U.S. Air Force Suffers Brain Drain as Top Guns Drop Out to Fly Drones – Leaving Pilot Numbers Short by Hundreds

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Photo Credit: Reuters The U.S. Air Force is struggling to keep its top gun combat pilots as increasing numbers move to the safety of flying attack drones from military bases.

Indeed, despite their adrenaline fueled reputations, fighter pilots believe the stresses of actual combat compared to the financial incentives of flying passenger airlines or drones are too much too ignore.

Facing a shortfall of 700 pilots from a required pool of 3,000 by 2021, the Air Force is now actively offering a huge $225,000 signing on bonus for new pilots – provided you stay in the service for nine years.

This year alone, the Air Force has a shortfall of 200 pilots among its ranks, as the surge in demand for better paid commercial jobs and reassignments to fly combat drones impacts and reshapes modern warfare.

Officers in the Air Force are aware of this issue according to the LA Times and as a result are beefing up their Aviator Retention Program which will offer a $25,000 signing bonus per year over the course of nine years.

‘Were it not for the program, there would be a greater problem that the one we currently have,’ said Lt. Col. Kurt Konopatzke.

Read more from this story HERE.

Who’s Watching the Watchdog? Records Show IG Billed Taxpayers for Questionable Trips

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Photo Credit: APThe man who’s supposed to be the chief watchdog for the Department of Homeland Security was himself billing the government for a string of “site visits” to sunny locales including Puerto Rico and south Florida — where he allegedly was pursuing his Ph.D.

The activity was detailed in a trove of documents obtained and published by conservative group Cause of Action. They appear to lend weight to at least some of the myriad allegations made last month against homeland security Acting Inspector General Charles Edwards.

Among other claims backed up by the documents are that Edwards employed his wife — some say in violation of nepotism rules — and that she won approval to telework.

“At least the timeline and the narrative are being confirmed,” Cause of Action spokeswoman Mary Beth Hutchins told FoxNews.com, adding there will have to be more digging. “There are some legitimate questions here.”

Edwards’ office, though, continued to battle and deny the allegations.

Read more from this story HERE.

Big Sis’ Shockingly Dirty Secrets Go Public

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Photo Credit: Center for American ProgressDemocrats and Republicans largely heaped praise upon Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano after she announced she would resign her post later in the year, but a longtime constitutional attorney says there is not much to applaud – especially for anyone concerned about preserving freedom and limiting government intrusion in their lives.

“What the Department of Homeland Security became under Janet Napolitano is this monstrous surveillance and very intimidating group,” said Rutherford Institute President John Whitehead, a constitutional attorney for the past 40 years and author of “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State.”

“I think originally there were some good intentions with the Department of Homeland Security, but what happened under President Obama is that it accelerated rapidly,” Whitehead told WND. “I criticized George Bush’s policies. Under President Obama, we’re zooming.”

Whitehead said the Napolitano legacy of reducing freedom is evident across the board, starting in early 2009 when the department issued a report listing returning soldiers as one of the greatest threats to American security.

“Another program Napolitano set up is Operation Vigilant Eagle, which is a surveillance system done on all returning veterans from overseas, where they watch Facebook posts, text messages, emails of returning veterans to see if they’re going to be disgruntled,” Whitehead said. “There are quite a few disgruntled veterans. In fact, one that we helped just filed a major lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.”

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Conservatives, Beware the Hatch Effect

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Photo Credit: RedStateIn 2014, several prominent Republicans in the House and Senate are going to be challenged by people more conservative than the incumbents in area where a more conservative person can still win. Leading up to these challenges, conservatives must beware of the Hatch Effect.

In 2012, many conservatives in print, radio, and television came out quickly and endorsed Orrin Hatch against Dan Liljenquist. Hatch had been a conservative warrior for a long time, he sounded conservative, and we’d need him in the fight against amnesty. He made the rounds on television, radio, and had references in various op-ed columns. Outside groups went to work for Orrin Hatch.

Those who fretted that Hatch might return to the ways of Ted Kennedy’s best friend on the right were drowned out by a near unified conservative front — one that did not include RedState.

In a debate against Dan Liljenquist, Hatch hit all the right notes on immigration.

[W]e won’t be able to solve these problems until we secure the borders, and we have to do that. Every other large nation in the world knows how to secure their borders, why can’t we secure ours? And second, we can no longer grant amnesty. I fought against the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill because they granted amnesty to 3 million people. They should have to get in line like anybody else if they want to come into this country and do it legally.

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GOP Allows NSA, Syria Debate

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Photo Credit: APA long-delayed Pentagon appropriations bill is heading to the floor after the House Rules Committee voted Monday night to allow a structured debate including amendments related to NSA surveillance at home and the flow of military aid overseas in the Mideast.

Altogether, 100 amendments are promised consideration, but those affecting the NSA — funded in the bill — and military aid to anti-government forces in Syria are clearly the most sensitive politically for the Republican leadership.

Indeed, conservatives led by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) had threatened to defeat the rule if votes were not permitted on a bipartisan proposal to narrow the ability of the NSA to collect private call records and metadata on telephone customers in the U.S.

“It’s not a partisan issue. It’s something that cuts across the entire political spectrum,” Amash told the Rules panel. And he argued that the amendment seeks only to rein in the NSA’s “blanket authority” under the PATRIOT Act to collect records and the metadata.

Read more from this story HERE.

Your Place in the Database

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerRegarding the American surveillance state, it seems that the truth comes out a little at a time. We learned about the FBI’s Carnivore in the 1990s, which the copied internet data of people whom the agency deemed “reasonably suspicious.” In September 2001, we saw the worst attacks on America since Pearl Harbor. September 11 left a unified country in its wake, but unfortunately, it was also a country more acquiescent than ever to big government. The PATRIOT Act was quickly shuttled through the lawmaking process, and life went on. We found out about NSA domestic wiretapping from a brave AT&T whistleblower in 2006. The program was given the formality of legality (though not constitutionality) in 2007. Would it have been had no one blown the whistle?

The surveillance state became even more unsettling with the Change of 2009, no less after political campaigning by the victor against domestic spying. We found out in 2009 that returning veterans were being targeted as possible extremists by the “Vigilant Eagle” program, a name positively Orwellian in its irony. The floodgates opened in 2013 once Obama’s re-election was secured. We found out that our government scans all domestic cell phone metadata (phone numbers, recipients, times), all letter and package labels are scanned and saved, and the NSA has agreements with every major internet provider to provide backdoor access to customers’ information (see PRISM). Even our credit card activity is analyzed. Of course, those are just high points. The entire last decade we have heard warnings from whistleblowers such as William Binney, as well as periodic admissions from U.S. officials of intelligence oversteps, which they falsely claim are immediately corrected.

One must wonder how the people of this nation would have reacted had all of this come out at once. Perhaps it is wishful thinking to hope that we would have shown a tenth the gumption of the Egyptians, who in July 2013 unceremoniously flung their Islamist government to the side. They took to the streets in outrage against tyrants at just the time we learned of the sickening scope of our national government’s spying. We meekly sat by. As each little bit of this diabolical system is leaked, it is palatable enough to warrant only a minor outrage, and then life goes on, albeit with a new normal. Tiny violations of our 4th-Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, and our 5th-Amendment right against self-incrimination, keep piling up, until it seems that those rights have bled to death from a thousand cuts. If Americans are the proverbial frog in the pot of water, the temperature has been ratcheted to a near-boil.

The Relational Database

For me, the most stomach-churning signpost on our nation’s road to tyranny has been the completion of the Utah Data Center. The center holds data on the scale of yottabytes. One yottabyte could account for 30 million gigabytes per U.S. man, woman, and child. It’s a staggering capacity. Now, for Americans, the camera is always rolling, creating a record of our every digital move. It reminds one of The Truman Show, a movie in which Jim Carrey’s entire life was filmed and broadcast as entertainment without him knowing it.

Because of the power of relational databases, and the laws governing internet service provider record-keeping, anything stored in the data centers (there are many across the nation, the Utah Center being the largest and most recent) can be tied to us directly. When tied to other sources of government data, it’s a more complete picture of our life than most of us could even provide about ourselves. The websites we browse, the comments we make, the e-mails we send, the phone calls to friends, the internet purchases, the Facebook associations, and most everything else you can think of are easily tied together.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bill Co-Sponsored by Mike Lee to Require Search Warrants for Fed’s Access to Your Email Gaining Steam

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Photo Credit: Social BIz SolutionsThe chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is pushing to fast-track legislation that would require police to obtain a warrant before accessing emails and other private online messages.

Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) goal is for the Senate to unanimously approve his bill before the August recess, according to one of his committee aides. Any opposition could delay a vote until after Congress returns in the fall.

He has secured unanimous support from his fellow Democrats and is in negotiations with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, and other Republicans to address their concerns.

Leahy’s aide claimed that even if a floor vote is delayed until after the recess, they are already “way past” the 60 votes they would need to overcome a filibuster and approve the bill, which is co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Mike Lee (Utah).

Gregory Nojeim, a senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology and a supporter of stronger privacy protections, said that the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs has given Leahy’s bill a new boost of momentum.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Cruz Downplays Talk of 2016 POTUS Run, Leaves Eligibility Question to Others

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreTexas Sen. Ted Cruz, a rising GOP star, downplayed speculation over a possible 2016 presidential bid, saying he was focused on his job in the Senate.

“We are having a national debate about which direction the country should go…and what I am doing now is trying to participate in that national debate,” Cruz told ABC News in an interview aired Sunday. “I’m not focused on the politics…the last office I was elected to was student council. So this has been a bit of a whirlwind”…

Cruz, though, was born in Canada, leading many to question his constitutional eligibility for the Oval Office…

“I can tell you where I was born and who my parents were. And then as a legal matter, others can worry about that. I’m not going to engage,” he added.

Read more from this story HERE.

Scalia: Judicial Activism a Cause of the Holocaust

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Photo Credit: The Higgs BosonU.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used the twin terrors of Nazi Germany and radical Islam to warn a Snowmass Village audience Saturday about the dangers of judicial activism.

Speaking to a gathering of the Utah State Bar Association at the Westin Resort in Snowmass Village, the longest-serving justice on the nation’s highest court lamented a trend among federal judges, including his colleagues on the Supreme Court, to read and interpret the U.S. Constitution as a “living document” that changes over time…

When judges begin to reinterpret founding documents like the Constitution and make value-laden decisions about individual rights and liberties, Scalia said, they distort the workings of a democratic society. The title of Scalia’s talk, “Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters,” underscores his point that societal decisions about morality and human rights — most of which have no right or wrong answers — should be made in the political arena and not by the courts…

Scalia cited numerous issues that have been thrown to the courts — a woman’s right to an abortion, society’s right to execute someone for a crime, whether “homosexual sodomy” ought to be allowed — and claimed that judges are unqualified to answer them. Medical doctors, engineers, ethicists and even “Joe Six Pack” would be just as qualified as a legal professional to settle some issues that have come before the high court…

Scalia opened his talk with a reference to the Holocaust, which happened to occur in a society that was, at the time, “the most advanced country in the world.” One of the many mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges began to interpret the law in ways that reflected “the spirit of the age.” When judges accept this sort of moral authority, as Scalia claims they’re doing now in the U.S., they get themselves and society into trouble.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Deploying Drones Around U.S.

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Steve Peacock. The deployment of federal drones in and around U.S. shores represents one of the Obama administration’s next steps in the nation’s expanded use of unmanned aircraft systems for surveillance purposes.

The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, or ONMS, recently acquired Puma UAS – a type of drone that the U.S. Navy also uses – for operations off the coast of Los Angeles.

ONMS now is enlisting contractor support in expanding UAS use in California, Hawaii, Florida, and Washington state. Vendors experienced in working with law enforcement and military personnel are needed for this endeavor, according to a solicitation that WND located through routine database research.

The Puma drones – which are small enough to launch by hand – will be used by ONMS to enforce federal regulations, the document says.

The ONMS drone project will focus on Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary located northwest of LA. However, the contractor also will assist Puma UAS operations at Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument Midway in Hawaii, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary in Washington. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: LA TimesJudge torn over lawsuit in drone strike that killed Americans

By Michael Doyle. Courts cannot second-guess drone strikes that kill U.S. citizens overseas, an Obama administration lawyer argued Friday.

A Republican-appointed judge sounded dubious about the expansive claim, saying she was “really troubled” by assertions that courts are completely shut out of the drone strike debate. But for other legal reasons, the judge also sounded hesitant about a lawsuit targeted at top military and intelligence officials for violating the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens blown up in foreign lands.

“There are instances where wrongs are done, but for one reason or another they cannot be remedied in a civil suit,” U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing a family member, have sued former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other former officials over the two separate drone strikes that killed three U.S. citizens in Yemen. The Obama administration wants the lawsuit dismissed.

The lawsuit is the latest challenge to the administration’s secretive war-fighting practices that have mobilized skeptics on both the right and the left. ERad more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: U.S. Air ForceU.S. military drone surveillance is expanding to hot spots beyond declared combat zones

By Craig Whitlock. The steel-gray U.S. Air Force Predator drone plunged from the sky, shattering on mountainous terrain near the Iraq-Turkey border. For Kurdish guerrillas hiding nearby, it was an unexpected gift from the propaganda gods.

Fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, filmed the charred wreckage on Sept. 18 and posted a video on YouTube. A narrator bragged unconvincingly that the group had shot down the drone. But for anyone who might doubt that the flying robot was really American, the video zoomed in on mangled parts stamped in English and bearing the label of the manufacturer, San Diego-based General Atomics.

For a brief moment, the crash drew back the curtain on Operation Nomad Shadow, a secretive U.S. military surveillance program. Since November 2011, the U.S. Air Force has been flying unarmed drones from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey in an attempt to suppress a long-simmering regional conflict. The camera-equipped Predators hover above the rugged border with Iraq and beam high-resolution imagery to the Turkish armed forces, helping them pursue PKK rebels as they slip back and forth across the mountains.

As the Obama administration dials back the number of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, the U.S. military is shifting its huge fleet of unmanned aircraft to other hot spots around the world. This next phase of drone warfare is focused more on spying than killing and will extend the Pentagon’s robust surveillance networks far beyond traditional, declared combat zones.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has amassed more than 400 Predators, Reapers, Hunters, Gray Eagles and other high-altitude drones that have revolutionized counterterrorism operations. Some of the unmanned aircraft will return home with U.S. troops when they leave Afghanistan. But many of the drones will redeploy to fresh frontiers, where they will spy on a melange of armed groups, drug runners, pirates and other targets that worry U.S. officials. Read more from this story HERE.