April 22, 2012, Iranian military officials announced they have successfully reverse engineered the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth UAV, captured from the United States in December last year.
Iranian officials gave several clues to prove they recovered data from the aircraft’s computers.
1: Drone parts had been transferred to California for technical work in October 2010. The drone was later transferred to Kandahar, Afghanistan in November 2010.
2: The drone had experienced some technical flaws in its Kandahar flight in November, but U.S. experts failed resolve the problems. The RQ-170 was then sent back to an airfield near Los Angeles in December 2010, for tests on its censors and parts. The drone had a number of test flights there.
3: The spy drone’s memory revealed that it had flown over Al-Qaeda Leader Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan two weeks before his death.
“Had we not accessed the plane’s soft wares and hard discs, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve these facts.”-Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Forces
Iranian officials also confirmed that Russia and China are requesting that Iran share the info recovered from the RQ-170 Sentinel. Iranian officials said many countries were asking for details on the U.S. stealth drone, but Russian and China had are being most insistent.
To show you how stupid U.S. officials are, U.S. Senator (and warmonger) Joe Lieberman called the claims “Iranian bluster.”
Facts are that during the 1980s Iran reverse engineered every U.S. and British weapons system they had, including the F-14 Tomcat and its Phoenix missiles!
Of course the Soviets helped. The proof is the fact that by the end of the 1980s the Soviets had exact copies of U.S. air to air missiles, including the Phoenix, as well as the radar system used on the F-14!
Iran has been building their own “new builds” of F-5s (including a twin tail version), F-14s (one British intelligence source had counted the number of F-14s Iran now has and concluded that the amount could only be explained by Iran building their own Tomcats), as well as developing their own medium altitude anti-aircraft missile based on the U.S. Hawk system.
Iran’s own Main Battle Tank (MBT), the Zolfaqar-3, is the result of combining technologies from U.S. M60 tank, British Chieftain tank and the Soviet/Russian T-72. In other words; the Iranians are more than capable of reverse engineering the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth UAV.
April 21, Illinois National Guard has been operating UAVs within the U.S. The unit is called Shadow Platoon and operates RQ-7B drones.
April 19, reports out of Pakistan said the United States is considering allowing Pakistani military to jointly operate U.S. assassination drones.
On April 19, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has officially requested for permission to kill anyone in Yemen!
According to an unnamed U.S. source, the CIA wants expanded authority to kill, even when it does not know the identities of those who could be killed! Apparently it is because U.S. assassination drone operators are having a hard time telling who’s the bad guy in Yemen!
U.S. Secretary of Defense, numb nuts Leon Panetta, flat out lied and said all the people killed by drones were planning on attacking the United States: “Our target there represents those terrorists, or those al-Qaida terrorists that involve a threat to this country, and there are very specific targets. This is not broad based. We are not becoming part of any kind of civil war disputes in that country. We are very precise, and very targeted and will remain pursuant to those operations.”
An international legal expert countered by stating the drone strikes are a violation of international law: “In other words, the CIA is seeking to escalate an already unlawful campaign of targeted killing at the very time Yemen needs support building the rule of law and ending violence and military conflict. The last time the CIA had this much freedom to kill was in Vietnam. It killed 25,000 people, and the U.S. lost the war!”-Mary Ellen O’Connell, American Society of International Law
April 18, U.S. drones killed five people in Yemen.
April 17, U.S. drones kill 31 people in Somalia.
April 16, three people killed by U.S. terror drone strike in Yemen.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved a license for the Seattle Police Department to operate UAVs. The approval was signed by President Obama back in February.
Since 2006, the FAA has issued as many as 750 UAV licenses, or permits, to 56 local governments through out the country. It took a lawsuit by the Electronic Frountier Foundation to force the FAA to reveal who is getting the permits.
Out of the 56, 22 are law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security. 23 have law enforcement duties, such as universities who’s campus police are using the drones.
Here’s a short list of U.S. police departments licensed to operate UAVs: Arlington, Texas; North Little Rock, Arkansas; Queen Anne’s County, Maryland; FBI; Gadsden PD; Georgia Tech PD; Mesa County, Colorado; Miami-Dade, Florida; Montgomery County, Texas; Ogden, Utah; Polk County, Florida; Otter Tail County, Minnesota; Herington, Kansas.