(Deborah Dupre) Unlike today’s human operated drone killers, robotic drones will decide without pity or fear who to kill, unless a multinational team succeeds in a human rights-based pre-emptive prohibition of the new battlefield technology.
“Military hardware will soon consist of ‘autonomous robots that know neither pity nor fear’ — quite a step up from the current generation of UAVs and drones operated by humans from the safety of military bases hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away,” reports Chris Tilbury for The Kernel.
With the next generation drone, in 20 to 30 years, foot soldiers might be obsolete because robotic equipment will have replaced them, according to The Kernel.
“Removing the human element completely is very dangerous,” Tilbury warns. “The list of legal questions is lengthy and human rights campaigners will be sure to make the process long and arduous, and rightly so.”
Rights defenders recognize that US drones are inaccurate; kill innocent civilians; and are key in separating the America’s working class soldiers from suffering they cause.
“These are not casualties but murder,” say groups such as Facebook’s group Stop US drones in Afganistan, Yemen, Pakistan, US-Mexican border, worldwide. “These acts of aggression do not keep us safe or free.”
Neither safety and nor freedom, however, are part of the U.S. military stated goal, as viewed in its Joint Vision 20 in which it outlined Full Spectrum Dominance.
The full Joint Vision 20 report has been all but washed from the internet. F. William Engdahl’s book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order details the US plan to replace human rights globally with total control of human body, mind and spirit and total control of the planet’s land, sea and air by the year 2020.
The Navy boasts of already controlling 75% of the world’s waterways, as stated at a recent ceremony at Naval Station Great Lakes, a clarion call considering the state of the planet’s major bodies of water such as the sick and dying Gulf of Mexico, since the BP oil operation event and the Pacific Ocean, since the Fukushima event.
Engdahl writes in this book’s summary:
For the faction that controls the Pentagon, the military industry and the oil industry, the Cold War never ended. It went on ‘below the radar’ creating a global network of bases and conflicts to advance their long-term goal of Full Spectrum Dominance, the total control of the planet: land, sea, air, space, outer space and cyberspace.
Their methods included control of propaganda, use of NGOs for regime change, Color Revolutions to advance NATO east, and a vast array of psychological and economic warfare techniques, a Revolution in Military Affairs as they termed it.
The events of September 11, 2001 would allow an American President to declare a war on an enemy who was everywhere and nowhere, who justified a Patriot Act that destroyed that very freedom in the name of the new worldwide War on Terror.
[To learn more about today’s US government’s psychological warfare against Americans through its propaganda campaign, see: Pakistani award-winning drone filmmaker denied right to enter U.S]
Officially known as full-spectrum superiority, the U.S. military defines this as:
The cumulative effect of dominance in the air, land, maritime, and space domains and information environment that permits the conduct of joint operations without effective opposition or prohibitive interference. (Emphasis added)
The United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons voted for a multinational team to assess robotic drone technology, aiming to enforce a pre-emptive prohibition before any of the technology reaches the production line.
This UN convention, however, has failed to prevent the United States from developing and using other banned weapons.
The UN is not the only organization battling U.S. drones with no conscience.
Yesterday afternoon, a group of organizations held a vigil to mourn 15 Yemeni wedding-goers killed Dec. 12 by a United States drone strike.
The vigil was in front of Manhattan’s famous St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“St. Patrick’s is chosen for the vigil as a reminder one week before the birth of Jesus Christ of his witness on behalf of poor and outcast people, his message of reconciliation and peace and his challenge to the religious and political establishments of his time,” said ” said Nick Mottern, coordinator of KnowDrones.org that participated in the vigil. “In this spirit, we urge Pope Francis and other religious leaders to condemn drone warfare everywhere in the world.”
A large-scale model of the MQ-9 Reaper drone, the workhorse of US drone killing in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, was featured at the vigil.
Over 5,000 people have been killed in US drone strikes since they began in 2001, according to Mottern’s estimates.
“The U.N. and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International [a front group for the US Department of State] recently released a flurry of deeply flawed reports on drone murders,” KnowDrone states on its website. “According to the U.N.’s special rapporteur, whose day job is as law partner of Tony Blair’s wife, and according to two major human rights groups deeply embedded in U.S. exceptionalism, murdering people with drones is sometimes legal and sometimes not legal, but almost always it’s too hard to tell which is which, unless the White House rewrites the law in enough detail and makes its new legal regime public.
The website refers to the human rights organization called Alkarama, and its report, License to Kill: Why the American Drone War on Yemen Violates International Law.
“While Human Rights Watch [a front group for the US Department of State] looked at six drone murders in Yemen and found two of them illegal and four of them indeterminate, Alkarama looked in more detail and with better context at the whole campaign of drone war on Yemen, detailing 10 cases,” KnowDrones says. “As you may have guessed from the report’s title, this group finds the entire practice of murdering people with flying robots to be illegal.”
Granny Peace Brigade, Veterans for Peace, War Resisters League and World Can’t Wait also participated in yesterday’s vigil.