Tag Archives: human rights watchdog

| ‘Historic’ Drone landing paves way for ‘Killer Robots’ anytime, anywhere!

Posted on by
1

‘Historic’ Drone Landing Paves Way for ‘Killer Robots’ Anytime, Anywhere ~  Lauren McCauley, Common Dreams.

Aircraft landing of the X-47B proves US military “would take autonomous armed combat anywhere in the planet.”

The landing of the X-47B pilotless drone is just the ‘precursor’ to the future of warfare. (Photo: Timothy Waller/ USNavy/ AP)In an event sure to make “history”—if not for its technical prowess, then for its long-term impact on international warfare—the US Navy Wednesday successfully completed the landing of a fully automated aerial drone on an aircraft carrier at sea.

In what is being billed as a “pivotal moment” for the US military in the “growing global robotics arms race,” the landing—which took place on the deck of the USS George HW Bush off the mid-Atlantic coast—is the first time a “robot performed a feat executable only by the navy’s top pilots,” reports the Guardian.

They continue:

The X-47B, constructed by Northrop Grumman, is a different kind of drone from the Predators and Reapers that have become global symbols of American military power. Contrary to popular understanding, those drones are not actually pilotless. People, usually US air force officers and contractors, fly them remotely, controlling them through instruments resembling those found in a traditional cockpit.

The X-47B is pilotless. Its operations occur thanks to lines of software code that its on-board computer systems execute. Its flight paths are pre-programmed […] although navy officials can take control in the event of a malfunction.

“Precursor to fully autonomous weapons?” tweeted Amy Wareham, Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch.

The human rights watchdog group has long been sounding the alarm over the potential of ‘killer robots,’ including the X-47B—a craft which they say “would take autonomous armed combat anywhere in the planet.”

And the Associated Press confirms that the successful landing paves the way for the US to “launch unmanned aircraft without the need to obtain permission from other countries to use their bases.”

“Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren and mine will be reading about this historic event in their history books,” boasted Rear Admiral Mat Winter, the head of the navy’s drone programs.

Though the navy plans on “mothballing” the costly X-47B ($1.4bn over four years), there are plans to develop other models of armed drones which will work alongside manned naval aircraft providing “around-the-clock surveillance while also possessing a strike capability.”

The Guardian continues:

[T]he navy will now put its energy into the X-47B’s successor, the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike robot, or UClass. The navy wants to use UClass to augment its carrier air wings – it will not replace manned pilots – providing surveillance flights longer than human pilots can withstand and, if necessary, firing its weapons in battle scenarios too dangerous for human pilots. Unlike the X-47B, the UClass robots will be armed, although navy officers insist that weapons releases will only occur at a human’s direction.

Four companies are competing for the UClass contract, each with their own design for the forthcoming drone.

______________________________________________________________

New Age in Carrier Aviation Takes Off With X-47B Landing ~ .

Northrop Grumman's X-47B just before landing on the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) on July, 10 2013. US Navy Photo

Northrop Grumman’s X-47B just before landing on the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) on July, 10 2013. US Navy Photo

The Navy has entered a new age in carrier aviation with the successful landing of the unmanned Northrop Grumman X-47B on the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77), the service announced at 1:45 p.m. EST on Wednesday.

Call sign Salty Dog 502 left Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md. shortly after 12:00 p.m. EST and flew to the Bush controlled through a complex series of algorithms and navigational sensors and landed on the deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier guided not with a joystick and throttle controls but by an operator with a mouse and a keyboard.

On its final approach to Bush a hypersensitive version of the same GPS technology used to direct families on vacation guided the hook of the tailless aircraft safely to the deck of the carrier and into history.

“The dynamics and complexity of the demonstration is not just flying an airplane. It is operating a system autonomously in and out of the most demanding launch and recovery environment around the world,” Rear Adm. Mat Winter program executive officer for unmanned aviation and strike weapons said in a Tuesday conference call with reporters.
“This is not trivial.”

The landing of the X-47B successfully proved the Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstration (UCAS-D) project and will pave the way to include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on carriers in the future.

The Navy’s focus now will be to move beyond the experimental UCAS-D and into a capability that will move from novelty to an organic component of the carrier air wing.

The next step will be development of the Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) a capability the Navy wants to field by 2020.

The UCLASS program has run in parallel with the UCAS-D program. According to documents obtained by USNI News, the Navy is looking for a system (consisting of one or more aircraft) that can conduct two 650 nautical mile orbits around a carrier for $150 million.

In June, the Navy issued a preliminary request for proposal (RfP) to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Atomics and Northrop Grumman to begin design work on their bids ahead of a full RfP in 2014.

“All of the knowledge out of the program is being transferred to UCLASS,” Winter said.
“UCLASS will benefit from all of what we have done here in X-47B.”

________________________________________________________________________

DroneEerie1 Related articles

drone firingA

| Exposing Truth: The Holy Land Gets Skunked — An Analysis!

Posted on by
1

The Holy Land Gets Skunked — An Analysis ~  To the point analyses, Lawrence Davidson.

Part I – Something Is Rotten in the State of Israel

 

It is said that the devil has about him the smell of fire and brimstone (sulphur). Evil deeds are often described as “most foul.” On the other hand, people who appear, accurately or not, as always innocent are described as “smelling like roses.” There seems, then, to be a long standing, if improbable, association between behavior and smells.

 

The Israeli army has recently dedicated itself to demonstrating this association. Back on 6 March 2013 the Middle East Monitor reported that

 

Israeli forces have sprayed Palestinian homes in the village of Nabi Saleh with Skunk as punishment for organizing weekly protests against the Apartheid Wall built on occupied land. Human rights watchdog B’Tselem  published a video showing Israel’s armored tanker trucks fitted with “water canons” [spraying] the foul fluid. 

 

 Skunk is a fluid so offensive smelling that people automatically retreat from anywhere or anyone doused with it.

 

This is not the first time the Israelis have used such noxious tactics. Zionist settlers are fond of diverting the sewage from their illegal settlements, which are usually placed on high ground,  into the fields and towns of Palestinians living in the valleys below. This is apparently done with the knowledge and approval of the Israeli state.

 

I doubt if many of the Israelis involved in these maneuvers have ever read Dante’s Inferno. In that epic poem, Hell is a place steeped in sewage and rot, and Israeli actions seem intent on reproducing this scenario.  Are the Israelis then trying to turn the Holy Land into Hell?  Well, yes, for the Palestinians. To  this end the settlers and soldiers mimic Dante’s demons.

 

Part II – Selective Smelling

 

How far does the bad smell of Israeli actions reach? We can be sure that it reaches as far as London, where MP David Ward of the Liberal Democratic Party recently wrote in a Holocaust Memorial book that,

 

having visited Auschwitz twice . . . I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.

 

Ward’s reference to “the Jews” have been qualified, because not all Jews support Zionism or Israel’s claim to “Judea and Samaria,” much less the pogrom-like way the Israelis are going about ethnically cleansing the areas under their control. In fact, an increasing number of American Jews are, if you will,washing their hands of Israel in general. Yet Ward was correct when it comes to the “Jewish state’s” behavior. Perhaps Mr. Ward’s confusion was a product of Israel’s constant insistence that it represents all the world’s Jews.

 

Not everyone seems to smell the odor emanating from Israel. Mr. Ward’s Liberal Democratic Party called him to account for daring to draw attention to the fact that foul acts continue to be committed against the Palestinians by the self-proclaimed representative of the Jews. A quiet word to Ward about avoiding generalizations would probably have sufficed but, using a process similar to those carried out by totalitarian regimes, Ward’s party ordered him “to meet with the party’s ‘Friends of Israel’ chapter to ‘identify and agree on language that will be proportionate and precise when he speaks out again on the Israeli-Palestine conflict.” He did so and issued the required apology. This    smells like censorship to me.

 

 

Part III – Foul Is Fair

 

It’s one thing to punish someone for calling attention to Israel’s rank behavior. It is something else to insist that foul is actually fair–-to say the sewage smells like roses. Who would be reckless enough to imply such a nauseating thing and do so with a straight face before cameras with the whole world watching? How about the President of the United States? He lives in Washington D.C., where denial of Israel’s malodorous nature is almost unanimous.

 

President Obama had an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 TV station on 15 March 2013, just before he left to visit that country. In the interview he stated that he admires Israel’s “core values.” The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who has an honest nose for these things, editorially asked Obama,

 

which values he was talking about? The dehumanization of the Palestinians? The attitude toward African migrants? The arrogance, racism and nationalism? Is this what he admires? Don’t separate buses for Palestinians remind him of something? Doesn’t two communities living on the same land, one with full rights and the other with no rights, ring a bell . . . ?

 

To admire “core values” while knowing we’re talking about one of the most racist countries there is, with a separation wall and apartheid-like policies, means betraying the core values of the American civil rights movement that made the Obama miracle possible.

 

Nonetheless, upon arriving in Israel, President Obama said that U.S. support for the very same Israel Levy describes will “be forever.” It might be added that, at the same time, the president insisted that the Palestinians cease demanding a halt to the building of settlements, with their targeted open- sewer policies, before any further “peace” negotiations with the Israelis.

 

When it comes to Israel, President Obama, and most of the Congress as well, can’t tell the difference between fair and foul. That is because they live in a peculiar professional world whose parameters, in reference to Israel and Palestine, are defined by a Zionist lobby with Orwellian powers. In this special world, double-think abounds. Racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the tactical use of Skunk and raw sewage disappear and are replaced by imaginary “core values” that smell like roses.

 

Part IV – Conclusion

 

The president can privately smell garbage and call it roses all he wants. But when he tries to sell the rest of us on this connection, the credibility of his language sinks into the gutter. Remember what George Orwell tells us about the potential for harm in the misuse of political language. Misused, such language offers a “defense of the indefensible” and is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” That is what most politicians’ language has sunk to when it comes to Israel/Palestine.

 

That this should go on “forever,” as the president claims, is just hyperbole. Consider the fact that a recent CIA report calls into question the Zionist state’s ability to last for more than another twenty years. No, the bad smell coming from Israel denotes internal socio-political rot, as well as rotten tactics toward non-Jewish inhabitants. Sooner or later everyone possessing a humane conscience, to say nothing of a functioning honest nose, will refuse to have anything to do with this “apartheid-like” state.

___________________________________________________________________

BS B

Related articles

PAL RECOGNISE