Statement from Edward Snowden in Moscow.

*Source: WikiLeaks

Monday July 1, 21:40 UTC

One week ago I left Hong Kong after it became clear that my freedom and safety were under threat for revealing the truth. My continued liberty has been owed to the efforts of friends new and old, family, and others who I have never met and probably never will. I trusted them with my life and they returned that trust with a faith in me for which I will always be thankful.

On Thursday, President Obama declared before the world that he would not permit any diplomatic "wheeling and dealing" over my case. Yet now it is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions.

This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.

For decades the United States of America has been one of the strongest defenders of the human right to seek asylum. Sadly, this right, laid out and voted for by the U.S. in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is now being rejected by the current government of my country. The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person. Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.

In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.

I am unbowed in my convictions and impressed at the efforts taken by so many.

Edward Joseph Snowden

Monday 1st July 2013

U.S. Drops Bid to Limit Sales of Morning-After Pill

*Source: The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has decided to stop trying to block over-the-counter availability of the best-known morning-after contraceptive pill for all women and girls, a move fraught with political repercussions for President Obama.

The government’s decision means that any woman or girl will soon be able to walk into a drugstore and buy the pill, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription. 

The Justice Department had been fighting to prevent that outcome, but said late Monday afternoon that it would accept its losses in recent court rulings and begin putting into effect a judge’s order to have the Food and Drug Administration certify the drug for nonprescription use. In a letter to Judge Edward R. Korman of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the administration said it would comply with his demands. 

The Justice Department appears to have concluded that it might lose its case with the appeals court and would have to decide whether to appeal to the Supreme Court. That would drastically elevate the debate over the politically delicate issue for Mr. Obama. 

Women’s reproductive rights groups, who had sued the government to clear the way for broader distribution of the drug, cautiously hailed the decision as a significant moment in the battle over reproductive rights but said they remained skeptical until they saw details about how the change will be put into practice.

The drug prevents conception if taken within 72 hours after sexual intercourse. 

“We will not rest in this fight until the morning-after pill is made available without delay and obstruction,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a lawyer and the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which represented the plaintiffs in the case. 

Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood said: “This is a huge breakthrough for access to birth control and a historic moment for women’s health and equity.” 

The F.D.A. issued a statement Monday night saying that it planned to drop its appeal. “To comply with the order, the F.D.A. has asked the manufacturer of Plan B One-Step to submit a supplemental application seeking approval of the one-pill product to be made available O.T.C. without any such restrictions,” the statement said. “Once F.D.A. receives that supplemental application, the F.D.A. intends to approve it promptly.” 

The decision is certain to anger abortion rights opponents, who oppose letting young girls have access to the drug without the involvement of a parent or a doctor. For Mr. Obama, the decision could rekindle a high-intensity, politically turbulent debate about contraceptives even as he is already dealing with a series of distracting controversies and national security leaks. 

Mr. Obama had expressed personal concern about making the drug more broadly available last year and offered support to Kathleen Sebelius, his secretary of health and human services, when she blocked a decision by the F.D.A. that would have cleared the way for nonprescription distribution to all girls and women regardless of age. He said that as the father of two young girls, the idea of making the drug available to them without a prescription made him uncomfortable. 

But a federal judge angrily accused the administration of blocking the drug because of politics, not science, and ordered Ms. Sebelius to reverse her decision. Last week the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City partially refused the Justice Department’s request for a delay in the judge’s order while the government appealed. 

In its letter to the court, the Justice Department outlined the procedural steps that the F.D.A. plans to take. It said the maker of Plan B One-Step, Teva Pharmaceuticals, has been asked to “promptly” file an application asking for no age or sales restrictions, and that the “F.D.A. will approve it without delay.” 

Once that is done, the F.D.A. expects makers of generic versions of Plan B One-Step — the most popular of those is Next Choice One Dose — to ask for a similar arrangement. The F.D.A. will evaluate those requests, based on whether it decides to give Plan B One-Step any type of market exclusivity, but most likely generic pills will also eventually be available without restrictions.  

The Justice Department said it would not remove restrictions from two-pill emergency contraceptives because it is concerned that young girls might not be able to adequately understand how to take two separate doses. But two-pill versions are a diminishing fraction of the market. 

The fight to make emergency contraceptives universally available without a prescription is more than a decade old. Plan B, the trade name for the morning-after pill, was approved in 1999 as a prescription-only product. In 2001 the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a citizens petition for it to be made available over the counter or without a prescription. 

By December 2011, after years of pressure from women’s reproductive rights groups and the companies selling the drug, the F.D.A. was poised to lift all age restrictions. By then the F.D.A. also said it had determined that the drug was safe. But in an unprecedented move Ms. Sebelius overruled the agency. She said at the time that she had based her decision on science because she said the manufacturer had failed to study whether the drug was safe for girls as young as 11, about 10 percent of whom are physically able to bear children. 

In April, Judge Korman once again ordered the government to make all morning-after pills available without a prescription and without any sales restrictions. In a stridently worded ruling, Judge Korman wrote that Ms. Sebelius’s decision to overrule the F.D.A. “was politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent.” 

He also accused the federal government of “bad faith” in dealing with the requests over more than a decade to make the pill universally available. 

“The F.D.A. has engaged in intolerable delays in processing the petition,” the judge wrote. “Indeed, it could accurately be described as an administrative agency filibuster.”

NSA Collecting Phone Records Of Millions Of Verizon Customers Daily

*Source: The Guardian

Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama.

Under the terms of the order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data and the time and duration of all calls. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

 

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.
Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself.

"We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".

The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".

The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.

For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.

Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized.

Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion." The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration's extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance.

In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows."
"We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.

Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual's network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency's focus on domestic activities.

In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.

At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."

Additional reporting by Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman

After Vowing Greater Transparency, Obama Admin Increasingly Censoring, Withholding Info From Public

A new report has revealed the U.S. government refused or censored freedom of information requests from the public more last year than at any other time during the Obama presidency. The Associated Press analysis determined that the Obama administration cited legal provisions for withholding information more often in 2012 than in any previous year -- especially a rule intended to protect national security. The CIA denied 60 percent of information requests in 2012, compared to 49 percent a year earlier. We speak to Jack Gillum of the Associated Press and Alexander Abdo of the American Civil Liberties Union.




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Obama's Legal Excuse To Execute Americans Without Trial

*http://www.adamvstheman.com
*http://www.youtube.com/user/AdamKokesh
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Former Adviser: Obama as 'Ruthless and Indifferent to Rule of Law' as Bush

*Source: Common Dreams

Americans 'unaware of the scale of the drone program ... and the destruction it has caused in their name'

- Beth Brogan, staff writer 

 

A former security adviser for Barack Obama now says the Pentagon's targeted drone program is counter-productive, is "encouraging a new arms race," and has killed far more civilians than has been acknowledged.

Obama has "been just as ruthless and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor" says former adviser to the president, Michael Boyle. (Photo: AP file)

In an article for the January 2013 issue of the journal International Affairs, Michael Boyle, a La Salle University expert on counterterrorism who served as an adviser on the Obama campaign's counterterrorism expert group from July 2007-November 2008, writes that the Obama administration's increasing reliance on drone attacks is having "adverse strategic effects that have not been properly weighed against the tactical gains associated with killing terrorists," the Guardian reports.

Although Obama pledged to end the so-called 'War on Terror,' Boyle continues:

"Instead, he has been just as ruthless and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor ... while President Bush issued a call to arms to defend 'civilisation' against the threat of terrorism, President Obama has waged his war on terror in the shadows, using drone strikes, special operations and sophisticated surveillance to fight a brutal covert war against al-Qaida and other Islamist networks."

Boyle argues that the administration has been "successful in spinning the number of civilian casualties" because it has reportedly begun counting all military-age men in the strike zone as militants unless the administration has clear evidence to the contrary, the Guardian reports. As a result, the standards the US uses to select targets has been "gradual(ly) loosening."
He continues:

The consequences can be seen in the targeting of mosques or funeral processions that kill non-combatants and tear at the social fabric of the regions where they occur. No one really knows the number of deaths caused by drones in these distant, sometimes ungoverned, lands.

The use of drones by the US has increased dramatically during the Obama administration, with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimating that US forces have conducted 307 deadly drone strikes in Pakistan alone since Obama took office four years ago.

Peter Singer, director of the 21^st Century Initiative at the Brookings Institution says the US now has 7,000 drones operating and 12,000 more on the ground, while not a single new manned combat aircraft is under research or development at any western aerospace company.

Boyle argues for more transparency about the surging use of drones by the Obama administration, because, he says, Americans are "unaware of the scale of the drone program ... and the destruction it has caused in their name."

Clinton Turns Down Request to Testify on Benghazi Next Week

*Source: PJ Media

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has turned down an invitation to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee next Thursday on the Benghazi attack.

A committee update this evening indicated that Michael Courts, acting director of International Affairs and Trade for the Government Accountability Office, will be testifying followed by a RAND Corp. analyst.

 The committee indicated further witnesses could be added, but the State Department confirmed that Clinton won’t be one of them.

“She was asked to appear at House Foreign Affairs next week, and we have written back to the chairman to say that she’ll be on travel next week,” said department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. She did not answer a question about whether Clinton would be willing to fly back from Australia to address either the Foreign Affairs panel or the Senate and House closed-door intelligence committee hearings getting to the root of the Benghazi scandal.

“The Committee plans to hold the second segment of this hearing the week of November 26, 2012 and will request Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton testify before the Committee at that time,” the Foreign Affairs Committee said in an advisory.

Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) wrote Clinton on Tuesday to demand that the State Department respond to the panel’s requests for information on Benghazi.

“It is disappointing that we have yet to receive any response from your Department and that we are receiving more information from the press than from the Administration,” Ros-Lehtinen wrote.

On Sept. 12 and Sept. 14, the chairwoman requested State Department witnesses for both an open hearing and closed-door members’ briefing. On Sept. 25, committee members requested information on intelligence leading up to the attack and the role former Guantanamo detainees may have played. On Oct. 15, fresh requests were sent from Ros-Lehtinen directly to Clinton. No responses have been received.

“While I understand that investigations by the FBI and the State Department’s own Accountability Review Board are ongoing, it is imperative that this Committee, having direct oversight responsibility, be kept informed every step of the way of developments in the matter,” Ros-Lehtinen wrote. “Accordingly, I respectfully request access, in accordance with standard procedures for classification information, to all cables regarding embassy security in Benghazi before, during, and after the September 11^th attack and all memoranda establishing security protocols, including agreements with other agencies.”

“Moreover, I continue to have concerns more broadly about embassy post security in frontline countries and I request an expeditious response to the questions raised in my October 15^th letter,” the chairwoman added. “Finally, please be prepared to present State Department officials to testify on these issues when Congress reconvenes later this month.”

Proof: Obama Refused to Call Benghazi 'Terror,' CBS Covered Up

*Source: Breitbart

 

In an astonishing display of media malpractice, CBS News quietly released proof--two days before the election, far too late to reach the media and the public--that President Barack Obama lied to the public about the Benghazi attack, as well as about his later claim to have called the attack "terrorism" from the beginning.

CBS unveiled additional footage from its 60 Minutes interview with President Obama, conducted on Sep. 12 immediately after Obama had made his statement about the attacks in the Rose Garden, in which Obama quite clearly refuses to call the Benghazi an act of terror when asked a direct question by reporter Steve Kroft:

KROFT: Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya Attack, do you believe that this was a terrorism attack? OBAMA: Well it’s too early to tell exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.  And we are going to be working with the Libyan government to make sure that we bring these folks to justice, one way or the other.

CBS News held onto this footage for more than six weeks, failing to release it even when questions were raised during the Second Presidential Debate as to whether Obama had, in fact, referred to the Benghazi attack as an act of terror before blaming it falsely on demonstrations against an anti-Islamic video. The moderator, CNN's Candy Crowley, intervened on Obama's behalf, falsely declaring he had indeed called the attack an act of terror in his Rose Garden statement, and creating the impression that Romney was wrong. That exchange turned what would have been an outright win for Romney in the debate into a narrow win or possibly a loss--and it discouraged him from bringing up the issue again in the next debate or on the campaign trail. CBS News could have set the record straight, but held onto this footage, releasing it just before the election--perhaps to avoid the later charge of having suppressed it altogether. Fox News' Bret Baier, who has been following the timeline of events closely, noted in his analysis this morning:

These are two crucial answers in the big picture.  Right after getting out of the Rose Garden, where, according to the second debate and other accounts he definitively called the attack terrorism, Obama is asked point blank about not calling it terrorism. He blinks and does not push back. Understand that this interview is just hours after he gets out of the Rose Garden. How after this exchange and the CIA explanation of what was being put up the chain in the intel channels does the Ambassador to the United Nations go on the Sunday shows and say what she says about a spontaneous demonstration sparked by that anti-Islam video? And how does the president deliver a speech to the United Nations 13 days later where he references that anti-Islam video six times when referring to the attack in Benghazi? 

There are many questions, and here are a few more. Why did CBS release a clip that appeared to back up Obama's claim in the second debate on Oct. 19, a few days before the foreign policy debate, and not release the rest of that interview at the beginning?  

Why on the Sunday before the election, almost six weeks after the attack, at 6 p.m. does an obscure online timeline posted on CBS.com contain the additional "60 Minutes" interview material from Sept. 12?  

Why wasn't it news after the president said what he said in the second debate, knowing what they had in that "60 Minutes" tape -- why didn't they use it then? And why is it taking Fox News to spur other media organizations to take the Benghazi story seriously?  

Whatever your politics, there are a lot of loose ends here, a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of strange political maneuvers that don't add up.

Actually, the conclusion to be drawn is quite simple: CBS News, in an effort to assist President Obama's re-election campaign, corruptly concealed information about two critical issues--namely, a terror attack and the president's dishonesty about it. When the players in the Libya scandal face investigation, so, too, should CBS News and those in the mainstream media who have wantonly assisted the administration's shameless lies.

US Drone Industry: Open For Business At Home And Abroad.

*Source: RT

US Air Force Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle hanger during a preview day of the Seoul International Aerospace and Defense Exhibition at a military air base in Seongnam, south of Seoul (AFP Photo / Jung Yeon-Je)

The Obama administration has continued in its enduring drive to sell drones to eager allies like Turkey. But if US clients are careless or misuse the weapons, Washington will share the blame, says Tim Brown, a senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org.

After speaking with President Obama on the sidelines of the NATO Summit in Chicago this past Monday, Turkish President Abdullah Gul mentioned the White House’s “positive stance” over the sale of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the state-run Anadolu Agency quotes him as saying.

“They are trying to convince the Congress,” he added.

Ankara has long been eager to get its hands on armed drones to help squash autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels in the country’s southeast.

But the influence of pro-Israel lobbyists on the US Congress could scuttle any such deal. Relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv plummeted following a 2010 Israeli commando raid on a Turkish ship carrying civilian activists and aid to Gaza Strip.

A failed Turkish airstrike that killed 34 smugglers misidentified as Kurdish rebels is also likely to stymie the sale for some time.

While Turkey eagerly awaits a decision, drone export advocates say a policy of refusing to sell the unmanned vehicles will only deprive the flagging US economy of sales and jobs. And those pushing for greater leniency in international drone sales have a powerful backer.

Apart from Turkey, President Obama has long been pressuring US lawmakers to authorize the sale of presumably armed drones to NATO allies in order to redistribute the burden of America’s global military operations, both past and present.

Advocates of the president's position claim that by empowering NATO allies with drone technology, alliance members would no longer need to rely on United States drone capabilities in counter-terrorism and reconnaissance operations.

With fears that countries like China and Iran are attempting to get in on the drone market – with Iran managing to reverse-engineer a captured US spy drone last month – pro-export enthusiasts are likely to feel their case has been bolstered.

The economics of unmanned flight

Even if Washington isn’t directly selling drones to foreign governments via Foreign Military Sales, one way or another, drone technology is already being exported.

On Monday, the US embassy-based Office of Security and Cooperation in Iraq (OSCI) announced “Iraq's Navy has purchased U.S. drones to protect the country's oil platforms in the south, from where most of Iraq's oil is shipped."

However, the OSCI was not forthcoming about the number or type of UAVs provided to Baghdad.

Several companies have in fact already been granted the right to sell drone-related equipment by the State Department, including L-3 Communications, Dream Hammer, and Broadcast Microwave systems.

LEPTRON has even been given permission to sell drone helicopters.

But Texas-based defense contractor Vanguard Defense Industries is paving the way for future trends, as it has been granted the right to sell drones to foreign governments for narco-trafficking and counter-terrorism operations, the American Independent reported earlier this month.

Despite an expected 25 per cent bump in domestic sales from $35 to $40 million for next year, Vanguard’s CEO Michael Buscher says the future is abroad.

“I don’t see the domestic market as being such a boom,” said Buscher. “Our bread and butter is still going to be overseas foreign military sales,” the daily quotes him as saying.

Buscher’s optimism is not surprising.

Last month, the US-based marketing firm Teal Group estimated that “UAV spending will almost double over the next decade from current worldwide UAV expenditures of $6.6 billion annually to $11.4 billion, totaling just over $89 billion in the next ten years.”

The Teal Group study further predicted the US will account for 62 per cent of the worldwide RDT&E (Research, Development, Test & Evaluation) and 55 per cent of procurements over the next decade.

Domestically, a congressional budget office study published last June showed a planned Pentagon outlay of $40 billion to purchase more than 700 large and medium-sized drones in the coming decade.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the United States Air Force trained more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined in 2011, NPR reported last November.

Congress remains unsure

Despite the purported economic benefits, Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein expressed her reservations about disseminating drone technology to foreign states last December.

"There are some military technologies that I believe should not be shared with other countries, regardless of how close our partnership," the Wall Street Journal cites her as saying.

"The United States should be trying to control the proliferation of certain weapons, and I would put armed UAVs in that category."

At the time, a proposal to equip six unarmed Italian-owned Reaper drones with $393 million in weapons systems was log-jammed after being informally presented to US legislators.

But with the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International spending some $280,000 lobbying Congress in 2011, lawmakers might become amenable to helping out the one US industry that appears to be crisis-proof:arms.

­

‘US bipolar on selling Terminator-type technologies’

Tim Brown, a senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org, believes America’s position on exporting drone technology is somewhat ambivalent.

“The US government has a bipolar attitude toward exporting UAV technology,” he told RT. “On the one hand there is a concern with how a weapon system is used once it is exported. The more sensitive the technology, the fewer countries the US will share it with.”

Brown says that while drone technology can be very effective in preventing the loss of soldiers’ lives and targeting terrorists, the US still has reservations about exporting the technology even to traditional allies, such as Turkey, which may use it to target Kurdish rebels.

“The concern is that Turkey will use US-built UCAVs to go after the PKK [the Kurdish Workers’ Party], and might not place a high enough priority on quality control in their targeting process,” he noted. “The number of innocent civilians killed might increase.”

Brown also stressed that the US Congress, the Department of Defense and the State Department will have to weigh the pros and cons of approving the export of the technologies to countries like Turkey.

“On the one hand the US would like to export UAV technology to support the US economy, sustain and create US jobs,” he said. “But if allies are careless or misuse these weapons, the US will share in the blame.”

Brown also took note of the fact that the US was able to successfully test a fully autonomous drone, without a pilot behind a computer controlling it with a joystick. He believes this may be the future of military technologies, the development of which is increasingly weeding out the human element.

“We are not quite there yet, but the era of 'Terminator' type UCAVs flying around autonomously, using programming and fuzzy logic to target enemies on the battlefield is probably not far off,” he noted. “The F-22 and the F-35, if built, will probably be the last manned fighter to go into production in the United States. The proliferation of this new weapon system may or may not have a positive effect overall.”