As Reuters noted, however, "McMahon appeared reluctant to rule as she did, noting in her decision that disclosure could help the public understand the 'vast and seemingly ever-growing exercise in which we have been engaged for well over a decade, at great cost in lives, treasure, and (at least in the minds of some) personal liberty.'"

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For several years now, militant enforcers have scoured the tribal belt in search of informers who help the C.I.A. find and kill the spy agency’s jihadist quarry. The militants’ technique — often more witch hunt than investigation — follows a well-established pattern. Accused tribesmen are abducted from homes and workplaces at gunpoint and tortured. A sham religious court hears their case, usually declaring them guilty. Then they are forced to speak into a video camera.

The taped confessions, which are later distributed on CD, vary in style and content. But their endings are the same: execution by hanging, beheading or firing squad.

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As Kevin Gosztola pointed out, the attacks highlight how drone technology have put an end to traditional American ceasefires over Christmas:

There was no ceasefire from the Obama administration during the holiday. In fact, it appears they waited until Christmas Eve on purpose to conduct a couple strikes as there had not been action in the covert drone war in Yemen for well over a month.

In earlier wars, there may have been some kind of a truce because most of the soldiers and their families would be celebrating Christmas, however, characteristic of drone warfare, the drone pilots who carried out the order to fire upon suspected militants were nowhere near the area of the strike. They were completely detached and, depending on where they were when they directed the flying killer robot to attack, they were likely able to go home and see their family on Christmas Eve.

As Reuters noted, the Christmas strikes "were the first in almost two months by pilotless aircraft against suspected al-Qaida men in Yemen" where the U.S. has escalated its shadow war over the past year.

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As the Altantic reported Tuesday, Google is giving $5 million to fund a drone program for the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF has already piloted the program, using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to scan large areas of Nepal for poachers. With new funding, they can expand the program into sites in Africa and Asia where poachers are known to operate.

Across Africa and Asia illegal trade worth $7 to $10 billion annually threatens to annihilate elephants, rhinoceros, tigers and other endangered species, the Atlantic noted:

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Begley used his personal account to stress that his project only included reported strikes, which human rights activists have often pointed out are only a fraction of all attacks carried out by the CIA and the military, and the Twitter user did not include strikes in Afghanistan.

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Dear President Obama,

Nothing you don’t know, but let me just say it: the world’s a weird place. In my younger years, I might have said “crazy,” but that was back when I thought being crazy was a cool thing and only regretted I wasn’t.

I mean, do you ever think about how you ended up where you are? And I'm not actually talking about the Oval Office, though that’s undoubtedly a weird enough story in its own right.

After all, you were a community organizer and a constitutional law professor and now, if you stop to think about it, here’s where you’ve ended up: you’re using robots to assassinate people you personally pick as targets.  You’ve overseen and escalated off-the-books robot air wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, and are evidently considering expanding them to Mali and maybe even Libya.  You’ve employed what will someday be defined as a weapon of mass destruction, launching history’s first genuine cyberwar against a country that isn’t threatening to attack us.  You’ve agreed to the surveillance of more Americans every which way from Sunday than have ever been listened in on or (given emailing, texting, and tweeting) read.  You came into office proclaiming a “sunshine” policy and yet your administration has classified more documents (92,064,862 in 2011) than any other in our history.  Despite signing a Whistleblower Enhancement Protection Act, you’ve used the Espionage Act on more government whistleblowers and leakers than all previous administrations combined, and yet your officials continue to leak secret material they see as advantageous to the White House without fear of prosecution.  Though you deep-sixed the Bush administration name for it -- “the Global War on Terror” (ridding the world of GWOT, one of the worst acronyms ever) -- you’ve accepted the idea that we are “at war” with terror and on a “global battlefield” which (see above) you’re actually expanding.  You’re still keeping uncharged, untried prisoners of not-quite-war in an offshore military prison camp of injustice that, on the day you came into office, you promised to close within a year.  You’re overseeing planning that, according to recent reports, will continue the Afghan War in some form until at least 2017 or possibly well beyond.  You preside over an administration that has encouraged the further militarization of the CIA (to which you appointed as director not a civilian but a four-star general you assumedly wanted to tuck safely away during campaign season).  You’ve overseen the further militarization of the State Department; you’ve encouraged a major expansion of the special operations forces and its secret presidential army, the Joint Special Operations Command, cocooned inside the U.S. military/  You’ve overseen the further post-9/11 expansion of an already staggering national security budget and the further growth of our labyrinthine “Intelligence Community” -- and though who remembers anymore, you even won what must have been the first prospective Nobel Prize for Peace more or less before you did a damn thing, and then thanked the Nobel Committee with a full-throated defense of the right of the U.S. to do what it pleased, militarily, on the planet! And if that isn’t a weird legacy-in-formation, what is?

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The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) aims to deploy as many as 1,600 “collectors” in positions around the world with a focus on Islamist militant groups in Africa, weapons transfers by North Korea and Iran, and military modernization in China, according to unnamed officials. Miller noted:

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Pushing an agenda to hurry surveillance drones into the domestic market, even though many questions about the ethics and safety of their deployment remain unanswered, has earned members of the House Unmanned Systems Caucus $8 million in drone-related campaign contributions, the investigation revealed.

The report detailed how legislative efforts have ensured a speedy timeline for putting drones in the hands of local police departments as well as private corporations:

Domestic use of drones began with limited aerial patrols of the nation's borders by Customs and Border Patrol authorities. But the industry and its allies pushed for more, leading to provisions in the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, signed into law on Feb. 14 of this year.

The law requires the FAA to fully integrate the unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, into national airspace by September 2015. And it contains a series of interim deadlines leading up to that one: This month, the agency was supposed to produce a comprehensive plan for the integration, and in August it was required to have a plan for testing at six different sites in the U.S. Neither plan has been issued.

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According to Ackerman, "It’s a sign that the U.S. is upgrading the hardware it gives the Yemeni military, and digging in for a long shadow war." The few dozen Light Observation Aircraft will be flown by Yemenis trained by U.S. forces. "The planes have to be configured so the U.S. can teach Yemenis how to be their own eyes in the sky, and they need to be in Yemen in under 24 months," reported Ackerman, noting that the aircraft will be used in Yemen alongside, not instead of, remotely operated U.S. drones to fly over areas where al-Qaida is believed to be operating.

Ackerman added:

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The Times reported late last week that, concerned that an "amorphous" set of guidelines over targeted killings could be passed on to a new president, efforts were made ahead of the election to pin down a clearer set of rules about kill lists and drone strikes approvals.

However, as the Guardian reported, human rights groups have noted that such a drone "rulebook" does nothing to ensure that the U.S. act in line with international law nor would it increase transparency drone programs.

"To say they are rewriting the rulebook implies that there isn't already a rulebook," Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Center for Democracy, told the Guardian. "But what they are already doing is rejecting a rulebook – of international law." Jaffer contined:

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"Our aircraft was never in Iranian airspace.  It was always flying in international airspace.  The internationally recognized territorial limit is 12 nautical miles off the coast, and we never entered the 12-nautical-mile limit," Little told the press, while the Iranian official stated, "Violation of the airspace of Iran was the reason for shooting at the American drone."

Whether the U.S. drone technically did or did not enter Iranian airspace is currently unclear. Here's what we do know: The warplanes missed the aircraft. The U.S. has told Iran (via the Swiss protective power) that surveillance drones will continue to conduct surveillance flights from international airspace in the area. War remains undeclared. (When asked by a reporter whether the attack was "an act of war," the Pentagon press secretary responded: "I'm not going to get into legal labels.")

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Emmerson said in his Harvard announcement, "If the relevant states are not willing to establish effective independent monitoring mechanisms … then it may in the last resort be necessary for the U.N. to act." He noted:

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The WaPo story, based on interviews with current and former national security officials, illustrates that kill lists -- once considered emergency measures post 9/11 -- have been crystallized as a permanent fixture of our national security apparatus. All the while the question of targeted assassination overseen by the president remains an untouched topic in this year's election campaign. WaPo's Greg Miller wrote:

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The proposal by CIA Director David H. Petraeus would bolster the agency’s ability to sustain its campaigns of lethal strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and enable it, if directed, to shift aircraft to emerging al-Qaeda threats in North Africa or other trouble spots, officials said.

According to the WaPo's official source, if Petraeus' request is fulfilled, the move would "extend the spy service’s decade-long transformation into a paramilitary force." Indeed, the CIA's drone program has developed extensively and controversially in recent years. As Salon noted, a recent study found that the agency's strikes in Pakistan were "counter-productive" and terrorized civilians. Meanwhile, as WaPo noted Thursday, the "campaign of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen has heated up," with 35 strikes by the spy agency this year.

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The ACLU of Northern California, alongside other civil rights organizations, announced on Thursday that they will question and challenge the sheriff's plans. According to the Occupied Oakland Tribune, "The ACLU of Northern California has sent County Sheriff Ahern a public records request, asking for basic information about why drones are needed, how much they would cost to acquire, operate and maintain, and how the drones would be used."

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Washington is keeping Pakistan, with its collapsing economy and bloated military, afloat but also cripplingly dependent on its handouts and U.S.-sanctioned International Monetary Fund loans.  Meanwhile, CIA drones unilaterally strike its tribal borderlands.  Islamabad returns the favor. It holds Washington hostage over its Afghan War from which the Pentagon won’t be able to exit in an orderly fashion without its help. By blocking U.S. and NATO supply routes into Afghanistan (after a U.S. cross-border air strike had killed 24 Pakistani soldiers) from November 2011 until last July, Islamabad managed to ratchet up the cost of the war while underscoring its indispensability to the Obama administration.

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Meanwhile, as the New York Times reported, her attack has provoked anger across Pakistan and the world. The information minister of her province has offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of her attackers, while politicians and military leaders have united in condemnation of the shooting. The Times noted:

Some commentators wondered whether the shooting would galvanize public opinion against the Taliban in the same way as a video that aired in 2009, showing a Taliban fighter flogging a teenage girl in Swat, had primed public opinion for a large military offensive against the militants that summer.

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The group had planned Sunday to march, accompanied by Pakistani activists and cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, to an area beleaguered by U.S. drone strikes and Taliban militancy. However, the march was met with warnings from Pakistan's army, who set up roadblocks and prevented the marchers from reaching their destination in South Waziristan. The tribal region has been off limits to foreign visitors since Taliban insurgents turned the area into a sanctuary from NATO forces in Afghanistan.

For the Code Pink delegates the curtailed march has been only one aspect of their trip to Pakistan, which delegation organizer Medea Benjamin told Salon provides a "win-win" situation for awareness raising, regardless of the march's completion.

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For wonks and stat-heads, the fact that we live in the golden age of poll analysis must be endlessly satisfying. And to be sure, complaints about excessive horse-race coverage accompany every modern American presidential election. We're a nation of fans who want to know who is winning, nanosecond by nanosecond. But in 2012, priorities seem particularly skewed. The Arctic ice cap melted to a historic low this summer, but neither presidential candidate has uttered more than a peep about what may well end up being humanity's defining challenge in the decades to come. Twelve moviegoers died in a hail of gunfire in Aurora, Colo., just three months ago, and the words "gun control" are never mentioned. The war in Afghanistan just finished its 11th year, and yet somehow did not merit a single word in Mitt Romney's address at the Republican convention. In the first presidential debate on Wednesday, supposedly devoted to domestic policy, we heard not a single word on abortion, immigration, crime, the Supreme Court or the death penalty.

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A delegation of 32 American women have traveled to Islamabad and will march alongside Pakistani organizers and political groups to South Waziristan -- a nucleus of Taliban militancy regularly struck by U.S. drones. The aim of the trip is to draw greater attention to the harm wrought by drone attacks, while reaching out and building solidarity with Pakistanis on the ground.

"We want to make it known to Pakistanis that there are Americans with a conscience who do care about their lives," Code Pink co-founder and delegation organizer, Medea Benjamin told Salon on the phone from Islamabad.

"We've encountered some overwhelming admiration over the fact that we're here, willing to put ourselves at risk," said Benjamin, who said she has been meeting with human rights groups, women's groups, Pakistani generals, U.S. diplomats and even members of the military spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in Islamabad.

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