Cindy Sheehan shakes up the Drone-Making Man
BOO! Cindy Sheehan and the peace activists are coming
By Brenda Norrell
WASHINGTON D.C. - Cindy Sheehan, preparing to protest the US drones that kill civilians, has already shaken up the security patrol at General Atomics in DC. Before she left home, the General Atomics "landlord" called her, concerned about the protest on Thursday, July 8. After she arrived in DC, she was watched by General Atomics security.
Also, Sheehan's wallet was stolen and someone attempted to run up a $911.00 bill for merchandise at Target.
Backing up a bit, General Atomics is the maker of the Predator B drone that crashed near the US/Mexico border at Nogales, Arizona, in April of 2006. Fortunately, no one was under the 10,000 pound drone when it hit the ground. The official cause was lax controls and pilot error.
The drones along the US/Mexico border were grounded for a while, until the US Grim Reapers and profiteers convinced Congress and Homeland Security that what the border needs now is more of the out-of-control, crashing drones.
Grim Reaper John McCain and his cohorts in Arizona and the US Congress, along with lobbyists and the US media, turned up the "terror" volume, convincing Americans of the need for drones. More than one billion dollars in US contracts for drones have been awarded in the past few months (see below.)
On the US/Mexico border, there's $500 million available for drones and most will go for the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, also known as Predator B.
The drones killing civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are remote computer controlled by Airforce soldiers seated in their easy chairs in Nevada and Arizona.
Sheehan, now in DC to protest these drones, writes, "General Atomics builds Predator unmanned aerial vehicles that are used by the US military to drop Hellfire missiles from thousands of feet above on to mostly civilian targets and have killed thousands of innocent people."
Sheehan described being questioned by General Atomics security in DC. There's a scene right out of a paperback spy novel. The General Atomic security guard saunters past her in another part of town, on the Metro Station platform, trying to look nonchalant in a ball cap and backpack, a formula look for leading a secret life.
Not so funny is the fact that killing is big business in the United States.
Read Sheehan's detailed account of the incidents with General Atomics: http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/07/cindy-sheehan-confronting-drone-maker.html
Listed below are just a few of the recent drone contracts. There are too many to list, including those along the US/Canadian border, where dangerous drones are being used to stimulate the economy. Besides the construction of drones, millions of dollars in contracts are being awarded for the training of remote control drone pilots.
In the US, killing is big business
In May, General Atomics received a $195 million contract to build 34 Sky Warriors drones for the US Army.
Boeing is also profiteering from the drone business with a new contract. Boeing is well known along the Arizona border for wasting millions on spy towers that don't work. Boeing also desecrated the graves of the ancestors of the Tohono O'odham during construction of the border wall.
"A St. Louis-based unit of Boeing won a contract worth about $69.7 million by the U.S. Air Force for the initial engineering, manufacturing and development of QF-16 Full Scale Aerial Targets, drone planes that will act as targets for newly developed weapons."
http://stlouis.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/2010/03/08/daily36.html
In May, Northrop Grumman was awarded $620.8 million in contracts for Global Hawk UAV and signals intelligence UAV payloads.
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