U.S. officials tell us that a drone strike has killed al Qaeda's #2 operative - Abu Yahya al-Libi:

One American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described Mr. Libi as one of Al Qaeda’s “most experienced and versatile leaders,” and said he had “played a critical role in the group’s planning against the West, providing oversight of the external operations efforts.”

U.S. officials also told us the American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was a dangerous terrorist, when it turned out he was a propagandist, and not all that influential in the mid-east.

Meanwhile, despite that administration officials claim that civilian deaths are rare and minimal (one official recently said "in the single digits") the think tank New America Foundation estimated that since Obama took office, the number of drone deaths in Pakistan alone totaled between 1,456 and 2,372. Certainly these were not all high-level al-Qaeda operatives.

I can't help but notice the numbers' similarity to some of the casualty numbers from the Pentagon or World Trade Center. Obviously, Americans would no doubt agree with me that -though Obama claims the legal authority to do so - it would morally reprehensible to take down one of the WTC towers with a drone just because an al-Qaeda operative happened to be hiding out in the broom cupboard.  

The question then is: how many innocents is it acceptable to kill to take down one suspected terrorist?

The question is made more stark considering that fuzzy math the Obama administration is using to determine who is a "militant."

. . . Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.  

Courtesy of Flickr user imjoshdotcomThe winners for this year's Hugh M. Hefner Foundation First Amendment Awards were announced today and – lo and behold – GAP’s own National Security & Human Rights Director Jesselyn Radack has been honored! Radack is co-winner in the government category with Thomas Drake, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower and GAP client. Radack and Drake are being acknowledged for their critical work exposing national security hypocrisy and abuses.

The Foundation has been giving out the First Amendment Awards since 1980, honoring those who have made contributions to the protections afforded under the First Amendment. Radack and Drake join an impressive rank of winners, including the likes of Walter Karp, Studs Terkel, Cecile Richards, Michael Moore, John Seigenthaler, Bill Maher, and Molly Ivins.

Drake, of course, blew the whistle on fraud, waste, and abuse within the NSA and was rewarded by being prosecuted under the Espionage Act, a tactic the Obama administration has now used six times against intelligence whistleblowers – more than all previous administrations combined. Radack, herself a Department of Justice whistleblower, represented Drake on whistleblower issues and played a vital role in winning his case in the court of public opinion.

This isn’t the first time Drake and Radack have been recognized for their work. They won the Sam Adams Award, presented by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence late last year. Drake was also the winner of the 2011 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, largely considered the most prestigious award for whistleblowers.

I thought we were done with "death panels" after the health care debate, but as the New York Times reported yesterday, Obama has his own 100-person "death panel" made up of members of the ever-expanding national security state.

It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

While the Times calls it a "bureaucratic ritual," a panel of suits deciding who to kill next sounds more like an organized crime ring, with Obama as the mob boss insisting on signing off on every death. John O. Brennan is like the consigliere. The Times' sources – "three dozen of [Obama's] current and former advisers" – imply that Obama's tight hold on decisions about who the U.S. should kill without charge or trial makes Obama morally responsible:

A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.

It could also make him a psychopathic dictator whose favorite part of being president is heading up the "death panel," but we'll never know, considering that the Obama administration continues to claim in court that it "can neither confirm or deny" the existence of the drone program. BEFORE the commenters jump down my throat about calling Obama a "psychopathic dictator," please read what I wrote - I am not saying Obama is a "dictator" - the point is we don't know the official policies, reasoning behind, or criteria of the death panels - because this is all occurring in secret. Americans cannot go to the U.S. Code or case law and learn the criteria for summary execution. The officials on these death panels are

The UK's Daily Mail reports:

The Department of Homeland Security [DHS] has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) obtained the list of mostly-innocuous words DHS finds important enough to include in a guide for analysts whose goal is to

[identify] media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities.

The list includes completely innocent words anyone would use in social networking, such as

flu
leak
incident
response
cops
exercise
sick
pork
electric
cancelled
smart
power
delays
cloud
vaccine
interstate
closure
emergency
hurricane
organization
metro
storm
virus
help

Whistleblowers like former National Security Agency (NSA) officials William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake have repeatedly warned us about a burgeoning surveillance state. At great personal risk considering Binney, Wiebe, and Drake were all targeted with a criminal investigation and Drake was prosecuted under the Espionage Act, Binney has publicly revealed massive domestic surveillance, which began under President George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, and is continuing rampantly under President Obama. All three have written extensively and spoken out against NSA's domestic spying.

Nonetheless, yesterday, an apparently hard-of-hearing Senate panel reauthorized the constitutionally problematic FISA Amendments Act, which gutted long-standing safeguards for Americans' privacy in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Considering how badly NSA has abused its surveillance powers since 9/11, it is infuriating that any Senator claiming to represent his or her citizenry would consider giving NSA more surveillance authority.

In fact, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) - the same Senators who warned us about the Justice Department secret interpretation of another surveillance power: Section 215 of the (un)PATRIOT Act - objected to the re-authorization because NSA refused to give them a clear answer to a simple question: "How many innocent Americans is the NSA monitoring?" WaPo reported:

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) opposed the extension on civil liberties grounds. Wyden, concerned that the provision allows innocent Americans’ e-mails and phone calls to be monitored without a warrant, has asked the administration to disclose how many Americans have had their communications monitored under the law.

The Washington Post reports:

The Air Force said Monday that it had fined the former commander of the Dover Air Force Base mortuary $7,000 and suspended his top deputy for 20 days without pay for retaliating against whistleblowers, but it allowed both men to keep their jobs.

The punishment came in response to an independent federal investigation that concluded the mortuary’s leadership had wrongfully tried to fire two subordinates after they reported missing body parts, lax management and other problems at the base that handles America’s war dead.

This is an encouraging result, but unfortunately it is far from typical. These officials did not receive discipline until after the revitalized Office of Special Counsel launched an investigation and found "gross mismanagement" at Dover

after whistleblowers reported horror stories of lost body parts, shoddy inventory controls and lax supervision.

The OSC also found that the supervisors had retaliated against the whistleblowers and

tried to fire two of the whistleblowers and placed others on suspension and indefinite leave.

Beyond OSC's hard-hitting investigation, aggressive main-stream-media coverage (largely from WaPo) spotlighted the wrongdoers even more, and members of Congress and the Secretary of Defense himself got involved in urging for accountability for the retaliating officials:

First Amendment written on the front of the Newseum in Washington, DCEvents of just last week reveal a full-on assault on the First Amendment. Since it seems our government has forgotten, the First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There are no exceptions in the text, but in practice, more and more often our government only applies the First Amendment when convenient.

"Free Exercise of Religion" – EXCEPT for Muslims. Last week a Muslim-American toddler was removed from an airplane for being on the no-fly list. And this is just one of many recent policies unjustly targeting Muslim-Americans, from racist law enforcement training materials, to surveillance in Mosques, to prosecution under material support for terrorism laws. Even the New York Times has published commentary on the "Separate Justice System" for Muslims.

"Freedom of Association" – EXCEPT with dissenters, as evidenced by the Storm Trooper-esque police force that literally beat back peaceful protesters at Chicago's NATO meeting:

Some among the hundreds of officers repeatedly struck protesters with police batons