Hezbollah Drone Shot Down Over Israel

End Of Days News

Israeli authorities claim they have shot down a drone that took off from Lebanon and belongs to the terrorist organization Hezbollah.

Read more: http://freebeacon.com/hezbollah-drone-shot-down-over-israel/

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Death from a swarm of tiny drones: U.S. Air Force releases terrifying video of tiny flybots that can can hover, stalk and even kill targets

• Air Vehicles Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, is already developing prototypes of tiny drones that can hover
• The Micro Air Vehicles will work in swarms to provide complex surveillance of a battlefield
• They can also be armed with incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads or even explosives 'for precision targeting capability'

The U.S. Air Force is developing tiny unmanned drones that will fly in swarms, hover like bees, crawl like spiders and even sneak up on unsuspecting targets and execute them with lethal precision.

The Air Vehicles Directorate, a research arm of the Air Force, has released a computer-animated video outlining the the future capabilities of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). The project promises to revolutionize war by down-sizing the combatants.

'MAVs will become a vital element in the ever-changing war-fighting environment and will help ensure success on the battlefield of the future,' the narrator intones.

'Unobtrusive, pervasive, lethal - Micro Air Vehicles, enhancing the capabilities of the future war fighter.'

 

Hovering: Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) are the future of the unmanned drones program, according to a new video from the Air Force. The Air Force has already developed a drone capable of hovering like a moth

Perching: The video, released by the Air Vehicle Directorate, shows a pigeon-like drone that can draw power from an electrical wire while its camera watches a target

Crawling: The drones will be equipped with legs so that they can crawl through tight spaces like an insect

 

The project, which is based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, was revealed in the March issue of the National Geographic magazine.

Air Force officials said they have already produced tiny remote-control prototypes - but they consume so much power that can only operate for a few minutes.

Researchers estimate that it will take several years of advances in battery technology to make the designs feasible.
Still, the Air Force has a clear concept of what it hopes to accomplish with the program. 
The promotional video begins with a swarm of tiny drones be dropped on a city from a passing plane.

The drones will work in concert to patch together a wide, detailed view of the battlefield - singling out individual targets without losing sight of the broader scene.

'Data will be communicated among the MAVs to enable real time, reliable decision-making and to provide an advanced overall picture for other platforms or operators,' the Air Force says.

Killing: The video demonstrates how MAVs could be used to sneak up behind unsuspecting targets and kill them with a single, lethal shot

Lethal: The drones could be equipped with incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads or even explosives 'for precision targeting capability'

 

As the drones fall, they begin to fly - not like planes, but like insects. High frequency flapping wings allow the drones to hover and maneuver in tight spaces.

The military has already produced a drone patterned after a hawk moth that can flap its wings 30 times a second. However, the activity exhausts the drone's tiny battery in just a few minutes, according to National Geographic.

Another drone type soars like a pigeon and perches unobtrusively on a power line to observe a surveillance target with a camera.

The Air Force is working on technology that will allow the drones to steal electricity from power cables and other sources - so they can continue to operate for days or weeks on end.

Swarming: The drones couple be dropped en masse over a battlefield or a city and would work together to create a complex surveillance network

Working together: The drones would use advanced software to navigate by 'sight,' rather than GPS - which can be blocked by buildings or by jamming from the enemy
 

The Air Force training video shows a winged MAV following a target as he drives through the streets of a dense city.

Advanced sensors will enable 'optic flow,' which will allow remote pilots to fly by 'sight' - rather than flying by GPS, which can be disrupted by buildings or deliberately jammed by enemy forces.

The video depicts three drones following the target into a house, where they maneuver hallways and rooms undetected.

'Small size and agile flight will allow MAVs to covertly enter locations inaccessible by traditional means of aerial surveillance,' the narrator says.

The video follows the drones as they fly through an open door and sneak up behind a man who is aiming a sniper rifle.

'Individual MAVs may perform direct attack missions and can be equipped with incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads or even explosives for precision targeting capability,' according to the video.

On screen, a small, hovering vehicle pauses before shooting the man directly in the back of the head.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281403/U-S-Air-Force-developing-terrifying-swarms-tiny-unmanned-drones-hover-crawl-kill-targets.html#ixzz2LfQ0UUR9

US Senator: 'We've Killed 4,700' People With Drones

End Of Days News

Senator Lindsey Graham supports drone strikes, so much so that he recently proclaimed "We've killed 4700" (people) at an Easley Rotary Club meeting, according to Easley Patch, a local news website.

The senator's 4,700 is actually higher than some other estimates by far less supportive groups.
Micah Zenko, a researcher on the forefront of curbing drone use, wrote a report titled Reforming Drone Strikes, for the Council of Foreign Relations in January — the report totaled, at 3,430, more than 1,000 fewer killed than Graham's estimate.
Senator Graham also touched on the killing of Anwar Awlaki. Activists and journalists have staunchly voiced opposition to Awlaki's death, calling it an "extrajudicial killing."
Well, Graham had something to say about perceived extrajudicial killing.
From the Easley Patch:

“He's a guy that was born in the United States, he radicalized Major Hasan, the guy at Fort Hood,” Graham said. “He helped plan the underwear bomber attack that failed. He's been actively involved in recruiting and prosecuting the war for Al-Qaeda He was found in Yemen and we blew him up with a drone. Good.

“I didn't want him to have a trial,” he continued. “We're not fighting a crime, we're fighting a war. I support the president's ability to make a determination as to who an enemy combatant is. It's never been done by judges before. I support the drone program.”

Drone strikes have been, and will likely continue to be a controversial topic. Recently, the Pentagon announced plans to design an award apparently specifically for drone pilots and people operating in cyber space.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/graham-weve-killed-4700-people-with-drones-2013-2#ixzz2LbA2wxLq

End Of Days News

FAA Working To Fill The Sky With Drones

February 18, 2013 by Sam Rolley

UPI FILE

Last week, President Barack Obama approved legislation that will likely rapidly increase the use of drones for surveillance in the United States.

The FAA Modernization Act of 2012, which contains provisions to modernize aviation laws and to immediately integrate unmanned aircraft systems, was signed into law by Obama Thursday.

Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration called on State and local governments as well as universities to compete to be the location of one of six unmanned aircraft test sites the agency will operate as mandated by the 2012 FAA Reauthorization Act. The agency says it will use the sites to better understand the dangers and benefits of domestic drones before they are fully introduced to the National Airspace System by 2015.

“We expect to learn how unmanned aircraft systems operate in different environments and how they will impact air traffic operations,” FAA Chief Michael Huerta said in a statement. “The test sites will inform the agency as we develop standards for certifying unmanned aircraft and determine necessary air traffic requirements.”

Part of the mission for the test sites is to develop a set of certification standards and air traffic requirements for drones and to designate airspace for the unmanned aerial vehicles. According to some reports, government bodies in roughly two dozen States have expressed interest in becoming drone research locations.

The FAA has already authorized 106 Federal, State and local entities — including law enforcement agencies, regulators and universities — to operate domestic drones. Current requirements, however, limit the size of the aircraft and how far they are allowed to fly.

http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/feds-buying-enough-bullets-for-24-year-war/



Strikes on Syria arms transfers may continue, analysts say

End Of Days News

 

Israel is keeping a close eye on Syria and will act if it sees any indication that weapons are being transferred to Hezbollah, military experts said in an interview published Saturday.

 

A reported Israeli attack on a Syrian weapons convoy could be only the first volley in a series of upcoming strikes against Damascus and Hezbollah should the embattled regime try to transfer weapons to the Lebanese terror group, former Military Intelligence head Amos Yadlin told the Washington Post.

 

“Any time Israel will have reliable intelligence that this is going to be transferred from Syria to Lebanon, it will act,” the paper reported Yadlin saying.

 

He added the caveat that the decision to strike would still be made on a case by case basis.

 

Hezbollah has reportedly been preparing for the possibility of more attacks, the pan-Arab London-based daily al-Quds al-Arabi reported Friday, citing an increase in Israeli fighter jets flying over southern Lebanese airspace and carrying out “mock raids.”

 

On Saturday the Lebanese army said Israeli “spy drones” had clocked over 17 hours over Lebanese territory in the past day.

 

Yadlin told the paper that Israel was looking out for four types of weapons: ballistic rockets, air-defense arms, land-to-sea missiles and chemical weapons.

 

Hezbollah reportedly already holds some of these weapons within Syrian territory, but cannot move them without risking Israeli action.

 

Yadlin said that the risk of escalation became greater as Assad’s rule grew languid.

 

“As the Syrian army becomes weaker and Hezbollah grows more isolated because of the loss of its Syrian patron, it makes sense that this will continue,” he said.

 

Israel has denied foreign media reports that it hit a weapons convoy or a research site outside Damascus late last month, though officials have hinted at Jerusalem’s involvement.

 

According to some reports, Israeli planes hit a convoy of Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles on the way from Syria to Lebanon. Syria reported that a research site at Jamarya, north of the capital, had been struck, and footage from the site seemed to show a bombed out building and charred vehicles, including what appeared to be a transport vehicle for an SA-17 battery.

 

An unnamed military official told the paper that the anti-aircraft missile could “pose a very big problem for the Israeli air force.”

 

“There are more tangible indications that such weapons could reach Lebanon,” as the fighting continues, the official said.

 

Yadlin, who now heads of the Institute for National Security Studies, told a security conference last week that Israel would likely come out more secure after the dust settled from the Syrian civil war. 

 

http://www.timesofisrael.com/strikes-on-syria-arms-transfers-may-continue-analysts-say/





THIS BETTER OPEN YOUR EYES FOLKS! Judge Napolitano on Obama's Drone Strike Policy 'This Is the Power Claim...

End Of Days News

Judge Andrew Napolitano rips President Obama's drone policy and the Justice Department for resisting attempts to gain access to the legal opinions that the drone policy is based on.

"Suddenly it shows up in an NBC newsroom earlier this week! It could only have come from a governmental source. So they really have made fools of the federal judges who’ve spent hours and days and weeks struggling over the laws involved here," Napolitano said.

"It says ‘any informed high-level U.S. government official can strip an American of his or her constitutional protections and order the killing of that American if the person is overseas, if it’s difficult to arrest that person," Napolitano explained on FOX Business.

"This is the power claimed by kings and tyrants. This is about as un-American a power as one could imagine," Napolitano concluded.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/02/06/napolitano_on_obama_drone_program_this_is_the_power_claimed_by_kings_and_tyrants.html

Infographic Shows With Stunning Clarity How Domestic Drone Use Is The New Normal

It's a Pandora's Box we cannot close: drones are here to stay.

Police use them, journalists use them, even the folks at Occupy Wall Street used them. The Federal Aviation Administration recently leapt through several flaming hoops to write rules and regulations for drone use in domestic skies.

With military operations coming to a close in Afghanistan (though drone use has gone up), defense contractors are going to look more and more often at local law enforcement, even corporations, to fill drone manufacturing quotas.

Check out this infographic from worldofmaps.com that diagrams exactly how we got here, and what we can expect:

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-domestic-drone-use-2013-1#ixzz2HyjEbFsf

America Is Setting A Dangerous Precedent For The Drone Age

 

The decisions America makes today regarding drone policy could come back to haunt it sooner than later.

Micah Zenko of the Council of Foreign Relations makes this argument in a new report:

A major risk is that of proliferation. Over the next decade, the U.S. near-monopoly on drone strikes will erode as more countries develop and hone this capability. In this uncharted territory, U.S. policy provides a powerful precedent for other states and nonstate actors that will increasingly deploy drones with potentially dangerous ramifications.

Jim Michaels of USA Today reports that 75 countries, including Iran and China, have developed or acquired drone technology in the wake of America's prolific program.

The situation places the U.S. in a possibly very brief window of leadership — and transparency is the key first step to this leadership.

U.S. policy is to consider "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

America targets these individuals using a "disposition matrix" that serves to keep track of the ever-evolving procedures and legal justifications for placing suspects on the U.S. "kill list."

And the Obama administration refuses to reveal its methods or justifications for bombing a target, indicated by a recent ruling to deny a FOIA request regarding the targeted killing of the 16-year-old American-born son of former Al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki.

From Judge Colleen McMahon's opinion:

I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules - a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.

So the U.S. has the benefit of the doubt, even when it carries out "signature strikes" in which the identities of those killed on the ground is unknown and the decision to strike hinges upon recognition of certain undisclosed behaviors and tendencies.

That's a powerful precedent.

Imagine China conducting strikes inside Japan, or its own borders (e.g. Tibet) while using the current administration's same opaque, one-size fits all statement that each strike only happens after "rigorous standards and process of review" — essentially, "nevermind the evidence, trust us."

That wouldn't fly, but right now America is not in a very strong position to criticize such a situation. That's why, as Zenko argues, the U.S. must reform its policies or risk losing its moral and strategic advantage.

A few months ago, the election spurred Obama to codify its rules and regulations regarding drone strikes because "there was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands," one anonymous official told Scott Shane of the New York Times.

Well that time is approaching, and it won't be a Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio in control. It'll be North Korea's Kim Jung Un, China's Hu Jintao, or Iran's Ahmed Ahmadinejad.

Which means that it may be time to show the drone "playbook" so extrajudicial killings don't become a blindly accepted aspect of international foreign policy.

[UPDATE 10:19 p.m.] As Daphne Eviatar, Senior Counsel in Human Rights First's Law and Security Program, noted last week in Reuters, laying out U.S. policy "would be a brave and principled move on Obama’s part. It would also go a long way toward developing global confidence that, despite past mistakes, Washington is waging its fight against terrorism in accordance with the rule of law.

If Obama instead continues to take refuge in the courts, he may be able to claim a minor legal victory. But the president will have lost a far more important battle."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/america-is-setting-a-dangerous-precedent-for-the-drone-age-2013-1#ixzz2HbYpehwg

New York artist to debut 'drone-proof' anti-surveillance clothing line

 

Some fashonistas strive for sexy when it comes to clothes, but one artist from New York is taking a rather utilitarian approach with outfits — he’s about to unveil a whole line of garments designed to make the wearer nearly invisible to drones.

Brooklyn-based artist Adam Harvey used to work primarily with photography, but he undertakes an entirely different medium with his newest project. He says that in the years since the United States post-9/11 PATRIOT Act has been in place, cameras have stopped becoming “art making tools” and have instead become “enablers of surveillance societies.”

That was Harvey’s explanation last year when he discussed his projects with the website Rhizome. At the time, Harvey was experimenting with how household make-up could render it harder for computers to use facial recognition programs to pluck people out of crowds. And while the practice of examining facial features using biometrics and sophisticated surveillance cameras has certainly intensified in the months since, Harvey has found another type of evasive practice that is a bit harder to avoid: the drone.

The United States currently has a modest arsenal of unmanned aerial vehicles — UAVS, or drones – that it uses in surveillance missions on its border with Mexico and in war zones overseas. By the year 2020, however, the Federal Aviation Administration expects the number of domestic drones in American airspace to be as large as 30,000.

At the moment, law enforcement agencies across the country are trying to get their hands on their own surveillance drones, some of which “can zoom in and read a milk carton from 60,000 feet,” according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And while escaping a space-age robotic spy machine thousands of feet above the Earth might not be as easy as, say, putting on some blush or mascara to make it harder to be detected, Harvey has designed an entire clothing line that will help disguise people from the all-seeing eye of Big Brother.

On January 17, Harvey will unveil Stealth Wear at a studio in London. There he’ll debut his “new counter surveillance fashions” that he plans to also test before his private audience.

“Building off previous work with CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection, Privacy Mode continues to explore the aesthetics of privacy and the potential for fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance,” the press release reads.

In collaboration with NYC fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield, Harvey has tried to tackle “some of the most pressing and sophisticated forms of surveillance today.” 

Ultimately, it’s a fashion statement that says an earful to those enabling a growing spy state.

“I think building privacy into modern garments can make them feel more comfortable and, like armor, more protected,” Harvey told Rhizome last year.

“Data and privacy are increasingly valuable personal assets and it doesn’t make sense to not protect them. It’s also a great conversation starter.”

Harvey hopes to get those conversations starting next week in London, where he will unveil an anti-drone hoodie and matching scarf, a shirt that shields the wearer from X-rays and a pocket protector that he says blocks cell phones from sending and receiving signals.

For the hoodie and scarf set, Harvey and Bloomfield use materials designed to thwart thermal imaging, which the artist says most UAVs employ in order to zero-in on targets. The t-shirt allegedly protects a person’s internal organs from harmful X-rays and the “Off Pocket” pants accessory disconnects mobile devices from service providers with special materials.

“Smartphones infiltrate our senses. They cause anxiety, phantom vibrations, and keep us on alert,” he told Rhizome. “We expend energy maintaining an always-on connection. Smartphones should come with a switch to turn this off, but they don’t. Turning my iPhone off and back on takes 45 seconds. Using flight mode is also clumsy. I wanted a way to quickly and politely disconnect myself without relying on the phone’s software or hardware features. The Off Pocket circumvents this design flaw.”

“[W]hen I first modified my pants with signal attenuating fabric, it felt odd to be unplugged. It was as if I had blocked out part of the world, covered my ears, or closed my eyes. But then I adjusted and realized that I had just opened them again.”

The artist says accompanying each project will be either recorded and in-person demonstrations that reveal the process behind each specific technology and counter technology relevant to his work.

Speaking to the UK’s Register back in 2010, Harvey said even then that surveillance was becoming more prevalent.

"The number of sensors that are going into the public spaces has been increasing,” he said, adding that we very well might be “heading to the point where we as a society need to think about what we are comfortable with."

"Maybe you could go to a privacy hair stylist in the future,” he quipped.

http://rt.com/usa/news/drone-artist-harvey-surveillance-665/ 

Check Out This Drone-Proof Counter-Surveillance Clothing

Check Out This Drone-Proof Counter-Surveillance Clothing

"Counter-surveillance clothing" is the new brain child of New York based artist Adam Harvey.

Harvey, in conjunction with UK-based company Primitive London, plans to display the fashion accessories Jan. 17.

The idea is that the material blocks heat signatures, captured using infrared sensors, which give people away to surveillance helicopters or drones from the skies above.

From the Press Release on Stealth Wear website:

“Building off previous work with CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection, Privacy Mode continues to explore the aesthetics of privacy and the potential for fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance."

Harvey told RT.com that since the Patriot Act, cameras have become "enablers of surveillance" rather than "art making tools."

As we covered recently at BI, drone use is not only a tactic on foreign soil. The FAA recently jumped through a bunch of flaming hoops to accommodate domestic drone use in America's skies.

As Naomi Wolfe diagrammed last month, a whopping 30,000 drones will be in the air above the U.S. come 2020 — so put those orders in now!

Here are some more photos of this fashion/counter surveillance gear:

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/check-out-this-drone-proof-counter-surveillance-clothing-2013-1#ixzz2HbTGFEcc

US Drone Use Setting Off New Global Arms Race

US Drone Use Setting Off New Global Arms Race

The proliferation of drone technology is, justifiably but hypocritically, generating concern in Washington

 

With the US’s dramatic expansion of drone use for both surveillance and targeted bombings, a veritable arms race in unmanned aerial vehicles has begun, prompting concern from some in Washington worried about international rivals using drones like the US does.

“The number of countries that have acquired or developed drones expanded to more than 75, up from about 40 in 2005, according to the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress,” USA Today reports.

Both China and Japan are working on sophisticated drone technology as their territorial disputes get more intense. Pakistan is also attempting to acquire armed drone systems, apparently with help from China. And Iran is known to have fielded their own drones.

Even the United Nations has expressed interest in acquiring their own drones, reportedly for use in peacekeeping missions.

The proliferation of drone technology is justifiably generating some concern in Washington. The prospect of other countries using drones in the same lawless, lethal, unaccountable way the US has is unnerving to Americans, who have long believed they should not be subject to the rules everybody else must follow.

“When we possess such weaponry, it turns out there is nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it,” Tom Engelhardt observes in Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

But “when the first Iranian or Russian or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of ‘terrorists,’ we won’t like it one bit,” Engelhardt warns. “Then let’s see what we think about the right of any nation to summarily execute its enemies—and anyone else in the vicinity—by drone.”

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/01/09/us-drone-use-setting-off-new-global-arms-race/

White House wins fight to keep drone killings of Americans secret

 

 

A federal judge issued a 75-page ruling on Wednesday that declares that the US Justice Department does not have a legal obligation to explain the rationale behind killing Americans with targeted drone strikes.
United States District Court Judge Colleen McMahon wrote in her finding this week that the Obama administration was largely in the right by rejecting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times for materials pertaining to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to execute three US citizens abroad in late 2011 [pdf].
Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both US nationals with alleged ties to al-Qaeda, were killed on September 30 of that year using drone aircraft; days later, al-Awlaki’s teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was executed in the same manner. Although the Obama administration has remained largely quiet about the killings in the year since, a handful of statements made from senior White House officials, including Pres. Barack Obama himself, have provided some but little insight into the Executive Branch’s insistence that the killings were all justified and constitutionally-sound. Attempts from the ACLU and the Times via FOIA requests to find out more have been unfruitful, though, which spawned a federal lawsuit that has only now been decided in court.
Siding with the defendants in what can easily be considered as cloaked in skepticism, Judge McMahon writes that the Obama White House has been correct in refusing the FOIA requests filed by the plaintiffs.
"There are indeed legitimate reasons, historical and legal, to question the legality of killings unilaterally authorized by the Executive that take place otherwise than on a 'hot' field of battle," McMahon writes in her ruling. Because her decision must only weigh whether or not the Obama administration has been right in rejecting the FOIA requests, though, her ruling cannot take into consideration what sort of questions — be it historical, legal, ethical or moral — are raised by the ongoing practice of using remote-controlled drones to kill insurgents and, in these instances, US citizens.
"The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable Catch-22,” she writes. “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reason for their conclusion a secret.”
Throughout her ruling, Judge McMahon cites speeches from both Pres. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder in which the al-Awlaki killings are vaguely discussed, but appear to do little more than excuse the administration’s behavior with their own secretive explanations.
“The Constitution’s guarantee of due process is ironclad, and it is essential — but, as a recent court decision makes clear, it does not require judicial approval before the President may use force abroad against a senior operational leader of a foreign terrorist organization with which the United States is at war — even if that individual happens to be a US citizen,” McMahon quotes Mr. Holder as saying during a March 2012 address at Chicago’s Northwestern University. “Holder did not identify which recent court decisions so held,” the judge replies, “Nor did he explain exactly what process was given to the victims of targeted killings at locations far from ‘hot’ battlefields…”
And while both Mr. Holder and Pres. Obama have discussed the killings in public, including one appearance by the president on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the Justice Department insists that going further by releasing any legal evidence that supports the executions would be detrimental to national security.
While Judge McMahon ends up agreeing with the White House, she does so by making known her own weariness over how the Obama administration has forced the court to rely on their own insistence that information about the attacks simply cannot be discussed.
“As they gathered to draft a Constitution for their newly liberated country, the Founders — fresh from a war of independence from the rule of a King they styled a tyrant — were fearful of concentrating power in the hands of any single person or institution, and most particular in the executive,” McMahon writes.
Responding to the decision on Wednesday, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer issued a statement condemning the White House’s just-won ability to relieve itself from any fair and honest explanation as to the justification of Americans.
“This ruling denies the public access to crucial information about the government’s extrajudicial killing of US citizens and also effectively green-lights its practice of making selective and self-serving disclosures,” Jameel writes. “As the judge acknowledges, the targeted killing program raises profound questions about the appropriate limits on government power in our constitutional democracy. The public has a right to know more about the circumstances in which the government believes it can lawfully kill people, including US citizens, who are far from any battlefield and have never been charged with a crime.”
The ACLU says they plan to appeal Judge McMahon’s decision and are currently awaiting news regarding a separate lawsuit filed alongside the Center for Constitutional Rights that directly challenges the constitutionality of the targeted kills.
“The government has argued that case should also be dismissed,” the ACLU notes.
In a Wednesday afternoon statement from the Times, assistant general counsel David McCraw says the paper will appeal the ruling as well.
"We began this litigation because we believed our readers deserved to know more about the US government's legal position on the use of targeted killings against persons having ties to terrorism, including US citizens," McCraw says.
Although she ruled against the plaintiffs, Judge McMahon, says McCraw, explained "eloquently … why in a democracy the government should be addressing those questions openly and fully."

http://rt.com/usa/news/drone-kill-mcmahon-obama-245/