A "Double-tap" Is Not Nearly As Fun As It Sounds

The U.S. Dept. of Defense claims to use drone warfare in order to minimize civilian casualties and target high profile terrorists. What a load of crap:

NYU student Josh Begley is tweeting every reported U.S. drone strike since 2002, and the feed highlights a disturbing tactic employed by the U.S. that is widely considered a war crime.

Known as the "double tap," the tactic involves bombing a target multiple times in relatively quick succession, meaning that the second strike often hits first responders.

A 2007 report by the Homeland Security Institute called double taps a "favorite tactic of Hamas" and the FBI considers it a tactic employed by terrorists.

UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings Christof Heyns said that if there are "secondary drone strikes on rescuers who are helping (the injured) after an initial drone attack, those further attacks are a war crime."

The U.S. refuses to discuss the merits of its overtly covert drone program, but the reports featured on @dronestream clearly document that U.S. hellfire missiles have intentionally targeted funerals and civilian rescuers.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/us-drone-tweets-reveal-double-tap-plan-2012-12#ixzz2OrjDSCew

Here is a screenshot from an excellent flash-based animated infographic on U.S. drone strikes, JUST IN PAKISTAN. Keep in mind that the "Other" category means enemy combatants which is pretty much any male age 16-60 ( http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/06/u-s-labels-all-young-men-in-battle-zones-as-militants-and-american-soil-is-now-considered-a-battle-zone.html )

Infographic Link: http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/

They Want To Make Everybody A Criminal So That Nobody Has Rights

This was actually the motivation for me to create this blog in the first place (before it is lawfully illegal to exercise your first amendment rights online)

“The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is the most outrageous criminal law you’ve never heard of,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and pioneer of network neutrality, wrote in the New Yorker. “It bans ‘unauthorized access’ of computers, but no one really knows what those words mean.”

Among the many additions, the new CFAA draft expands the number of ways one could be found guilty by punishing anyone who “conspires to commit” violations in the same way as those that have already “completed” the offense, also adding computer crimes as a form of “racketeering activity” to allow the Department of Justice to hit computer criminals with further charges in court.

But what’s perhaps most troubling is how the new CFAA bill actually expands the law to include accessing information for an “impermissible purpose,” which means even if you have the right to access the information in the first place, it’s still considered a crime if someone deems you are misusing your access in some way.

According to law expert Orin Kerr, the language in the new CFAA would make it a felony to “lie about your age on an online dating profile if you intended to contact someone online and ask them personal questions,” or if you violate the Terms of Service on a government website. 

(Studies show ~70% of people on online dating sites lie about something - usually their age or weight. Also, 99+% of people never read ToS notices)

Both Sides Love Torture and Secrecy

How Destroying Evidence Of Torture Gets You Promoted In Obama’s CIA

If you helped cover up evidence of war crimes by destroying unknown numbers of tapes of torture during interrogations and had actually run the “black site” prisons into which detainees were disappeared for torture, then given the President’s past rhetoric the last thing you’d have expected the Obama administration to agree to would have been your promotion to head of the clandestine service of the nation’s premier intelligence agency, right?

Fast forward to 2013.

A C.I.A. officer directly involved in the 2005 decision to destroy interrogation videotapes and who once ran one of the agency’s secret prisons has ascended to the top position within the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, according to current and former intelligence officials.

Cont.. http://notthesingularity.com/1578/how-destroying-evidence-of-torture-gets-you-promoted-in-obamas-cia/