Showing posts with label The White House Murder INC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The White House Murder INC. Show all posts

Thursday, January 06, 2011

The White House Murder INC, local chapter in DC.....still hard at work for the NEOCONS.

January , 2011 -- Another dead body from the Cheney dual nuclear chain-of-command days turns up.....

The White House Murder INC, local chapter in DC.....still hard at work for the NEOCONS.
Wheeler would have had a vantage point if for Cheney's rival chain-of-command.....

Former special assistant to Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne, John Wheeler III, also a veteran of the GHW Bush and Reagan administrations, was discovered at the Cherry Island landfill in Wilmington, Delaware on December 31 after it was dumped from a sanitation truck that originated its run in Newark, Delaware. Wheeler's wife lives part-time in Harlem, New York where she reportedly runs a Cambodian silk import business.

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=68463

On December 31, 2010, Wilmington Police issued the following press notice: "At 9:56 a.m., Wilmington Police were called to the landfill on East 12th St. Upon arrival, officers were directed to a dump site within the landfill where they located a male body lying in a pile of rubbish. This incident is being handled as a suspicious death investigation. The victim’s identity has not been confirmed at this time. The body has been turned over to the State of Delaware Medical Examiner’s Office to determine the cause of death. Anyone with information regarding this crime, please contact Criminal Investigation Division at 302-576-3620 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 302-576-3620 end_of_the_skype_highlighting."

The body was later identified as Wheeler's. Wheeler was last seen on an Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington on December 28.

Wheeler, a West Point graduate, former Army officer, and lawyer, served under Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne until Wynne and Air Force chief of staff General T. Michael Moseley. Wynne and Moseley were fired by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on June 5, 2008, over a breakdown in the security of nuclear weapons under Air Force control, particularly at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Wheeler left his Air Force position in June 2008, the same month Wynne and Moseley were fired. After leaving the Pentagon, Wheeler took a job with MITRE Corporation....

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2008/06/meet-mitre-corporation-mcclean.html

While assisting the Secretary of the Air Force, Wheeler was primarily tasked with "standing up" Cyberspace Forces and providing Precision Strike technology and Real Time Streaming Video targeting links U.S. ground combat troops. It was one such targeting video from Baghdad that was among Wikileaks's first major disclosures of U.S. classified information that led to charges that the U.S. was indiscriminately killing civilians in Iraq.

Wheeler was also known to be a strong opponent of the use of biological weapons by the United States. Wheeler was last seen on an Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington on December 28. Wheeler was also chairman of the fund that raised money to build the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC. In that role, Wheeler had a testy relationship with one of the major funders of the project, former independent presidential candidate H. Ross Perot. While serving as director of the Vietnam Veteran's Leadership Foundation, Wheeler was also special counsel for the Securities and Exchange Commission during the 1980s.

John Wheeler's suspicious death latest in many of Air Force officials in the last few years....the White House Murder INC, local chapter in DC.....hard at work for the NEOCONS.

According to various Washington Post reports from the time, on November 4, 1983, Wheeler filed a criminal complaint with the Montgomery County Police Department against WDVM [which is now WUSA] Channel 9 investigative reporter Carlton Sherwood for illegally taping a conversation between himself and Wheeler at Wheeler's home in Bethesda, Maryland. Sherwood, like Wheeler, served in Vietnam. However, Sherwood began investigating for Channel 9 where most of the $9 million raised for the Vietnam memorial by Wheeler and memorial fund president Jan Scruggs was spent. Sherwood was arrested by Montgomery County police on November 7, 1983. Channel 9's news management maintained that two audits of the fund were less-than-detailed. In 1984, WDVM retracted its investigative series on the "financial propriety" of the memorial fund and apologized for the story. Sherwood later went to CNN as a special assignments reporter and The Washington Times and he was active in the "Swift Boat Veterans" criticism leveled against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam combat record.

Wheeler, as special assistant to Wynne, would have known about the dual nuclear chain-of-command established by Vice President Dick Cheney, bypassing the Defense Secretary and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, that resulted in a spate of nuclear surety and security incidents during 2007 and 2008.

WMR reported on those incidents from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana in 2008.

On April 21, 2008, WMR reported:"There is something radically wrong with America's control over its nuclear weapons, particularly those maintained by the U.S. Air Force. After a long investigation, it can now be reported that there is, in effect, two de facto nuclear chains-of-command in the Air Force, one with dangerous links to the neocon cell that exists within the office of Vice President Dick Cheney and Air Force headquarters, the other acting within the bounds of established nuclear weapons surety and control.

On August 30, 2007, a B-52, assigned to the 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale AFB, left Minot AFB with reportedly five AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles armed with W-80-1 nuclear warheads. The number five apparently was reported to Air Force Times, a Gannett publication, by three high-ranking Air Force officers who blew the whistle on what was later described by the Air Force as a 'mistake.' Later, the Associated Press said there were six nuclear armed missiles on board the aircraft. In theory, there should be no discrepancies for such a small number and for such a serious incident.

The B-52 flew 3 1/2 hours across the United States with missiles thought by the B-52 crew to be "dummy warheads" being shipped to Barksdale for 'disposal' under the US-Russian Strategic Offensive Reductions (SORT) arms treaty.

There was, according to sources WMR spoke to at both Minot and Barksdale Air Force Bases, no mistake whatsoever in the transfer of the nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to Barksdale. One airman who had been a bomb loader for 11 years in the USAF relayed, "that was no mistake. That was a major operation."

The cover story was that the cruise missiles were flown to Barksdale for decommissioning. However, conventional cruise missiles are sent to Davis-Monthan Air Force base in Tucson, Arizona for decommissioning while nuclear missiles, according to the former 2nd Bomb Wing official, are sent to Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. The nuclear warheads are sent to either Sandia National Laboratories or Pantex in Texas for disposal. Barksdale plays no part in the missile decommissioning process. Barksdale is, however, a major deployment base for Middle East air operations.

It has been discovered that there were a series of security 'incidents' directed by what amounts to a renegade nuclear chain-of-command that permitted five or six nuclear 5 to 150 kiloton thermonuclear weapons to remain outside of legitimate control for some 36 hours, resulting in a rare Bent Spear nuclear incident report that quickly reached the Oval Office.

The rogue nuclear chain-of-command starts at the White House office of Vice President Dick Cheney, with significant influence from Cheney's Chief of Staff David Addington, and extends to Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, and further to the Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley."

Our report continued: "Minot's 5th Bomb Wing Commander, Col. Emig, who had been transferred to Minot only three months before the August 30 nuclear incident, was transferred to the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Division at the Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. One of the Air Force's primary UAV contractors is Northrop Grumman, which has a cooperative relationship with Israel Aircraft Industries on using Israeli UAV technology, particularly for the Global Hawk UAV.

Emig's colleague, 5th Maintenance Group commander, Col. Cynthia Lundell, was not as fortunate. Directly responsible for the nuclear weapons at Minot, Lundell was transferred to a 'dead end' special assistant job at Warner Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia. WMR has learned that Emig was in charge of Minot when a number of experienced senior non-commissioned officers and officers, including those directly responsible for nuclear surety and safety, were suddenly transferred on temporary assignments to Iraq and Afghanistan from Minot in the months and weeks prior to the nuclear incident.

It is clear that the rival nuclear chain-of-command acted outside the authority of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and used a little-known nuclear weapons protocol known as the 'permissive link' that allows nuclear weapons to be moved and used outside of presidential authority and the transmittal of nuclear codes found in a briefcase known as the 'football' that is always carried by the President's military aide . . .

A little over a week after the Minot-Barksdale nuclear weapons incident, the body of US Air Force Captain and Major-selectee John Frueh, assigned to 'Operations Weather' at Hurlburt Field, adjacent to Eglin, was found near is rental car, near Badger Peak in Washington state. Frueh was in Portland to attend his best friend's wedding. Frueh's last phone call to his family in Florida was from a pay phone at Portland International Airport on August 30, the very same day the B-52 flew with the loose nuclear missiles from Minot to Barksdale.

Frueh was a U.S. Air Force Special Operations 'Weather Warrior' with the 10th Combat Weather Squadron at Hurlburt Field. Weather Warriors are, according to the Air Force, 'Special operations weathermen [who] are meteorologists with advanced tactical training to operate in hostile or denied territory." It should be noted that Iran is considered "denied territory' by the U.S. military.

Frueh was last seen on August 29 in Portland. He was carrying in his backpack at Global Positioning System (GPS), camera, camcorder, and cell phone. Oddly, Frueh's last call to his family was from a pay phone at the airport and not from his cell phone.

There were initial reports that when the B-52 from Minot landed at Barksdale on August 30, it sat on the runway for as much as ten hours, virtually unguarded with five or six nuclear weapons under its starboard wing. However, WMR spoke to a former high-ranking officer with the 2nd Bomb Wing in Barksdale who said that the security for the movement of any nuclear weapons is extremely tight. The officer said that when the nuclear weapons were removed from their highly-secured bunkers, known as 'igloos,' within the similarly highly-secured weapons storage facility at Minot, two-person controls, constant checks of the weapons' serial numbers, higher officer sign-offs, the clearing of a secure route from the weapons storage facility to the B-52 on the ready alert apron by armed security personnel, the placement of orange cones around the nuclear weapons while they are stationary, and the entering of the weapons types on the B-52 flight log, known as the '781.' The '781' would inform the crew whether they were carrying conventional or nuclear warheads, either under the wings or in the plane's interior . . .

WMR's special report continued on April 25, 2008: "On August 24, 2007, three B-52s operating from Barksdale flew a training exercise called REX REDUX, officially billed as a commemoration of a 1938 B-17 flight directed at the Italian luxury liner SS Rex. The exercise, personally ordered by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley, was actually testing an Israeli-developed imaging and targeting pod called LITENING II on a U.S. Navy contracted merchant vessel, the USNS Bobo, in the Atlantic east of Bermuda and several targets of opportunity along the planes' flight paths through the southern United States.

REX REDUX also involved assets of the Air Force's embryonic Cyber Command in Washington and Barksdale.

Four days later, on August 30, a Barksdale-based B-52 flew six nuclear warhead tipped AGM-129 advanced cruise missiles from Minot to Barksdale. The incident was later called a "mistake" by Air Force officials. However, three high-ranking Air Force officers leaked the incident to the Air Force Times.

Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, a key member of the rival chain-of-command, rewarded his loyalists in Barksdale by announcing the base had been selected as the preliminary headquarters for the Air Force Cyber Command. Wynne made his announcement at a Shreveport gambling casino. Wynne, according to a CNN report, advocated the testing of nonlethal weapons, like high-power microwave weapons, against American citizens. Wynne said, 'If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation.' . . .

The rival nuclear chain-of-command that was responsible for the Minot nuclear incident, REX REDUX, and associated events is as follows:

Vice President Dick Cheney

-- Chief of Staff David Addington

Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley

-- Gen. Lawrence Stutzriem, Chief of Staff of the Air Force Strategic Studies Group - CHECKMATE

-- Dr. Lani Kass, ex-Israeli Air Force, Cyber Warfare, US Air Force, CHECKMATE

Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, Commander 8th Air Force, Barksdale Air Force Base

Col. Bruce Emig, Commander 5th Bomb Wing, Minot Air Force Base (relieved of command after nuclear incident)

Maj. Gen. Stephen Goldfein, Commander Air Warfare Center, Nellis Air Force Base. . .

In July 2007, there was another unusual incident involving Minot security, one of many reported during the summer of 2007 by Minot security personnel. Found in the Minot Police Department's files is case number CFS# 07-16088. The case involved the misappropriation of a cache of military supplies by two Air Force sergeants assigned to guard nuclear weapons at Minot. The report states: 'Minot Air Force Base Investigations called requesting assistance in locating and apprehending two individuals that had filed a report about missing military equipment.' The two individuals reported the theft of the equipment from a vehicle parked in the city of Minot.

Minot police went to an address of one of the Air Force security personnel in Minot and found 'several other people that were also at the residence.' There were a total of three military personnel at the residence. The police went to a second residence of the other Air Force security sergeant and found 'several flash bang grenades along with one smoke grenade.' One of the Air Force security guards from Minot had originally reported military equipment being stolen from his car in Minot on July 17, 2007. However, the report was false. The two security personnel were actually hording the military equipment for what they described was a 'plan.' Minot Air Force Base security later clamped a gag order on all discussions about 'the plan.' . . .

Nor was Minot the only base involved with the August 30 nuclear incident to experience an unusual event with its nuclear security personnel. On September 27, 2007, the police blotter in the Shreveport Times reported the following:

'A Barksdale Air Force security forces airman was accidentally shot early Thursday, base officials said.

The shooting occurred during shift change about 7:30 a.m. at the 2nd Security Forces Squadron headquarters in Hangar 3. The airman was shot by a fellow security staffer. The incident remains under investigation, so officials could not say what action, if any, may result from the incident.'

There is also the possibility that an Air Force carve out contract may have been used to support the rival chain-of-command. The FBI and Pentagon are investigating a sole source Air Force contract with Commonwealth Research Institute (CRI), a non-profit intelligence subsidiary of Concurrent Technologies.

Charles Riechers, a senior Air Force civilian, was paid by CRI while awaiting confirmation as principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition. After Riecher's conflict of interest was made public, he was found dead of an apparent suicide in his Fairfax County, Virginia home. [On October 14, 2007]. CRI paid Riechers a salary of over $26,000 for no work. Concurrent and CRI are both listed as tax-exempt charities. A federal grand jury is currently examining ties between CRI and Concurrent and particular Air Force officials, including those in the Air Force's office responsible for security, counter-intelligence, and special program oversight (e.g., nuclear and Operation Checkmate). CRI and Concurrent have also provided contract support to the NSA, CIA, National Reconnaissance Office, and Defense Intelligence Agency. CRI has also provided support to the federal government on managing faith-based initiatives.

The Washington Post reported that a CRI spokesperson reported that CRI had 20 employees involved in 'very specialized work/ for the Pentagon and Intelligence Community.

What occurred last summer at Minot, Barksdale, and inside the Air Force offices at the Pentagon and Cheney's White House office was the first time that a renegade chain-of-command assumed control over part of America's nuclear arsenal. Dr. Strangelove is no longer fiction, it is fact.

UPDATE: Inexplicably, the Shreveport Times, a Gannet newspaper, which publishes one edition per day, had two different headlines on its front page. A Times source revealed that this was possibly the result of the presses being stopped after the first print run and the original headline being replaced with a substitute requested by Barksdale Air Force Base public affairs officials. The source said the newspaper was likely pressured by Air Force officials to alter the headline.

The first headline in the September 6, 2007 edition was "B-52 hauls errant nukes to BAFB." The second headline indicates the event was accidental: "B-52 unwittingly delivers nukes to BAFB." The two different headlines were discovered in a microfiche search of the newspaper in the Bossier City, Louisiana Public Library. Other than the headlines, the content of the two articles is the same."

Our April 25, 2008 report also pointed out: "Gates ordered an outside review of the Minot incident conducted by retired former Air Force Chief of Staff General Larry Welch. Welch was hardly an impartial judge, having been part of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's favorite program, the Ballistic Missile Defense System or 'Star Wars II.' Welch led a Blue Ribbon panel that heaped praise on the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, then led by Air Force General Ronald Kadish.

The Welch Report failed to discover the breakdown in Air Force nuclear command-and-control and the existence of the rival chain. An indication of the worthlessness of the Welch Report was the discovery that in August 2006, four Minuteman nose cone nuclear fuse assemblies were 'mistakenly' shipped from Hill Air Force Base in Utah to Taiwan. The fuses had originally been shipped to Hill from F. E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming in March 2005. Gates reacted to the incident by ordering an unprecedented inventory of all nuclear weapons and nuclear material in the U.S. arsenal . . .

On April 24, 2008, as news broke of an FBI investigation into a long-time Israeli intelligence ring that penetrated the U.S. military and intelligence communities, CIA director, Air Force General Michael Hayden, revealed further 'intelligence' on the Syrian facility, said to be a joint North Korean-Syrian reactor modeled after the Yongbyon facility in North Korea. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and American weapons experts cast doubt on the veracity of the CIA's intelligence, including a dubious videotape said to have originated with Israeli intelligence sources. Hayden, it appears, is part of the rival Air Force chain-of-command, taking orders directly from Cheney, to prepare and incite a U.S. military conflict with Syria and Iran.

The FBI investigation of the Israeli spy ring, which included convicted US Navy spy Jonathan Pollard; accused Army spy Ben-Ami Kadish; and possibly others who served in high positions in the George W. Bush administration is also reportedly looking at key members of the rival Air Force chain-of-command....."

While working for Wynne, Wheeler helped formulate the Pentagon's cyber-war policy which ultimately resulted in the creation of the US Cyber Command in 2009. In that position, he worked with Lani Kass, the ex-Israeli Air Force major who now advises the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on policy. Wheeler was opposed to co-locating the US Cyber Command with the National Security Agency. However, NSA director General Keith Alexander now wears both hats -- NSA director and commander of the US Cyber Command -- at his two Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters. The June 25, 2009, Washington Times reported that Wheeler favored putting the Cyber Command headquarters in "Texas or California or Colorado or North Carolina."

Welch remains a member of the Defense Science; Ronald Kadish works for Booz CIA Allen....; Wynne is a promoter of the KC-X Air Force refueling tanker project; Stutzriem is Director of Plans, Policy and Strategy for the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado; Elder remains Commander, 8th Air Force, Air Combat Command, at Barksdale Air Force Base; Kass is the Senior Policy Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen; Ben-Ami Kadish received a $50,000 fine but no jail sentence from US Judge William Pauley III, who said prison "would serve no purpose." And now Wheeler, an adviser to Wynne on a number of issues and policy questions, has turned up dead in a Delaware landfill....

January , 2011 -- Intelligence "spook" murdered, FBI yields to law enforcement overseen by Vice President's son....

Murdered ex-Air Force official by the atrocious White House Murder INC, had significant intelligence connections.....

In what could otherwise be a Hollywood political suspense and "who dunnit?" murder movie, the murder in Delaware of former special assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force John P. ("Jack") Wheeler has taken on added significance with the decision of the FBI to provide little to no assistance in the murder of an individual described to us by a former senior Air Force official as a long-time "spook."

The FBI only began assisting in the investigation of Wheeler's murder after it initially stated it does not get involved in investigating the deaths of individuals with mental health problems. Before his body was discovered in a Wilmington landfill on December 31, witnesses claimed that Wheeler was disoriented and disheveled....courtesy of special toxins administered to him by the infamous White House Murder INC, and its goons....Hence the FBI's cover-up shenanigans.....

A Wilmington Parking Authority security guard at the New Castle County Court House in Delaware, where Wheeler was captured on a security video, was quoted as claiming that Wheeler looked "homeless." However, some others who saw Wheeler dispute that claim and there appears to be an attempt by certain parties to sully Wheeler's reputation with other reports trying to link Wheeler to smoke bombs being set off at the home of a neighbor who Wheeler and his wife were locked into a real estate legal dispute over the neighbors' under construction home that marred the Wheeler's view. WPVI, Channel 6, in Philadelphia quoted "sources" as claiming Wheeler's cell phone was discovered in the under construction home of Frank and Regina Marini.

Wheeler was last seen returning to Wilmington from Washington, DC. After leaving the Air Force, Wheeler worked for MITRE Corporation as a consultant on cyber-warfare. Earlier, Wheeler had traveled from Wilmington to New York to meet his wife. The Wheelers owned a condominium in Harlem, where Wheeler's wife reportedly runs a Cambodian silk import business. A source familiar with Cambodian silk products told us that the silk originates in Thailand and is sent to Cambodia for sewing and other processing before being re-exported. The CIA has been involved in the Thai silk business since the days of Jim Thompson, the first Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and CIA station chief in Bangkok after the end of World War II. Jim Thompson brand silk ties are still highly sought-after by shoppers...

Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, is also at the hub of a Mossad "buy back" weapons program from former Khmer Rouge guerrillas.... Instead of being taken off the market, Israel smuggles the traded weapons to violent hot spots like Burma, Sri Lanka, and others in the region.

Delaware's Attorney General in Joseph "Beau" Biden III, son of Vice President Joe Biden. Biden's role is the chief law enforcement officer for the state of Delaware where a high-level political murder may have taken place adds to the drama of the Wheeler case....

In June 2008, Beau Biden sent two Delaware law enforcement officers to Washington, DC to accompany arrested Barack Obama sex accuser Larry Sinclair to Delaware on money fraud charges that were later dropped due to lack of evidence. Senator Joe Biden was locked in conversations with Obama senior staffers over his being Obama's vice presidential pick. On May 11, 2010, Beau Biden suffered a "mild stroke."

Wheeler's murder has some similarity to the murder of CIA analyst and former Army Colonel William Bennett, who was, with his wife, attacked while walking near their Loudoun County, Virginia home on March 22, 2009. From our April 10, 2009 report: "Federal law enforcement and intelligence officials told us . . . that FBI counter-intelligence agents believe the van seen in the area [of the Bennett murder] was a Ryder rental van. The van, known as a 'cargo van,' does not have rear windows for security purposes and was favored by the Israeli 'art students' who cased the offices and homes of federal employees in the months prior to the inside Job of 9/11. There is particular interest in a heavy set man seen with the white van in the area where the Bennetts were found by police. The description matches that of a known Mossad hit man, called 'Stinky' by FBI counter-intelligence agents. "Stinky's" height is 5' 4", he has black hair that is balding in the front and on the top, and he is said to wear a lot of gold jewelry along with a black leather jacket. Stinky is known to always take a souvenir, such as an item of jewelry, after he performs a murder in order to prove the "hit." The FBI reportedly has an extensive file on 'Stinky' and has linked him to pre-9/11 Israeli art student activities, as well as the 1990 assassination of Canadian arms designer and dealer Gerald Bull in his Brussels apartment. Bull was involved in weapons projects involving Iraq, China, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Spain, and Israel. And the date of Bull's assassination by Mossad should be of interest to FBI and Loudoun County investigators: March 22, the same date that Colonel Bennett was murdered, nineteen years later."

On March 30, 2009, We reported: "Although there is a great deal of interest in a suspicious white van with Florida tags that was spotted in the area on the Saturday evening before the attack on the Bennetts, some Loudoun County officials attempted to brush off the white van with Florida tags that was transporting 'college students' selling magazines as a non-issue and a 'debunked' conspiracy." There were also attempts by the media to paint the Bennetts as reclusive and strange, none of which was true. Similar items are now being floated by some corporate media about Wheeler, although his friends and colleagues have rejected all of them as untrue....and utter fabrications by the odious White House Murder INC,....

There were indications that Bennett may have been brutally interrogated and tortured before being murdered. Wheeler's disorientation, possibly from being administered drugs, and police interest in two chairs in Wheeler's house, possibly used in a similar brutal interrogation, indicate a scenario similar to that of Bennett. Bennett's battered body was found off the side of a road in Lansdowne while Wheeler's was discovered in a garbage dump next to the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

Last news reports are that the FBI is very slowly pretending to getting involved in the Wheeler murder....


I saw the video shots of Wheeler at a parking garage, and he looks fairly elegant in a neat black suit-clear and cogently pointing a finger. Whether he might have been drugged is another matter. But the very name Biden raises big questions. If Wheeler wanted to tell a Dem about the moronic, disastrous smuggled nuke case, he might have waited just about two years, thinking it would take that long at least for Obama to know who he can trust, and who not, even in his own administration.

Wheeler might have thought, given his Mitre employment, that to tell Joe Biden about the smuggled nukes (or any other Bush betrayal) the new might both help his company, and would also preserve the military acuity that caused military leaders to tell Bush no when he wanted to either bomb or possibly mini-nuke Iran. Again, the news about the nukes appears to outline a sharper military move to cut Bush off, thank goodness.

But the Israeli phone routing company might have picked up Wheeler calling Biden or even Biden's son. Wheeler could have told either. Wheeler was last seen in the DuPont-related "Nemours Building," also location of that Jack Abramoff employer, a building with an underground tunnel right into DuPont Company headquarters in downtown Wilmington. Not a good place to dump a body, obviously. I suspect a possible convergence, i.e. the Biderman part of the DuPont family (perhaps the most deeply enmeshed with Rothschild finance, over time) with Rothschild Mossad elements. Both DuPonts and Mossad wanted the nukes to get through with a direct US attack on Iran, which US military brass knew was a moronic move (typical Bush Jr.).

Wheeler says he was mugged---maybe roughed up, things stolen, then injected in the scuffle. We see him in downtown Wilmington (trying to contact some Republican he thinks might help him out when under assault?) and police say his body was likely dumped in a dumpster 12 miles away in Newark, DE. Why move the body so many miles? That suggests a possible DuPont attempt to remove the body from an obvious DuPont family context, or possibly even a Mossad attempt to do the same, out of mutually complicit consideration.

Of course, we don't know the exact motives, but the timing, the location, and the relative weakness of the Southeast Asia and silk misc. suggest a possible nuke weapons case motive. If Wheeler, a high ranking military Republican mainstay were trying to tell Biden's people about the case, the suspects might have moved to kill him before he could contact them. Wheeler's mistake may have been to assume he was secure or could safely use a (Mossad-monitored) US-Israeli phone routing network built into the US phone system.

Imagine, he calls Biden's people. Mossad maps it as possibly suspect, a man directly witness to the nuke smuggling plan. Alarms go off, a surveillance/hit team is put in place, or simply a call to a DuPont, who maybe does the same?
...Slowly, oh so slowly... We must give the perps enough time to get to cover and for the trail to go stone cold... Shades of Vince Foster, indeed... More of the ever-expanding political assassinations on behalf of the usual Corpgov and Zio-fascists. What a country......


January , 2011 -- Fixing blame on Lebanese assassinations on Hezbollah. Final report cooked up by players in New York, Langley, and Tel Aviv...
Hillary's State Department foments political upheaval in Lebanon....
AS we have been reporting since 2002, most assassinations in Lebanon have been carried out by Asef SHAWKAT and his Syrian Military Intelligence goons, together with the Lebanese deep state apparatus, on behalf of CIA/MOSSAD, starting with the assassination of Mr. Elie HOBEIKA, January 24th 2002 and ending with the assassination of Imad F. MOUGHNIEH in Damascus Feb. 12th 2008....
We have learned that the final report of the UN's Special Tribunal on Lebanon was made known to leaders from the United States, France, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Lebanon in New York with an agreement by most parties that blame will be fixed for all of Lebanon's recent assassinations, most of them signature CIA/Mossad remotely-controlled car bombings, on Lebanese Hezbollah. Hezbollah, aware of the secret deals in New York, has announced that it will pull out of the Lebanese coalition government led by Prime Minister Saad Hariri, son of slain ex-Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a victim of one of the Mossad-CIA car bombs, thus bringing down the Lebanese government...
The US/Israeli/French nexus of utter evils are eager to perpetuate the covert links of the infamous White House Murder INC, with Asef SHAWKAT and Syria's minority mafia Dictatorship of the ASSAD dynasty of assassins for hire, since January 24th 2002....and the barbaric assassination of Mr. Elie HOBEIKA and his brave companions in Hazmieh by Asef SHAWKAT's goons and Lebanese Military Intelligence lackeys....and others....working on behalf of CIA/MOSSAD or being bamboozled into action in a classic black operation on Feb. 14th 2005 and the hit on Hariri....

Saudi King Abdullah, in New York for surgery on a herniated disc, met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and spoke by phone with President Obama on the forthcoming UN tribunal report on Hezbollah. A key member in the talks was Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, who is as close to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as he is to his own government.... Feltman, a former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon and a bitter enemy of Hezbollah, reportedly met with Hariri in New York prior to the Lebanese Prime Minister's trip to Washington to meet with Obama. French President Nicolas Sarkozy was also in New York where he met King Abdullah and Hariri. Sarkozy's meetings with the Arab leaders followed his meeting with Obama in Washington. Hariri also met with Hillary Clinton in New York...

Although the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has proven to be a propaganda tool of the Israelis and its lobby in the United States and recent Lebanese intelligence discoveries of Mossad penetration of Lebanese telecommunications proves that Israel manufactured the cell phone and other telecommunication "evidence" pinning blame for the Hariri assassination on Hezbollah, the Obama administration and France, Saudi Arabia, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and Israel are poised to see Hezbollah blamed for several assassinations of Lebanese politicians and international criminal indictments issued against leading Hezbollah figures. The tribunal report will result in a major political upheaval in Lebanon, which is to Israel's benefit.

The presence of Feltman, who is a virtual tool of the Israeli government, in the top Middle east policy position in the State Department, has largely led to the present debacle in America's Middle East policy.

A political deal was in the works for Lebanon that would have prevented the UN tribunal from indicting senior Hezbollah officials for the 2005 Hariri assassination. However, the Saudis helped scuttle the deal being worked out with Syria. Hezbollah political ally, retired General Michel Aoun, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement of Lebanon, decried the Saudi double-cross and Qatar Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabr al-Thani, who helped work out the Arab-led peace deal for Lebanon, also expressed alarm that the Lebanese government would collapse as a result of the deal between Washington, Paris, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv....


http://www.eutimes.net/2011/01/top-us-official-murdered-after-arkansas-weapons-test-causes-mass-death/

Sunday, April 12, 2009

The White House Murder INC, and the Tin-pot dictator in Damascus



The White House Murder INC, and the Tin-pot dictator in Damascus and bread winner for the Alawite Mafia in Syria, a thuggish minority, continues to do Israel's bidding for decades...., in perpetuating endless proxy-wars on behalf of the threesome of assassins, CIA2/MI6/MOSSAD's tricksters, in order to stay in power, Loot Syria's resources, and oppress the good peoples of Syria.

In the last two or three years, a number of old arguments regarding Syria have again become fashionable. One of them is that peace with Syria is not only “there to be had”, but that it may lead to drastic changes in Syrian behavior, in turn altering regional dynamics for the better. However, in several recent interviews, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has made statements that paint a very different picture.

In his comments, Assad clarified exactly what he meant by “peace” with Israel, and it bore no resemblance to the rosy scenarios painted by the “peace processors.” In fact, the president raised serious questions about the value of any such deal altogether.

In a recent interview with the Emirati newspaper Al-Khaleej, Assad made a remarkable – and indeed unprecedented – comment about what his concept of “peace” with Israel was. “A peace agreement,” he said, “is a piece of paper you sign. This does not mean trade and normal relations, or borders, or otherwise.”

The long-held view among people dealing with the negotiating track between Syria and Israel is that a peace deal will lead to a normalization of relations between the two countries. That was the purported basis of their talks during the 1990s. In recent years, another element was added to the argument, namely that a peace deal would distance Syria from Iran and allied militant groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, so that Damascus might even put pressure on Hamas itself to accept peace talks with Israel. This ambitious theory was dubbed “strategic reorientation”, and it has become the basis for conceptualizing engagement of Syria today.

However, the implications of Assad’s statement to Al-Khaleej should lead to a reassessment of the Syrian-Israeli track. Assad has now articulated what he had strongly implied for years.

In 2002, at the Arab League summit in Beirut, Assad led a strenuous effort to torpedo the formula put forward by Saudi Arabia’s then-crown prince, Abdullah, which offered Israel “full normalization for full withdrawal.” Assad rejected the term “normalization” and in the end a compromise was reached on watered-down language proposing only “normal ties”.

Then last July, Assad went further, telling the Qatari satellite station Al-Jazeera that from the Syrian point of view, “the word ‘normalization’ does not exist.” He insisted that it was a Western concoction that Syria rejected. Instead, Assad used an even more downgraded term, namely “average relations”, whose Arabic root removes any link to the word “normal.” The late Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, also told interlocutors during the 1990s that he did not accept the word “normalization.” Now, with his son’s declarations, the regime’s position can be summarized in three No’s: No normalization, no trade and no borders, by which Assad presumably meant no open borders.

What about Syria’s “strategic reorientation” away from Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah? Assad has been very clear on that as well. In a recent exchange with the American journalist Seymour Hersh, Assad said that Israel and the United States should not “waste time talking about who is going to send arms to Hezbollah or Hamas. Whenever you have resistance in the region, they will have armaments somehow. It is very simple.”

In other words, Assad intends to maintain his military support for these groups regardless of engagement with Syria. This undercuts the main claim of the peace processors of how an opening to Damascus might affect Syrian relations with Hezbollah, Hamas or Islamic Jihad. At best, Assad was admitting to his inability to halt arms supplies. At worst, he confessed that he intended to pursue active armament. This is precisely what Assad meant when he said, “resistance and peace form a single axis.”

What about Iran? Assad rejected that relations with Tehran were in any way part of the discussion. “It is not part of the peace process,” he told Hersh. Therefore, Assad’s “peace” involves no change in Syria’s regional posture and alliances, or its support for proxy warfare against Israel. “This peace is about peace between Syria and Israel,” Assad told Hersh. Meaning, you can forget the nonsense about “strategic reorientation.”

If this is Assad’s understanding of peace (or as the Syrians define it, “the restoration of rights in full”), what remains of the argument of those who read too much into Syrian-Israeli negotiations? Hasn’t Assad validated the old adage that peace with Syria is not worth the paper it’s written on?

When Egyptian President Anwar Sadat decided to change his country’s foreign policy, he broke with the Soviet Union years before finalizing his peace agreement with Israel, and he traveled to Jerusalem before signing the treaty. Sadat went ahead without any of the conditions imposed by Assad today, and without the excuses and exceptions that supporters of Syrian-Israeli negotiations offer on the Syrians’ behalf. Egypt was then the leader of the Arab world. Assad heads a country far less important in the Middle East, one that is often no more than a spoiler and should not be afforded disproportionate significance or unwarranted exceptionalism.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

The White House Murder INC, now A sky filled with assassins ...




The White House Murder INC, now A sky filled with assassins ...
Assassins on the ground roaming the world is not enough any more...?

In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a "terminator”, back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human resistance of Skynet's time. You with me so far? That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator movie and for the multi-millions of people who saw it; the images of future machine war - of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape - are unforgettable.

Since then, as Hollywood's special effects took off, there were two sequels during which the original terminator somehow morphed into a friendlier figure onscreen, and even more miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid governor of California. Now, the fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, is about to descend on us. It will hit our multiplexes this May.

Oh, sorry, I don't mean hit hit. I mean, arrive in.

Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven't waited for Hollywood. As you sit in that movie theater in May, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already talking about and working on next-generation machines. Post-2020, according to these dreamers, drones will be able to fly and fight, discern enemies and incinerate them without human decision-making. They're even wondering about just how to program human ethics, maybe even American ethics, into them.

Okay, it may never happen, but it should still make you blink that out there in America are people eager to bring the fifth iteration of Terminator not to local multiplexes but to the skies of our perfectly real world - and that the Pentagon is already funding them to do so.

An arms race of one

Now, keep our present drones, those MQ-1 Predators and more advanced MQ-9 Reapers, in mind for a moment. Remember that, as you read, they're cruising Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani skies looking for potential "targets", and in Pakistan's tribal borderlands are employing what Centcom commander General David Petraeus calls "the right of last resort" to take out "threats" (as well as tribespeople who just happen to be in the vicinity). And bear with me while I offer you a little potted history of the modern arms race.
Think of it as starting in the early years of the 20th century when Imperial Britain, industrial juggernaut and colonial upstart Germany and Imperial Japan all began to plan and build new generations of massive battleships or dreadnoughts (followed by "super-dreadnoughts") and so joined in a fierce naval arms race. That race took a leap onto land and into the skies in World War I when scientists and war planners began churning out techno-marvels of death and destruction meant to break the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western front.

Each year, starting in 1915, new or improved weaponry - poison gas, upgrades of the airplane, the tank and then the improved tank - appeared on or above the battlefield. Even as those marvels arrived, the next generation of weapons was already on the drawing boards. (In a sense, American auto makers took up the same battle plan in peacetime, unveiling new, ramped up car models each year.) As a result, when World War I ended in 1918, the war machinery of 1919 and 1920 was already being mapped out and developed. The next war, that is, and the weapons that would go with it were already in the mind's eye of war planners.

From the first years of the 20th century on, an obvious prerequisite for what would prove a never-ending arms race was two to four great powers in potential collision, each of which had the ability to mobilize scientists, engineers, universities and manufacturing power on a massive scale. World War II was, in these terms, a bonanza for invention as well as destruction. It ended, of course, with the Manhattan Project, that ne plus ultra of industrial-sized invention for destruction, which produced the first atomic bomb, and so the Cold War nuclear arms race that followed.

In that 45-year brush with extinction, the United States and the Soviet Union each mobilized a military-industrial complex to build ever newer generations of ever more devastating nuclear weaponry and delivery systems for a MAD (mutually assured destruction) world. At the peak of that two-superpower arms race, the resulting arsenals had the mad capacity to destroy eight or ten planets our size.

In 1991, after 73 years, the Soviet Union, that Evil Empire, simply evaporated, leaving but a single superpower without rivals astride planet Earth. And then came the unexpected thing: the arms race, which had been almost a century in the making, did not end. Instead, the unimaginable occurred and it simply morphed into a "race" of one with a finish line so distant - the bomber of 2018, Earth-spanning weapons systems, a vast anti-ballistic missile system and weaponry for the heavens of perhaps 2050 - as to imply eternity.

The Pentagon and the military-industrial complex surrounding it - including mega-arms manufacturers, advanced weapons labs, university science centers, and the official or semi-official think tanks that churned out strategies for future military domination - went right on. After a brief, post-Cold War blip of time in which "peace dividends" were discussed but not implemented, the "race" actually began to amp up again, and after September 11, 2001, went into overdrive against "Islamo-fascism" (aka the "war on terror", or the Long War).

In those years, our Evil Empire of the moment, except in the minds of a clutch of influential neo-cons, was a ragtag terrorist outfit made up of perhaps a few thousand adherents and scattered global wannabes, capable of mounting spectacular-looking but infrequent and surprisingly low-tech attacks on symbolic American (and other) targets. Against this enemy, the Pentagon budget became, for a while, an excuse for anything.

This brings us to our present unbalanced world of military might in which the US accounts for nearly half of all global military spending and the total Pentagon budget is almost six times that of the next contender, China. Recently, the Chinese announced relatively modest plans to build up their military and create a genuinely offshore navy. Similarly, the Russians have moved to downsize and refinance their tattered armed forces and the industrial complex that goes with them, while upgrading their weapons systems. This could potentially make the country more competitive when it comes to global arms dealing, a market more than half of which has been cornered by the US. They are also threatening to upgrade their "strategic nuclear forces", even as Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama have agreed to push forward a new round of negotiations for nuclear reductions.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has just announced cutbacks in some of the more outre and futuristic military R&D programs inherited from the Cold War era. The navy's staggering 11 aircraft-carrier battle groups will over time also be reduced by one. Minor as that may seem, it does signal an imperial downsizing, given that the navy refers to each of those carriers, essentially floating military bases, as "four and a half acres of sovereign US territory". Nonetheless, the Pentagon budget will grow modestly and the US will remain in a futuristic arms race of one, a significant part of which involves reserving the skies as well as the heavens for American power.

Assassination by air

Speaking of controlling those skies, let's get back to UAVs. As futuristic weapons planning went, they started out pretty low-tech in the 1990s. Even today, the most commonplace of the two American armed drones, the Predator, costs only US$4.5 million a pop, while the most advanced model of the Reaper - both are produced by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of San Diego - comes in at $15 million. (Compare that to $350 million for a single F-22 Raptor, which has proved essentially useless in America's most recent counterinsurgency wars.) It's lucky that UAVs are cheap, since they are also prone to crashing. Think of them as snowmobiles with wings that have received ever more sophisticated optics and powerful weaponry.

They came to life as surveillance tools during the wars over the former Yugoslavia, were armed by February 2001, hastily pressed into operation in Afghanistan after 9/11 and, like many weapons systems, began to evolve generationally. As they did, they developed from surveillance eyes in the sky into something far more sinister and previously restricted to terra firma: assassins. One of the earliest armed acts of a CIA-piloted Predator, back in November 2002, was an assassination mission over Yemen in which a jeep, reputedly transporting six suspected al-Qaeda operatives, was incinerated.

Today, the most advanced UAV, the Reaper, housing up to four Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound bombs, packs the sort of punch once reserved for a jet fighter. Dispatched to the skies over the farthest reaches of the American empire, powered by a 1,000-horsepower turbo prop engine at its rear, the Reaper can fly at up to 7,000 meters for up to 22 hours (until fuel runs short), streaming back live footage from three cameras (or sending it to troops on the ground) - 16,000 hours of video a month.

No need to worry about a pilot dozing off during those 22 hours. The human crews "piloting" the drones, often from thousands of kilometers away, just change shifts when tired. So the planes are left to endlessly cruise Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani skies relentlessly seeking out, like so many terminators, specific enemies whose identities can, under certain circumstances - or so the claims go - be determined even through the walls of houses. When a "target" is found and agreed on - in Pakistan, the permission of Pakistani officials to fire is no longer considered necessary - and a missile or bomb is unleashed, the cameras are so powerful that "pilots" can watch the facial expressions of those being liquidated on their computer monitors "as the bomb hits".

Approximately 5,500 UAVs, mostly unarmed - less than 250 of them are Predators and Reapers - now operate over Iraq and the Af-Pak (as in the Afghanistan-Pakistan) theater of operations. Part of the more-than-century-long development of war in the air, drones have become favorites of American military planners. Gates in particular has demanded increases in their production (and in the training of their "pilots") and urged that they be rushed in quantity into America's battle zones even before being fully perfected.

And yet, keep in mind that the UAV still remains in its (frightening) infancy. Such machines are not, of course, advanced cyborgs. They are in some ways not even all that advanced. Because someone now wants publicity for the drone-war program, reporters from the US and elsewhere were recently given a "rare behind-the-scenes" look at how they work. As a result, and also because the "covert war" in the skies over Pakistan makes Washington's secret warriors proud enough to regularly leak news of its "successes”, we know something more about how our drone wars work.

We know, for instance, that at least part of the US Air Force's Afghan UAV program runs out of Kandahar air base in southern Afghanistan. It turns out that, pilotless as the planes may be, a pilot does have to be nearby to guide them into the air and handle landings. As soon as the drone is up, a two-man team, a pilot and a "sensor monitor", backed by intelligence experts and meteorologists, takes over the controls either at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, or at Creech Air Force Base northwest of Las Vegas, thousands of kilometers away. (Other US bases may be involved as well.)
According to Christopher Drew of the New York Times, who visited Davis-Monthan where Air National Guard members handle the controls, the pilots sit unglamorously "at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers". Depending on the needs of the moment, they can find themselves "over" either Afghanistan or Iraq, or even both on the same work shift. All of this is remarkably mundane as pilot complaints generally run to problems "transitioning" back to wife and children after a day at the joystick over battle zones - and at the same time, right out of Ali Baba's One Thousand and One Nights.

In those dimly lit trailers, the UAV teams have taken on an almost godlike power. Their job is to survey a place thousands of kilometers distant (and completely alien to their lives and experiences), assess what they see, and spot "targets" to eliminate - even if on their somewhat antiquated computer systems it "takes up to 17 steps - including entering data into pull-down windows - to fire a missile" and incinerate those below. They only face danger, other than carpal tunnel syndrome, when they leave the job.

A sign at Creech warns a pilot to "drive carefully"; "this, it says, is 'the most dangerous part of your day'." Those involved claim that the fear and thrill of battle do not completely escape them, but the descriptions we now have of their world sound discomfortingly like a cross between the far frontiers of sci-fi and a call center in India.
The most intense of our various drone wars, the one on the other side of the Afghan border in Pakistan, is also the most mysterious. We know that some or all of the drones engaged in it take off from Pakistani airfields; that this "covert war" (which regularly makes front-page news) is run by the CIA out of its headquarters in Langley, Virginia; that its pilots are also located somewhere in the US; and that at least some of them are hired private contractors.

William Saletan of Slate has described our drones as engaged in "a bloodless, all-seeing airborne hunting party". Of course, what was once an elite activity performed in person has been transformed into a 24/7 industrial activity fit for human drones.

Our drone wars also represent a new chapter in the history of assassination. Once upon a time, to be an assassin for a government was a furtive, shameful thing. In those days, of course, an assassin, if successful, took down a single person, not the targeted individual and anyone in the vicinity (or simply, if targeting intelligence proves wrong, anyone in the vicinity). No more poison-dart-tipped umbrellas, as in past KGB operations, or toxic cigars as in CIA ones - not now that assassination has taken to the skies as an every day, all-year-round activity.

Today, we increasingly display our assassination wares with pride. To us, at least, it seems perfectly normal for assassination aerial operations to be a part of an open discussion in Washington and in the media. Consider this a new definition of "progress" in our world.

Proliferation and sovereignty

This brings us back to arms races. They may be things of the past, but don't for a minute imagine that those hunter-killer skies won't someday fill with the drones of other nations. After all, one of the truths of our time is that no weapons system, no matter where first created, can be kept for long as private property. Today, we talk not of arms races, but of "proliferation”, which is what you have once a global arms race of one takes hold.

In drone-world, the Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis, the Georgians and the Iranians, among others, already have drones. In the Lebanon War of 2006, Hezbollah flew drones over Israel. In fact, if you have the skills, you can create your own drone, more or less in your living room (as your basic DIY drone website indicates). Undoubtedly, the future holds unnerving possibilities for small groups intent on assassination from the air.

Already the skies are growing more crowded. Three weeks ago, President Obama issued what Reuters termed "an unprecedented videotaped appeal to Iran ... offering a 'new beginning' of diplomatic engagement to turn the page on decades of US policy toward America's longtime foe." It was in the form of a Persian New Year's greeting. As the New York Times also reported, the US military beat the president to the punch. They sent their own "greetings" to the Iranians a couple of days earlier.

After considering what Times reporters Rod Nordland and Alissa J Rubin term "the delicacy of the incident at a time when the United States is seeking a thaw in its relations with Iran”, the US military sent out Colonel James Hutton to meet the press and "confirm" that "allied aircraft" had shot down an "Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle" over Iraq on February 25th, more than three weeks earlier. Between that day and mid-March, the relevant Iraqi military and civilian officials were, the Times tells us, not informed. The reason? That drone was intruding on our (borrowed) airspace, not theirs. You probably didn't know it, but according to an Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman, "protection of Iraqi airspace remains an American responsibility for the next three years”.

And naturally enough, we don't want other countries' drones in "our" airspace, though that's hardly likely to stop them. The Iranians, for instance, have already announced the development of "a new generation of 'spy drones' that provide real-time surveillance over enemy terrain".

Of course, when you openly control squads of assassination drones patrolling airspace over other countries, you've already made a mockery of whatever national sovereignty might once have meant. It's a precedent that may someday even make us distinctly uncomfortable. But not right now.

If you doubt this, check out the stream of self-congratulatory comments being leaked by Washington officials about our drone assassins. These often lead off news pieces about America's "covert war" over Pakistan ("An intense, six-month campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on al-Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust, US intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say ..."); but be sure to read to the end of such pieces. Somewhere in them, after the successes have been touted and toted up, you get the bad news, "In fact, the stepped-up strikes have coincided with a deterioration in the security situation in Pakistan."

In Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country.

To those who know their air power history, that shouldn't be so surprising. Air power has had a remarkably stellar record when it comes to causing death and destruction, but a remarkably poor one when it comes to breaking the will of nations, peoples, or even modest-sized organizations. Our drone wars are destructive, but they are unlikely to achieve Washington's goals.

The future awaits us

If you want to read the single most chilling line yet uttered about drone warfare American-style, it comes at the end of Christopher Drew's piece. He quotes Brookings Institution analyst Peter Singer saying of our Predators and Reapers: "[T]hese systems today are very much Model T Fords. These things will only get more advanced."

In other words, our drone wars are being fought with the airborne equivalent of cars with cranks, but the "race" to the horizon is already underway. By next year, some Reapers will have a far more sophisticated sensor system with 12 cameras capable of filming a two-and-a-half mile round area from 12 different angles. That program has been dubbed "Gorgon Stare", but it doesn't compare to the future 92-camera Argus program whose initial development is being funded by the Pentagon's blue-skies outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Soon enough, a single pilot may be capable of handling not one but perhaps three drones, and drone armaments will undoubtedly grow progressively more powerful and "precise”. In the meantime, BAE Systems already has a drone four years into development, the Taranis, which should someday be "completely autonomous"; that is, it theoretically will operate without human pilots. Initial trials of a prototype are scheduled for 2010.

By 2020, so claim UAV enthusiasts, drones could be engaging in aerial battle and choosing their victims themselves. As Robert S Boyd of McClatchy reported recently, "The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons."

It's a particular sadness of our world that, in Washington, only the military can dream about the future in this way, and then fund the "arms race" of 2018 or 2035. Rest assured that no one with a governmental red cent is researching the healthcare system of 2018 or 2035, or the public education system of those years.

In the meantime, the skies of our world are filling with round-the-clock assassins. They will only evolve and proliferate. Of course, when we check ourselves out in the movies, we like to identify with John Connor, the human resister, the good guy of this planet, against the evil machines. Elsewhere, however, as we fight our drone wars ever more openly, as we field mechanical techno-terminators with all-seeing eyes and fire our missiles from thousands of miles away ("Hasta la Vista, Baby!"), we undoubtedly look like something other than a nation of John Connors to those living under the Predators. It may not matter if the joysticks and consoles on those advanced machines are somewhat antiquated; to others, we are now the terminators of the planet, implacable machine assassins.

True, we can't send our drones into the past to wipe out the young Ayman al-Zawahiri in Cairo or the teenage Osama bin Laden speeding down some Saudi road in his gray Mercedes sedan. True, the UAV enthusiasts, who are already imagining all-drone wars run by "ethical" machines, may never see anything like their fantasies come to pass. Still, the fact that without the help of a single advanced cyborg we are already in the process of creating a Terminator planet should give us pause for thought ... or not.