol

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Apr 11, 2013 12:18 AM

A new witness and new evidence seem to bolster the case that a Mexican teen shot to death by the Border Patrol in October in Nogales, Sonora, was walking down the street at the time he was killed — not, as the Border Patrol has maintained, throwing rocks over the fence at agents.

The new information also suggests that more than one agent may have opened fire on Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16. That information arrived as the family of the youth held a march on Wednesday in Nogales to protest what they called the FBI and Border Patrol’s “veil of silence” about the killing.

Both the bureau and the patrol have declined to comment on the boy’s death, citing an ongoing FBI investigation. They have declined to identify the agent or agents involved and have declined to release a surveillance video of the incident, shot by cameras mounted above the border fence.

Agents, along with Nogales, Ariz., police, were chasing two men they believed were fleeing back to Mexico after climbing over the fence to the U.S. side with drugs. The agents said rocks began flying over the fence at them as they tried to arrest the men climbing back over the fence.

The new witness, Isidro Alvarado, a private security guard, said on the night of Oct. 10, he was walking about 20 feet behind Elena Rodriguez down Calle Internacional, which runs parallel to the border fence, when two other youths suddenly ran past them. Then, he said, he heard gunshots from two separate places by the fence and saw Elena Rodriguez fall.

Alvarado said his brother, a Nogales police officer, persuaded him to come forward and speak to the Sonora Attorney General’s Office. Alvarado’s statements were first reported by Nogales radio station XENY. He also spoke at a news conference Wednesday in Nogales, Sonora.

Luis Parra, a Nogales, Ariz., attorney representing the Elena Rodriguez family, said he recently interviewed Alvarado and then confirmed with an attorney from the Sonora Attorney General’s Office that the first call to Nogales police reporting the shooting, immediately after it happened, came from Alvarado’s cellphone.

“But what has made the family even more distraught,” he said, “are the indications that two agents were involved in the shooting and that he (Elena Rodriguez) had to have been lying on the ground when five bullets penetrated his back.”

In a forensic scene-analysis report, investigators for the Sonora Attorney General’s Office concluded that at least five shots into Elena Rodriguez’s back must have hit him while he was lying on the sidewalk. This jibes with findings in an autopsy, previously reported by The Arizona Republic, that all but one of the bullets that hit the boy entered from behind and most at an angle suggesting he was prone when hit.

In their forensic report, investigators also describe how they climbed the story-and-a-half-high bluff on which the border fence sits and looked through the fence as Border Patrol agents and Nogales, Ariz., police conducted their investigation on the U.S. side of the fence.

They describe an area next to the fence, cordoned off with police tape, where they counted 11 shell casings, and another taped-off area, about 28 feet away, where they could see three more casings. This seems to suggest, Parra said, that agents fired from two different spots along the fence.

A Sonora ballistics report, meanwhile, describes the nine bullets recovered by Mexican police — six from the boy’s body, and three from the street — as hollow-point, .40-caliber slugs fired from one or more polygonal-rifled guns.

Michael Haag, a forensic scientist and ballistics expert based in Albuquerque, reviewed the report. He said this is a relatively uncommon type of rifling, a type used in the Heckler & Koch P2000 handgun, among others.

That is the standard-issue Border Patrol sidearm, a spokesman confirmed.

The ballistics report said polygonal rifling, which leaves a much smoother barrel than conventional rifling, makes it harder to distinguish whether all the bullets were fired by the same gun or different guns.

“Because it leaves no good marks on the bullets, it’s very rare by forensic science to identify the bullets back to a specific gun,” Haag agreed. He added, “You can ID it sometimes, so it should be attempted.”

He also noted that each Border Patrol agent should have told the FBI whether he or she fired shots that night.

The Sonora ballistics report identified the bullets as Starfire hollow points, but Haag said the poor-quality photocopies of the bullets show cannelures — a ring that runs around the circumference of the bullet — that are not found on Starfire rounds but are consistent with the similar Federal Premium HST .40-caliber rounds.

Those are standard-issue ammunition for the H&K P2000 handgun, a Border Patrol spokesman confirmed.

The Department of Homeland Security expects shortly to complete a review of the Border Patrol’s use-of-force policy, which allows agents to fire at rock-throwers, Secretary Janet Napolitano said in an interview with The Republic last week.

There have been eight incidents in the past three years in which agents have shot and killed alleged rock-throwers, among 20 deaths caused by agents since the beginning of 2010. In all but three of those cases, the FBI investigations remain open and the Border Patrol and the DHS have declined to release any information, including the names of the agents involved.

Reach the reporter at bob.ortega@arizonarepublic.com

NRA - Worlds largest gun control organization???

Some people like to say that the NRA is the worlds largest gun control organization.

I think this editorial cartoon by Steve Benson on April 11, 2013 gives credibility to that.

In the cartoon NRA leader Wayne LaPierre is picture on TV saying

We think it is reasonable to provide instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone.

Who is that idiotic bobblehead.

It's you Wayne, don't you remember.

Testimony before House Judiciary Committee on Crime, 27, May 1999

You get a fair trial??? Don't make me laugh!!!

The government views you as either an enemy that belongs in prison, or a source of cash with a big wallet they want to steal. And in both cases they ain't going to let a fair trial get in their way of putting you in prison and stealing your wallet.

Source

Guantanamo dogged by new controversy after mishandling of e-mails

By Peter Finn, Published: April 11

The military justice system at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which has been dogged by charges of secret monitoring of proceedings and defense communications, became embroiled in a fresh controversy Thursday when it was revealed that hundreds of thousands of defense e-mails were turned over to the prosecution.

The breach prompted Col. Karen Mayberry, the chief military defense counsel, to order all attorneys for Guantanamo detainees to stop using Defense Department computer networks to transmit privileged or confidential information until the security of such communications is assured.

Army Col. James Pohl, the chief judge at Guantanamo, also ordered a two-month delay in pre­trial proceedings in the military-commission case against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of organizing the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Defense attorneys in the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed , the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and four co-defendants filed an emergency motion — via a handwritten note — seeking a similar pause in proceedings.

Pretrial hearings in both cases were set to resume this month.

“Is there any security for defense attorney information?” said James Connell, attorney for Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, one of the Sept. 11 defendants. “This new disclosure is simply the latest in a series of revelations of courtroom monitoring, hidden surveillance devices and legal-bin searches.”

The inappropriate transfer of the e-mails follows other questions about government intrusion and secrecy that have undermined the legitimacy of a judicial process that has struggled to establish itself as an effective forum for the prosecution of some terrorism cases.

In February, a military lawyer acknowledged that microphones were hidden inside devices that looked like smoke detectors in rooms used for meetings between defense counsel and their clients. The military said the listening system was not used to eavesdrop on confidential meetings and had been installed before defense lawyers started to use the rooms. The government subsequently said it tore out the wiring.

That same month, Pohl learned that the soundproofed courtroom at Guantanamo was wired with a “kill switch” that allowed an unknown government entity, thought to be the CIA, to cut audio feed of the trial to the public gallery. Pohl ruled that in the future only he could turn off the audio feed to protect classified information. But defense lawyers questioned whether the audio equipment in the courtroom had been manipulated to allow the government to monitor attorney- client conversations.

In the latest controversy, the prosecution gained access to about 540,000 e-mails from defense teams. It is not clear which cases or lawyers the e-mails concerned; a Pentagon spokesman declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

Defense attorneys said prosecutors told them that they stopped looking at the e-mails as soon as they realized that the messages contained confidential defense information.

The mishandling of the e-mails was detected when IT specialists were conducting a search of the government’s computer system on behalf of prosecutors in a particular case. When they did so, they came across not only the e-mails they were seeking but also those between defense lawyers.

Defense attorneys said military IT personnel unsuccessfully tried to refine their search parameters two more times — and in each case discovered more confidential defense material.

In another controversy, defense counsel recently complained that huge volumes of work files were lost when the Defense Department tried to upgrade its network and mirror at Guantanamo the computer system that is available to defense lawyers handling detainee cases in the Washington area.

“Entire files, months of work was just gone,” said Navy Cmdr. Stephen C. Reyes, an attorney for Nashiri. “I have no evidence of any nefarious conduct, but it demonstrates again that we don’t have confidence that our files and communications are secure.”

Reyes noted that a prosecution file also was recently found in the defense computer system.

The latest delay in the commission hearings comes as the Obama administration faces a widening hunger strike among the detainees at Guantanamo.

Attorneys for the detainees and the military have clashed over the number of participants in the protest. The Pentagon said Thursday that 43 of the 166 detainees were on hunger strike, of whom 11 are being force-fed, while defense attorneys said the overwhelming majority of the 120 or so detainees in Camps 5 and 6 are on hunger strike.

The military has refused requests from the media, including The Washington Post, to allow reporters to observe conditions at the camps. Human Rights groups also have requested unfettered access to the camps.

A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross is visiting the camp, but the organization does not make its recommendations public.

ICRC President Peter Maurer said Thursday in an interview at The Post that the hunger strike is born of detainees’ frustration at being held indefinitely without any further review, even in cases in which they have been cleared for transfer out of Guantanamo.

With Police in Schools, More Children in Court

Let's face it, it's not about the kids. It's about high paying, cushy jobs for cops.

Well at least that is probably how the cops and police unions feel about it.

Source

With Police in Schools, More Children in Court

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: April 12, 2013 175 Comments

HOUSTON — As school districts across the country consider placing more police officers in schools, youth advocates and judges are raising alarm about what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe is better handled in the principal’s office.

Since the early 1990s, thousands of districts, often with federal subsidies, have paid local police agencies to provide armed “school resource officers” for high schools, middle schools and sometimes even elementary schools. Hundreds of additional districts, including those in Houston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, have created police forces of their own, employing thousands of sworn officers.

Last week, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, a task force of the National Rifle Association recommended placing police officers or other armed guards in every school. The White House has proposed an increase in police officers based in schools.

The effectiveness of using police officers in schools to deter crime or the remote threat of armed intruders is unclear. The new N.R.A. report cites the example of a Mississippi assistant principal who in 1997 got a gun from his truck and disarmed a student who had killed two classmates, and another in California in which a school resource officer in 2001 wounded and arrested a student who had opened fire with a shotgun.

Yet the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior — including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers — that sends children into the criminal courts.

“There is no evidence that placing officers in the schools improves safety,” said Denise C. Gottfredson, a criminologist at the University of Maryland who is an expert in school violence. “And it increases the number of minor behavior problems that are referred to the police, pushing kids into the criminal system.”

Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year. A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected, according to recent reports from civil rights groups, including the Advancement Project, in Washington, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York.

Such criminal charges may be most prevalent in Texas, where police officers based in schools write more than 100,000 misdemeanor tickets each year, said Deborah Fowler, the deputy director of Texas Appleseed, a legal advocacy center in Austin. The students seldom get legal aid, she noted, and they may face hundreds of dollars in fines, community service and, in some cases, a lasting record that could affect applications for jobs or the military.

In February, Texas Appleseed and the Brazos County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. filed a complaint with the federal Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. Black students in the school district in Bryan, they noted, receive criminal misdemeanor citations at four times the rate of white students.

Featured in the complaint is De’Angelo Rollins, who was 12 and had just started at a Bryan middle school in 2010 when he and another boy scuffled and were given citations. After repeated court appearances, De’Angelo pleaded no contest, paid a fine of $69 and was sentenced to 20 hours of community service and four months’ probation.

“They said this will stay on his record unless we go back when he is 17 and get it expunged,” said his mother, Marjorie Holmon.

Federal officials have not yet acted, but the district says it is revising guidelines for citations. “Allegations of inequitable treatment of students is something the district takes very seriously,” said Sandra Farris, a spokeswoman for the Bryan schools.

While schools may bring in police officers to provide security, the officers often end up handling discipline and handing out charges of disorderly conduct or assault, said Michael Nash, the presiding judge of juvenile court in Los Angeles and the president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

“You have to differentiate the security issue and the discipline issue,” he said. “Once the kids get involved in the court system, it’s a slippery slope downhill.”

Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, defended placing police officers in schools, provided that they are properly trained. He said that the negative impacts had been exaggerated, and that when the right people were selected and schooled in adolescent psychology and mediation, both schools and communities benefited.

“The good officers recognize the difference between a scuffle and a true assault,” Mr. Canady said.

But the line is not always clear. In New York, a lawsuit against the Police Department’s School Safety Division describes several instances in which officers handcuffed and arrested children for noncriminal behavior.

Many districts are clamoring for police officers. “There’s definitely a massive trend toward increasing school resource officers, so much so that departments are having trouble buying guns and supplies,” said Michael Dorn, director of Safe Havens International, in Macon, Ga., a safety consultant to schools.

One district in Florida, Mr. Dorn said, is looking to add 130 officers, mainly to patrol its grade schools. McKinney, Tex., north of Dallas, recently placed officers in its five middle schools.

Many judges say school police officers are too quick to make arrests or write tickets.

“We are criminalizing our children for nonviolent offenses,” Wallace B. Jefferson, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, said in a speech to the Legislature in March.

School officers in Texas are authorized to issue Class C misdemeanor citations, which require students to appear before a justice of the peace or in municipal court, with public records.

The process can leave a bitter taste. Joshua, a ninth grader who lives south of Houston, got into a brief fight on a school bus in November after another boy, a security video showed, hit him first. The principal called in the school’s resident sheriff, who wrote them both up for disorderly conduct.

“I thought it was stupid,” Joshua said of the ticket and his need to miss school for two court appearances. His guardian found a free lawyer from the Earl Carl Institute, a legal aid group at Texas Southern University, and the case was eventually dismissed.

Sarah R. Guidry, the executive director of the institute, said that when students appeared in court with a lawyer, charges for minor offenses were often dismissed. But she said the courts tended to be “plea mills,” with students pleading guilty in the hope that, once they paid a fine and spent hours cleaning parks, the charges would be expunged. If students fail to show up and cases are unresolved, they may be named in arrest warrants when they turn 17.

In parts of Texas, the outcry from legal advocates is starting to make a difference. Jimmy L. Dotson, the chief of Houston’s 186-member school district force, is one of several police leaders working to redefine the role of campus officers.

Perhaps the sharpest change has come to E. L. Furr High School, which serves mainly low-income Hispanic children on the city’s east side. Bertie Simmons, 79, came out of retirement 11 years ago to try to turn around a school so blighted by gang violence that it dared not hold assemblies.

“The kids hated the school police,” said Ms. Simmons, the principal. They arrested two or three students a day and issued tickets to many more.

Ms. Simmons searched for officers who would work with the students and build trust. She found them in Danny Avalos and Craig Davis, former municipal police officers who grew up in rough neighborhoods, and after years of effort, the campus is peaceful and arrests and tickets are rare. Discipline is usually enforced by a principal’s court with student juries, not summonses to the criminal courts.

“Writing tickets is easy,” Officer Avalos said. “We do it the hard way, talking with the kids and coaching them.”

With new guidelines and training, ticketing within the Houston schools was reduced by 60 percent in one year. Citations for “disruption of classes,” for example, fell to 124 between September and February, from 927 in the same period last year.

“Our role is not to be disciplinarians,” Chief Dotson said in an interview. “Our purpose is to push these kids into college, not into the criminal justice system.”

Cops read everything you post online???

This Chicago teenager was busted for the victimless crime of posting a Craigslist ad selling his pet alligator.

I also posted articles before about Phoenix and Tempe cops who work full time posting internet ads posing as hot, horny, underage teenager girls looking for old men to have sex with.

On these web pages I get at least one visit everyday from a site in the Washington D.C. area (IP address 76.114.145.234 located in Shady Side, Maryland), which appears to be a Homeland Security office that is spying on me for my posts documenting crimes committed by the police.

The site that logs the visits was broken into several times, by I suspect police with the Homeland Security, or perhaps hackers hired by the Homeland Security and they modified the logging software.

Sadly only 30 years after 1984, America is beginning to look like the police state written in the novel 1984.

Source

Police: Galewood neighborhood man tries to sell alligator on Craigslist

By Rosemary Regina Sobol Tribune reporter

2:30 a.m. CDT, April 16, 2013

A Northwest Side man accused of trying to sell a baby alligator on Craigslist for $300 was arrested Monday evening, police said.

Juan A. DeJesus, 19, of the 1700 block of Meade Avenue, was charged Monday with one count of misdemeanor possession of wildlife, police said.

A state Department of Natural Resources police officer responded to an advertisement that was posted on Craigslist and went to DeJesus' home Monday afternoon under the pretenses he was going to purchase the alligator, police said.

The ad, which has since been pulled from Craigslist, stated:

"Baby gator for sale, id consider a trade for a leachie gecko. Sale price is 300 obo asap."

DeJesus came out of his home with the alligator and said he would like to have $300 for it, but the officer identified himself and told DeJesus of the violation, police said.

The alligator was seized as evidence and given to other IDNR agents and DeJesus was transported to the Grand Central District police station to be processed, police said.

DeJesus could not be reached immediately Tuesday morning. He is scheduled to appear in court at the Daley Center on May 31.

rsobol@tribune.com

Only police officers can be trusted to handle guns properly!!!!

Retired cop drops gun, shoots self at Des Plaines school

By Jonathan Bullington Tribune reporters

8:18 p.m. CDT, April 16, 2013

A retired police officer accidentally shot himself when he dropped his gun inside a Des Plaines school while attending his grandson's Boy Scout troop meeting.

Police and school officials said the man was carrying his licensed, loaded gun inside a fanny pack Monday evening at Iroquois School, and that the gun went off and a bullet struck him in the leg after he dropped the pack.

The man, who school officials called a troop leader, was taken to Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. Des Plaines police Chief William Kushner said the man is a retired Chicago police officer.

No one else was injured, and police did not file charges because no laws were broken, Kushner said.

The retired officer is licensed to carry the firearm, according to a letter to the school community from Iroquois Principal Michael Amadei.

"Of course, the district does not condone bringing firearms on school grounds," the letter states.

Kushner said he initially heard that the retired officer was in serious condition, but school officials said the man's injuries were "not as serious as anticipated."

Amadei's letter said the school "will continue to work with" police and Scouting officials "to clarify any questions that arise. ... Student safety is our number one priority."

Representatives of the Boy Scouts of America Northwest Suburban Council could not be reached for comment late Tuesday.

Tribune reporter Robert McCoppin contributed.

jbullington@tribune.com

Most Glendale tax dollars go to the POLICE!!!!

That is followed by the fire department which gets 22 percent of the budget.

And all other departments combined share the remaining 37 percent of the budget.

They had a second graph that showed the number of Glendale police employees was 550, the number of fire department employees was 250. All the other city employees on the graph were 500. So the police and fire departments have more employees then all the other departments combined.

Those numbers are typical for other city budgets I have seen and the money spent on the cops is usually twice as much at the fire department, and that the police and fire departments budgets are always more then that of all the other city departments combined.

Which leads me to say that America cities are police states because most of the money is spent on the police.

The sad part is that most of the arrests the police make are for victimless drug war crimes. I have read that at the Federal level two thirds of the people in prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes. I am not sure what percent of people in state prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes, but I suspect it is also a huge number.

Glendale city finances could be nearing steep cliff

Glendale city finances could be nearing steep cliff

By Paul Giblin The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Apr 17, 2013 8:59 AM

The mostly new Glendale City Council is contending with a mostly old problem. The city’s financial position has been on a downward slope for years.

In an effort to offset declines in tax revenues, the state’s fifth-largest city has nearly chewed through its financial reserves while it has shed employees and cut services.

Yet, according to the city’s projections, its financial position is about to get far worse.

According to current forecasts, the city will have $3.4 million in reserve in the general fund at the end of fiscal 2014. Without serious restructuring, by 2015 the city would be $3.8 million in the red, and by 2018, the city would have a $20.3 million shortfall.

One option city bookkeepers recommend is to make $3.5 million in cuts for the fiscal year opening in July, followed by $10.8 million in reductions for 2015, and an additional $8.2 million in cuts in 2018.

The seven-member council, with its four new members, is trying to determine how to shape a budget that will keep enough police on patrol and parks in good repair.

But those goals seemed to border on unachievable during an opening series of budget workshops in recent weeks.

If all goes as scheduled, the council will offer a draft of the 2014 budget and a 10-year capital-improvement plan May 28, then authorize a final budget June 11.

Glendale’s financial experts project the city to finish the current fiscal year with an $11.4 million reserve in the general fund.

Ending with any savings, or a reserve, in 2014 requires $3.5 million in reduced spending that would be accomplished by eliminating vacant positions and related costs, Financial Services Executive Director Sherry Schurhammer told the council.

With those cuts and deeper ones recommended by staff, the city could build its reserve to nearly $20 million by fiscal 2018.

Without changes, the city’s financial position is set to become particularly grim in 2018, because that year marks the first year without revenue from a current, but temporary sales tax.

“What I want to make clear here — or hope I’m making clear — is that this ongoing structural operating deficit exists even if that sales tax does not sunset, because you’ve got this negative fund balance,” she said March 27.

The general fund is important because it’s the city’s largest operating fund and it supports the widest range of programs, she said.

The city’s financial position is headed downward because municipal spending patterns were based on prerecession tax collections, and spending was not reduced enough to keep pace as tax collections tapered off during the recession, Schurhammer said.

Most city departments have reduced spending by letting vacant positions remain unfilled in recent years, but those efforts aren’t enough to balance the books, she said.

The heads of most municipal departments told council members that staffing cuts already have cut into their programs.

Acting Police Chief Debby Black and Fire Chief Mark Burdick told council members that they have run out of ways to cover the staffing cuts by adjusting employees’ work schedules and assignments. Both departments need more employees, they said.

Likewise, the number of positions in the Community and Economic Development Department has fallen from 78.5 in 2009 to 39.8 this year, according to city records. Projections call for the department to lose three more positions next year.

Yet the city’s economic development officials are handling more business prospects than they have in years, Executive Director Brian Friedman said.

In addition to anticipated budget expenses across the city, council members are expected to consider an array of new expenses in coming weeks. Among them:

Payments to the potential new owners of the Phoenix Coyotes or a separate management firm to operate Jobing.com Arena. Next year’s budget assumes the city could pay an arena manager $6.5 million.

Funding air-traffic controllers at Glendale Municipal Airport beginning in June when the federal government discontinues the service.

Securing permanent parking and perhaps even building a parking garage around University of Phoenix Stadium.

Possible pay raises or cost-of-living adjustments for city employees, whose pay has been frozen for years.

What about Fifth Amendment rights?

Letter: What about Fifth Amendment rights?

Posted: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:16 pm

Letter to the Editor

Every time I am stopped by the police I tell them I am taking the Fifth and refusing to answer their questions.

I even refuse to tell them my name.

I am not a criminal, but I figure that since the founders died to get me those rights I should use them or lose them.

The next things that usually happens is the cops tell me I don’t have any Fifth Amendment rights in “this case.” I am confused on that because Miranda v Arizona says “If the individual indicates ... he wishes to remain silent, the interrogation must cease”

And of course things then get worse. The cops usually illegally search my wallet, and all my pockets looking for my ID, drugs and guns. I don’t carry an ID, and I don’t use drugs or carry a gun so they never find anything.

Yes, I know Terry v. Ohio allows the cops to give you a pat down search of your outer garments looking for weapons, but a search of my pockets and wallet is clearly illegal per the 4th Amendment and Terry v. Ohio.

Then, I am usually handcuffed and falsely arrested while the police make all kinds of threats on what is going to happen if I don’t answer their questions. After an hour or two the cops release me and tell me I am a jerk for thinking I have “Constitutional rights”.

With that in mind, I can understand where the cops are going in attempting to force Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, to answer their questions without reading him his Miranda rights.

Our Constitutional rights were not created to protect criminals. They were created to protect the innocent from government tyrants, like the police that have a number of times falsely arrested me, illegally questioned me and illegally searched me. I guess I should be glad, because I have not been beaten up, yet, for thinking I have Constitutional rights.

Mike Ross

Tempe

3,000 drone murders by America???

Bringing drones out of the shadows

By The Times editorial board

May 13, 2013

The use of unmanned aircraft to kill suspected terrorists, a practice that has dramatically escalated during the Obama administration, is receiving fresh and welcome scrutiny in Congress and elsewhere even as the number of drone strikes seems to be on the decline. Last week, Rep. William M. "Mac" Thornberry (R-Texas), the chairman of a House armed services subcommittee, introduced legislation to require the Pentagon to promptly inform Congress about every drone strike outside Afghanistan as well as about operations to kill or capture terrorists away from declared war zones.

And in a speech at Oxford University, Harold Koh, who until recently served as the State Department's legal advisor, criticized the administration for not being "sufficiently transparent to the media, to the Congress and to our allies." He urged the administration to publicize its standards for placing targets — Americans and others — on kill lists and to offer a clear tally of civilian casualties.

This page has repeatedly criticized the administration for its lack of transparency about the targeted killing of terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and for its troublingly elastic definition of what constitutes an "imminent" attack on Americans that would justify the killing of a U.S. citizen abroad by drones or other means. The legality of targeting citizens without due process of law is an urgent issue.

But a debate about drones and targeted killings can't be limited to questions about disclosure, accountability to Congress and legal standards. Nor should legitimate concern about the killing of Americans obscure the fact that about 3,000 foreigners have been killed in drone attacks, some of them high-level Al Qaeda operatives but many others "unknown extremists."

As Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor and former Pentagon official, put it in recent testimony before a Senate judiciary subcommittee: "Over the last decade, we have seen U.S. drone strikes evolve from a tool used in extremely limited circumstances to go after specifically identified high-ranking Al Qaeda officials, to a tool relied on in an increasing number of countries to go after an eternally lengthening list of putative bad actors, with increasingly tenuous links to grave or imminent threats to the United States. Some of these suspected terrorists have been identified by name and specifically targeted, while others are increasingly targeted on the basis of suspicious behavior patterns."

Though estimates vary, it seems that hundreds of civilians also have died in drone strikes, a source of anti-American outrage in Pakistan and Yemen. That drones are more precise than manned jet bomber is small consolation for the families of those victims. In testimony before the Senate committee, Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemeni activist and writer educated in the United States, described the effects on his village of a strike: "For almost all of the people in Wessab, I'm the only person with any connection to the United States. They called and texted me that night with questions that I could not answer: 'Why was the United States terrifying them with these drones? Why was the United States trying to kill a person with a missile when everyone knows where he is and he could have been easily arrested?"

When even former officials of the Obama administration are expressing qualms about drones and targeted killings, it behooves the president and his advisors to reconsider the scope and utility of the policy. There are indications that such a reappraisal is underway. The Times has reported that administration officials are moving to shift authority for drone strikes from the CIA back to the Defense Department. There also have been reports that the administration will eliminate so-called signature strikes that are aimed not at particular individuals but at suspicious behavior, such as the massing of vehicles in areas thought to be under the control of Al Qaeda or similar groups.

For all their technological novelty, drones are weapons, and their use raises the perennial question of when and under what safeguards deadly force should be used to protect the national interest. More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks that provided the ultimate authority for the drone campaign, it's time to take stock of whether that policy still makes sense.

More articles on drones

More articles on drones.