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They increasingly dot the planet.  There's a facility outside Las Vegas where "pilots" work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth at an air base in the United Arab Emirates that almost no one talks about. And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide.  Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America's ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous - until now. Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases - some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command and control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment - are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war.  They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of American power projection abroad - in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign "footprint" and little accountability.Using military documents, press accounts, and other open source information, an in-depth analysis by TomDispatch has identified at least 60 bases integral to U.S. military and CIA drone operations.  There may, however, be more, since a cloak of secrecy about drone warfare leaves the full size and scope of these bases distinctly in the shadows.

inarticle: Pakistan is holding talks with the United States to end drone strikes against suspected Taliban fighters, which sometimes also kill civilians, a senior Pakistani official has said. "Drone attacks are against sovereignty of Pakistan, against international law and against the UN charter," Jalil Abbas Jilani, the administrative head of Pakistan's Foreign Ministry told members of Parliament in Islamabad, the capital. "Innocent people have been killed in these attacks," Jilani said on Friday, adding; "We are having talks with the US to stop the drone attacks and we hope for a positive outcome of the dialogue and hope that drone attacks will stop." The attacks, which are operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), have strained Pakistan's relations with the US. Pakistan says the attacks violate its sovereignty.

AN AMERICAN general told Peter Singer once that insurgents most fear America's unmatched technology. Then, talking to a Lebanese newspaper editor as a drone circled overhead, he heard a different story: Americans and Israelis, the editor said, are cowards to send machines to fight for them. Much of the ethical conversation around America's unmanned aerial vehicle strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan has centered around unintended civilian casualties. This is certainly a worthy topic for conversation. But Mr Singer asked a different set of questions: how do drones change the nations that use them?

Well. Notice that RT notes that "So far, the only drones making incursions into Pakistani skies have been US Predators used to attack Taliban insurgents." Making this distinction means that UAVs would be flying for a reason distinct from attacking the Taliban, i.e. war with Pakistan. This is in response to the bombing which killed many Pakistani soldiers due to NATO forces fucking up and thinking they were 'terrorists'.

President Obama's former National Intelligence Director makes the case that drones are counter-productive

almost certainly under-stated conclusion that it has "found that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children." And targeting rescuers and funeral attendees of your victims is quite the opposite of keeping the drone program on a "very tight leash." 

Northern areas of Pakistan For a decade, the northern areas of Pakistan have been under terrorism. The whole area was destroyed by terrorism and then the 2005 disastrous earthquake almost destroyed the northern area of Pakistan. At first, the innocent residents of northern Pakistan were under the terrorism of the Taliban and Al Qaeda; now, they are in the fear of the U.S. drone attacks. After the event of 9/11, the world has been completely changed, the western world, especially the U.S., has been hostile to countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Will peace ever be restored in the northern areas of Pakistan? The northern area of Pakistan was under the invasion of the Taliban. The Taliban had taken over the area and enforced many severe laws. Girls were banned from acquiring education, girls' educational institutions were destroyed completely, and women were banned from earning a living. Women were also not allowed to go out of the house unnecessarily, if the situation occurs that they have to, they should be accompanied by male Mahram. If a female was caught alone in the street, then she was severely punished. A couple of years ago, a mobile phone recorded video was released in which the Taliban was spanking a girl with a leather belt in front of everyone. The girl was caught in the street with her father in law. The Pakistani Army conducted various operations in the areas and killed most of the Taliban and brought many areas back to peace.

From human evil in wars, drone attacks, and brutal mass killings, to natural disasters as in earthquakes, floods and tornadoes, many innocent people have died and many survivors spend their lives mourning the loss. Amidst all this misery, we cannot help but ask, why? Is it fair that my lovely child who still has not tasted the good things in life died while those malicious people who killed him ran away? Is it fair that a flood comes to drown a group of people while others remain untouched? However, there is a beam of hope that still manages to arise only if we think deeper within ourselves.

I intended to post sporadically or not at all this week, and that's still my plan, but there is a new Washington Post article which contains three short passages that I really want to highlight because they so vividly capture the essence of so much. The article, by Greg Miller, is being promoted by the Post this way: "In 3 years, the Obama administration has built a vast drone/killing operation"; it describes the complete secrecy behind which this is all being carried out and notes: "no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation's security goals." Here is the first beautifully revealing passage:

The candidate supported by progressives - President Obama - himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians - Muslim children by the dozens - not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents - in secret and with no checks - to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

Cities are forced to turn off streetlights and slash school days while the wealthy thrive and wars drone on

Administration officials anonymously boast of preparations to escalate a bombing campaign in Yemen

Without being charged with a crime, the American-born cleric has drone missiles shot at him in Yemen

Since America's political and media class steadfastly ignore this glaringly obvious point, it's nice (albeit self-interested) of the Chinese to point it out for us.  As we endlessly hear about a massive debt crisis, the current President has started one optional war that has already exceeded its estimated costs, plans to continue (if not escalate) two more, is drone-attacking a new country on a seemingly weekly basis, expands sprawling covert military actions in still other countries, builds new overseas detention facilities, all while offering only the most modest, symbolic and illusory "cuts" in military spending.  The alleged need to slash the financial security of American citizens -- and the notion that America faces a severe debt crisis -- would be more persuasive if the country didn't continue its posture of Endless War and feeding the insatiable, bloated National Security State (to say nothing of the equally insatible and wasteful Drug War and its evil spawn, the increasingly privatized American Prison State, which the Obama administration is expanding as aggressively as the War on Terror).

In today's On the News segment, Thom Hartmann discusses a letter sent by 248 economists demanding a "clean vote" on raising the debt ceiling, new evidence that the body scanners at airports are giving people cancer, new US drone strikes in Somalia, Ohio's ongoing war on organized labor, and more. Scroll down to watch the newscast.

Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen - far from any battlefield and with no due process - it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager's life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people. News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that Awlaki's son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (needless to say, as Terrorist often means: "anyone killed by the U.S."), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker's Amy Davidson wrote: "Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions say either about the the quality of the government's evidence - or the honesty of its claims - and about our own capacity for self-deception." The boy's grandfather said that he and his cousin were at a barbecue and preparing to eat when the U.S. attacked them by air and ended their lives. There are two points worth making about this:

My column last week on drone attacks so clearly struck a nerve that I intended to write a follow-up this week, addressing some of the many comments and responses. I did publish an interim statement on my own website, where I invite you to continue that conversation.

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi addressing a joint news conference with visiting US special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke and chairman US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen here.