By Claire Bernish

Obama’s drones have ‘officially’ killed more innocent people than mass shooters — despite paranoia surrounding gun control and propaganda about unhinged loose cannons shooting civilians en masse.

According to President Obama’s administration — in a years-in-the-making report — drones used in military combat overseas killed between 64 and 116 civilians between 2009 and the close of 2015 — almost certainly a paltry representation of the true total, considering accurate record-keeping remains a near impossibility.

But the voluntary disclosure, praised by some human rights advocates, nonetheless proffers an official U.S. tally for innocent lives lost in various geopolitical melanges.

“It’s hard to credit this death count, which is lower than all independent assessments,” director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, Hina Shamsi, told The Intercept.

Indeed, as Ryan Devereaux pointed out:

Organizations such as the Long War Journal, the New America Foundation, and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism estimate that at least 200 and as many as 1,000 civilians have been killed by American drone strikes in nations where the U.S. is not at war since Obama took office. The administration offered no individual accounts to explain where its numbers came from, or who the civilian casualties were.

As the Guardian summarized, “Between 2009 and 31 December 2015, the administration claimed that it launched 473 strikes, mostly with drones, that killed between what it said were 2,372 and 2,581 terrorist ‘combatants.’”

Assessing the true number of civilians killed during combat operations can be a matter of interpretation — to an extent. But lowballing estimates already widely considered conservative typifies the severe curtailment of transparency the public has come to expect from the government Obama once aggrandized as “the most transparent administration in history.”

For all that pellucidity, Obama’s drone assessment went public immediately prior to the July 4th holiday weekend — as if it were hoped no one would notice — complete with a number of glaring flaws.

“In releasing only aggregate figures that did not include when or where the strikes occurred, the administration shielded those claims from meaningful public scrutiny, even as it sought to bolster its own assertions about the accuracy and effectiveness of the operations,” the Washington Post keenly explained.

To wit, in explaining how the administration arrived at its altogether opaque numbers, a vague description devoid of any meaningful analysis left many scratching their heads:

The information that was provided to the [Director of National Intelligence] regarding combatant and noncombatant deaths is the result of processes that include careful reviews of all strikes after they are conducted to assess the effectiveness of operations. These review processes have evolved over time to ensure that they incorporate the best available all-source intelligence, media reporting, and other information and may result in reassessments of strikes if new information becomes available that alters the original judgment.

In comparison to this exercise in semantics gymnastics and its dubious underestimation of innocents killed, a count of those killed in mass shootings in the U.S., compiled by the Los Angeles Times last month and noted by Rare, offers telling insight into Obama’s drone program — if you overlook the administration’s laughable figures.

According to the Times, 168 people have perished at the hands of mass shooters between 1984 and the end of 2015 — 218 when including the 2016 massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Both figures massively undercut the up-to 1,000 — and likely far more — civilians killed by drones in the aforementioned conservative estimates noted by the Intercept. This means Obama’s drone program abroad, when looking at independent estimates, has killed up to 500 percent more innocent people than mass shootings in the United States.

In these times of hot tempers and the seeming imperative need by many to swiftly assign blame, it’s necessary to emphasize this article isn’t intended to condone wanton violence — no matter who perpetrates it. Nor does this article seek to condemn guns or call for any measure of gun control.

But what must be noted are the lengths the government goes to in order to obfuscate exactly how deadly its drone warfare program can be — treating innocent lives as meaningless through statistical legerdemain for the sole purpose of justifying its continuance — while simultaneously posturing about gun violence at home.

This is heightened hypocrisy at its finest. And we would expect nothing less.

Image Credit: Anthony Freda Art

This article (Obama’s Civilian Drone Death Count up to 500% Higher Than US Mass Shootings) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Claire Bernish and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radioairs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.g.


(activistpost.com)

By Derrick Broze

In a recent speech, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency discussed the controversial topic of geoengineering, leading some activists to ask whether the agency is actively and deliberately modifying the weather.

In late June, John Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, spoke at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting about threats to global security. Director Brennan mentioned a number of threats to stability before discussing the science of geoengineering. Brennan said the technologies “potentially could help reverse the warming effects of global climate change.”

(Brennan mentions geoengineering at 12:05)

The term ‘geoengineering’ describes this array of technologies that aim, through large-scale and deliberate modifications of the Earth’s energy balance, to reduce temperatures and counteract anthropogenic climate change. Most of these technologies are at the conceptual and research stages, and their effectiveness at reducing global temperatures has yet to be proven. Moreover, very few studies have been published that document the cost, environmental effects, socio-political impacts, and legal implications of geoengineering. If geoengineering technologies were to be deployed, they are expected to have the potential to cause significant transboundary effects.

In general, geoengineering technologies are categorized as either a carbon dioxide removal (CDR) method or a solar radiation management (SRM) (or albedo-modification)method. CDR methods address the warming effects of greenhouse gases by removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. CDR methods include ocean fertilization, and carbon capture and sequestration. SRM methods address climate change by increasing the reflectivity of the Earth’s atmosphere or surface.

Aerosol injection and space-based reflectors are examples of SRM methods. SRM methods do not remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, but can be deployed faster with relatively immediate global cooling results compared to CDR methods.

Director Brennan specifically mentions a type of SRM known as stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI. As Brennan notes, SAI is “a method of seeding the stratosphere with particles that can help reflect the sun’s heat, in much the same way that volcanic eruptions do.”

Brennan goes on to claim that an SAI geoengineering program could limit global temperature increases, a claim that has been disputed in several studies. For example, Activist Post recently reported on a new analysis released by the Finnish Meteorological Institute. The FMI is the government agency responsible for reporting weather data and forecasts in Finland. The Institute’s study, “Modelling radiative and climate effects of aerosols: from Anthropogenic emissions to geoengineering,” examined the potential for SRM to combat climate change.

The study specifically looked at two types of SRM. The first involved marine aerosol concentrations use to increase clouds, while the second looked at increasing the amount of sulphur concentrated in the stratosphere. The researchers stated that their key objectives were to “investigate the potential of aerosols to cool the climate at the global scale, and identify the possible limits in the effectiveness of the Solar Radiation Management techniques as well as the risks related to these techniques.”

The researchers found that the geoengineering techniques which were studied do in fact have the potential to cool the climate and slow down warming. “However, the cooling effect has limitations,” the team writes.“The cooling effect attributable to aerosols would be rather small due to the geographical change in tropospheric aerosol emissions or change in energy production studied here when compared to the warming due to the increased greenhouse gas emissions,” the paper states.

In other words, the effort, money, and time it would take to invest and create geoengineering methods would likely do very little to actually limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. The researchers even state that, based on their models, if the world replaced coal with nuclear power for energy production it would lead to a “temporal cooling effect,” but after several years “the warming effect from simultaneously increased GHG emission would exceed the cooling effect.” Also, the cooling that does result from an increase in aerosols is “often achieved at the cost of air quality” which could “lead to an increase in premature mortality.”

In February 2015, an international committee of scientists released a report stating that geoengineering techniques are not a viable alternative to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat the effects of climate change. The committee report called for further research and understanding of various geoengineering techniques, including carbon dioxide removal schemes and solar-radiation management before implementation.

The scientists found that SRM techniques are likely to present “serious known and possible unknown environmental, social, and political risks, including the possibility of being deployed unilaterally.” The report was sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. intelligence community, NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

According to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, if geoengineering programs were started and then suddenly halted, the planet could see an immediate rise in temperatures, particularly over land. The study, titled, “The Impact of Abrupt Suspension of Solar Radiation Management,” seems to indicate that once geoengineering begins, the programs cannot be suspended without causing the very problem the engineering was intended to solve.

Conspiracy Fact or Theory?

The idea that aerosols could be sprayed from planes is eerily reminiscent of various conspiracies involving the government using weather control technology to manipulate world events. This is what is derogatorily called the “Chemtrails Conspiracy.” Essentially, some believe geoengineering is actively taking place in our skies, and the “contrails” are actually geoengineering programs covertly being carried out. The “chemtrails” label comes from the portion of the crowd that believes these programs are delivering dangerous chemical additives to the food, water, soil, and humans below for nefarious purposes.

Despite the knee-jerk dismissal from many casual researchers, the theories might be grounded in reality. In February 2015, while speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California, Professor Alan Robock discussed the possibility that the CIA is using the weather as a weapon of war. Robock has done research for the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) in the past.

Robock stated he was phoned by two men claiming to be from the CIA, asking whether or not it was possible for hostile governments to use geoengineering against the United States.

Professor Robock’s fears of the government using the weather as a weapon are not completely unfounded. In a 1996 document entitled “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather by 2025” the U.S. Air Force discusses a number of proposals for using the weather as a weapon. The Environmental Modification Treaty was signed by the United States and other nations to halt global weather modification.

But the government did not simply research these ideas, they actually implemented them. During the Vietnam War the US government operated covert weather modification programs under Operation Popeye. The government does not only experiment with technology in foreign countries, they like to try it at home as well. In 2012 it was revealed that the US Army sprayed toxic chemicals over the skies of St. Louis without informing the public.

Whether or not Professor Robock’s theory is correct remains to be seen; but for now, Director Brennan’s speech makes it perfectly clear that America’s favorite spy agency is interested in manipulating the weather on a global scale. Whether it’s happening already or will be in the near future, the thought of the CIA (or any agency of government) using the weather as a weapon of war should make it clear that the U.S. government is not operating with reason or concern for the people.

Derrick Broze is an investigative journalist and liberty activist. He is the Lead Investigative Reporter for ActivistPost.com and the founder of the TheConsciousResistance.com. Follow him onTwitter.

Derrick is available for interviews. Please contact Derrick@activistpost.com

This article may be freely reposted in part or in full with author attribution and source link.

(activist post.com)