If You Take A Postion On Drone Strikes... This Is MUST READ Stuff...

[WillyT]

UK detention of Reprieve activist consistent with NSA's view of drone opponents as 'threats' and 'adversaries'
A top secret NSA document provides context for yesterday's abusive detention of Baraa Shiban
Glenn Greenwald - theguardian.com
Wednesday 25 September 2013 13.17 EDT

• Read the excerpts of the drone document here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/25/nsa-documents-top-secret-excerpts

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A well-known and highly respected Yemeni anti-drone activist was detained yesterday by UK officials under that country's "anti-terrorism" law at Gatwick Airport, where he had traveled to speak at an event. Baraa Shiban, the project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve, was held for an hour and a half and repeatedly questioned about his anti-drone work and political views regarding human rights abuses in Yemen. When he objected that his political views had no relevance to security concerns, UK law enforcement officials threatened to detain him for the full nine hours allowed by the Terrorism Act of 2000, the same statute that was abused by UK officials last month to detain my partner, David Miranda, for nine hours.

Shiban tells his story today, here, in the Guardian, and recounts how the UK official told him "he had detained me not merely because I was from Yemen, but also because of Reprieve's work investigating and criticising the efficacy of US drone strikes in my country." Link: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/like-david-miranda-interrogated-british-airport

The notion that Shiban posed some sort of security threat was absurd on its face. As the Guardian reported Tuesday, "he visited the UK without incident earlier this summer and testified in May to a US congressional hearing on the impact of the covert drone programme in Yemen." Viewing anti-drone activism as indicative of a terrorism threat is noxious. As Reprieve's Cory Crider put it yesterday, "if there were any doubt the UK was abusing its counter-terrorism powers to silence critics, this ends it." But perceiving drone opponents as "threats" or even "adversaries" is hardly new. Top secret US government documents obtained by the Guardian from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden characterize even the most basic political and legal opposition to drone attacks as part of "propaganda campaigns" from America's "adversaries".

The entry is part of a top secret internal US government website, similar in appearance to the online Wikipedia site. According to a June interview with Snowden in Hong Kong, the only individuals empowered to write these entries are those "with top secret clearance and public key infrastructure certificates", special access cards enabling unique access to certain parts of NSA systems. He added that the entries are "peer reviewed" and that every edit made is recorded by user.

One specific entry discusses "threats to unmanned aerial vehicles". It lists various dangers to American drones, including "air defense threats", "jamming of UAV sensor systems", "terrestrial weather", and "electronic warfare employed against the command and control system". But alongside those more obvious, conventional threats are what the entry describes as "propaganda campaigns that target UAV use".

Under the title "adversary propaganda themes", the document lists what it calls "examples of potential propaganda themes that could be employed against UAV operations". One such example is entitled "Nationality of Target vs. Due Process". It states:

Attacks against American and European persons who have become violent extremists are often criticized by propagandists, arguing that lethal action against these individuals deprives them of due process."

In the eyes of the US government, "due process"...

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Much More: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/nsa-uk-drone-opponents-threats

[DJ13]

1. K&R