(Wired.com) President Obama doesn’t like to talk about how he uses drones to kill suspected militants — including American citizens. Explanations about who gets picked for remote-control death and who does the picking are left to underlings and aides. Just a few days ago, for example, Obama blew off a local Cincinnati television reporter who asked the president about his “kill list.”
On Wednesday, however, CNN’s Jessica Yellin managed to get Obama to open up, just a little, about his criteria for approving drone attacks. His comments may have been the president’s most extensive so far on robot warfare. They were also total baloney, outside experts say.
1 “It has to be a target that is authorised by our laws.”
2 “It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative.”
3 “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”
4 “We’ve got to make sure that in whatever operations we conduct, we are very careful about avoiding civilian casualties.”
5 “That while there is a legal justification for us to try and stop [American citizens] from carrying out plots … they are subject to the protections of the Constitution and due process.”
At least two of those five points appear to be half-truths at best. In both Yemen and Pakistan, the CIA is allowed to launch a strike based on the target’s “signature” — that is, whether he appears to look and act like a terrorist. As senior U.S. officials have repeatedly confirmed, intelligence analysts don’t even have to know the target’s name, let alone whether he’s planning to attack the U.S. In some cases, merely being a military-aged male at the wrong place at the wrong time is enough to justify your death.
“What I found most striking was his claim that legitimate targets are a ‘threat that is serious and not speculative,’ and engaged in ‘some operational plot against the United States,’ That is simply not true,” emails the Council on Foreign Relations’ Micah Zenko, who has tracked the drone war as closely as any outside analyst. “The claim that the 3,000+ people killed in roughly 375 nonbattlefield targeted killings were all engaged in actual operational plots against the U.S. defies any understanding of the scope of what America has been doing for the past ten years.”
A third point — that an American citizen is given the “protections of the Constitution” before he’s approved for unmanned killing — is dubious. Yes, there is a process that the White House uses to vet proposed drone targets. Several government officials review a suspected terrorist’s dossier before an attack on that person is okayed. This is an internal review by presidential aides, not subject to any kind of independent authority, and obviously not one in which a target’s representatives can contest the case. It’s enough to condemn someone to death. The Obama administration has argued that this is the same as the “due process of law” guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.
Legal scholars have found the argument flimsy — with no coherent standard of evidence that amounts to an instant death sentence, and no limits to where that sentence can be carried out. in a January Google Hangout — one of the few other times Obama has even mentioned the drone campaign — he said that targeting decisions were not managed by “a bunch of folks in a room somewhere just making decisions.” Actually, it appears to be something rather close to that.
by Sayer Ji, Contributor Activist Post
September 6, 2012
In the photograph above, taken on Jan. 10th, 2010, you will observe the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, administering bivalent oral polio vaccine (bOPV) to an infant at the Mahabodhi Temple Complex in the Indian state of Bihar, Buddhism’s holiest site – the very place where Guatama Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment approximately 2500 years earlier.Click to view the Reuters video: Dalai Lama launches polio vaccine.
During this globally televised and deeply symbolic event, the Dali Lama vaccinated not one but two infants, ostensibly as an expression of compassion, as well as to lend his visible support for India’s National Immunization Day, and for the larger Global Polio Eradication Initiative, whose duplicities and failures we have covered elsewhere.
The 14th Dalai Lama, mind you, is not only the exiled political leader of Tibet, but is believed by his devotees to be the living and breathing manifestation of the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteśvara – and as a bodhisattva, an expression of enlightenment. It is therefore no small thing for him to be personally administering vaccines to infants, on the very spot that the Buddha was believed to have attained enlightenment.
The Dalai Lama Abandoned Buddhist Ethical Principles In Vaccinating Infants
The concept of doing no harm is fundamental to Buddhist teaching, as it is within other Indian religions (Hinduism, Jainism), and is known as ahimsa, literally “the avoidance of violence – himsa.” One would not, for example, justify killing an animal in order to save one’s own life, which is one reason why Buddhists are vegetarians.
Nor would one justify the killing of one child in order to save 1,000,000, as is often done by regulators in evaluating the costs/benefits of vaccines (which are known on rare occasion to maim or kill) to society as a whole. Simply, do no harm. This principle is no more open to negotiation to a Buddhist than Jesus being the Son of God is open to negotiation to a Christian.
The Dalai Lama himself once said
If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them. [emphasis added]
The principle of nonviolence, or ahimsa, when applied to the environmental chemical exposures and medical interventions can be related to the precautionary principle, which states if an action has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, the burden of proving that it is safe falls on those taking the action.
It was the precautionary principle, in fact, that lead the United States Public Health Service and American Academy of Pediatrics to determine that thimerosal (methylmercury) should be removed from vaccines as “a purely precautionary measure,” despite what they said was a lack of convincing evidence of toxicity. By 2001, thimerosal was removed from almost all routine childhood vaccines in the US (it is still found in multi-dose vaccines targeted against flu and tetanus).
Not only has most of the existing vaccine safety research been funded by the manufacturers of vaccines themselves (or scientists directly funded by them), but much of the safety-checking occurs only long after a vaccine has been released onto the market and the general population has already been exposed to its risks, i.e. the most accurate vaccine safety (or lack thereof) information is ascertained through post-marketing surveillance studies, and adverse events reporting by the public.
In other words, the precautionary principle is disregarded in favor of the “weight of evidence” standard, which puts the burden of proving a medical intervention to be unsafe on those who are, or already have been, exposed to potential harm — and often without being made fully aware of the true risks beforehand, which is essential for the medical-ethical principle of informed consent.
Moreover, vaccines clearly violate the principle of ahimsa in at least two ways: 1) all vaccines require harm to animal and/or human life (e.g. fetal tissue for diploid vaccines) in order to develop them. 2) All vaccines have serious, and sometimes lethal unintended, adverse health effects — for unequivocal proof of this, view the “side effects” panel on any vaccine insert where the manufacturer is legally required to list them. The question therefore is not whether vaccines will do harm, rather, how many will be harmed and to what extent.
In the case of oral polio vaccine, the known risk of polio-vaccine induced paralysis is weighed against the theoretical benefits of the polio vaccine. Contrary to the precautionary principle, the standard is to determine “an acceptable level of harm [himsa]. If only a ‘small percentage’ of infants receiving the vaccine are expected to become paralyzed or die as a result of vaccination, then the vaccine is considered justifiable and will be approved for use. This, of course, violates the Buddhist ethical principle ahimsa discussed above.
The Dalai Lama Launched The New Bivalent Polio Vaccine In India Which Carried Far Higher Risks
Sadly, the Dalai Lama did not only personally vaccinate two Indian infants on Jan. 10th, 2010, but he also officially launched the new bivalent oral polio vaccine (bOPV), which according to a 2011 article published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, was found in a Hungarian population to result in over 4-fold higher risk of paralysis than the monovalent 3 oral polio vaccine, and a 70-fold higher risk of paralysis than the monovalent 1 oral polio vaccine, to which it was compared.
Even more disturbing is the finding that as many as 47,500 cases of polio-vaccine associated paralysis may have occurred in Indian infants and children in 2011 alone, following the launch of the “new and improved” vaccine. Adding insult to injury, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative claimed that polio was all but eradicated that year and that vaccine-induced cases of polio are exceedingly rare, if not altogether unworthy of mention.
Oral polio vaccine was phased out of use in developed countries because of its lack of safety. In fact, oral polio vaccine has been the #1 cause of polio paralysis in developed countries like the US since 1973. [i] The vaccine is associated with a phenomenon known as “reversion,” where the vaccine itself causes polio paralysis, also known as vaccine-associated polio paralysis (VAPP). This is why a more expensive inactivated form (IPV) is now being used in countries that can afford it, and why the more dangerous form continues to be given to the poorer nations who can not afford a non-infectious vaccine.
Vaccination Violates Fundamental Medical-Ethical Principles Within Buddhism
One does not have to point to oral polio vaccine, specifically, to reveal the profound moral problems associated with vaccination. According to their religious beliefs, Buddhists are vegetarians, and there is not a single vaccine which is vegetarian. All vaccines have been created from cultured human, animal tissue and/or blood products.
Furthermore, vaccine development, historically, has depended on vast animal cruelty and aborted fetal tissue to produce vaccine antigen. (The GlaxoSmithKline bivalent oral polio vaccine launched by the Dalai Lama, in fact, was “propagated in MRC5 human diploid cells,” according to the WHO Dossier. The MRC5 cell line was derived from the lung tissue of a 14-week old male fetus by J.P Jacobs in 1966).
Also, if compassion towards the sick and poor is the impulse behind global, universal vaccine campaigns, why is there not equal emphasis and economic support for improving sanitation, hygiene and nutrition? Billions of dollars have been expended to provide billions of doses of oral vaccine to Indian infants and children, not a penny of which has gone towards improving their immunity from the ground up, as it were.
We can assume that the Dalai Lama is not familiar with these facts, and is simply trusting the official position statements concerning vaccine safety and effectiveness put out by organizations like the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which he has allowed himself – by accident or intention — to become an official emblem of. See photo on their website here.
But, if this is the case, the Buddha himself advised against sheer faith in the knowledge of others:
Do not believe anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many…Do not believe anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders…But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
What is so difficult to comprehend is how a political and spiritual leader with the equivalent of a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies (he attained the scholarly rank of Geshe), could fail to understand and/or abide by fundamental medical-ethical Buddhist principles, especially when concerning the health and well-being of the most vulnerable: poor and often sick infants.
The Buddhist scriptures actually reinforce the perspective that you simply can’t vaccinate people out of poverty, environmental chemical exposures or suboptimal nutrition. For example, according to the Medicine Buddha Sutra, two of the 12 fundamental vows of the Medicine Buddha, known as Sangay Menla in Tibetan tradition, are #3: “To provide the sentient beings with whatever material needs they require” and #11 “To relieve those who suffer from terrible hunger and thirst.” In other words, hungry folks need food, homeless folks need shelter, in order to be healthy.
To the Dalai Lama, ‘Science’ may be more important than Buddhist teachings. In his book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, The Dalai Lama penned:
If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
His statement reminds me of another, made by Dr. Isaac Golden: ‘To someone whose god is science, vaccination makes sense. But to someone whose god is God, it is appalling.’
The Dalai Lama, of course, has created controversy for his penchant for veal, and his belief that abortion may be appropriate if the unborn baby is ascertained to be determined to be “retarded.” So, given his characteristically non-Buddhist beliefs, his support of vaccination is not all that surprising. It is, however, none the less disturbing.
The problem, of course, with the argument that Science trumps Buddhist morality (or any non-violent moral tradition), is that vaccinology is more pseudo-science than science. There is, for instance, a shocking lack of scientific evidence supporting the safety and effectiveness of flu vaccines — and this, according to the Cochrane Collaboration’s many meta-analyses on the subject. And yet, the WHO, the CDC, and myriad governmental health agencies around the world spout an endless stream of pseudo-scientific propaganda to the contrary. Even basic tenets, such as the antibody-based theory of vaccine-induced immunity have been called in to question, if not altogether disproved. Also, there is a growing body of research indicating that routine vaccines can cause well over 200 different adverse effects, including death. This is the science, mind you, speaking — not opinion, or mere belief.
Your body is precious. It is our vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care. ~ the Buddha
As the controversy of the use of drones for illegal assassinations and overseas surveillance the Pentagon reveals plans to make drones available to 66 countries.
RT – The use of drones might be raising questions within the United States, but overseas the demand is mounting. The US Defense Departments says they are preparing to make unmanned aerial vehicles commercially available to 66 outside nations.
If approved by Congress and the US State Department, the Pentagon could soon be peddling the remote-controlled war machines that have become a hallmark of America’s overseas wars to dozens of its allies. It’s a not deal that’s likely to be cut without a sound, however, as the use of UAVs has become one of the most debated issues regarding the US military at home.
Last year, however, the DoD put together a list of 66 countries they hope they will be cleared to sell drones too, and today the Defense Department says they are just as eager as ever to get the ball rolling.
Countless watchdog groups have condemned the use of drones, calling the aircraft responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians. As recently as this past weekend, a US-led drone strike in Yemen was reported to cause fatalities for no fewer than 13 civilians. Even so, adding UAVs to the wish-lists of other countries could be a consideration favored by much of Washington, especially those who have feared than planned budget cuts will nix billions from the Pentagon’s budget over the next decade.
Last year, US weapons exports amounted $66.3 billion worth of deals thanks to sales to the States’ allies, the largest figure ever to come through arms sales. Just last month, a Congressional Research Service report claimed that 2011 was “the highest single year agreements total in the history of the US arms export program,” and that trend could very well carry over, especially if UAVs are added to the list of inventory available to the allies.
To Reuters on Wednesday, Northrop Grumman Corp CEO Wes Bush says that the Obama White House is working to make it easier for his company and others to deal drones as part of their international arms exchange, but roadblocks remain in place, regardless.
“I wish we were further along in getting that done. It’s slow, it’s painful, but we’re doing the right things to move in that direction,” Bush tells Reuters.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency deputy director, Richard Genaille, told attendees at the ComDef 2012 conference, “We don’t really have a comprehensive U.S. government policy” on drone exports, but one was indeed in the works.
“It hasn’t moved quite as fast as we would like, but we’re not giving up,” Genaille said.
In May, Turkish President Abdullah Gul told the state-run Anadolu Agency that the White House has expressed a “positive stance” over the sale of UAVs, and “They are trying to convince the Congress” before an agreement is made.
Last month, the US-based marketing firm Teal Group estimated that “UAV spending will almost double over the next decade from current worldwide UAV expenditures of $6.6 billion annually to $11.4 billion, totaling just over $89 billion in the next ten years.”
(Discovery News) Mind-controlled applications and drones have been quite in vogue as of late, wouldn’t you say? We’ve told you about scads of brain-computer interfaces and our list of drone-related projects stretches as far as the finger can click.
So, naturally, it came as no surprise when this landed in our lap: a brain-controlled quadcopter drone.
Researchers at Zhejian University in Hangzhou, China, developed the quadcopter with the intent to give those with impaired motor skills a new way to interact.
By wearing an emotiv electroencephalography (EEG) headset, the researchers showed how they can pilot the drone simply by thinking “left hard” to have quadcopter take off and land, “left lightly” to rotate, “right” to move it forward and “push” to have it fly up. If users clench their teeth, the drone descends. Blinking the eyes causes the on-board camera to snap a photo.
The EEG headset first relays commands from Bluetooth to a laptop, then via Wi-Fi to the drone. The quadcopter, named Flying Buddy 2, also live streams video footage of the flight back to the laptop to give users better control.
Researchers will present their mind-controlled drone this week at the 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2012) in Pittsburgh, Pa. Check out the team’s demo video below. Make sure to stick around until the end, where there’s some pretty wicked drone-on-drone combat, a fight almost as fierce as the time Daniel LaRusso battled Johnny Lawrence for the All Valley Karate Tournament.
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia – Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird says he’s cutting ties with Iran amid worries about the safety of Canadian diplomats in the country.
Baird says the Canadian embassy in Tehran will close immediately and Iranian diplomats in Canada have been given five days to leave.
He says he’s worried about the safety of diplomats in Tehran following recent attacks on the British embassy there.
He’s also warning ordinary Canadians to avoid travel to Iran.
Michel Chossudovsky, a prominent analyst and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, says Western powers are after a war of aggression in Syria by supporting and arming insurgents and terrorists, Press TV reports.
“It is well-understood that this is not a civil war; this is a war of aggression where forces of some NATO countries have entered the country; I am talking about elite SAS, MI6, US CIA, French and American forces, forces from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, mercenaries… the aggressors are the NATO countries and the FSA [the so-called Free Syrian Army] terrorists are their foot soldiers,” Michel Chossudovsky said in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday.
He went on to say that there is a breakdown of UN diplomacy because “the Secretary General (Ban Ki-moon) is in fact blaming the victims in the name of the aggressors.”
“He is blaming the victims in the name of the aggressors; it is well-documented that these atrocities directed against the Syrian people have been committed by FSA mercenaries and terrorists and these terrorists are supported by the Western military alliance,” the Canadian analyst noted.
Chossudovsky further argued that the underlying objective of the actions of the Western powers in Syria is to “destroy the Syrian nation.”
“What is happening now is a whole series of acts of intimidation, of threats, not to mention economic sanctions. The underlying objective is to destroy a nation; it is to kill a nation, to destabilize its economy, to trigger a humanitarian crisis and then send in the NGOs to pick up the pieces and so on and so forth or send in NATO,” he explained.
Many people, including large numbers of security forces, have been killed in the turmoil that began in Syria in March 2011.
Damascus says outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorists are the driving force behind the unrest and deadly violence, but the opposition accuses the security forces of being behind the killings.
The Syrian government says that the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the armed militants are foreign nationals.
Satellite companies Nilesat and Arabsat have stopped broadcasting Syrian television stations.
Satellite companies Nilesat and Arabsat have stopped broadcasting Syrian television stations in a clear act of hostility against the Damascus government.
The operators took Syria’s state television channel as well as pro-government channels al-Ekhbaryah and al-Dunya off air on Wednesday shortly after a meeting of Arab League ministers in Cairo.
In June, the Arab League asked satellite operators Nilesat and Arabsat to shut down Syrian TV signals.
The operators, however, continue broadcasting Syria’s anti-Damascus television channels.
The Syrian government has slammed the move as an attempt to silence the Syrians, stressing that it is in violation of media ethics.
It is believed that by removing Syrian channels from Nilesat and Arabsat, Western-backed anti-Syria channels will gain absolute control of media with regard to covering events unfolding in Syria.
Syria has been the scene of deadly unrest since mid-March, 2011 and many people, including large numbers of army and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.
While the West and the Syrian opposition accuse the government of being behind the violence, Damascus blames ”outlaws, saboteurs and armed terrorist groups” for the unrest, insisting that it is being orchestrated from abroad.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on August 1 that the country is engaged in a ”crucial and heroic” battle that will determine the destiny of the nation.
By wearing an emotiv electroencephalography (EEG) headset, the researchers showed how they can pilot the drone simply by thinking “left hard” to have quadcopter take off and land, “left lightly” to rotate, “right” to move it forward and “push” to have it fly up. If users clench their teeth, the drone descends. Blinking the eyes causes the on-board camera to snap a photo.
PN 