Panetta admits to employing drones in Pakistan
The US government has previously officially declined to admit that the spy agency's drone strikes, but Panetta - who served as Central Intelligence Agency director until taking over the Pentagon in July -made two casual references to the CIA's use of robotic aircraft during a visit to US bases in Italy.
"Having moved from the CIA to the Pentagon, obviously I have a hell of a lot more weapons available to me in this job than I did at CIA -although Predators aren't bad," Panetta told an audience of sailors at the US Navy's Sixth Fleet headquarters in Naples.
Later at a joint US-Italian air base in Sigonella, Panetta thanked air crews for their role in the NATO air campaign over Libya as he stood in front of a Global Hawk drone, a larger unmanned aircraft that flies at high altitude for surveillance missions and is not armed.
Panetta cited the important role of drones in the Libya operation, including the Predator drones.
Predators are "something I was very familiar with in my past job," he said. During his tenure as the CIA chief, a majority of drone strikes by US were conducted inside Afghanistan and Pakistan.
After Panetta spoke, a Predator drone took off from the base - right on cue.
The military does not hide its own drone flights in Libya or the war in Afghanistan, in contrast to the CIA's covert missions to take out al Qaeda extremists in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.
It was not the first time Panetta has made references to the drone programme, which US officials credit with severely weakening al Qaeda.
As CIA director, he once alluded to the drone strikes against al Qaeda as "the only game in town".
The Drones are infected with computer virus
A scoop by Wired.com magazine revealed that the drone programme had been recently struck by a virus.
The virus, which does not affect the ability of the remote operator to control or fire from the aircraft, records the pilot's every keystroke, compiling a log and sending it back to the worm creator.
The virus has so far resisted all attempts by technicians to remove the offending piece of code.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
According to Wired, one officer said that the virus could most probably be a common malware. While in itself it cannot harm the system, it could be potentially dangerous given to whom it communicates the logged keystrokes outside of military networks.
COMMENTS (8)
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If the virus logs all the keystroke it has the potential of seizing control from the legitimate operator. One day the robot aircraft will be turned against its masters and give them a good dose of their own medicine. The programme has already been pirated and is available on the black market. Watch out for the mutineering drones!
@Gen Pasha (retd): Your comments are words of wisdom which are required to be delibrated by the military who makes the foreign policy and as you have rightly pointed out that future of Pakistan depends on decision in dealing with the militancy, which is now out of control of the establishment.
"Panetta admits to employing drones in Pakistan"
I am sure the strength of the APC resolution has forced the Americans to start confessing!!
What's the big surprise even if it was clearly spelled out for us - everyone know's that we give permission for drones to kill terrorists in our country. However the average Pakistani favourite pass time is living in self denial or conspiracy theories. Its not RAW, MOSSAD,CIA or MI6 - its our own home grown terrorists that WE created with funding from the middle East and US in the Zia years that are the problem. We initially had them under our control but now they are out of our control. We can either pretend that they don't exist or we can deal with the problem - the future of Pakistan depends on our decision.
@OmarSharif Agree with you. On many issues, ET tries to see the response of the readers, which they use it for data mining purposes. ET is used for the same purpose as is facebook and twitter used.
Watch out Panetta you are going to get sued for illegal killings right in the good old United States. Lets see you squirm out of that that one Mr. Big mouth!
I am sorry, but I don't see where he said they used drones inside Pakistan. Tribune Trying to provoke responses?
Oh, on a related note, he said there are US agents in Pakistan. Another meaningless headline to encourage misplaced nationalism.
This is what happens when you use an outdated pirated copy of Norton.