Since 2008, the year of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Defense has funded a multimillion dollar university research program to probe the complex dynamics of mass social and political movements, anticipate global trends, and ultimately augment the intelligence community’s preparations for civil unrest and insurgencies both abroad and at home.

Part of that has involved developing advanced new data mining and analysis tools for the U.S. military intelligence community to pinpoint imminent and potential threats from individuals and groups.

Among its many areas of focus are ongoing projects at Arizona State University (ASU) designed to enhance and automate the algorithms used by intelligence agencies like the NSA to analyze “open source” information from social media in order to track the potential threat-level to U.S. interests. Formal organizations and broad social networks as well as individuals could be identified and closely monitored with such tools to an unprecedented degree of precision.

Loosely defined concepts of political “radicalism,” violence and nonviolence, as well as questionable research methodologies, open the way for widespread suspicion of even peaceful activist groups and their members, and the equation of them with potential terrorists. Civil society organizations in the U.K., including both Muslim religious groups and non-religious anti-war networks, have been prioritized for study to test and improve the effectiveness of these data-mining tools.

Increasingly, though, the automation of threat-detection and terrorism-classification has been accompanied by the automation of killing, in the form of the generation of “kill lists” of terrorism suspects to be targeted via extrajudicial assassination by drone strikes. As President Obama, encouraged by powerful lobbies in the defense industries, has paved the way for the systematic integration of drones into domestic law-enforcement and homeland security operations, the prospect of extrajudicial assassinations occurring on U.S. soil are no longer merely hypothetical.

Now, new but little-known Pentagon directives authorize the use of armed drones against American citizens in the homeland in the context of domestic emergencies.

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Flawed DoD Algorithms Determine Extrajudicial Assassinations

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Algorithms of Death

“The algorithms being developed at ASU remind me of the algorithms used as the basis for signature strikes with drones,” said Thomas Drake, a former senior National Security Agency executive who leaked information about the NSA’s data-mining project Trailblazer to the press in 2006.

Drake agreed that the algorithms linked to “LookingGlass,” a new Pentagon-sponsored visual intelligence platform, could in fact be applied to fine-tuning the generation of the CIA’s notorious “kill lists.”

“Having the U.S. government and Department of Defense fund this kind of research at the university level will bias the results by default. This is a fall-out of big data research of this type, using algorithms to detect patterns when the patterns themselves are an effect – and mixing up correlation with causality. Under this flawed approach, many false positives are possible and these results can create an ends of profiling justifying the means of data-mining.”

It is now increasingly recognized that U.S. drone strikes against foreign terrorism targets have systematically killed large numbers of civilians, with a 2012 joint Stanford and New York University report suggesting that as few as 2% of casualties are “high-level” targets – an analysis cohering with counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen’s 2009 estimate showing a “kill ratio” of 50 civilians to one militant, or, in other words, 98% civilian casualties.

“My colleagues in Special Forces tell me that the men on the front line are furious with the lack of accuracy and integrity at the national level, and no longer trust the targeting data,” said former veteran CIA case officer Robert Steele, who previously served as a Marine Corps infantry officer.

“They have seen for themselves how wrong the system is when they look their man in the eyes. Technical surveillance is the most expensive, least useful, and least accurate form of surveillance. Technology is not a substitute for thinking. We must become deeply and broadly expert at the human factor.”

Drones Come Home

U.S. administration officials including Obama himself have repeatedly refused to confirm whether the alleged legal power to conduct extrajudicial assassinations via drone strikes extends to the U.S. homeland. Last year, prior to becoming CIA director, John Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee: “…we do not view our authority to use military force against al-Qaeda and associated forces as being limited to ‘hot’ battlefields like Afghanistan.” He referred to Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement that “neither Congress nor our federal courts has limited the geographic scope of our ability to use force to the current conflict in Afghanistan.”

In February 2012, Obama signed in a law directing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American airspace wide open to drones by as early as September 2015. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) already deploys Predator drones to spot smugglers and illegal immigrants crossing into U.S. territory, and two dozen U.S. police departments have successfully applied for FAA permits for drones. As National Geographic observes, “all 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. are potential customers.” By 2020, it is estimated that some 30,000 drones would be active across the U.S. homeland.

Documents obtained under Freedom of Information by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) show that police plan to use drones essentially for surveillance. In Seattle and Miami, drones are already being used during criminal investigations and in “hot pursuit” of suspects, and could be used during natural disasters along with “specific situations with the direct authorization of the Assistant Chief of the Homeland Security Bureau.” Hundreds of “domestic drone missions” have been flown by CBP on behalf of other state and local agencies.

Last year, government documents revealed that Department of Homeland Security had customized its Predator B drones, built originally for foreign military operations, for domestic surveillance tasks and to “respond to emergency missions across the country,” including “identifying civilians carrying guns and tracking their cell phones.”

These drones are now being used on U.S. soil by the FBI, Secret Service, Texas Rangers and some local police forces. The DHS had also proposed to arm its domestic fleet of border patrol drones with “non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize TOIs [targets of interest]” – an option also being pursued by local police agencies that want to arm drones with rubber bullets, tear gas and other riot control weapons.

According to an unclassified U.S. Air Force document, the deployment of military drones in U.S. airspace will be controlled by the Pentagon and will be able to monitor unidentified groups, as well as “specifically identified” individuals with the Secretary of Defense’s approval. Military drones “are allowed to fly drones in public areas and record information on domestic situations,” noted Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Executive Decisions

In February 2013, an extraordinary Pentagon directive authorized the deployment of U.S. military resources and personnel to respond to domestic emergencies, quell civil unrest and support civilian law enforcement in a domestic terrorism incident. The new directive builds on an earlier 2010/2012 DoD directive specifically authorizing the use of military surveillance drones on U.S. soil under Pentagon authority.

Although that directive prohibited the use of “armed” drones for “DSCA [Domestic Support to Civil Authorities] operations,” the new 2013 directive for Domestic Support to Civil Law-Enforcement Agencies goes further. It broadly asserts that “the Secretary of Defense may authorize the use of DoD personnel in support of civilian law enforcement officials during a domestic terrorism incident.”

Unlike the older directive, it stipulates that U.S. military commanders, including those at USNORTHCOM, USPACOM, and USSOCOM, would receive blanket authority over “operations, including the employment of armed Federal military forces at the scene of any domestic terrorist incident.” No limit is specified on what kind of “armed military forces” the Pentagon can conceivably deploy.

The “hypothetical” but nevertheless real extension of powers here was confirmed when Republican Senator Rand Paul asked Attorney General Holder to confirm the Obama administration’s position on conducting armed drone strikes on U.S. soil.

Holder wrote back that “the president could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances like a catastrophic attack.”

While denying any specific “intention” to do so, Holder conceded “it is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance, in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.”

Although Holder’s comments were widely publicized last year, their pseudo-legal parallel in the form of the Pentagon’s 2013 directive was not. The latter demonstrates that Holder’s consideration of the U.S. military’s legal authority to execute drone strikes on U.S. soil is far from “hypothetical.” On the contrary, the U.S. military was determined to ensure that this extraordinary authority was formally adopted.

I asked the U.S. Department of Defense whether it could confirm that the Minerva-funded data-mining research would not be used to support the U.S. intelligence community’s analytical tools to identify terrorism suspects, in particular to identify targets for extrajudicial assassination. I did not receive a direct answer to this question.

“Research in these areas will improve strategic and operational responses to insurgencies,” said Dr. Erin Fizgerald, chief of the Minerva program. “Perhaps more importantly, these efforts will help analysts faced with a particular political environment that seems ripe for mass mobilization – or a particular movement that appears to be turning violent or destabilizing a government – know where to look to understand a particular movement and its implications for society.”

Global Instability

Prof. Mark Woodward, an anthropologist who leads the ASU projects funded by the DoD’s Minerva Research Initiative, is also affiliated to the CIA-funded Political Instability Task Force (PITF), originally formed in 1994 by appointment of the U.S. government. Although the PITF boasts of developing a predictive model with a “two-year lead time and over 80% accuracy” based purely on modelling “political institutions, and not economic conditions, demography, or geography,” in practice U.S. intelligence was unable to anticipate the unprecedented wave of instability that has swept across the Middle East and North Africa since 2011.

The Pentagon Minerva program addresses this gap in attempting to account for a complex range of interconnected factors beyond political institutions, including the impacts of environmental, energy and economic crises.

As I reported last year, the NSA’s surveillance programs are linked to extensive Pentagon planning for civil unrest in the context of escalating risks from climate, oil, food and economic shocks. Official documents over the last decade confirm that the intelligence community anticipates a heightened threat of instability, including “domestic insurgencies,” due to social and political collapse triggered by such shocks.

As episodes like the recent conflagration in Ferguson demonstrate, the Pentagon’s fears of a future of imminent domestic civil unrest are already being borne out.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, international security scholar, investigative journalist and regular Guardian contributor on the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. This article was originally published on Occupy.com and is the fourth and last part of an investigation published. The first part can be read here, the second part here and the third part here.

Photo by Truthout on flickr

It’s been three weeks since Israel launched its bombing campaign and subsequent invasion of the Gaza strip. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, over 1,500 Palestinians have been killed and over 6,500 have been wounded in what has become one of the bloodiest offensives ever launched in the region.

The overwhelming majority of casualties are civilians. On the contrary, three Israeli civilians have died due to Hamas launched rockets and 56 IDF soldiers have lost their lives. Over the last four days Israel has bombed more than 70 sites, including Gaza’s  power plant, the only provider of electricity to the 45 mile territory’s 1.8 million citizens. Additionally, Israel has targeted and shelled dozens of medical facilities, refugee centers and is wiping out entire families every day.

Yet despite the extreme disproportionality of this ongoing massacre, there are still thousands of people vehemently defending Israel’s right to self-defense. According to Israel and its defenders, the skyrocketing Gaza death toll should be blamed on the Palestinians for committing “self-genocide” by putting themselves in the line of fire. And the crux of this perversion of reality all stems back to one single, extremely loaded talking point: human shields.

Abby Martin Dissects the ‘Human Shield’ Propaganda Talking Point

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From speeches and media appearances to incessant info-graphics, the human shield claim has been used as the crux of Israeli propaganda to absolve its government of any accountability.

There’s only one problem. Besides rockets found in an abandoned school, there’s been no evidence to back up the claim that is regurgitated without question across the media establishment. The pro-Israel talking point has been so repetitive that some critics, like Max Blumenthal have sarcastically suggested that “Hamas must be hiding rockets inside Palestinian children.”

On the ground journalists have corroborated the baseless nature of this claim. According to an article titled the ‘Myth of Hamas Human Shields,’

“Some Gazans have admitted they were afraid of criticizing Hamas, but none have said they have been forced by the organization to stay in places of danger and become unwilling human shields…”

The unsettling reality is that for many Palestinians there is simply nowhere to go. The strip of land they live on is about 45 miles long and is one of the most densely populated places on earth. It’s borders are closed (immediately following the siege, Egypt closed it’s Rafah border crossing into the Gaza strip) and many people have made the decision to stay inside their own homes instead of trying to evade death on the streets.

Amazingly, despite the loaded term being parroted to absolve Israel of its blatant war crimes, one entity that has systematically used human beings as shields is Israel, and here are just three examples documented in the past five years:

Israeli soldiers use civilians as human shields in Beit Hanun
Israeli soldiers who used Palestinian boy, 9, as a human shield avoid jail
Palestinian Children Tortured, Used As Shields By Israel, UN Says

Using human beings as shields or conducting military operations from civilian areas is an undeniably cruel and inhumane tactic that stands in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which is exactly why it’s consistently projected to demonize the enemy.

Other countless propaganda points have aimed to do the same from ‘these people cut people’s heads off’ in reaction to the Nick Berg beheading to ‘they throw acid in women’s faces’ in response to the acid attacks in the Muslim world.

The establishment wants you to look at these people, and think they want to die, they encourage death; they have such little value for life they actually shield themselves with other civilians, including children. It’s the oldest trick in the book to make people feel the massacre they’re sponsoring is justified. This is exactly what’s unfolding in Gaza, and as a result the indiscriminate bloodshed is not seen as horrendous or even deliberate by the majority of people. Instead it’s shrugged off as “what are coalition forces supposed to do when enemies are firing at them hiding behind civilians?”

Israeli society even has a word for this technique, Hasbara. In Hebrew it literally translates to “an explanation” but 972 Mag gives us the modern definition:

“A form of propaganda aimed at an international audience, primarily, but not exclusively, in western countries. It is meant to influence the conversation in a way that positively portrays Israeli political moves and policies, including actions undertaken by Israel in the past. Often Hasbara efforts includes a negative portrayal of the Arabs and especially of Palestinians.”

 

How Israel Uses Hasbara on Social Media to Legitimize Murder 

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This framework is used to build cases against nation states the US and Israeli government wants to topple. And the magical talking point is the enemy’s use of human shields.

One has to look no further than the infamous Bin Laden compound raid by Seal Team Six, where US officials claimed he was using his wives as human shields when he was shot. But when all was lied and done, officials were forced to admit that there was no use of human shields. In fact, according to the official narrative, the world’s most wanted man wasn’t even armed when he was allegedly executed.

Shortly after the Bin Laden raid, Pakistani Assistant Political Agent Javid Khan told the Inter Press Service “The [Taliban] militants [in Pakistan] have been using civilians as human shields.” Three years later, Khan would be accused of leading an armed militia into a Pakistani neighborhood which threatened an elderly woman at gunpoint.

But it’s not just Bin Laden and Pakistan. Nearly every major world conflict or war involving the US in the last 60 years has included this argument. In Libya, despite Gaddafi being boys with US politicians just the year prior to the NATO bombing campaign, the human shield talking point was used ad nauseum. Yet the only uncorroborated citation of this was through the same NATO supported rebel fighters that ultimately ousted Gaddafi, killing and sodomizing him with a metal pole.

Leading up to the Iraq war, Bush also included the human shield talking point as a main tenant of his campaign to oust Saddam. There is evidence of Saddam holding people hostage near military targets during the invasion of Kuwait. However, like much of the Bush era propaganda which inflated kernels of truth into a hysterical echo-chamber, little evidence exists of a systematic use of human shields during his reign. Of course, a lack of evidence didn’t stop Bush’s cabinet from fear-mongering the world about Saddam’s allegedly long history of devaluing human life through the use of human shields or gassing his own people by weapons provided to him by the US government.

During the height of the US propaganda push for a second unjustified war, a lengthy CIA document was dedicated to Saddam’s use of human shields. In the document, the Bush administration tried to preemptively justify the mass civilian death toll they knew was certain to come by saying the Iraqi dictator plans to shield his military and blame coalition forces for civilian casualties that Saddam has caused.

After Paul Bremer, Iraq’s Civil Occupation Governor, announced Saddam’s capture, his spokesperson, Dan Senor, conveniently transferred the human shields talking point to the independent insurgents that took the place of Saddam’s army.

The propaganda was modified so that the human shield claim could be used to justify hitting civilian targets. If an American soldier bombed or shot at a Mosque resulting in the deaths of civilians, the immediate retort from Senor was a variant of “they are using places of worship to stockpile weapons.”

Moving on to Afghanistan, where Taliban militants were accused of using civilians as human shields, according to government officials. Yet again, another narrative spun by the military with little evidence used as a cover for mass civilian casualties.

Despite the frequency of this term being applied in a post-9/11 world, it has been long practiced before the so-called War on Terror. Searching through print newspaper archives you can find the use of human shields applied to virtually every enemy involved in a military conflict with the US.

During the Vietnam war, the Viet Cong was accused of using defenseless civilians as human shields.

During the Korean war, the North Koreans were described similarly, but with even cruder 1950’s slang.

Even during World War II, the Nazis and Japanese army were accused of doing the same. 

The further one goes back in the historical record, the more difficult it is to verify or debunk the veracity of these claims. But the propaganda has served the same purpose – to dehumanize entire populations. In almost every instance, the enemy was painted as having zero regard for human life, making it easier for nations like the US to blow up countries, desecrate culture, torture, slaughter, and hold thousands of people indefinitely without charges.

Francis Fukuyama, influential DC neoconservative and co-sponsor of PNAC’s ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ displayed a rare moment of candor when he admitted that modern American foreign policy is even inspired by Israeli Hasbara: 

“Many Neoconservatives have adopted the point of view, the strategic prism of many hardliners on the Israeli right, including their interpretation of Arab motives and behavior, this idea that the Arabs don’t understand any principles of legitimacy, its only force that they respect.”

Every society, culture and country has extreme aspects to it, and Muslims are no different. But taking the most severe scenario that exists and exploiting it to generalize an entire demographic is extremely disingenuous and frankly, racist. When these terms are used, it paints Muslims, Arabs or Palestinians as monsters, ignoring that we’re all human beings, bleeding the same blood, feeling the same pain and suffering the loss of our loved ones just the same.

Written by Abby and Robbie Martin

Follow @AbbyMartin & @fluorescentgrey

Photo by flickr user Zoom_Airbrush